Quote Originally Posted by Theodoxus View Post
I'm with you LibraryOgre, but people scream 'Wuxia!' (a short hand for 'kung-fu powers') and things devolve...
It depends on what you mean by "kung-fu powers", which I chose because it sounds cool, and fits in with Flying Swordsmen and with AD&D Oriental Adventures martial arts.

Gather round, children, it's story time at the library.

A few years ago, I got into Oriental Adventure's Martial Arts system as an abstract idea... something you could bring into AD&D in any setting to give warriors (and priests and rogues, but mostly warriors) something to do with their WP slots. (The original Oriental Adventures had some great ideas, but it's tied up in a very Orientalist view of Asia, which is a problem). It's got great flexibility for creating new stuff from a pretty straightforward toolkit; that last link has a style for every standard 2e race and one for every 2e class.

The basics of the OA system are that you define your basic style... hard, soft, or hard/soft, and your favorite body part to attack with. Those choices determine what your AC is, how many attacks you have per round, and what damage you do. You also define what weapons are used by the style. Beyond that, you have Powers, which you buy with WP, and so get more as you level up, if you choose to invest in them. You can look at all of this on the blog links in the previous paragraph; I worked it up for C&C, too.

What the "kung fu powers" thing gives you is new special abilities. Some of them *are* mystical... you can learn to Levitate by focusing your chi, and you can use the Vital Strikes line to have healing touch. Some are a bit freaky... you can create a melee-only spear with a long cloth. But others? You can give a strong kick behind you. You learn the right way to fall, so you take less damage. You can train to jump, or move faster, or push yourself to haste yourself. Since your style determines what weapons you use, you can get locked into a gear set... if your style uses long swords and shields, then you're going to want a long sword and a shield... but I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. "Can use any weapon with amazing facility" is an archetype in and of itself, separate from "fencer" and "viking" and "armored knight."

Now, the above system does not work that well in 5e; resource allocation is different. In AD&D, your additional WPs are a resource in and of themselves. In 5e, your ASIs are more limited, and spending them on feats means you're not spending them on ASI. Some of the AD&D martial arts manuevers are class abilities in 5e; "Ironskin", the Physical Training ability, isn't too far from the Barbarian's ability to use their Con bonus on their AC. You can somewhat mimic others if you take every ASI as some sort of weapon or combat feat, like Martial Adept giving you special maneuvers you can pull off, but that then put the martial types behind their caster counterparts in another way... the casters are all sporting 20s, while the martials capped at 17, spending their ASIs on things that don't give stat bonuses... which is rough, since they're already more MAD than casters (martials NEED constitution, since their job is to take the punches; casters LIKE constitution, because it gives more HP.)

Fighters *do* somewhat address this, by sneaking in a couple extra ASIs. But the consistent complaint that martials significantly lag in T3-T4 means, to me, that it needs to be addressed further. Thus, kung fu powers.