If that does not qualify me as an expert in martial arts (at least when it comes to hitting, choking and joint locking), well then let me know what would.
I think it does. But don't get shirty, you're posting on an rpg board under a pseudonym and none of us have any clue who you actually are. It would of course be obvious in person. And in any case, I said, "how is
this assessed?" I meant, what's the objective standard? Obviously a guy comes into your gym and you move together
you'll know in ten minutes - but what's the ISO9000 standard, here? Objectively?
I do know that a couple of solid shots to the face are momentum changing, for sure. That will not stop a really tough guy, but it will cause a wannabe tough guy to question his ability to win. It takes actual damage to stop a really tough guy. In real life, there are no rules in a fight.
How should we model that, in an RPG?
As Brad said, hit points do fairly well for that. Aside from that, it's the good old morale check. Fighting requires that you be willing and able to do others harm. Game systems tend to focus on the
able part, skills and toughness and so on. The
willing part is either assumed or left up to roleplaying, decisions not systems.
Most people are going to
choose to leave a fight,
if they are able to, before they physically can no longer fight - indeed, often before they're hurt at all. This is typically forgotten by players, since if your character takes a jab with a sword,
you are not feeling the pain, and if you are playing a computer game, squatting down behind cover and/or bandaging your arm for thirty seconds heals all wounds - for you, though not the enemy, of course. And almost all computer games and too many GMs have the enemy all fight to the last man, no matter what.
But in reality normal people will do their best to avoid a fight, and if they do fight do their best to avoid injury, and if they do get injured, do their best to get the fuck out of there ASAP.
Players should not, I think, have morale checks imposed on them. If you want to be a suicidal idiot, great - we need a player to go do the pizza run anyway.
Rory Miller expressed it well in
A Writer's Guide To Violence, where he described people's levels of being willing to use violence to achieve their ends. The ranking of people, in descending order of frequency in the population, was: nice, manipulative, assertive, aggressive, assaultive and murderous. Most people default to one level, are scared of and uncomprehending of people a level above, and have some degree of contempt for people a level below.
Assertive is probably the right level for most fighter types. Nice people don't want to hurt anyone. Manipulative people become magic-users or thieves. The aggressive ones will get themselves into more trouble than they planned for when they become aggressive towards someone who is assaultive, and the murderous one ends up in prison, shot by police, lynched by the village, etc.