Turn-based Martial Combat

[soggie]

Hi codex hive mind. I have a proposition. I've been brainstorming mechanics for turn-based hand-to-hand fighting, and this is what I came up with.

Intercepts should be introduced into unarmed combat. In ranged combat, movement triggers intercept/reaction checks, which gives interrupts to successful interceptors. In unarmed combat, I believe a similar mechanism can be adopted.

First, the background stats. In my character system, unarmed combat can be specialized into three distinct fields: striking arts, grappling arts and counter arts. Each field can be further specialized:

Striking Arts:
Punching, Kicking, Infighting

Grappling Arts:
Groundfighting, Takedowns, Submissions

Counter Arts:
Trapping, Negating, Counterstrike

Specifically, each specialization deals with one kind of fighting style, and the counter arts are the ones that will be rolled against when a character is being attacked to see if the character managed to "counter" the attack or not.

Trapping involves intercepting the opponent's attacks and effectively stopping his movements, opening him up to grappling-type counter attacks. Negating involves redirecting the opponent's attacks or force back at him, like cross counters and tai chi-styled counters. Counterstrike involves dodging the attack and then landing a striking-type counter before the opponent regains his footing.

Which specific counter to use would depend on the player's preference first, and skill level second. The player can choose to always use a specific counter during the enemy's phase, or if no preference is chosen, the counter with the highest chance to succeed would automatically be used.

This would create an interesting scenario where martial artists, instead of running around the game world collecting unarmed combat stat boosting equipment, would find out grandmasters to learn techniques that can be active or passive and have their own specific uses. They can gain familiarity levels with these techniques the more they practice/use them, and in combat they can employ a vast variety of moves (like skills in D&D) to expand the range of tactical options available to them.

Imagine if two fighters A and B meet in the ring, and A throws a fast punch at B which has a +1 against counter checks. B eats the punch and when it is his turn, instead of launching a strike of his own he predicts the next attack from A would most likely be either a punch to the head or a kick to the head. Therefore, he selects the action "Prepare vs Head Attacks" (which is a skill learnt from his adventuring days) and ends his turn, giving him lots of AP reserves to take advantage of an interrupt if he succeeds in it. In order to hide the preparation from A, he chooses to feint a quick return punch that has +2 against counters, uses 50% less AP, but at the cost of -3 to hit.

A, true to B's prediction, launches a high kick, hoping to knock B out in a quick victory. B rolls for intercept (with his prepare vs head attack skill, he gains a +2 to his rolls) and succeeds, and the turn ownership is passed over to B to deploy any counters he deem suitable.

He then chooses the monkey punch, which is directed at A's groin, crushing his balls in one fatal strike, winning the match and neutering A at the same time.

So what do you guys think about this mechanism?

 

[spectre]

I smell it being a clusterfuck if there is more combatants than just two... or it would be if it were pnp. With proper interface on a pc, it just might work.

Fighting as a collection of techniques is a good and novel approach.

You need to take a few things to make this work, imo
just bullet points, will elaborate if time permits:
(o) Fatigue.
(o) Distance and various differences in reach.
(o) Being off balance.
(o) Initiative - not in the 'who goes first' sense, but who is actually on the offense and who is defending at the moment.

First two are self explanatory, off-balance means the character is super vulnerable to certain techniques for a period of time, this can be a result of general lack of skill, aggressive enemy onslaught, or a deliberate action, like making a risky maneuver or even luring the enemy to strike.

Initiative can be used to effectively bring combos into the game. That's one thing. I would in fact base the whole system on this so that to avoid the 'I punch, then you punch' nonsense. In short it means that one of the guys is pounding the other into the ground, and the other needs to wait for an opening to counter and regain initiative (ie. start playing offensively), or back off and gain some space. When you are on offense and defense, different techniques are available. This also serves to differentiate between fighting styles, and even individual fighters. Imagine a village brute who is only good at sucker punching and panicks once someone starts to fight back. One trick pony only knows a few offensive techniques.

 

[denizsi]

It sounds like you have done some reading into the subject, spectre. Those are nice points.

I'm also developing a TB (or rather semi TB) combat system based on european medieval martial arts and it's very strongly tied to the current knowledge and practices of the arts.

Psychological aspects and challenges of an encounter, footwork (which naturally includes balance), commitment (closely tied to one's fatigue), initiative and simultaneity (explained by a concept known as "Indes" ("meanwhile" in English) in German school of fencing; the wisdom and ability to act, observe and decide on the next course of action simultaneously) are cornerstones of the system.

tl;dr : it's pretty cool

(1) Pscyhological aspects and challenges involve the urges one could resist or submit to perform premature moves, the ability to maintain one's attention span and the ability to maintain initiative. For example, imagine an opponent who is trying your patience by stalling and feinting or keeping the initiative (that is, having you submit to his domination by making you wait for him to attack and to give you a reason to respond) while not using it and waiting for you to lose your patience and act prematurely, opening yourself to master strikes, ie. one hit one kill deals if you don't counterattack properly, with very little room to break off and retreat if you don't know how to respond. At the end of each turn and based your actions or inaction, you get cumulative increases (or decreases) to a few derived stats dealing with these.

(2) Footwork is, well, I think it's pretty self explanatory. It's a big factor in the quality, or rather efficiency of your moves and how easy or hard it might be to counter those moves. Proper footwork gives maximum momentum during attacks, ie. harder to intercept or deflect.

(3) Commitment is how much effort and power you dedicate to any single action, and how much of a strain they become on your status. Without fully committing, you could be baiting or feinting the opponent to think you are giving an opening, you could be stalling to try his patience, you could be searching to get a sense of what your opponent might be thinking through his responses or, you could just be unsure of what to do (this last part, "being unsure of what to do" has an actual place in the system based on "Indes"). Commitment also dictates how easy and safe it is to change from your course of movement (a matter of momentum, when applied to real life) and the level of fatigue involved.

That probably sounds complicated but its application in the system is based on very simple and straightforward checks, between your Strength and your Endurance in the case of fatigue for instance: You assign as many Strength points as you have and wish into your actions and when the Strength you commit into your action exceeds your Endurance, it's a cumulative increase on your fatigue but can "cool off" if you refrain from straining yourself again for the next couple moves. When your fatigue exceeds your Endurance (possibly by performing a series of highly or fully committed attacks without breaks), the fatigue increase becomes permanent. When your fatigue permanently reaches or exceeds your Endurance, you become exhausted - but not collapsed... yet).

(4) Initiative is a little more than physically being in the offence or defence. One can hold the initiative while letting the opponent act. I explained this a little in the example above. When holding the initiative, you are in the dominant position, leaving the opponent in an uncertain state of mind, making guesses and trying to figure out how to win the initiative back from you. However, in the most blunt sense and in most circumstances, it still translates into who attacks first with a planned preconception of the attacks and counterattacks to follow, which is derived from "Indes".

Now, before I explain "Indes", it's a good time to explain my first remark in the parenthesis ("semi-TB"). Movement and certain actions are still turn-based in the traditional sense but once two or more opponents actually start exchanging strikes, flow of exchange between two opponents become the measurement of time so there are no attacks that cost any action points. Any attack is immediately a simultaneous turn for both opponents, lasting as long as the particular attack and maybe more depending on "Indes".

How much action points you have when you attack your opponent during your turn, or how much action points you had left in your last turn while being attacked during an enemy's turn still matters, it's still an important factor, but once either party attacks, combat becomes a series of interrupts, until both opponents break off without follow-up actions.

(5) So, "Indes", in my system, deals with one's ability to recall already possessed knowledge in the heat of a moment, the ability to correlate that knowledge to your opponent's actions and the ability to respond with an appropriate action within your knowledge as well as the ability to predict and direct further actions, like an action-tree and if you are really good, like a branching action-tree. In short, Indes is the quality of your interrupt and is derived by knowledge (skills, skill perks and particular elements in skills), experience (familiarity with particular elements of skills), mental state, initiative and a little bit of luck in the form of die rolls. What this means is that just because you have "learned" a certain technique doesn't mean you have a grasp on it and can recall it perfectly to employ it whenever the opportunity arises in the heat of a moment without regard to previous experience or your state of mind.

When your turn begins (ie. not engaged in combat yet), you already have access to these preconceptions to a degree by default, even if your actual Indes score wouldn't permit it (ie. an Indes Lite) but the real stuff kicks in after you perform your first combat action (whether that's a sword strike, a straight grappling attempt or a feint). As soon as you choose an attack and decide to go with it, the opponent very likely gets his first Indes interrupt before anything is even played out. Based on feedback from you and his ability to process that information in a timely manner, he will respond in a certain way and the first exchange of actions will play out.

Note that this is not to say your opponent will always get some feedback and will have the luxury of reacting as good as he would have liked to and also notice that I said "very likely"; he might not get an interrupt at all, usually in the case of having a poor Indes and also rolling bad dice. In such cases, combatants perform actions reflexively, based on their preconceptions I mentioned (so the game doesn't randomly choose a response for you. It was a response you have already prepared yourself to give in the first place).

When you are very experienced, eg. have a strong Indes, you get access to a series of actions in your interrupts, something like this:

You choose a counterattack (based on your opponent's counterattack to your previous attack), you predict your opponent's next counterattack to the attack you are about to make now and so, choose a follow-up counterattack to the counterattack that you think he will make. When you make such predictions successfully while the opponent can't, you can "dominate" the fight, forcing your opponent to respond in certain ways and bringing him into positions where he will be weak and or give openings for one hit - one kill deals (provided that's what you want: to kill).

Or something like that. It's not rigid as that sounds because attacks come in all types, leading to all kinds of actions and sometimes there are only one or two ways you can respond to a particular attack. Finally, when either or both combatants successfully break off from the engagement without any further follow-up attacks, you go back to your traditional turn where if you want to say "fuck this shit, I need to make it to the tower before the Bad Guy fucks my Damsel in Distress" as fast as possible, you can run in turns, and be chased in turns.

It's probably important to note that a single turn lasts 1-2 seconds and fights are, despite the level of depth and range of options available, last very short.

Read this interesting thread for several first hand personal accounts of several of these concepts as experienced by practicing members of the arts. There are very good account on the psychology involved, "commitment", "indes" (note one member's "you know that I know that you know that I know" remark).

Also, I'm trying to develop the whole system to be as simple and straightforward as possible to use in PnP with a simple die ruleset, without any alterations/adaptations.

And spectre, I'd like to know what made you consider fatigue to be a similarly important aspect. Obviously, it's an essential factor but also a very pedestrian one: one that exerts will be fatigued. I'd like to know if you find something warranting more emphasis in it.

 

[spectre]

And spectre, I'd like to know what made you consider fatigue to be a similarly important aspect. Obviously, it's an essential factor but also a very pedestrian one: one that exerts will be fatigued. I'd like to know if you find something warranting more emphasis in it.

That's exactly what warrants its inclusion, or at least some degree of simulation (and I am not insisting on a vertical bar over here though it would work), imo. Something is needed to simulate the fact that as the encounter draws on, you just begin to lose the oomph behind your blows (not thinking about a 10 second one on one quickie where the adrenaline most likely will make this irrelevant, more like a prolonged encounter, say a small battle). But his is just one thing.

The effect should be like this - whoever has the more means of controling the opponent (ie., among other things, conserve his fatigue/stamina better while denying the same to the foe), can more surely lead to a situation where the other guy is vulnerable (For simplicity I use the blanket term "off balance" for all these situations) and real damage can be done.
And fatigues gives us a nice way to do it, with added benefits, like making subdual possible by draining fatigue through, say, holds.

However, if it is possible to simulate all these effects without adding a stat, I'd go for it for simplictity's sake.

Read this interesting thread for several first hand personal accounts of several of these concepts as experienced by practicing members of the arts. There are very good account on the psychology involved, "commitment", "indes" (note one member's "you know that I know that you know that I know" remark).

Unfortunately, no time to read it in full, but I'll definitely go back to it. There seems to be some substance past all the"ancient manuals" wankering.

For now, I can only confirm that both indes and commitment are big factors and I agree that they deserve to be placed at the foundation of the system.
Commitment is fairly straightforward, but indes is a nice thing to addtactical depth to combat.

In "gamey terms", I would see it work like this -first you need to train train, train, until the muscle memory is in place, without that you won't always have the full arsenal of your techiques available in all circumstances.

Now the thing is to work on the kinds of situations which make you "forget" techniques in the heat of battle, and the way to regain them (a brief break off from close quarters to reassess?). A good place for fatigue influence maybe? As you lose fatigue, you begin to forget the stuff you trained less?

Anothier thing which was hinted at, and needs to be discussed at length, cause it deserves to be placed as the system's foundation imo is blow telegraphing and anticipation.

It works well with the other bits - normally, the more you telegraph your blows, the greater ass kicking you'll recieve in return. The less experienced you are, the more fatigued you are and the more commitment you put into the blow, the more it shows.
Now, the more telegraphed the action becomes, the more techniques become "open" to be used against it.

 

[denizsi]

"Ancient manuals wankery"? Heh, late medieval period is hardly ancient and some of the people in that forum are some of the leading figures in the European martial arts communities, but you have point about people in general with an interest in the subject.

Now, about Indes again, things like the ones in my first example in Psyche (1), affect it and whether you have the initiative also plays an important role. More on that in a moment.

Yes it's all about training and having muscle memory. This is something that can be abstracted by selecting it "to have done" at rest (what you do with your time during your rests -read a book? practice skills and techniques? go hunting?- is big. It's basically how you spend your life) and affects the duration of resting. Apart from that, a couple of things such as mental fatigue, affect it during an encounter.

For instance, every character has an Impulse pool that fills up at the end of every turn without a real engagement and further up when subjected to weakly performed single engage-and-breakoff attacks (which don't count as a real engagement) intended to probe or harrass. It's derived from a Will Power attribute (in the same league as Strength and Endurance) and experience. Larger the pool, more patience and self-controlling a combatant is.

When an encounter drags on in uncertainty, several turns passing without a real engagement and with lots of probing and harassing, these pools fill up, obviously. When you have a full pool, you must roll against the impulse at the end of every turn to stay focused and to refrain from making premature, "impulse" attacks. At that point, your mental fatigue increases whether you pass or fail an impulse roll at the end of a turn, bringing penalties to observation and Indes. Thus, you need to stay sharp. If you have the initiative, this is softened up a little bit (one of the reasons you'll want to have the initiative).

The particular relation between Indes and initiative is that when you DON'T have the initiative, the feedback you get from your opponent (including what he's telegraphing, as you put it) lets you focus on a narrower list of actions he can possibly perform to attack or counterattack you and you can possibly perform to break his guard. But if your opponent intends to feint, giving you misleading signals and you fail to pick up on that, it essentially means he can control the way you think and react. This is a bad thing, obviously. This usually happens as the mental fatigue seeps in.

So how much you remember of forget is interchangeably based on what you think your opponent is telegraphing along with skill, experience, mental fatigue and a bit of good old dice rolling.

 

[mondblut]

http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0233.html

 

[denizsi]

Yes, D20 is retarded.

 

[KalosKagathos]

OP may be interested in:

 

[Lord Rocket]

Moar like this one, amirite? Couldn't find an official website or anything, sorry.

Also The Riddle Of Steel for a non-D20 alternative, which (I assume) covers a lot of the same ground.

PS I would be careful of providing too much choice to players. Although well intentioned, having to constantly choose from a list is not especially fun. Sometimes you just want your guy to do the work.
Actually that would tie in quite well with the experienced fighter things deniszi and spectre are talking about - if you are fatigued/inexperienced your character will make poor predictions regarding what countermoves etc. they make in combat, reducing their overall effectiveness.

 

[denizsi]

The Riddle of Steel is pretty good. I took some of my inspiration from there in solving complex situations with simple mechanics elegantly.

It's a shame it never gained enough mainstream momentum. I'd take TRoS over any D20 crap any day. At the very least, there should have been one crpg using TRoS.

Although well intentioned, having to constantly choose from a list is not especially fun. Sometimes you just want your guy to do the work.

I'd agree for typical games with HP pools but when an average encounter to death can last seconds and it is as easy to die or get seriously wounded as it is to kill and to hurt, it's necessary and "letting your guy do the work" is a luxurious abstraction. There's still place for it, though.

 

[crufty]

who wants to make millions? I might have even posted it before.

I had an idea for a game: an action kung-fu puzzle game where the player controls the archetypical ancient martial artist (think raiden) who is responsible for escorting chosen ones to their destiny.

the key is the player is allowed to fight in realtime, as well as pause and fight rag dog style, positioning each foot / fist / kick / punch just so, jumping spinning dodging on a millisecond scale timeline, going backwards and forwards in time to allow for flawless level execution, stringing together ridiculous combos and doges, saving punches/kicks etc as moves for real time execution.

The action is real time, but pausing and reversing to reposition a foot better, or undoing back x seconds to try a different move to finish the level, knowing what is coming up--that is the game, and the puzzle aspect. And why not?

at first the player's escorts are weak children, then they bloom into at least decent martial arts guys, each level is another period of life, with mini games in between levels (yes the hated mini game) that allow the player to 'train up' the chosen ones. the kicker? no health restoration. injuries are permanent. in concept, the player starts out completely bad ass. by the end, he is a wreck, and its the chosen ones who save his ass more often then not.

I think a game like that would allow the detail to come through. But the focus would have not be on epic, but almost stealth based combat Iron Monkey style: small scale, swift, fatal.

 

[denizsi]

Similar ideas have been posted, as I recently found out myself by posting one. It's funny nobody has done it even though it's fairly an original idea as far as the game industry is concerned.

positioning each foot / fist / kick / punch just so, jumping spinning dodging on a millisecond scale timeline

Isn't that a bit of a stretch?

Never mind, I misread it.

 

[soggie]

From what I see, the underlying mechanics sound complicated but execution is really simple. Essentially, you have 3 kinds of martial techniques:

(1) Active
(2) Passive
(3) Reaction

Strikes, Grapples, and various techniques are all active techniques, where you can select them like Diablo skills or magical spells. Select the technique you need, aim at the opponent, and click. Simple as that.

Passive actions are those that are used without the player doing anything, like defensive techniques and counter-grappling/takedown techniques. Attacks of Opportunities are passive actions.

Reaction actions are those that the player prepares during his round, like "Prepare vs Spell", "Counterspell" and so forth in KoTC.

Add all these to the fact that some techniques causes status ailments like "Knocked Down", "Pinned", "Trapped", or "Off Balanced", and you have a complete martial arts system.

The reason I am putting in such a system into my game is because I believe unarmed and melee combat is under-represented in modern/post-apocalyptic CRPGs. And rightly so too, because who would want to use their arms and legs and tire irons if a gun does it better and faster? But in a PA setting, where ammunition is limited, or in close quarter urban/jungle warfare, they do come in handy as a melee build can close the distance easily due to the abundance of cover. And when he does, I wouldn't want the player to just have the capability to "Spend x amount of AP to punch the enemy with the same move until you knock him out".

 

[denizsi]

I hope you also add take into account things like hitting with the stock/butt of a rifle, using a pistol like a hammer, etc.

I took a look at your skills and found this:

Melee Weapons
Blunt Weapons - maces, hammers and knuckles
Bladed Weapons - machetes, polearms and axes
Piercing Weapons – crossbows, throwing knives and spears

One interesting thing with all martial arts systems, be it European medieval, renaissance or Asian this or that, they all share a huge number of similarities and it's only natural as it's all about biomechanics. So, I hope you plan to add some sort of synergy. You can't have substantial skill with one and none with another of these. Doing so would be both cumbersome from a gamist pov and unrealistic. And this extends to unarmed combat as well. I see that you have divided all categories into 3 skills, which looks orderly and visually appealing, but basically, it looks like it will be an unnecessary clutter.

 

[soggie]

I hope you also add take into account things like hitting with the stock/butt of a rifle, using a pistol like a hammer, etc.

I took a look at your skills and found this:

Melee Weapons
Blunt Weapons - maces, hammers and knuckles
Bladed Weapons - machetes, polearms and axes
Piercing Weapons – crossbows, throwing knives and spears

One interesting thing with all martial arts systems, be it European medieval, renaissance or Asian this or that, they all share a huge number of similarities and it's only natural as it's all about biomechanics. So, I hope you plan to add some sort of synergy. You can't have substantial skill with one and none with another of these. Doing so would be both cumbersome from a gamist pov and unrealistic. And this extends to unarmed combat as well. I see that you have divided all categories into 3 skills, which looks orderly and visually appealing, but basically, it looks like it will be an unnecessary clutter.

Stock/butt attacks are equivalent to hammer class weapons; pistol butts are equivalent to mace class weapons, while bayonets are spear class weapons.

The way my character system works is that all stats are categorized as either primary or specialized. Blunt Weapons; Bladed Weapons and Piercing Weapons are primary stats, which has a ranking of 1 to 5, while Maces; Hammers; and Knuckles (as well as the rest) are all specialized stats, each with a ranking of 6 to 10.

When a character uses a mace in combat and has 7 ranks in the Mace stat, he will be using that rank in his combat rolls. However, if he does not have any ranks in that stat, the primary stat's (Blunt Weapons) rank would be used instead.

Another thing is that from level 6 to 10, a special technique is unlocked every 2 levels (every even level) for that particular weapon class, which is an incentive and justification for players to specialize other than just to get better combat rolls (the way my dice system works, increases beyond 7 would only yield diminishing returns in probabilities).

The list of stats above is not final. They're thrown together in 5 minutes to be used as an example to illustrate my points on the martial arts mechanics.

Having said all that, can you explain more about what you mean by synergy?

 

[denizsi]

You put 3 points to one melee combat skill, you get 1 to the other 2 melee combat skills or something like that for a crude example.

Interesting way to separate primary and specialized stats there, but wouldn't it be better to add those specialized stats on top of a single unified melee weapon primary stat? Perhaps separated into two as close and longe ranges (swords, axes, hammers etc. in one group and spears, flamberges and polearms in the other) at least?

Because, from a gamist perspective, that looks like a clutter and from a realism perspective, it's unlikely as all melee weapons operate on the same basic biomechanical principles so you can't separate one from the other completely. A master swordsman could most probably still turn a novice spearman into swiss cheese with a spear.

Note that I've been quite very disillusioned with the traditional DND style distribution of skills, lately.

 

[soggie]

The actual stat tree looks like this:

Unarmed Combat
- Striking Arts (Punches, Kicks, Infighting)
- Grappling Arts (Groundfighting, Submissions, Takedowns)
- Special Arts (Counters, Reversals, Disarms)

Melee Weapons
- Blunt Weapons (Hammers, Batons, Staffs)
- Bladed Weapons (Knives, Axes, Machetes)
- Piercing Weapons (Bolts, Thrown, Spears)

Melee Weapon = primary stat (point-buy system)
Bladed Weapons = specialized stat (point-buy system)
Knives = familiarity levels (use-based system)

Familiarity levels unlock passive special moves while stat points give better combat rolls and allows the stat to gain mastery levels (by finding the right trainer) which allows for re-rolls and a host of other bonuses and active special moves/techniques.

I'll leave unarmed combat out of this discussion for now. The three weapons listed to each sub-categories are the weapons that exists in my game's setting, which is a frontier-like post-apocalyptic world set about 400-500 years after doomsday.

I listed the three classes down partly because I need to limit the framework of how many weapons there are in the game, making it easy for me to keep track and balance the various weapons that exists in the world. I deliberately made it so that there's no difference between learning how to whack a person with a mace (hammer-class) and a flail (also hammer-class). The reasoning is that anything that has a piece of weight attached to the end of a pole is considered a hammer-class weapon, in which there is only a small effective area on the weapon that can be used offensively. The technique involves learning how to position and angle your strikes so that the piece of weight on the far end of that stick connects with your opponent, and for simplicity's sake I don't want to drill down to the atomic differences between a mace and a flail.

Now compare it to a baton, which is just a pole with nothing on the far end. The difference in technique between a baton (or club) and a mace is vast - a mace relies on the user accurately landing the heavier end on the opponent while the baton is more forgiving in terms of effective points of contact. Stabbing an opponent with a baton is far different than stabbing another with a hammer.

Same story with the staff. A staff is basically a longer version of the baton, and due to the difference in length the techniques also differ. While a baton requires the user to close the distance in order to be effective, the staff allows more leniency in range, at the cost of lesser efficiency when fighting in close ranges. Again, different techniques are in play here. The extension in range and the subsequent increase in flexibility allows the user of a staff more offensive and defensive options, and while a baton user learns how to close the distance, a staff user learns how to maintain the distance.

Same thing with bladed weapons, where axe = hammers, knives = batons and machetes = staffs.

Now you might ask, why not polearms, warhammers, katanas and exotic weaponry? The setting. The world that the game is designed for is a very practical world, and most melee weapons double as daily survival tools as well (hammers as contruction tools, axes to chop trees, spears for fishing and hunting, etc). Guns are an exception as they are used only for hunting and personal protection, but what's the point of spending years of your life forging a scimitar when a simple machete could do the same job? Why forge an exotic short sword when there are plenty of combat knives out there? Why use a flail when a hammer is going to do the same thing plus help you build houses and tools?

As far as combat rolls go, like I mentioned in my previous post, if a user has these stats:

Melee Weapons: 5 ranks
- Bladed Weapons: 3 ranks
- Blunt Weapons: 0 ranks

And he starts the fight with an axe, he gets a 5+3 combat dice pool. But if he changes to a hammer mid-fight, he will only get 5 dices to roll in his combat rolls. This therefore creates a situation where you can choose to generalize in a primary stat so that you are not totally helpless when a stat check comes calling, but leave the specialized stats aside because you think they are not as important as other stats (like speech stats in an action RPG), and maybe used only once or twice in the game.

Is this all really too cluttered? While you have a point that most melee techniques share common biomechanical principles, game-mechanic wise I'm not so sure that streamlining it would deliver the level of breadth of tactical options to the player. The last thing I want in the game is for characters to trade punches with the one that hits the hardest winning the encounter.