Martial Artists in P&P

[Nestor]

Greetings!

Glad someone else broke the ice. I was feeling somewhat self-conscious about posting on a spanking brand-new forum.

So this is something of a fusion of compliment/clarification request/design quesiton. If it comes off a bit rambling, I'm just trying to "show my work", so to speak.

I picked up P&P after a friend posted on it on Google+ and have been enjoying reading through it. I'm a long-time superhero RPG fan and have been jonesing for some good ol' fashioned cape action, but it's sort of become out of fashion with my local group.

One of my favorite character archetypes is the martial artist; characters like DC's Black Canary and Marvel's Mockingbird. I see how P&P presents Might as the offensive trait for bricks and Athletics for ranged weapon guys. But what about your friendly neighborhood street brawler?

I'm thinking Athletics would cover the defensive aspect; dodging, ducking and weaving. I saw the Martial Arts pro and thought that might help for the attack side, but the fact that it only factors in half the trait makes it less useful.

Here's my logic. I'm seeing the martial artist being able to take care of the average mook with ease. The way the dice pool works, the average result of the roll is usually half the number (I'm not considering the exploding dice aspect to simplify matters). That gives your minion an average result of 1 or 2. I figure I'd want my hero to manage getting 2 above that as a matter of course, so that gives me a result of 3 or 4, or 6 to 8 for the attack trait. An Athletics trait with a Martial Arts pro's not going to cut it, unless I use at least a trait of 12.

Looking at the sample characters, I see that the Martial Artist uses Strike as the attack trait. Okay, I can see how that would work; define the Strike as the MA's fighting prowess and take it from there. Did I get that right?

And it makes me wonder, what's the use of the Martial Arts pro then? Could there be a way to make it more... useful?

Thanks if you stuck around to read this far.

[rune]

Yes, you do have that correct as far as I can tell. Strike is what a Martial Artist would want to invest in. I think that the Athletics option is there to provide a cheap way to get some ability to attack using your Athletics.

Of course, I'm just reading the book ATM and have some questions up myself.

[LakeSide Len]

Rune, you nailed it. The Martial Arts pro is there to give a character with a high Athletics rank a modest attack. It's kind of the "mundane" martial arts, as opposed to Strike, which would be used as the "super" martial arts.

Honestly, this is a pro best used for agile, street level heroes: if you were, oh I don't know, a super agile blind lawyer street-level hero, this would be a good bet.

[Nestor]

Perhaps, but I would argue that said blind lawyer street-level hero would have more of an offensive ability than half his Athletics trait.

I was wondering if maybe having the pro provide the ability for the character to use his full trait offensively, but make it more expensive (say 2d or 3d extra) could work.

[LakeSide Len]

The reason we didn't do this is because if you have a high Athletics, you will never buy Strike and always buy Martial Arts. Athletics 10d = 8 hero dice, Martial Arts (say it costs even 4d) = 4 hero dice. Total = 12 hero dice. That's 4 less than the 16 hero dice you would spend if you wanted to do the same amount of melee damage with something other than martial arts (and thus bought Strike at 10d). We didn't want to create multiple ways of getting to the same place and make one way the obvious choice for the min/maxer. I'm not against min/maxing, but I don't want min/maxing to force you in a certain direction, and if we were to do that, Martial Arts would always be the more cost-effective option. We tried very hard to avoid doing that.