In GURPS, the Trained by a Master advantage allows a character to perform martial feats on par with those seen in kung fu movies and other similar stories. The Weapon Master advantage does basically the same in a slightly different way. They overlap so much that I’m not sure if they were meant to exist in the same campaign!

I think both advantages are fairly priced on their own, but I don’t think both of them combined are worth 75 points. Choosing to only allow one of them in your campaign is a fairly simple matter, but what if you want to allow both, potentially on the same character?

Most of the differences between the two traits are fiddly matters of skill coverage. Sweeping those aside leaves us with the remaining elephant in the room, the Weapon Master damage bonus.

Elephant Examination: The Damage Bonus

In my experience, the damage bonus is the biggest game changer in the entire WM package. Even if a Weapon Master never learns a supernatural skill and never attacks or parries more than once per turn, they’re still going to feel like an entirely different character from someone who has the exact same stats but lacks the advantage. It feels a bit unfair to me that this bonus is not available to characters that focus on unarmed strikes.

GURPS uses realistic assumptions as a base for its rules, and under those assumptions a combatant with a weapon always has a big advantage over one without. The unarmed fighter risks limb injury on every parry and strike. The armed one has greater reach and much better damage from using swing attacks or simply from doing a better damage type than crushing.

An unarmed fighter with Trained By a Master can approach that by taking other traits… But then they’ve spent 60 points and bought a Hard combat skill to be on par with someone who bought an Average skill and took Weapon Master (single weapon) for 20 points.

I don’t feel a need to keep this “effectiveness gap” between armed and unarmed skills when we’re dealing with a campaign that allows “mastery” advantages in the first place.

New Traits

My solution to the above situation is to rejigger the existing traits. The new and altered traits below are available in any campaign that also allows both Trained by a Master and Weapon Master.

True Master (50 points)

Through either decades of dedication or being some sort of war god, you have mastered all forms of “archaic” combat. You gain all the benefits from having both Trained by a Master and the full version of Weapon Master. Your unarmed strikes enjoy the same damage bonus described under Weapon Master. This bonus does stack with other bonuses from high striking skills and from traits like Claws.

Those two advantages still exist, and represent a slightly less comprehensive form of mastery. You can upgrade from any of them to True Master by spending the difference between their point value and 50.

Iron Limbs (10 points)

Your limbs are immune to incidental injury during unarmed combat. Enemies can’t damage your limbs when they parry your unarmed attacks with a weapon, nor can they switch targets and damage your limbs when you fail to parry their attacks. You also don’t hurt yourself when hitting armored opponents with unarmed strikes. Your limbs can still be deliberately targeted by enemy attacks, however.

This trait replaces Unarmed Master, as it is basically Unarmed Master without the damage bonus.

Conclusion

I like those two traits, though as of this writing I still need to actually field-test them.

In campaigns that use these two new advantages, an unarmed specialist can’t turn their limbs into Strikers. That’s what Unarmed Master did, and we did away with it. IF the specialist in question happens to belong to a non-human species that has natural Strikers, though, those would stack with True Master. Beware of boxing crab-people!

Iron Limbs doesn’t have any prerequisites: you could buy it without having any of the “mastery” advantages. This allows it to be used to represent an extremely focused blessing, or a creature whose limbs are naturally hard to hurt or even naturally made of metal.

Finally, if you feel 10 points for Iron Limbs is too expensive for someone who is already a True Master, you could try rolling it into True Master at no extra cost, and eliminating the separate Iron Limbs advantage.