I am an admitted and unashamed fan of all manner of Kung fu movies (Poison clan rocks the world!) and after going through the Inquisitor's Handbook and took to reading into the Moritat with a great deal of interest. The advance Moritat Reaper has a skill (or talent, can't remember off the top of my head) called the Reaping that allows them to attack multiple targets in a single turn unless one of the targets successfully parry the Reaper's attack.

Would a system of fighting styles that add to the character's list of abilities to use upclose be a little <i>too</i> out of place in the game? I could certainly see something like this working especially for Guardsmen and Assasins or Advances that focus on the more militant route (i.e. Savant Militants, etc)

Thoughts?

I wouldn't be too keen on armed martial arts, but unarmed abilities would give a little spice to the otherwise boring and useless unarmed attack.

Here is some suggestions I gave to someone on Dark Reign:

I was going to create a few Talents that built upon one another;

1st level increases damage to 1D5
2nd level grants +5 WS when fighting unarmed and +1 damage
3rd level grants natural weapons (1D10 impact) and +10 WS

Deflect- may parry enemy attacks even if unarmed, although at half WS. Against chain, shock, or power weapons a successful parry means they take half the damage on the arm used to parry.

Weapon style - small weapons used with similar styles to a fist can be incorporated into the melee strikes. When using knives, daggers, knuckle dusters, gauntlets etc, you count as unarmed for the purposes of damage caused and increase the amount of damage done by +1 and pen+1.

Accurate strike - may always choose body location when making unarmed attacks.
Vital Strike - halve TB and armour (rounding down) before reducing for damage (requires accurate strike)

All of these abilities would be absolutely deadly if applied to melee weapons like power swords, but by giving them only to unarmed attacks you make unarmed at least competitive with weapons, even if not better.

I think that the talents that exist are pretty good as is for armed combat. Smacking someone with a power sword is enough damage as it is.

Hellebore

Well, that depends on what you are after. Having a complicated system were different styles have different trait is not something I would like to see. But if you like to tweak the unarmed ability with a few more stats, dices and let that cover all styles and ways to cripple you fellow human then it is ok.

The Space Marine suppliment had a pretty good rule:

Martial Arts Training
Prerequisites: S 35, Ag 35
You have undergone the rigorous training to learn the secret art of hand-to-hand combat. Each Chapter
has its own style created from a mixture of the martial arts schools of ancient Terra, but all of them
accomplish the same thing. You count as being armed even when not wielding a weapon. Your unarmed
attack does 1d5 points of damage +SB and counts as Primitive damage. Although you are able to attack as if you
were armed, this Talent does not grant you the ability to Parry.

I think not parrying against weapons is fair enough. I wouldn't want my arm to get in the way of a chainsword tbh. There is scope to expand it though and maybe add the Accurate trait to called shots on the head?

There are already enough aim-to-hit-a-certain-area talents but I like the idea
My try:

Unarmed Combat Specialist:
Prerequisites: WS 30, Ag 30
You have been trained in one of the many unarmed martial systems of the Imperium.
Though many styles excist the system works the same:
You inflict +1 damage with Unarmed attacks or fist weapons like gauntlets or brass-knuckles, you may also attempt to parry at -10% WS while unarmed but failure will result in adding your own SB to the damage of the attack you meant to parry.

It is possible for someone trained in martial arts to parry/catch an attack by a knife or sword, though it is difficult.
If such a manouver fails the results can be quite messy.

Lightbringer did a pretty nice treatment of putting Martial Arts into Dark Heresy in this thread: new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

Basically the gist of his idea was that game mechanics wise a given martial art was an Elite Advance package that taught a particular set of skills and talents. This would function in the same way as alternate ranks from IHB except no particular career requirement, and it didn't replace a rank just added to the character's options. The entry prequisites (mostly RP/in-game based) as well as the skills and talents varied by martial arts style. Lightbringer offered a couple complete example martial arts styles.

Putting together more styles using his conceptual framework would not be terribly difficult. Hardest part would probably be decent setting appropriate concepts/backstorys. After that its just pluggin in the skills/talents that fit well w/ that mode of combat and assigning costs.

The cool thing about this idea was that it provided flavor and variety to martial arts styles yet still worked within the given parameters of the existing game system without having to come up with a large number of new special rules.

My Assassin is a Fist Fighter who uses two Best Quality Brass Knuckles. At 2nd rank i asked my gm if I could buy Crippling Strikes and Street Fighting as an elite package for 500 each and he accepted. My Battle Fleet Assassin has Ws:45+(10 quality and close quarter fighting) Str:40 and Ag:41 (rolled four ten's in my stats)

So I run around doing critical dmg for my attacks, punching the breath out of people and breaking bones

craigpearson81 said:

Hehe... I was catching up on missed posted and thought this was familiar! It made my night to find out that someone was still using the Space Marines work I did so long ago. I still use this Talent as a House Rule in my game (and maybe it is time to dust off the old Codex Astartes and re-write for Version 2.0)

Thanks for the inspiration craigpearson81!

-Cynris

Cynr said:

No probs Cynris. A goup of us actually played a full Space Marine mission with the suppliment you did and it went really well. We'd been looking for Space Marine rules and stats for a while and pounced when we saw those.

I think this martial arts training is the most balanced I've seen, haven't tried them in a game yet though.