R&L: Unarmed Fighting

This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.

Most RPGs try to support a variety of playstyles. In a D&D-like, you might be a fighting guy, a support guy, a talk-y guy, a skill-monkey, etc. But Rivers & Lakes is a fighting game, meaning that everyone is a fighting guy, and therefore, we need a variety of different fighting playstyles.

I think we've accomplished that quite well. Technically, every character has a unique "fighting style." But even just looking at the handful of core ingredients those fighting styles are built from, we wanted to make sure that each ingredient offered a distinct experience that would be fun and interesting and have its own role to fill. D&D-likes usually just settle for "melee vs ranged" with only a couple extra details on top. But we have a lot more than that, giving you tons of possibilities to explore.

There's one in particular that I want to talk about, because it presented a design challenge that I find especially interesting: unarmed fighting.

What's the deal with unarmed fighting?

D&D, quite realistically, treats unarmed fighting as functionally non-viable. Bringing your fists to a sword fight is like bringing a sword to a gun fight: it won't end well for you.

The main exception is the Monk class, for whom unarmed fighting is either their best option, or is at least comparable to using a weapon. And we generally accept this exception because, honestly, if you've ever watched a Bruce Lee movie, he does make it look fairly plausible.

The result of this is that D&D players associate the Monk archetype with unarmed fighting. There's nothing unreasonable about that, but it does now put us into a tricky situation. Why? Because one of the simplest pitches for R&L is "D&D, but everyone is playing as Monks."

Not a bad one-line pitch, but maybe you can see the problem. Many players will then expect all the fighting to be unarmed, when of course it isn't. Not only are weapons still present, but just like in D&D (and nearly all other fantasy), using weapons is still the most common way to fight. In the wuxia genre, the classic, archetypal hero is a swordsman, and most other characters also rely on weapons at almost all times.

And yet, there is truth to the idea that wuxia characters are way more likely to use their fists for fighting than characters would in most other genres of fantasy. The unarmed fighter is not an uncommon sight, even if it's not the "default."

So that puts us into a weird position. We have to make unarmed fighting:

1. More powerful than it is in D&D, so that it features more prominently.
2. Not as powerful as using a weapon, which should still be the most prominent playstyle.
3. Have the potential to be way more powerful than using any weapon, should you choose to build a fighting style around using it.

How did we do that?

"A bowl is most useful when it is empty"

- Lao Tzu

Step one: flesh it out a little bit. In D&D, there's just the singular "unarmed strike," which has a base damage of just 1. You don't even get to roll a die.

In our game, there are three types of unarmed strikes: punch, kick, and haymaker. You got options!

Step two: give it some downsides compared to melee weapons, for just that pinch of realism. Here's a chart comparing them all:

The first downside is that penalty you suffer for missing a kick or a haymaker. Being slowed means you can't use your movement, while being disoriented means you can't Counter. Higher risk and higher reward.

The second downside is that unarmed strikes, on average, have a lower damage output than other melee strike options. Sure, the damage dice line up 1-to-1 for the most part, but consider:

1. Basic weapons, improvised weapons, and martial weapons all have some kind of gimmick that boosts their average damage.
2. Unarmed strikes have no "heavy" strike like the others, which would normally be the highest damage option.
3. Those penalties for missing a kick or haymaker incentivize you to rely on punches instead, the lowest-damage option.

Step three: now we have to make sure that unarmed strikes have enough upsides that there's still a reason to base a fighting style around them. If you want to focus on unarmed strikes, they need something special for you to build on.

The first set of these are intrinsic benefits, but which are nonetheless not immediately obvious:

1. Focusing on unarmed strikes means that you aren't dependent on a weapon. Weapons need to take up item slots, they can break if their quality is reduced to 0, and they can be disarmed. Fists and feet will never have those problems.
2. Keeping your hands free makes you better equipped to Grapple, Disarm, and Climb, meaning that unarmed strikes have lots of natural synergies with other options.

Then, to give you something to invest in, we turn to the Kung Fu arts. There are 18 paths in the base game, each with 6 arts to learn, meaning that every kind of attack you like using has at least a couple techniques and forms that enhance it somehow. Wanna be an archer guy? Don't worry, there's a bunch of arts that fit an archery build. Wanna focus on wrasslin'? We got wrasslin' moves.

Oh, but you? The guy who wants to focus on unarmed fighting? We got boatloads of arts. There are more arts for unarmed strikes than any other kind of attack in the game. So while the baseline power of swords and spears and bows is better than fists and feet, unarmed striking has a lot more potential as a basis for powerful Kung Fu.

-Dwiz