> Cross-cultural differentiation. Several advocates of CC have
claimed
> or implied that some CC abilities are "different" from others. I
Mechanically idential, granted. There is a descriptive and contextual difference.
> forcing to be identically described? Wouldn't it be more logical,
> convenient, and evocative to describe different abilities
> differently?
I suspect that the design decision here was that CC is referenced often enough that it needed to be marked on the character sheet. But it COULD only be marked in the abstract because there is no way to tell WHICH CC skill the character will have.
> Martial arts. This is an instance of the previous item, to a large
> degree. If one wants to run a game focussing on (Eastern, most
> obviously) martial artists, or develop more detailed rules for
> "mystical martial arts" schools, the dead hand of "Close Combat" is
> not a help. (And I've given a good deal of thought to both, though
> currently have given up on any immediate plans of doing anything
with
> either.)
Then we have things to discuss. I've been trying to convert L5R to HW with some success, I think, although it has yet to see anything resembling a playtest. I'll concede that martial arts is challenging, but essentially I would argue that you treat it as a magical ability - it has a high order and sub order which give it greater detail. "broad ability" I here you cry, but it fits glorantha - it's whatever the term is for, umm, physically manifest mystics. Their magic is their body.
However, there is a lot of stuff you can do without even going that far. Give them abilities like "one life, one arrow" or "breathing to the belly", with some fluff text, and all the "detail" will be provided by the player in their description of action. If they need/want to augment CC with "martial shout", they will soon get to grips with the conceptual, dramatic and descriptive quirks of martial arts. Furthermore, the process of arguing to you the GM how and why it works means they are rationalising and thus internalising the concept far more readily (IMO) than mechanical systems. The subjective nature of the abilities means the player is prompted to argue from a first person analysis.
>
> Trivialisation of learning utterly different combat skills.
Whatever
> you do, however orthogonal it might be from your existing martial
> knowledge, it'll be one HP please, to learn that new "style". (Or
> 2 if the GM's being fussy.) Evidently the Five Dragon Warriors
Well, I'd be quite happy with a character having a rating for each combat style, and in fact I think this is implicit in the ranged and close categories. But on the other hand, I strongly suspect that what people really learn is "killing", and that this is a one way trip. Learning how to use a particular weapon is IMO rather secondary to the psychological and intellectual training required to fight and win. This is not to say there is no room for the measurement of subsidiary factors like reaction time and the like, but I can certainly argue the case for a single primary ability.
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