Martial Arts Help - Style Mastery

I am looking to make a feat (or something else, feat was the first thing to come to mind) that applies to schools of martial arts. Something like “Style Master.” The idea is players are encouraged to make signature banes to reflect their school of martial arts. For example, blinding becomes “eagle strike” in the Birds of Prey school. My thoughts are to make a feat that gives advantage 1 or 2 when using your school’s moves. I also have an idea for a Counter Style feat so that you get get better defense against a school of martial arts. but I am not sure how best to implement them since my experience with the system is pretty low at the moment. Any advice?

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I think the Attack Specialization feat would work, but just flavor it.

Thank you that’s a great call. I could use it as a skeleton for the Counter Style too.

Style Mastery
Cost: 3 points

Prerequisites
Tier 1 - 3: Agility 4, Might 4, or Any Extraordinary 4
Description
Through long years of training you have reached mastery in your style. You are most effective at strikes designed to wear down your opponents.

Effect
When you take this feat, select one martial arts or mystic arts style. You gain advantage 1 per tier of this feat for any bane attack made with your chosen style.
Example of style Bane: “Starfall Horn Soars Again” for example is the Qilin Lotus Spear School’s Forced Movement Bane.
Examples of martial arts or mystic arts styles you can choose to specialize in include Ten Swift Heavenly Flashes Sect, Birds of Prey Style, Qilin Lotus Spear School - though this list is not exhaustive.

Special
In addition to purchasing multiple tiers of this feat, you may take this feat multiple times and select a new martial arts or mystic arts style each time. Your total advantage to an attack is equal to your tier for that particular martial arts style. For example, a character might have Attack Specialization II (Brids of Prey Style) for Brids of Prey School Banes and Attack Specialization IV (Qilin Lotus Spear School) for Qilin Lotus Spear School Banes.

Counter Style is basically the same, but applies disadvantage to attackers using a chosen style.
This will also work with Mystic Arts (schools of magic taught in traditions like martial arts are in the homebrew setting)

So basically I’m seeing this less of Martial Arts Style Mastery (which is a cool flavorful take) and more of Bane Attack Specialization.

One thing I would note/ask: are you intending for ALL banes of a chosen Attribute (school) to gain the bonus? So like, if I chose a Black Hand style (Banes: Blinded, Death, Disarmed, Fatigued, Immobilized, Incapacitated, Knocked Down, Silence, Stunned), I would gain advantage on ALL of these Banes? Regardless of which Attribute I used to invoke them?

yeah that is the idea

Part of what makes Open Legend so cool is that each Feat has multiple interpretations. It sounds to me like what you are looking for to replicate a martial arts style would be something like Bane Focus and/or Multi-Bane Specialist. The former allows the fighter to be more effective with a single bane, while the latter gives characters a “signature move” that allows them to inflict two banes with a single attack. Counter-Based Combat can be replicated by the plethora of defense based feats like Battlefield Reflexes and Battlefield Punisher. These can allow characters to deal damage and even inflict banes with good Defend rolls. In short, Open Legend allows for nearly infinite character customization options to tell whatever story you think is awesome.

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Basically, you don’t need to create any special feat for this at all. Everything is already in place for you to do exactly what you are wanting.

Attack Specialization (Unarmed) would work for a lot of this as far as attacks.

For your Counters, you can just make that part of your world.

Rock gains advantage 1 vs Scissors
Scissors gains advantage 1 vs Paper
Paper gains advantage 1 vs Rock

And just make that be a thing in the world. You can even do something like Advantage X vs the other school, where X is half your level.

Everything else is just flavor.

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Just pointing something out since we’ve had a problem with it recently: if you give advantage/disadvantage to attacks against a character it causes problems with multi-targeting.

For example: say your character has Steady Boulder Counter style and “Forced Move” attacks have disadvantage; what dice does the attacker roll if they’re targeting you and one of your party members with a single attack? Do they get disadvantage on the roll or not?

Also, I’d like to add my voice to the others on this post in saying that you don’t need a new feat for this if you can just rename an existing one :smile:

I would say on that case roll disadvantage and use the first roll against the first person and the lower one against the person the disadvantage was meant for. If those are the same then so be it.

Has some memory issues, and makes explosions hard to keep track of, but it’s a decent house-rule. We’ve been handling similar effects in the Core Rules by having +Guard (see Invisible boon).