What? No, that's not how it works, not in Third Edition, at least. Brawl is street fighting self-trained stuff. Jiujutsu would be Martial Arts: Jiujutsu. Same as Martial Arts: Ebon Shadow or Martial Arts: Black Claw. You can be a mortal Martial Artist with no Charms using Ebon Shadow Style. The Charms are how the fighting style expresses itself. If you are an Akido master who Exalts, you're gonna be manifest Akido Charms. Martial Art Charms are supernatural expressions of the given martial art.
Sorry to pick on you in particular, but you provided the most available quote for this.
This is
incoherent nonsense.
There is a limited subset of things you can do in a fight that won't get you horribly killed. A martial art is simply a codified list of a certain number of those things, organized in a way that seemed logical to the people who came up with that list.
Self-trained street fighters either
never get any good, they die horribly, or they pick up enough of the 'ways to not die horribly' to assemble a martial art out of. This is in fact how martial arts
get founded.
If you have a combat skill at a half-decent level
you are a martial artist. What
kind of martial artist you are is the interesting matter. This elitism about where and how you learned it is incoherent and moronic - and I
am an actual martial artist.
My knife fighter doesn't have the entire Solar Melee damage tree, actually. Nor any of it, actually, not at the moment. If I were to get him more dedicated Melee Charms, I would focus on the defensive and counterattack Charms, I think. Because Hungry Tiger Technique feels unfitting, to me, personally, as a damage Charm for a hesitant knife fighter. I would likely stop at Fire and Stones Strike, for damage enhancers, for exactly that reason. I mean, obviously you don't have to, you could easily fluff Hungry Tiger Technique as a perfect stab to the lungs or heart or whatever. But it's too much overwhelming damage in fluff and execution for my tastes. Melee's a big tree. Even my dedicated Meleeist with a crazy ton of Melee Charms only has half of it, and the other half would take him until E3 to get, assuming he bought nothing else, which he really wouldn't, he's got Resistance, Presence, and Socialize to invest in.
I think I could make a brutal axe warrior with Melee pretty easily. I'd avoid the defensive tree, dip into damage and hitting reliably, and be a Resistance berserker who can utterly shatter enemy defenses with his heavy weapon and Melee, while being nigh-invulnerable with his Resistance Charms. But I also wouldn't try to master Melee, because Melee, as a whole, doesn't fit the concept. But the damage enhancers and a couple 'hit better' Charms does it fine. Oh, and dip into Athletics, it's got some good stuff for enhancing a damage-focused melee fighter.
TL;DR: Yes, it would bother me if my axe guy felt like a knife fighter, which is why I'd spread my axe-fighter around, since not all Melee Charms would make me feel like a giant with a heavy axe cleaving enemies in two.
Right. Exactly. And in just that exact same way, your unarmed fighter can feel as different from your swordsman as you care to make 'em. The one tree's plenty big, and it's even bigger if you put the Brawl charms in there too.
So if this approach works for differentiating an axe-man and a knife fighter, why wouldn't it work for differentiating a brawler and a knife fighter?
Fists and knives are probably more similar in use than knives and axes, when you get right down to it.
They are. Knife-fighting is fist-fighting with a sharpened hand. The game changes up a bit with longer weapons like swords and axes because there's space and time to react.
It would probably work? I don't want to fuse abilities, though. It'd be less fun. I don't value simplifying things for its own sake. I enjoy complexity. It'd make the game worse, in my eyes.
It doesn't get less complex, though. It gets less
fiddly because now you don't have to invest in multiple favoured abilities to do the same thing, but the full breadth of charms is still there.
As noted charm bloat is a potential issue, but that's a separate potential issue. Cramming the Brawl and Melee charmsets into one, on its own, doesn't reduce complexity at all - it just removes the stumbling block of 'I can maneuver my body perfectly to hit a target, but completely forget how the moment I don't have a stick in my hand' that makes it troublesome for an actual martial artist to engage with Exalted as-written (hiya!), while opening up more finesse-oriented unarmed combat and more 'raaaaargh for the rargh god' for a dude with an axe.
If Solar Brawl could do all of the things Solar Melee can do, and Solar Melee could do all of the things Solar Brawl can do, then why would we have two separate combat abilities and charmsets?
I think some members' answer to that question is pretty clear, but just in case: They
shouldn't be.
I literally just got home from whacking people in the face with a sword, do you have any idea of how many times it turned into grappling? (You have no idea how beautiful it is to get an elbow push and send your opponent spinning so much their back is facing you) How the action to punch and the action to cut someone with a sword are borderline-identical?
Any idea how large a percentage of that above-mentioned 'ways to not die horribly' is 'clothesline your opponent with your sword'? (Swords are grappling tools, man, a good half of sword-in-armour is 'using the thing as a prybar to throw the other guy on the ground')
The human body is used
all at once in violence. The only thing melee weapons do is provide leverage, reach, and sharpness.
Yes, but that's not where we are and given that Ex3 has the 25-ability spread it makes no sense to complain about the fact that they made the charm trees distinct.
Makes even less sense to use 'that's not where we are' as a defence against people
complaining about 'where we are'.
We know that's not where we are.
That's the problem.
