Martial arts and proficiency

[oosyrag]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Learning martial arts from books and turning into a kung fu master is a little farfetched.

Solution you would like.

Add a proficiency for each martial art that would be a simple multiplier on how often martial skills trigger. Partially learned proficiency would scale linearly. You can still learn a martial art from reading a book, but it doesn't mean you'll be able to apply it in an uncontrolled combat situation perfectly efficiently right away. Even someone who may have experience and practiced martial arts in controlled environments previously might not always be able to fully apply their skill when shit goes down and a zombie is trying to eat their face.

Add a practice recipe for each martial art that can train a proficiency up to a certain %. Not sure if this is possible as it is currently. However, training up to 100% wouldn't be too unreasonable either, given that training at this point in the cataclysm would be training with practical application in mind. Professions/backgrounds starting with partial proficiency might need to be a thing that needs to be implemented. Alternatively, some sort of large bonus to proficiency learning rate for having the martial background might be good as well.

There could be an opportunity to leverage nps here as well. Having a knowledgeable or experienced teacher would be a huge benefit towards learning a martial art. Even if the npc didn't know the martial art, I would believe having a training dummy sparring partner would be very beneficial in practice.

Describe alternatives you have considered.

No response

Additional context

Just jotting down some ideas.

[I-am-Erk]

Someone commented on #41359 and in looking up the details, I noticed we don't have an issue open for "tie martial arts to a proficiency" but it really should be done, and this one is more or less the basic implementation I would do.

1. Martial arts should each be tied to their own proficiencies.
2. Martial arts books should be able to teach that proficiency up to a certain percent (25% or so? IDK)
3. The martial arts book should also enable a practice recipe that lets you spar solo and train higher, or spar with an NPC and get still higher.
4. Ideally, martial arts techniques could be locked depending on your progress in the proficiency, so at 10% proficiency you can access up to level 1 martial arts techniques, or something like that.

We might want to look carefully at how we grant access to the full proficiency. IMO this should require a trainer NPC, so just using a book and sparring with your friend might get you to a healthy and respectable 70% proficient, but you can't be a black belt if both of you are learning it from a manual. However, someoen who knows more about martial arts may wish to weigh in here.

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Another option might be to give each martial art its own skill, although I think for UI purposes we'd want to move these to a different area of the @ menu. Proficiencies are not designed to model things that come in 10 levels, and martial arts do. However I have a feeling this would be a ton more work.

[Tharn]

That's all good stuff IMO. Don't forget though that Martial Arts were also passed on by pretty in-depth written works historically. A practitioner might not pick up every detail from a book, especially things that only resistance sparring will teach you such as more solid stances that lend the most stability vs. an opponent. It's the same thing with fencing manuals - you can tell the difference between a HEMA practicioner and someone who's just been doing flourishes and drills for years by the simple efficiency of footwork. Also other things, but that one stands out. This could be represented by a theoretical and practical knowledge separation similar to how skill learning happens currently.

Or realistically, maybe by a speed penalty proportional to how much your practical knowledge is lagging behind your theoretical knowledge while your pool of techniques is actually tied to the theoretical knowledge. After all, you can't magically learn new techniques without being taught - practice alone isn't cutting it.

Or: Gate the various stances behind practical training and the other techniques behind theory.

[TrueChevaleresse]

You should absolutely not require a martial arts master to learn a style. The original suggestion of having a proficiency tied to actually using it makes sense; it ties in with the existing proficiency system. Needing someone to master it, though, that's frankly a bit absurd. Martial arts are already gated by tracking down books (and are otherwise outright impossible to learn without NPC help, unlike every other properly implemented proficiency) and having the requisite melee/unarmed skills. It just doesn't make sense from a gameplay standpoint. It's also not terribly realistic, given that, as mentioned, most of your training is practical anyway.