Welcome to Gaia! ::

This is why I don't like martial arts fights of any kind. The moves are complicated, you get the details wrong, nobody understands each other and it devolves into butting heads about whether or not you can O Soto Gari here when you have different mental pictures.

And it's not fun, either.

Yeah, these things have all the clarity of Schroedinger's Cat in a time machine set to "random".

Getting that balance can be tricky if you don't know what you're doing, or, in an attempt to gain an edge, deliberately start leaving out pieces of attacks in order to get an OOC advantage. I've seen NO U fights start because of stuff like that going on.

Beyond grappling, hand-to-hand requires no more detail than any other kind of fighting. All that really needs to be covered is where your fist goes, the power behind it, and the motion itself (hook, jab, straight, uppercut, ect).

Detail is the key to any amount of roleplaying, to some extent or another. You can say it about martial arts, I can say it about any other means of combat, and it still holds true. No matter how you slice it, if you leave details out, it's going to ******** s**t up.

If it's a wankfest, you might as well not even bother roleplaying, because any combat situation is going to require detail. Sometimes you can get away with less, sometimes more. But it doesn't really matter whether or not it's H2H, or grappling, or powers. The power is in the information you provide, too little and it's vague, too much and it bogs s**t down.

There's really nothing about "martial arts" or H2H centric combat scenes that's inherently MORE prone to NO U fights, except maybe that many people try to simplify it too much, or have an overdeveloped sense of what their opponent knows about the situation. Which, unsurprisingly enough, trails right back to detail. And, by and large, this applies to EVERY combat centric roleplaying situation.

Swing a sword? How? Aiming where? Via what stance?

Throw a fire ball? Where? How? How big? How fast?

Going for a takedown? How? Which leg? How fast? How low? To what position?

No one situation is really worse off than the other, it's just the fact that some people cannot accurately describe certain scenes. Some people suck at H2H, some at using powers, some at weapon oriented stuff. It's moreso a user error, than something inherently problematic with the roleplaying itself.

I used to be anti-H2H thinking it was prone to arguments, too. Then I found myself using Deitric and having him fighting with his hands more than with his weapons, and it wasn't particularly complex or prone to BS. Any time there was a misunderstanding, it was easily solved.

Some people are bad at certain mechanics. Personally, I probably could not play a character who was really small, or something. I wouldn't be very good with the mechanics of how to apply its abilities or size properly. Most often, it's not the particular mechanics that are prone to fault, so much as the person perceiving them as such just isn't that good at it. Or they don't enjoy it. Rose colored glasses, basically.

DOMINION.

And if you get perfect victories, you might face SHIN DOMINION.