Martial Arts

A person can be very good at dishing punishment out and taking a hit without any formal training. There’s no instructor needed to tell you to ball up your fist, or to swing your foot and connect with something vital; to duck as a sword is swinging toward your head, or run for cover when bullets are flying at you. Combat skills encompass the basics of close-combat actions and associated moves (Block, Charge, Dodge, Escape, Grapple, Parry, and Subdue), and the skill rating and specialization in a close-combat skill represents how well a character performs actions along with their general style of completing said action. Martial arts styles may also be selected as specializations for the normal cost of 7 Karma—selecting that specialization provides a +2 bonus when using that technique.

Each martial art style has six techniques for a character to choose (listed under Available Techniques). Buying a new style costs 7 Karma, and when you buy that style you may then choose a technique to go with it. Buying additional techniques costs 5 Karma. At character creation, you can buy up to 5 total techniques, in a single style, which costs 27 Karma. You can only buy one style at character creation.

After character creation, the character can continue to learn techniques within the martial art style or pick up a new martial art style. Each technique within the style takes 2 weeks to learn and the same Karma cost. A character can learn a new technique in a different martial art style, but they must spend the time to learn that style of fighting as well. Each new style takes 1 month to learn and costs 7 Karma for the style and the first technique; that time includes the learning of the technique. Once a style is known techniques within that style cost 5 Karma and 2 weeks to learn. A character can learn multiple styles, but there is a limit in how much stacking a character can get away with. You cannot gain more than a +2 bonus or a reduction in modifiers by more than 2 from purchasing the same technique from two different martial art styles.