Why is grappling in role-playing games never fun?

>>49774306
because if it's abstracted too much it's practically useless, or has no mechanical benefit. if it's structured with too many rules it becomes cumbersome and bloated. striking the correct middle ground would basically require an entire system to make grappling functional and cool, but most systems aren't built from grappling upward, so you get one of the first two results.

>>49774306
>bait: the post

>>49774306
The fuck, how did I not see this thread in the catalog before I made my grappling thread:

>>49775169

grappling is hard in most crunch-heavy systems because it introduces a lot more variables than the usually simplified combat. Even in cases of complex combat systems, it tends to get to an even finer level of detail.

Rules light works well for grapple because it usually just boils down to some opposed strength/endurance/relevant-ability checks

Grappling is simply too complicated, and very undefined in how it goes.

Like, wrestling and stuff like that is super weird to describe to people, just because of how minute the movements and actions can be to gain an advantage.

Works fine in 5e, and can be super powerful. Mostly because after you grapple you knock them on the ground so you and your melee buddies can wail on them with advantage and they can't do fuck with movement 0.

If you mean why isn't there an involved narrative for grappling then, I suppose you could say that about swordplay etc as well. Would just take too long. If you wanted to draw out a lengthy wrestling match tho its pretty easy to detail your moves and make checks like anything else.

>>49774306
Becuase it's passive. You're not doing a cool attack or spell, you're simply sacrificing your turn to prevent the other guy from doing anything.

>>49774306
RPG combat evolved from wargame combat with a turn-based resolution. That is plausible for attacks by artillery pieces on a 20th century battlefield, but does not really resemble how wrestlers, boxers, or fencers actually fight. The puzzling element in any real fight is good game material, but not for the kind of people who don't like puzzles, which at this point is three fourths of the hobby.

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lets talk about game mechanics vs combat goals.

game mechanics: I want to assign number advantages to RNG to make a fast system where people can see how effective they are.

combat goals: defeat the opponent.

its a fairly system of attack and defense when it is just simplified to that degree.

But what if combat goals were elaborate? Like: I want to hold someones arms down while I try and trip them.

Or I want to set up a series of counter strikes to get a sense of his range then bait him into over extending.

A lot of these are great sauce on the meat of combat narration. In game sense I only want to roll one set of dice for an idea of how good or bad I do rather than the fuck ton of splat book bullshit variable chart. So it all just boils down to +1 or -1 to show how much better training you have.

Just like every fighting style has their nuance systems and structures of good and bad in the end we are still playing a gaming systems and us as gamers boil down a simple fact...
Why should I be doing anything besides applying damage...

So they try and jazz it up and control other things like, movement options, pinning check, disarming... all that shit...
but if it takes me 4 rounds of combat just to pin someone I have to think. Could I have just killed this guy in those 4 rounds. Did I take any damage in those 4 rounds it took to pin and could I have died? Now that I have a pin, does this just lock them in as good as dead, or is there a chance that they could get out and undo all of my work.

>>49774306

It would be fun in GURPS if it was just a bit more efficient.

See the problem with grappling in literally every fucking system is that it's worse than striking. Which is really weird when you think about it, because it's pretty much the opposite in real life and you'll get murdered in the ring if you don't at least know how to defend yourself against grappling.

>>49779954

In 7th Sea grapple is death. If a character was built for grapple he can kill almost any other character one on one.

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>>49774306
>Why is grappling in role-playing games never fun?
because eddie bravo didn't get high and play dnd yet

>>49774306
But it is. A friend was running a premade SW campaign for some of my other friends, all of whom were new. At the climax of the game, one of them decided to wrestle the vampire boss in a shitty sewer, and succeeded.

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>That feel when you marry a female paladin who specializes in grappling and pinning to defeat her opponents in a non-lethal fashion
>That feel when some of her techniques are perfectly applicable in the bedroom
That makes grappling fun, I guess.

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in D&D 3.5 I can absolutely murder anything 1v1 with my unarmed grapple fighter build, and I can do it in two turns.

You faggots must be coming from pathfinder.
And I don't get the complaints about rules complexity.

>>49774306
Because you can't feel their dick against your back as they wrestle you to the ground.

Because the basic goal of a grapple is to hold your opponent so that your friends can stab him more easily. That's kind of boring and pretty easily resolved.

Unless it's a one-on-one stealth kill or a sporting event.

I really liked how it was done in Through The Breach. Mostly because they kept it simple.

Grappling is an attack like any other unarmed attack. It has some pretty terrible damage codes compared to full weapons but it's fantastic for handing out Slow (The other guy only gets half a turn) or even paralysed (The other guy gets NO turn) if you do well with it.

Because you don't mime it with your players/GM

>>49774306
Because grappling isn't fun in real life.
Source: I practiced Jujutsu

>>49782665
>And that was the story of how I made it to level four.
This always gets to me. The whole story sounds like it should be at the end of a high level campaign.

>>49782875
It's not real.

Just like your waifu.

>>49781213

I practiced Hapkido and the grapples/throws were my favorite part. Most effective too. I work in corrections now and do a lot of manually restraining and see a lot of fights. A good hold/pin is a fight ender.

Hell, I can't even remember the last time I ever really punched anyone.

But its usually boring as fuck to watch from an outside perspective and often leaves the person on the receiving end feeling incredibly helpless/humiliated which makes the person doing the grappling look kind of like a dick even though it's a pretty efficient way to end a fight without too many serious injuries.


It's just not flashy.

>>49780721
I doubt it
>inb4 dubious rulings, strange RAI, splatbook nobody ever heard about, etc

>>49775072
What systems that have rules for grappling that don't run into the problems >>49774348 mentions?

>>49774306

Melee combat lends itself better to RPGs. Combat is broken down into discrete actions: hits and blocks and etc. Hits have a definitive effect. Everything is clear and stark and makes perfect sense. It's TV-friendly.

Contrast that with locks and chokes. These are more like continuing conditions that span turns and depend on many variables. Even on most TV shows and films, grapples are less common and usually are abstracted out of existence. And why not? Usually the details of what is happening are hidden in the scrum, so one pair of actors wrestling looks much like another (unlike brief acrobatic holds and throws, of course).

Also in combats that are many vs many, grapples make it harder for players to change tactics and opponents, and at least in my experience players pair up with an NPC and combat gets very boring unless it's your turn.

In game turns, grapple systems are slow and cumbersome. "Normal" combat screeches to a halt and then you haul out the special grapple rules. In GURPS (sorry >>49779954), the rules are cumbersome, and Technical Grappling is a hopelessly complex divergence from the rest of the system. In D&D3.x, grappling is a special set of rules and either you're hyperoptimized for it (and thus invincible) or comparatively inept. In other games, threatening to force him to haul out the grapple rules is a way for a player to intimidate his dungeon master into backing off from a combat scene because even when you know the rules (and many don't), it's a hopeless complicated mess and time suck.

>>49782665
>>49782875

That story is the fucking bomb. Middle levels are best levels.

I did something similar but much less majestic. I had a minotaur character in Dragonlance, part of the notRoman minotaur empire. The bad guys had the upper hand but I kept outmaneuvering them politically. Finally they got me on trial and long story short it was to be settled in the gladiatorial arena.

So the bad guy was like four levels above me, with the half demon template tossed on for good measure. He had a spiked chain and that was his shtick. It was 3.5 so the tactic was VERY effective-- he had reach, trips, bonus hits, and I couldn't close.

My own build was based around crits and damn if I could actually score a hit in the threat range. (I roll like shit.) But as a secondary thing, I had a lot of grappling powers and bonuses. I think I was level 5 or so.

So he beats my ass. I got one or two hits, and if one had been a crit (15-20 threat range) I'd have had him. But I didn't. So I'm down at <10 hp and getting desperate, when I decide to charge him and grapple.

Fuck yeah, it worked! His grapple checks were much lower than mine and suddenly *he* was the one who couldn't score a hit on me. Spiked chain? Disarmed. Tries to move? Tripped. And, since I have these cool natural weapons on my head, I was able to pin him and then beat him down to negative HP via head-butts.

The crowd in the arena (and the rest of the gaming group) went fucking wild.

I won the contest, gained more power and prestige in the Empire, leveled up, bought Leadership as a feat, and gained the defeated champion as my cohort (special DM permission thanks to the epic victory-- he'd intended me to lose). For the rest of the campaign, even much higher level minotaurs didn't dare face me in the arena.

Changed the whole course of the campaign, which went on 2-3 more years and which my group still fondly remembers.

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>>49774306
Most likely because "grappling" is something that can be done IRL vs the fantasy of shooting magic missles or wielding a two handed great sword.

It's always going to be more fun to "system" something that's not in your reality because why system something common? Like you are not going to make a cooking system using dice to determine if you're chicken is tender or not.

If it takes 15 minutes to determine if you've grabbed someone then imagine how long it will take to say "I punch" (roll) "I try to block" et al for something that would happen in less than 20 seconds IRL.

I feel role playing is a balance between granularity (meaning understanding your actions) vs real time spent executing. Once one is out of balance you are sacrificing one for the other.

>>49782975
You are definitely right, grappling, pins & holds are extremely effective, there are some holds that are all but impossible to counter if initiated.
I don't find it too boring to watch from outside, but you've nailed the reason why I said grappling isn't fun, the humiliation and making the grappler look like a dick.

I mean, sure some people definitely deserve to be pinned and forced to give up, but in most cases it's just deppressing. When I was pinned, I felt awful and wanted to disappear from embarrassment; when I was the one winning, I felt like a jerk and thought "well maybe I overdid it".

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>>49783064
>>inb4 dubious rulings, strange RAI, splatbook nobody ever heard about, etc

As posted in the other grappling thread we had, here's Mongoose Traveller's grappling rules, which are both effective and simple.
Someone else posted similar rules from a recent Runequest edition.

>>49780721
ghosts?

>>49780462
God damn it Eddie, you marijuana monster. He must be constantly smoking because none of those position names tell me anything.

>>49774306
Because grappling in real life is like watching your parents fuck. They're all hot, heavy and possibly enjoying it, but it's disgusting to look at.

>>49781213
I fucking love grappling. The sweat, grunts, grabs, pushing and pulling, getting manhandled and manhandling others.

>>49774306
Because most of the time they're not properly abstracted like in >>49783397
If your game treats grappling and swords as completely separate ways to do melee then it is a sign that the designer had a total brainfart when writing the rule. Any martial art that involves weapons involves grappling, they are parts of the same parcel and package.

It's fun in pathfinder as a minmaxed monstrosity brawler. I had a coplayer who made A dwarf that strangled a wraith to death.

>>49782665
Los is plural

>>49784094
Freedom of Movement

>>49784344
well excuse him for being white. Jesus Christ, maybe we'll all convert to SJWism so you can feel so special

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>>49784460
It's just grammar.

>>49784344

He outwrestled a fucking DRAGON, anon. He gets to be plural if he wants.

GURPS martial arts has some vignettes around a mexican wrestler / super-detective character that's pretty damn funny.

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>>49774306
incorrect. the wrasstle baba is super fun

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>>49785467

Here's a thing for me as dude who haven't practiced any grappling sport it seems kinda boring. I mean I can imagine a spectacular fight with punches and kicks though if there was a kick-boxing tournament on tv I would probably change the channel. So maybe grappling just needs a fleshy choreographed version of it? Would that be something like professional wrestling?

Maybe there is a reason there are a lot of fighting video games but there aren't many grappling-based characters in them? Maybe it's harder to brake down into element an average person understands?

>>49778520
>5e being a good system
>D20 being even worth while for combat

Bait post.

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Alright guys, here's the grappling rules from drafts of a system I'm working on:
>As an attack, a combatant may choose to grapple.
>Make a roll based on the grappling skill of both combatants. If the roll lands in favor of the attacker, the defender takes a -G penalty to all successive rolls involving movement of the arms or legs, where m is margin of success. If the attacker makes another grapple attack, the margin of success is added to G.
>If the defender attempts to escape the grapple, make a grapple roll based on the grappling skill of both combatants. If the roll lands in the defender's favor, the margin of success is subtracted from G. If G drops to zero, the grapple ends and the defender escapes. If G drops BELOW zero, the defender may grapple the attacker, and the absolute value of the old G becomes the value of the new G.
>Rolls to escape a grapple are not affected by the penalty imposed by being grappled.

r8 me /tg/. The rules aren't very well-explained, so it probably sounds a lot more complicated than it is, but it basically amounts to a tug of war between the two fighters. The variable "G" represents how much of an upper hand the attacker has; i.e. how grappled you are.

The system is 3d6 based, so the target number is 11 by default. The attackers grappling skill is added to the roll, and the defender's grappling skill is added to the target number. If the attacker succeeds, the margin of success (which is equal to 1 + ROLL - TARGETNUMBER) becomes G, and G becomes a penalty imposed to any action the defender wants to take that involves use of the grappled appendages.

For throws and takedowns, I think I'll rule that you roll grapple skill + strength modifier + G vs defender's grapple skill + defender's weight.

>>49778520
Doesn't getting behind an enemy do the job just as well? I mean, it's true that you can give disadvantage to an enemy's attack rolls...if you're strong enough to keep anything with ridiculous strength down.

Better hope that your enemy doesn't have misty step AKA nearly all casters.

>>49786490
*where G is the margin of success.
I originally called "G" for grapple "m" for margin but then changed it 'cause "G" looks better.

>>49783657
no homo

>>49780462
This also points to the problem that most players couldn't even do interesting grappling in freeform roleplay, never-mind convert it into stats.

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>tfw you will never tickle an elven assassin into submission during a taledown attempt because you dont want to bring the party into your sexual fantasies