Customer Reviews

Gurps Martial Arts: Exotic Combat Systems from All Cultures (GURPS: Generic Universal Role Playing System)

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I have been interested in GURPS and Martial Arts for a long time. This book contains tons of styles and the rules for skills and manuvers are very nicely done. Although it doesn't have Every martial art in existance it does have a wide selection and rules for creating/integrating your own. I integrated Taido in and it worked really well. This book can add flavor to GURPS combat even if it is weapon-oriented (a lot of martial arts are.) However I would recommend the 2nd Edition but overall I loved it! The possiblities are pretty much limitless and that is what makes it so good

This is a highly useful book. The information in it can be applied to almost any genre or campaign. The listing of martial arts is comprehensive and there are rules to design your own new ones. I use this book more often than almost any other gurps book that I own. The only downside is the increase in complexity for combat. Extra realism brings extra complexity as usual. Note: you must have the gurps basic set to use this book.

GURPS Martial Arts is a book with lots of different martial arts styles for your characters. It also includes maneuvers, which are like skill subsets. I really like how this book lets you build your own martial arts styles. Martial Arts also includes tables for all the weaponry, such as Sai (for anyone who's ever watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Raf uses a pair of these).
A lot of the illustrations are gory, reminding you that GURPS was never meant for kids (Steve Jackson Games should make that clearer, I think). BUT, aside from the "Silly Combat Rule" Bulletproof Nudety, there's no adult content! And while there's gore in some of the pictures, everyone's fully clothed. That's really, really nice.

GURPS Martial Arts is one of the best Martial Arts supplements I've seen for any game. It is a must for any serious gamer. Staying true to GURPS form a lot of research went into writing this book. It includes both historical information about most of the major fighting styles in the world as well as the game stats. It also expands the GURPS combat rules making them more realistic and fun to play

With such a large, expansive system like GURPS it's fairly logical to expect that all the supplements will not be created equal. GURPS Martial Arts is one of those supplements. Overall, the amount of new character options and abilities is really close to zero. The martial art styles you can take using GURPS Martial Arts are really packages of skills, advantages and manuvers that are covered in other, better books. In the end, listing the styles just creates clutter on your character sheet. Like, say, you have 40 points in the Ninjitsu style. What you really have is 40 points worth of skills that are listed under the Ninjitsu style in the Martial Art supplement. So those 40 points would be listed twice. In the end, the information showed in Martial Arts is no different from what is available in Compendium 1 and Compendium 2, which have lots of other handy information. If you are looking for a supplement to expand your GURPS play experience, this one will probably leave you pretty flat (especially if you have the Compendiums already)