I went to see Haywire yesterday, starring MMA celebrity Gina Carano*. Apparently, these days Mixed Martial Arts is all about various forms of grappling, and the movie features quite a lot of it. It got me thinking.
Grappling is historically one of the most difficult-to-implement combat systems in RPGs (famously so in the case of D&D 3.x). People naturally look at all the crazy stuff that goes on and want to make sure it’s accurate. But accurate wrestling is not necessarily cinematic wrestling. In the movies, when two characters wrestle, the language of the fight requires that there is a constant shift in control of the grapple. In a lot of grappling systems, it’s pretty hard to lose dominance if you’re even a couple points better at it than the opponent. Making a system to account for frequent turnover could wind up being even more complicated.
But do most players that want to initiate a grapple really want a dedicated and complex ruleset? Or do they just want to accomplish a few of the things that grappling gets used for in the movies, namely:
- Keep the target from getting away
- Keep the target from using a deadly weapon on you
- Disarm the target of said deadly weapon or other carried item
Anything else that goes on in a grapple is probably something that can just be played out with the normal combat system and different descriptions. The back and forth of control of a grapple is pretty easily handled by the normal back and forth of attacks during a fight. Theoretically, in any given system, you could model grappling mechanics much more simply if you just came up with an easy way to accomplish the above three tasks.
So my main questions are:
- Am I missing any other important reasons why a player might want to start a grapple?
- How much additional complexity do those important reasons above justify in the grappling rules? That is, is the advantage of locking down a target and control of wielded weapons significant, or could it just be something that a grappling-focused martial artist is just allowed to do?
* The way Soderbergh cuts movies is weird, so I’m still digesting how much I liked it. But the action was pretty good, as you might expect when casting an actual martial artist as your lead. If you’d like to see more women in action movies that aren’t 100 pound models using waif-fu, there are probably worse things you could do than see this so Hollywood’s more willing to look to female leads like Carano.
Jan 23, 2012 @ 12:24:33
This probably falls under stuff that is handled elsewhere in the system, like bull rush, but I’d add that often the player wants to MOVE his opponent with grapple, by throwing him or whatnot. I know that’s my first instinct whenever I see a ledge, cliff, or second story window in any game I play in. Also wall spikes, traps, vats of boiling sludge, tripwires, giant spider webs…
Jan 24, 2012 @ 01:39:25
I think the use of grappling depends on the system quite a bit. D&D is not generally there for simulating any kind of real fighting, but to give you an impression of fighting. I think if were looking to make grappling part of 4e, i would be looking at making it as progressions of powers with that flavor and built around incorporating those key things you mentioned. An at will that slides an opponent, an encounter that is save ends, locks the guy in place and places penalties on attacks, a daily stance that allows you to take his basic attack power away from the opponent as long as you are next to him, for the rest of the turn and on miss you still cancel his cancel his next standard action. That sort of construction, with some variation.
In Pathfinder, I think it is a little harder to make it interesting and still fit. Maybe as a set of feats which give you options in fight which basically boil down to, make an attack, the effect is damage and this thing someone has to save against or take penalty, or loose an attack. Not sure there. It is the flavor of the fighting style you are going for there, rather than a separate grapple system per say. In both of the ones there the idea is to give it as a fighting style, rather than a single attack.
Now I can picture a game, where you are much more focused on making the fighting more an interchange of fighting styles. In that, you would need a more complex system.
that is my .02 cents anyway.
Jan 30, 2012 @ 22:09:47
I will point out that 4e did have a build of fighter that was all about grappling, and the powers involved were super cinematic and awesome. It is in the Martial Powers book.