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+--- Thread: What's your character fighting style? (/showthread.php?tid=15704)
What's your character fighting style? - Leanne - 03-30-2016
Super simple question that I stole from a thread I wrote in years past!
Basically, how does your character generally moves during a fight?
Using Leanne as an example: If I had to resume Leanne's way of fighting, I would do so with two words, those being adaptation and opportunism. Although she is able to stick to a plan when necessary, most of the times she acts on the fly, improvising as the situation goes. Also her growth as an archer alongside her mischievous nature taught her to being highly opportunistic, not being over using cheap/dirty tricks and tactics if that means getting and edge or end the fight right there.
Even though her specialty is around attacking from a safe range(she's a ranged fighter, duh!), moons of fighting in the Grindstone taught her into a manner of close quarters combat even while holding a bow, possibly surprising those unaware of such fact. Further helping such is the presence of her ever trustworthy dagger, and her self-taught/mimicked pugilism moves. Not being of a particularly strong constitution, but being quite acrobatic, blows coming towards her tends to be evaded or redirected. Â If fighting without weapons, kicks tends to be her preferred method of assault, given the leg strength she contains, plus her already mentioned acrobatic skills.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - FreelanceWizard - 03-30-2016
L'yhta tends to run around, dive, and roll a lot. As someone who primarily uses magic but often ends up in the thick of fights, she uses her speed to her advantage, bouncing around like a flea hopped up on (insert stimulant here). This is especially true when she's wielding a sword. She's not especially good with a blade, so rather than parrying attacks, she tends to jump out of the way of them instead.
Her dodge-centric style can be (and has been) a significant liability for her. A well-timed feint or attacks coming from multiple directions can force her to fall back on her magical shields or armor and to take what she believes will be the lesser blow. If she guesses incorrectly about which hit to take, she can, for example, end up nearly losing an arm. Her style is also fairly physically taxing, so it's certainly possible to wear her out in an extended battle.
Offensively, she typically casts spells.
That involves a lot of hand and staff motions. With her sword, she has a very straightforward cut-and-thrust style, with a preference for quick thrusts at apparent weak points given her penchant for speed, her relatively low physical strength, and her preference for light blades. She's akin to a very roughly trained sabre fencer.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Edelirium - 03-31-2016
Directing others to do her fighting for her.
She's a battle strategist, so she tends to hang back and organize others. When she fights personally, she does so with an occasionally more than appropriate amount of magical force.Â
Annoyances tend to get a Sleep treatment.
For aggressors, she will hold nothing back.
Overwhelming might and power is her go-to. She's not the strongest around, physically, so she uses the metaphorically magical equivalent of a great sword.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Aaron - 03-31-2016
Assuming he's not quitting or just getting beat up because reasons (Which happens even without RNG because it's his character).
Aaron fights I guess haphazardly? Depends if he wants to hurt or get away first. If he wants to get away he'll fight defensively using his sword like a shield to parry and block more than attack until he finds an opening to stun the opponent and bail.
Now assuming he's trying to actually hurt, he'll be the aggressor more often than not I think, aiming for limbs mostly to cripple, or the occasional deep chest wound.
He's not much for dodging, and tried to tank (hueh) blows at him over dodging.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Kellach Woods - 03-31-2016
Kell first learned the axe as an actual tool for combat from the Marauder Guild - However, the only time he'd used an axe before was essentially to slaughter cattle. There's elements of that in his style, especially versus monsters who share some physical traits with farm animals. If he can, he'll throw himself in the mix to protect others and with the axe being a weapon that has some reach, it allows him to do so quite nicely.
Of course, that's not going into his unarmed combat style which differs based on which art he is concentrating on developing.
And, of course, that's not going into his, as of yet untapped, unusual skill.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Zazanni - 03-31-2016
Zazanni is well trained and would be a good archer if she stopped trying to show off. Her archery is peppered with all kinds of unnecessary flare that just gets in the way during a serious fight. "Course I can do it without the flippin'. Why would I though?"
Patience is not her forte and she'd much rather fire as many arrows as possible to force her enemy into making a mistake rather than line up a precise shot. There's a lot of improvisation and jumping around, trying to weaken a large number of foes instead of focusing down one. Of course, all this works way better if she has an ally to take advantage of the chaos she's trying to create.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Coatleque - 03-31-2016
Brute force.
Combat is not a dance for Crofte. She tries to get in and out, neutralizing her target efficiently so she can move on. Though she occasionally will greatly overestimate herself.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Caspar - 03-31-2016
A round peg in a square hole, forcing herself to fit with pure willpower and every ounce of her strength, nothing held back. There is a constant tension between how Virara thinks and feels, and how her style is supposed to function, to say nothing of her race and its innate weakness of reach. When thinking of how she fights, I tried to imagine the legendary (heavily embellished) combination of Bajiquan and Piguaquan, which was described in a saying "When pigua is added to baji, gods and demons will all be terrified. When baji is added to pigua, heroes will sigh knowing they are no match against it." I derived a lot of the mindset from aggressive styles like Jigen-ryu kenjutsu and Okinawan karate. Since this is a fantasy setting, a mundane martial art made no sense, so I tried to spruce things up with a bit of mystery, and from Wuxia novels like the Condor Heroes trilogy I drew the supernatural element.
I meant to make a tab on my wiki describing the background and techniques of the style for interested parties and also for my own reference, but I haven't gotten around to it yet, so here's the abridged version.
When she was a feral child, Virara was an opportunist who beat down the weak and defenseless when she could to steal food or seize shelter for herself. She avoided large monsters and slaughtered small wild animals with her uncanny strength that developed several years into her life stranded on the island, or perhaps lay dormant within her from beyond the murkiness of early childhood and her brush with drowning on the high seas. On her island, she was more akin to a wild animal than a sentient creature and didn't have awareness of herself other than a sense of self-preservation, so she never held back and often maimed or crippled the people she struck. Eventually this made every refugee camp on the atoll wary of her, and she could no longer find food easily. She had to become more subtle, more tricky, but her innate hunger and straightforwardness got in the way of this necessity and she was eventually caught trying to pickpocket the woman who would become her Master.
Years later, after countless days of abuse and training, almost all of that feral instinct was focused into a compressed furnace of fighting instinct within her, meant to be controlled, a domestication. Even now though, the focus necessary to use such a complex style eludes her, and she uses the memorized techniques with exacting detail, but never actually follows the theoretical ethos of the martial arts. Her style is meant to either sneak attack or respond to an aggressor, not necessarily to initiate open combat, but Virara's viciousness leads her to often strike first. Virara misunderstands the concept of "ichigeki hissatsu," or "one strike, one kill," which doesn't actually necessarily mean kill in a single hit, though the style does do that often enough, but rather to make every strike count; to be capable of transitioning to a decisive blow with every move. Instead the attitude of "I have to finish this immediately or I failed" makes her hasty and sometimes careless. In what should be cold hands that kill without thought or sentiment there is a ferocious thirst that renders her fighting impure and heterodox. She understands how to replicate the techniques, but holds herself to them like scripture. This is in spite of being taught that "the novice holds themselves rigidly to learned techniques, the initiate modifies or abandons them when they don't serve their purpose, and the master manipulates the opponent into receiving them in their purest form."
It seems like, on a certain level, her Master expected that, and wanted to harness it, or otherwise felt it was inherent within Virara. It's like being allowed to roam free for years and then suddenly being cooped up in a tiny cage for an equal amount of time. As a naturally talented sort, Master was unaccustomed to training others and an indifferent mentor. There was a strong general theme of "master this technique I demonstrated once or die tomorrow when I test you," to basically everything. The conditioning itself was more akin to torture, and it is questionable whether some methods were simply done to amuse Master rather than actually benefit Virara, though they all ultimately made her strong. This attitude bled over into the way she regards other tasks in life. Virara throws all that she is into mastering something she takes seriously, at the expense of her ability to perform other or even related tasks. Sometimes that overeager desire to conquer ruins her ability to perform what she was tasked with, despite her best efforts.
That being said, her training is all that she is, and an amateur, or even a dutiful student, cannot begin to comprehend the severity of the ordeals Master put her through, and so Virara's will to endure and emerge alive is gargantuan. Most martial artists had a life outside of the dojo that granted them succor, even if that was fleeting, or if their day to day existence was similarly brutish. Virara's sense of personhood was innately tied to the art of killing itself, and there was nothing outside of the longhouse, the grove, or the later houseboat, when she was being taught. Although not a very tricky person herself, Virara has been taught to use misdirection and optical illusion unconsciously through muscle memory within the techniques to make her strikes harder to avoid or guard. She is able to shut out pain and suffer injury to land a hit if she needs to, though her small body can't resist forever no matter how strong she might be.
It'd be yet another stupidly long post for me to describe the more nuanced details of the style proper and why they clash with Virara's personality, but it's helpful to think of it as being akin to a cannon, or shotgun, while the Fist of Rhalgr is something like a machine gun. Being a relatively unknown style, those in the know believe there is a common ancestor from centuries ago, but it seems to be insubstantial rumors. Meant for assassination, it prioritizes offense above all else, and even its guards are intended to be capable of inflicting fatal wounds. Yet surprisingly it stresses defense when the initiative cannot be seized decisively. It supposedly doesn't incorporate any Aetheric training, which renders it an impractical style for a world in which people must face the scourge of monsters and magic. It may also be that there were what Virara calls "internal techniques," but her Master was so monstrously talented she had no need to learn them, and thus couldn't confer the knowledge to her "student." (More an amusing toy.) The staggering number of techniques the style contains, derived from two main styles fused together and a number of secondary styles, make memorization impossible for most, and encourages rigidity of thinking. It's easy to fall into a habit of assigning specialized techniques learned to specific situations, which is ludicrous given the sheer amount of variables involved in combat.
So on paper, it is an impractical style with no Aetheric ability, inferior to weapons-based martial arts and only mechanically equitable to other famous bare-handed schools. It could be useful, if fully trained, but what point would there be in that when the same amount of effort could teach five students how to wield a lance properly? Only its ability to kill in a single blow through circulatory shock is impressive. Yet the rumors about the woman who trained Virara, known largely only within espionage circles in Doma and the Empire, speak of assassinations done in plain view without anyone even seeing the practitioner, skin able to resist blade and fist alike with the hardness of ceremite, hands that rend bodies like wisps of smoke, and even the ability to murder with a glance. Embellishments, most certainly. Right?
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Kilieit - 03-31-2016
Aghurlal's style with a polearm is predominantly focussed on mitigation. Which is quite different than the FFXIV Lancer Guild-advocated style of "full fearless offense", but it suits him well as a character.
He likes disarming people. He likes redirecting attacks away from himself and taking advantage of the openings left as a result, possibly with his knife if it's close enough quarters. He likes snipping people's vital spots with the sharp end and watching them tire themselves out on the injury. He likes coating the tip of his lance in poison or other drugs that could turn the tide of battle in his favour. He loves distracting people by being annoying so his friend can get behind them and give them a proper stabbing (especially folks the rogues' guild gave him the word to attack, since they're usually pretty bad people).
He doesn't have a dragoon soulstone (and won't for the forseeable future; he hasn't got the contacts or prestige to earn one with), but he has a moderate competence in acrobatics - that tail isn't there for show, after all. So think "passably similar to dragoon moves, but within the range of normal human ability", I guess.
He's fairly proficient in other weapons. If he was disarmed, and the only other weapon available to him was a sword or somesuch, he wouldn't be helpless. But he wouldn't be as good as someone who favours the weapon in question, and the polearm remains by far his favourite to work with for extended amounts of time. His best secondary weapon is shortblades, on account of they accompany a polearm well - in a position where one is too short/long reach to be used effectively, the other fills the gap nicely.
Last but not least, he has the potential to be good with arcanima if he found a teacher and put the hours in, but he hasn't has the opportunity to learn any yet - the fact he's not literate in Eorzean not really helping matters.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Kaiya - 04-01-2016
Kaiya fights very defensively. As a Scholar, she forms barrier and whittles down her opponent's defenses with various spells that can cause harm even when she has to relocate. She looks for openings and only moves when necessary.
Alasarnil fights dirty. Corrosive acids for metals, a baton for a blunt weapon, daggers for wielding and daggers for throwing, poisons, toxins; powdered, dried, pepper mixtures for the eyes. She tries to make sure she is always in a state of movement, and if she cannot end a fight quickly, she aims to cripple and bleed. To her, winning as a cheat is better than dying honorably.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Misharu - 04-01-2016
I would think Misha'to does/will fight with a lot of misdirection. He'll move rather gracefully, but with probably a lot of feints and other such movements to throw opponents off balance and keep them guessing. He's a very calm, collected, and intelligent individual which leads me to believe he will use a certain amount of mind games in combat. While strong, I think he main objective would be to outwit his opponent. And of course, being a miqo'te, he has a certain amount of natural grace.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - Jana - 04-01-2016
Jana's melee fighting style is based more around reflexes than anything else. For that reason she can be pretty comfortable with almost whatever weapon she can get her hands on, though something that's heavy like an axe or greatsword is more of a hindrance than fighting barehanded. For the same reason, she's more comfortable in leather armor than plate. Inertia also plays a big part in it; she knows how to use the motion she's in the middle of to make her next few motions do maximum damage.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - LiadansWhisper - 04-01-2016
Liadan stands in the back and hopes she doesn't get hit (Leanne knows alllllll about this).
And heals things. When she can.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - V'aleera - 04-01-2016
Not unlike a bowling ball.
RE: What's your character fighting style? - LiadansWhisper - 04-01-2016
(04-01-2016, 03:43 AM)Valeera Wrote: Not unlike a bowling ball.
An angry, racist bowling ball that's bad at physical combat, yes!