Stances and Martial Arts actions in a Skirmish

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The rules for stances on p. 154 say "To choose an action that stipulates a specific ring, the character must be in the matching stance."

The Martial Arts skills sections say that a character can use Martial Arts to strike using any approach... buuuuuut they also specify some kinds of attacks associated with different approaches. For example, the Overwhelm approach for Ranged can be used for "Firing to create openings," and the Withstand approach for Melee says "fighting defensively".

Does this mean you can't fight defensively in Fire Stance, or create openings in the Earth stance? Seems like that'd be really difficult to regulate/interpret, especially since actions like Guard, Charge, and Strike aren't restricted to particular stances. That said, this sort of restriction might keep people from using only their best ring for every action. Thoughts?

[Magnus Grendel 11,673]

45 minutes ago, sidescroller said:

The rules for stances on p. 154 say "To choose an action that stipulates a specific ring, the character must be in the matching stance."

The Martial Arts skills sections say that a character can use Martial Arts to strike using any approach... buuuuuut they also specify some kinds of attacks associated with different approaches. For example, the Overwhelm approach for Ranged can be used for "Firing to create openings," and the Withstand approach for Melee says "fighting defensively".

Does this mean you can't fight defensively in Fire Stance, or create openings in the Earth stance? Seems like that'd be really difficult to regulate/interpret, especially since actions like Guard, Charge, and Strike aren't restricted to particular stances. That said, this sort of restriction might keep people from using only their best ring for every action. Thoughts?

You can perform any non-ring specific action in any stance - but how you do that thing will vary.

Guard is essentially "make myself harder to hit" - a fire(energetic, aggressive) version of guard might be sweeping your katana back and forth in vicious sweeps, whilst a water (flexible, mobile) version of guard is weaving yourself back and forth, and a void version might be standing stock-still attuning yourself to the world.

All of them have different visual/narrative appearances, and different opportunities to spend [opportunity] on, but they have the same mechanical effect.

Using the same ring for every action in a conflict is less of an issue - because in a duel you can have strife dumped on you FAST if you're predictable in your stance, and being in a given stance defines what critical you suffer (which generally messes up your ability to use the ring in question) and stacking criticals hurts. Plus some techniques do specifically mandate a given ring.

Edited October 17, 2017 by Magnus Grendel

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Phew  Thanks.