As per public request!

Originally I wanted to make this simply as a joke, but then it got me thinking... Surely a fencing martial art would be neat.

for the benefits I can reckon stuff like bonus to disarm, interception attacks, bladed weapons and melee defense.

Thoughts?
Oh, feel free to discuss fencing attire aswell

En garde!

I was thinking of making a character who uses a Rapier, something along the lines of deposed noble who learned of the old dueling traditions (Would also use a pistol). Will watch this thread with interest.

Given that it's a major corporate sport, Fencing should definitely have a listing, maybe even giving corporate-appropriate bonuses to things like social skills.

Kendo needs to be in as well. Not enough Martial Arts that employ weapons. Maybe a 6th World Viking inspired style, possibly with strong focus on sword and board, as well as two-handers?

~Umi

looking at my copy of arsenal, I'm kinda surprised to not see a kendo or fencing style. a number of styles use weapons.... but the focus is on unarmed combat.

Escrima seems the closest to fencing, with its bonus to blades and focus on the disarm, but it dosent quite do the job. fencing needs a parry bonus.

for maneuvers, two-weapon style seems an obvious choice for using a main-gaunch. off-hand training and riposte both fit well, as does break weapon and clinch.

where do we want to put the focus though- Errol Flynn and the three musketeers? Olympic sport fencing? some kind of awakened version for adepts?

Fencing should be finesse based - defeating an opponent with skill and speed rather than power. So bonuses to things like disarming, disorienting, herding, and sweeping all sound appropriate. Anything where you're overwhelming the enemy with movement and positioning and tactics rather than brute force.

~Umi

While I'm on the subject, let's take a crack at fixing the Disorient maneuver.


The concept behind Disorient is fine - sacrifice the ability to deal some damage to instead temporarily reduce your foe's capacity to fight. It's a lot like the adept power Nerve Strike in that regard, and this sort of thing can come in handy in situations where you'd rather not spill blood, or where you're trying to set up a more powerful opponent to take them down with a follow-up shot powerful enough to overcome their defenses.

The problem is the pitiful effect. Spending a Complex Action to inflict a -1 dice pool modifier that lasts less than a single initiative pass is a waste of time. Sure, you rob the enemy of a single die from whatever action they next choose to perform, but think about the opportunity cost. Instead of doing that, you could just attack normally and attempt to inflict a wound modifier of the same magnitude, which will last for the rest of the entire combat session and beyond. Or you could attack to knockdown, inflicting modifiers for being prone and forcing the enemy to take an action to stand back up. And heck, if you're going to learn a maneuver anyway, take Sweep instead, deal damage while knocking them down!

In contrast, Nerve Strike is much more effective. You make a single attack and each and every net hit reduces either the enemy's Reaction or Agility for the rest of the entire combat session and beyond. Sure, you have to choose either to penalize their ability to attack, or to penalize their ability to defend, but if you reduce EITHER attribute to zero, you paralyze the enemy completely, removing them from the fight! And since it's pretty unlikely for either of these attributes to go much higher than six, you only need a handful of cumulative net hits to drop a target for good.

That said, Nerve Strike IS magical in nature. Its cost as an adept power is much higher than the cost of picking up the Disorient maneuver, so it ought to be much more effective. But surely that's no excuse for Disorient being quite so pitiful?

So there are two ways to make Disorient more effective. Increase its power, or increase its duration. If it had a more substantial effect on an enemy, the short duration wouldn't be so bad. And if it lasted long enough to be useful, you could actually manage to stack the effect, as you're supposed to be able to do. Either option can work.

Personally, I'd simply make a small change to the modifier it inflicts, giving it more power but retaining the short duration of the effect. Instead of a flat -1 die per successful attack, make it -1 die per net hit, while still capping at -4. Whereas a single lost die is largely negligible in most cases, a -4 modifier is much more substantial. And while it might be a bit much of it lasted longer, I think it balances out very nice with the current duration.

~Umi

The errata changed disorient to
-2 per stack, up to -6

Well goody gumdrops, then! Makes it at least kind of useful.

~Umi

From a shadowrunner's angle, armed styles have an abvious drawback - particularly when involving things like full-sized swords : they imply carrying a weapon. Not much of problem when it's a knife, but a sword or worse a sword-and-board combo (don't even think of an halberd...) is fairly obvious adusually frowned upon in polite company. An uramed style, on the other hand, is always at hand (pun intended).

that makes the armed styles more of a niche market. When carrying something blatantly lethal and too big to hide, most peoples will go for a gun rather tha na melee weapon.

Tsk, tsk, real gentlemen carry a swordcane!

If you're looking for discretion first, a sword umbrella would be a viable alternative (Seattle's weather is on the rainy side if I remember right). They go along with far more styles of clothes than a cane.

if you used Search, you'd find a thread with a fully written out Fencing Martial Art

You could also simply use a (reinforced) umbrella/cane. You would probably use the clubs skill then, but many techniques can be applied to both weapons.
Bartitsu and canne de combat could provide inspiration for "improvised" fencing.

In my opinion you may as well go for the completestyles (Baritsu and Savate) who add unarmed techniques to the cane (or more accurately add the cane to unarmed techniques)

SR4 does not work that way. If you are unarmed (and with certain specific weapons) you use Unarmed Combat, if you use any other weapon you use the appropriate weapon skill. You could however a) invent a style that gives bonuses to uses of both skills and/or b) a Specialization of a single name that can be added to either skill.

Arsenal does mention under DM discretion that just how you can specialize in "Martial Arts" as unarmed, you could conceivably specialize in "martial arts" in other skills as well. So you could say, take unarmed, clubs, and blades and specialize, in each one, in escrima.

Other than that I'm not sure how you would represent say, Baritsu (or escrima) incorporating weapons into the same unarmed movements... isn't that what having the skills at a similar level already represents?



-


Back to fencing! (Construction noises)
Seems to me you can pretty much take existing Martial Arts and rename them, right? Wildcat, for its focus on movement and repositioning would be a good fencing quality, you just change "unarmed" to "with a fencing implement." Kendo, or other more aggressive sword styles, could be Boxing, again with "unarmed" renamed. I'm not sure what that would do to game balance since blade DV is significantly higher than fists, but...


*Edit: I feel obligated to mention that a good citizen would just turn their life over to Ares and learn Firefight with Real Weapons ™ instead of this silly sword nonsense.

That is exactly what I meant except with a specialization called French Martial Arts or something like that.


No problem there, you can already get the maximum +3DV for all three Melee skills with Stock Martial Arts. A few examples:
Blades/Clubs: Take Arnis (+1 DV on Club/Blades attacks), Escrima (+1 DV on Club/Blades attacks) and Kali (+1 DV on Club/Blades attacks)
Unarmed: Boxing (2x +1DV on Unarmed attacks) and Karate (+1DV on Unarmed attacks)

The easiest (probably least cheesy as well) way would be to write up some fluff for your desired fencing style and take the advantages from any martial Arts style that best fit it.

Example:

Iaijutsu
the art of fluidly drawing a sword and attacking the opponent in a single motion (I know it's more than that but I'm lazy)
Advantages: +1 die on Surprise Tests when initiating an attack (may be taken twice for a cumulative +2 dice); +1 DV on Blades attacks; +1 on Intimidation Tests.

Other than the DM slapping them silly, what's to stop someone then from taking the three existing +DV, and finishing off their 25BP of martial arts with the new kendo style? (S/2)+8 is just screaming to be abused.
Or, are you advocating just taking existing levels and calling the whole shebang whatever you want? I'm really in favour of that, especially if everything you'd want to do is already possible just a different name.

DV Bonuses is capped at 3 (Arsenal errata)

The Errata:Damn Ninjas!

Stacking the bonuses from different Martial Arts however is perfectly legal:


That's what I proposed in the second paragraph.

Either you edited that in or I'm legally blind. D:

You may want to see an ophthalmologist

I did not edit that post. Here's what I wrote:

I'm currrently playing a melee focused magician in my new game; and disorient is exceptionally handy when using touch spells. It's also a nice combo with Set-up and two-weapon style.

I don't have Herding yet, but when I do, I'm going to be using it with all that to set myself up for charge bonuses. You only need two net hits to move someone into a chargable range.

Disorient isn't great by itself. Its all about finding the right synergies. Try it with Nerve strike; its particularly devastating to someone's defense pool.

Why do you want to do that? This is not The Other Game. Charging is not that great in SR. Also what's to stop the opponent from moving out of the charging distance between the herding attack and the charge, if he still has an action left?

Nothing! except, well, me.

I usually open with Decrease Reflexes and chain my martial arts off of the free unarmed attack touch spells grant.
If I start in melee range and Herd someone back, I can Finishing Move and use my unspent Free Action to Charge at the same time with the follow up second strike. Delayed actions are kind of awesome like that.

I'm also a liberal multi-target melee user. Charge bonus bonus, occasional full offense and a spec often let me run into a close group of enemies and mess them ALL up.

Tae Kwon Do <3 I've also learned that the touch-only melee modifier kind of owns too.

Fencing as a sport would be rather different from sword fighting as an armed combat skill because of the rules. forexample foil only uses the torso for a target area. Epee allows all over the body- but it results in people trying to hit the arms and hands more than body shots and all types are use to a set narrow strip to move on. it's not impossible to apply the skills to a fight but it should be at a minus.

As an interesting view on this a few years ago I saw a Japanese variety show where one of the things they did was to see what was faster- a western fencer or a Japanese Kendo expert. They were shocked when repeatedly the western fencer scored shots on the kendoist's hands time and again while the asian swords man was pumping his hands for the strike, he'd loose out to a straight thrust.

Fencing derived from actual swordfighting in Europe. Yes, the current day sport is limited compared to actual combat, but that can easily be fixed with a bit of fluff.

They could just say that with the revival of interest in the sport among the Corporate World, new changes were introduced, fencing was overhauled, made more deadly, returned to its roots as a fighting form. Maybe someone digs up some ancient codex on 4th Era fencing or whatever, and that the European version was an unwitting pale imitation of the much older art form.

~Umi