What it says on the tin.

Does any game have a clean, easily run system that gives the flavor of hand-to-hand combat, without bogging down into endless complexity?

Post your systems, and justifications.

EDIT: I'm not talking about blow by blow realism, but a system that — in play — captures the feel of a martial arts or boxing or wrestling bout.

For example, each shot in pool sinks a ball, but must also set up your next shot. It's a game of skill.

Likewise, an attack in a MA, boxing, or fencing match isn't about just that attack, it's about setting up the next one, or carrying out a strategy that plays to your strengths as a fighter and minimizes your opponent's strengths.

In real-world fighting there are several elements like that, of which I know nothing. I don't need to duplicate them.

I'm looking for a system that evokes them, making it feel like a real fight, without getting bogged down in mechanics.

Realistic hand-to-hand combat? No RPG ever.

However, a few games are pretty good at cinematic martial arts. My favourite is Thrash, which is a homebrew based largely upon the Streetfighter RPG from White wolf in the 90s. Final Stand is pretty good too.

GURPS Martial Arts does a pretty good job. It looks complex but it is because of the toolkit nature. When you setup a character with a particular style the selected options can fit on a one or two page cheat sheet. The system has the virtue of having a one to one relationship between the mechanics the real-time art being simulated.

Unisystem.

You have to pick the right supplements though:
Enter the Zombie (AFMBE)
Mystery Codex (witchcraft)
Angel or Buffy (cinematic)

The three systems are different. AFAIK all unisystem supplements work with all core rules.

Edit: read your edit. Unisystem isn't most realistic, either.

The best MA / melee system I've played is very simple, and a homebrew. PCs have a combat skill, and weapon skill. Combat is an opposed roll made at the start of combat, whoever wins has control of combat and is on the offensive. They then choose to attack, or carry over control. If they carry control over to next round and win combat again they get a hefty damage bonus.

It's not a system for micro managing attack/defence moves, but I have not found better.

I do also rate Lace and Steel, but it's OOP and covers sword fights. Could be adapted.

I'm going to catch a ton of flak for this, but here goes.

Ninjas and Superspies.

Stay with me for a second here.

The Palladium house system has a lot of problems, but in my experience most of these problems have more to do with it being horribly organized, dreadfully laid out and all too often contradictory. All in the same book, which is every Palladium core rulebook ever.

However, hand-to-hand combat is brain-dead simple. Roll initiative. Perform your actions; each attack can be countered by a parry or dodge. A punch that lands can be rolled with, subtracting from damage.

Martial arts are modeled as level-based progression. For example, Jujitsu at 1st level gices you +3 to roll with punch, +2 to parry and dodge, and critical strike (double damage) on attacks from behind. At 2nd level, you get +1 to attack rolls and +1 to disarm attempts. At 3rd level you get +1 on attempts and double damage from body flip/throw attacks, and +2 on balance tests. And so on.

The end result is that each martial arts feels different; that experience is paramount to performance; that different martial arts might have different strong and weak points (e.g. Hwarang-Do is highly acrobactic and gives you a lot of bonuses for leaps, balance and other physical skill tests, as well as being balanced between offensive and defensive modifiers; Phoenix Eye Kung Fu partly eschews defensive maneuvers and favors an all-out aggressive approach; and so on, and so forth; etc.), even before you get into the frankly magical Mystic Martial Arts stuff.

The one problem is that these modifiers are laid out in a level-by-level, incremental fashion. I was actually working on slotting each martial arts on a table, so you'd know right off the bat each bonus and maneuver for, say, an 8th-level practitioner of Zanji Shinjinken-Ryo -- you know, like Palladium did with PFRPG 1e and never again (yet another "WTF, Kevin Siembieda?" moment) -- when my HD crashed. Alas, I never found the time to start over.

I can't speak for realism, especially since the game -- while meticulously researched, Erick Wujcik style -- seems very explicitly intent on aping both martial arts flicks and spy movies of the 1970s and 1980s. It's pretty much Every Jean-Claude Van Damme Movie Ever: The RPG. While maybe not strictly adhering to the criteria you set out in the OP, I really feel this book deserves a look by everyone who's interested in a martial arts RPG. The world information and technology is horribly dated but there's an awesome game underneath all of it. I am also passionate about the minimalist setting information; it's very much a toolkit for the enterprising GM to make of it what he or she will. But I digress; this is beyond the scope of the OP.

Quote from: TristramEvans;619942Realistic hand-to-hand combat? No RPG ever.

In the sense of a combat system that would actually simulate the kind of moves, thoughts, positioning, reflexes etc going on in hand-to-hand and martial arts type combats as accurately as humanly possible through numbers, ratings, dice rolls and the like, that'd be my answer as well.

Quote from: Benoist;619972In the sense of a combat system that would actually simulate the kind of moves, thoughts, positioning, reflexes etc going on in hand-to-hand and martial arts type combats as accurately as humanly possible through numbers, ratings, dice rolls and the like, that'd be my answer as well.

I have done MA for years and just keep second guessing myself anytime I try to sit down and make a martial arts rpg. I don't think it is worth thinking too much about. Martial arts people are about as divided as rolelplayers are on things, so you would never be able to put together a single system that feels realistic to all of them. I think you would need to pick a category (full contact sport fighting, traditional eastern ma, modern self defense, etc) and write the game toward it.

Quote from: Benoist;619972In the sense of a combat system that would actually simulate the kind of moves, thoughts, positioning, reflexes etc going on in hand-to-hand and martial arts type combats as accurately as humanly possible through numbers, ratings, dice rolls and the like, that'd be my answer as well.

It seems kind of strange, but I'm not looking for a system that can model "parry in sixte" or "stop thrust, followed by riposte".

I'm looking for something which feels like that. "I do X, it provokes them to do Y, then I finish them off with Z."

"Attack+Damage, repeat until opponent's dead" is much more straightforward. It's easy to imagine and implement. Something more would be more complicated, but might be more involving.

Butcher mentioned something that could work. Each HTH attack is contested, the opponent always has the chance to parry, avoid, or roll with the punch.

Couple this with options that allow the character to do more than a straight attack — such as trick, manuever, overbear, intimidate, and taunt (the five from my home system) — and make sure they offer enough benefits that players will choose them. Use these, it makes the eventual attack that much more effective.

"I push him off balance (overbear), then strike."

That could work.

None of them.

Not least because none I've seen ever bother to address the psychological side of things, both willingness to actually hurt someone else and risk being hurt in order to do so. That by better ringcraft/experience the savvy, but not as technically competent fighter can dismantle and defeat the inexperienced, yet technically more competent fighter (old fighters might not be as fast or fit as they were in their youth, but they can be seriously tricky to deal with for this reason).

There's all sort of other complicated, yet rapidly assessed and applied things that matter, such as timing and appreciation of distance often matter more than speed. The value of momentum, which is why aggression can be a potent thing in getting the initiative and keeping it.

Much of the mechanics and permutations of the thing are more complicated than they first appear. For example, there's roughly four types of defense: block (passively receive the attack on your guard), parry (actively turn the attack aside), intercept (proactively attack the limb making the attack to stop if before it's executed) and dodge (remove yourself from the path of the blow).

If you start attempting to model each of these with mechanics, the system rapidly fills up with crap that makes interacting with it a boring pain in the arse, and nothing like the thing it's actually modelling.

Quote from: Kiero;619985None of them.

Not least because none I've seen ever bother to address the psychological side of things, both willingness to actually hurt someone else and risk being hurt in order to do so.

My grandfather used to say there are two types of fighters: one there to "win", and one there to Kill. the one intent on killing will always win against one trying to win.

Quote from: TristramEvans;619990My grandfather used to say there are two types of fighters: one there to "win", and one there to Kill. the one intent on killing will always win against one trying to win.

Indeed, they speak of differing levels of restraint, conscious or otherwise.

The closest to bothering with that in any system I'm aware of was Unknown Armies, which made killing something that rarely happened, except by accident, when "normal" people were concerned.

To continue on the path The Butcher started...

N&S has offensive and defensive moves that set up for later attacks and defenses - like leap dodge, circular parry, leap attack, and some of the special moves - like Shao lin kung fu (If I'm remembering correctly) has a special move that does no damage, but forces the opponent back so many feet. There are attack and defense options that throw opponents off balance, and so on.

There has never been an accurate representation of martial arts in a roleplaying game.

The biggest pitfalls:
* You shouldn't have to know the martial art in order to be able to emulate it in a roleplaying game.
* Issues of weight distribution, footwork and position - which are probably the heart of any martial art, are some of the hardest mechanics to emulate in a roleplaying game.
* There is more in-fighting in the martial arts community than there is in the roleplaying game community....to the death. This stuff seriously still happens.

Just look up Count Dante, and how he and his Black Dragon Fighting Society raided a rival kung fu school, plucked out a man's eye and killed another one with a sword, in 1970s America.

Edition wars has nothing on rival kung fu schools.

//Panjumanju

I always thought that combat Burning Wheel "felt" right in play. Same, to a lesser extent, the Riddle of Steel and Streetfighter.

Getting a sense of uncertainty coupled with planning and reaction is really hard to do in a you-go I-go system.

One way to bring it in a little bit is to enforce the declaration phase, a step that I've seen too many groups throw out without really understanding the effects (myself included). Burning wheel basically works by making the declaration phase way more prominent and robust.

HERO System.

But then, I say that with everything.  

JG