Is this guy a Martial Artist? A Swashbuckler? A Knight? Yes.

Dungeon Fantasy has the Swashbuckler template. Swashbucklers are physical combatants who prioritize mobility and precision over heavy armor and brute strength. They use a specialized set of weapons, are obsessed with improving their skill, and strive to learn secret techniques of legendary reputation and effectiveness.

Dungeon Fantasy also has the Martial Artist template. Martial artists are physical combatants who prioritize mobility and precision over heavy armor and brute strength. They use a specialized set of weapons, are obsessed with improving their skill, and strive to learn secret techniques of legendary reputation and effectiveness.

Yes, those descriptions use most of the same words. When you look at these two professional templates from a large enough distance, they really are two takes on the same concept. They could, in theory, be represented by the same template. The reason Martial Artist is a separate archetype in Dungeon Fantasy is because Monk is a separate class in D&D.

And the reason Monk is a separate class in D&D, as far as I can tell, is because of a particular set of media cliches that have surrounded the words “martial arts” in a lot of media contemporary with earlier editions of D&D. I guess you could call it a form of orientalism1.

In some of these media sources, “martial arts” are this mysterious and exotic secret from the mysterious and exotic East, much more sophisticated than the crude flailings of Western barbarians. Knowing it makes you more “enlightened” and gives you superpowers.

In others, they’re this fancy dance for pansies that’s totally ineffective in a “true” fight, because a Real Man knows he just has to punch the other guy. The Real Man in this scenario is of course always a man, and always Western too.

D&D monks were originally based on this character named Remo Williams, the protagonist of the Destroyer series of novels. These novels came out in the 70s, and they were very much in the “exotic secret that gives you superpowers” camp. Williams learned a fictional martial art from an exotic foreign master and proceeded to use it to defeat a string of (usually Asian) bad guys. D&D writers applied a “shaolin” veneer to the class in later editions but many monk abilities are still based on stuff Williams did in the novels.

GURPS replicated this in Dungeon Fantasy because it tries to replicate D&D, but its “default” approach to martial arts turns out to be a lot better in my opinion. It has a supplement named GURPS Martial Arts that treats historical styles from all over the world with the same level of respect. The message contained in its rules seems to be that these styles are all different expressions of the same thing2. How good an individual combatant is matters a lot more than where his techniques come from. I really liked that when I first read it, and I’ve only grown to like it more over the years. It kinda bothers me to see a game that still treats the subject in that older “Destroyer” way.

Every character who practices a fighting style and trains to improve their skill at it is a martial artist by definition, no matter where that fighting style comes from. Whether that training gives you superpowers has always been more of a genre or campaign “setting” than something that should be assigned to individual character types.

In the case of the dungeon fantasy genre, that particular setting is obviously stuck on “yes”. Every PC can perform impossible feats of badassery, that has been a given since the very beginning3. Someone who comes from a culture that talks about things in terms of Chi will likely describe any such character as possessing “strong chi”. Someone who doesn’t will just describe them as being really good at fighting. This in no way changes the fundamentals of how their abilities work.

So here’s what I’m going to do in my campaigns from now on.

Demonkified Dungeon Fantasy

Chi Mastery no longer exists as a specific power. There is no Chi Talent, and all its component abilities lose the power modifier along with the associated discounts and drawbacks.

If you only have access to the DFRPG, do this instead: if a former Chi ability is described as “working like” another trait, you can buy that trait instead. For example, Tough Skin instead of Dragon Skin, and Striking ST instead of Mantis Strike. For abilities that have no parallel… keep the same cost, it’s simpler. In all cases you no longer get a bonus for Chi Talent, but you also no longer need Disciplines of Faith: Chi Rituals to keep them either.

The Swashbuckler and Martial Artist become related templates. A Swashbuckler gains access to the Martial Artist’s abilities and power-ups, and vice-versa. Characters of each template might still look and behave very differently on a role-playing level, but there isn’t any fundamental difference in their mechanics any more. The 30 points that would go to Chi Talent in the Martial Artist template are instead avaialble to be spent on any template advantages or skills. And there you go!

If you’re also using Streamlined Mastery, this means that a PC built using the Martial Artist template could start off with True Master and Iron Limbs for the same cost as the official Trained By a Master and Chi Talent 2 advantages.

What about Knights?

Everything I said about monks and swashbucklers in my introduction applies equally well to Knights and the other “fighty” templates. However, I still want to keep it as a separate template because it’s good to still have some guidance when building characters!

“Combatant who prefers strength and heavy gear” is different enough from “combatant who prefers precision and speed” to remain a useful distinction. I’d still allow some judicious cross-aisle shopping for traits that make sense for a specific PC.

Heck, combining this with some form of Agnostic Dungeon Fantasy (where either no spellcaster is a priest or they all are) would leave us very close to ditching templates entirely, or at least having a collection of “classes” that’s much closer to that of the oldest of old D&Ds: “warrior” and “magic user”. Maybe I’ll try that some day.

What About the Path?

One of the side-boxes in the Dungeon Fantasy Companion 2 introduces the notion of The Path, an alternate progression scheme that a Martial Artist PC can opt into at character creation. Basically, it makes your Chi Talent levels limit how many levels you can have in certain traits. As a result those limits are lower to start with, but with enough time and points they can end up much higher.

I think The Path is more appropriate for a campaign that does the reverse of what I’m trying to do here, where everyone uses chi mechanics. I’ll leave it out of my games for now and maybe write about it at a future date.

  1. Though of course I’m not an expert on the subject and will gladly defer to people who are. ↩

  2. Yes, Bruce Lee said this, and yes, the book does talk about him with great admiration. ↩

  3. Don’t even try to bring the Guy at the Gym fallacy into this. The guy at the gym will never have 200 HP or be able to fight 50 goblins without breaking a sweat. ↩