Hello to all!

I have recently bought most of the boxes for the 3ed. and after reading the material I started to think about unarmed combat. In the page 19 of the rulebook it is stated that unarmed combat belongs to Weapon skill. Still every action card (the total of 2 IIRC: Mighty blow & Grapple) featuring unarmed combat uses athletics. That made me think if it should belong to athletics rather than the "weapon" skill. It would not make a huge change over all as athletics use Str. How do you read the rules?

The second problem I have touches the action cards. Most of them require a melee weapon. Even the melee strike basic action requires a weapon. That is easy to ignore, but I wanted to ask your opinion about what action cards can or can't be used without a weapon in hand?

Over all I think it is suicidal to try to manage battles without weapons, but sometimes the fights can be more like brawls and not meant for annihilation of the opponent and it would be useful to have broader range of options even in a more "safe" fights.

Action cards have requirements on them. Most melee action actions require a Melee Weapon, including the Basic card Melee Strike.

The only Melee Action cards I see that don't require a melee weapon are:

Mighty Blow

Surprise Attack

Acrobatic Strike

Grapple

And, strangely enough: Sword & Board and Skalf's Anvil (from toolkit), which both require a shield but say nothing about a weapon.

Your "basic" melee attack card for unarmed will need to use Perform A Stunt.

To run a brawl/barfight/boxing match, I'd probably just have Fatigue inflicted rather than Wounds, or somesuch (off the top of my head it feels like it would work reasonably)

"Unarmed" is actually listed in the Melee Weapons table, so it could be argued that you can do Melee Strike with an unarmed attack.

We certainly play like that, if needed; we wouldn't use perform a stunt.

However, if the fight is supposed to be non-lethal, then we would use fatigue costs in some way in the same way that Dvang suggests.

Yeah I've also toyed with the idea of using fatique to represent the hits taken in a non-lethal brawl. On the other hand it seems unnecessary, as I have a hard time imagining fights were the critical treshold would be achieved often enough to make it lethal. The good point in it would be that the fatique is A LOT easier to heal, if one needs to have harmless fights from where the PCs just jump up even when they lost.

Do other people have opinions about the requirement of a "melee weapon" and the unarmed being listed in the weapon chart. Weapon or not?

I don't consider unarmed as a melee weapon. Hence the reason that Actions like Mighty Blow and grapple do not have the requirement for one, as they are obviously intended as special unarmed attacks.