Fighting With Relationship Maps
I’m a martial arts nerd and a novice grappler (about a year of BJJ on and off), so one thing that hit me is how gameable a lot of the theory behind grappling is. For instance, teachers often use flowcharts to describe transitioning from one position to another. The goal in a legitimate grappling art is to attack from a dominant position — “position before submission” is the slogan. For instance, while you can crank someone’s arm while you’re in their guard you will almost never succeed because your opponent has more leverage – so you want to protect yourself while transitioning to side control or mount.
What if we integrated BJJ’s grapplingv flowchart concept into RPG combat systems? If I greatly simplify sub grappling strategy I get the following flowchart — a map that shows the relationship between positions and how the influence attacks.
Again, this really simplifies something that can get really elaborate. There are a whole lot of guards, an “attack” can be a hit or submission, I’ve folded knee on stomach into side control and not differentiated between mount and back mount.
If we turned this into a game system success and failure would move you around the map. You can always try to attack from a less optimal position but it’s weak. Mount is the best posture from which to deliver attacks (standing and kicking the guy works too, but I omitted that because it crosses over into standup, which I’ll talk about in a sec). The danger is that stops along the way get borning ot the weak/medium/strong split don’t balance well. It also gets confusing when the defender also attacks.
What if we took this beyond ground grappling? The clinch has its own positions (double-under, under/over, Thai clinch, dirty boxing clinch, etc.) and striking as both range considerations (kicking, in and out of the pocket) and specific tactics that flow well or badly.
We would ultimately end up with a huge map of tactical relationships — maybe too huge for an RPG without electronic assistance. Maybe this would work well for a game that’s all about martial arts, or could be automated and hidden in the background. In any event, mapping tactical relationships takes combat out of the "point and shoot" realm or the inheritance of unit-based wargaming. I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge myself. This may be the kind of thing I want someone else to design. To be fair, I have worked with zoning and transitions through range in some recent designed for White Wolf, so I’m not fleeing the idea completely, but you’d get one hell of a tinkertoy if you extended this chart to cover everything.
