Martial Arts

As you saw in the Player's Handbook, everybody knows how to punch and wrestle.

Martial Arts, however, are another matter. Not every character in a normal medieval-style campaign will know how to utilize oriental-style Martial Arts.

The Martial Arts described in this section aren't any real-world fighting style; they're a combination of "generic" martial-arts maneuvers in the tradition of martial-arts movies.

These Martial Arts are only available in a campaign if the DM decides that the art is available for characters to learn. He must first decide if he wants characters to be able to use these maneuvers in his campaign, which will tend to give the campaign a more oriental flavor; then, if he wishes to use them, he needs to establish a history for these combat abilities. Customarily, they've been developed by some distant civilization, and recent trade with that culture has brought some practitioners and teachers of the art to the player-characters' society.

To learn Martial Arts at its basic level, the character spends one Weapon Proficiency slot on Martial Arts. Once he has spent that slot, he can use Martial Arts in the same way that other people use Punching and Wrestling, as we'll describe immediately below.

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