Roll the Bones - Alternative Teaching of Martial Arts via Tabletop Roleplaying
Join me at the 10th Annual Martial Arts Studies Conference in Brighton, England where I’ll be presenting a behind the scenes dissection of the making of Fists & Fiends. How the creation of the game, born out of strife and chaos during a global pandemic, guided me on a journey of deep exploration and discovery in my own martial arts.
The plethora of fields the development of Fists & Fiends touches upon are numerous — game design, systems, business development, manufacturing/production, printing, logistics, marketing, etc. To limit the scope, topics will include —
Martial arts systems development for RPGs and how this can teach us more about our own arts.
The gamification of hand-to-hand combat to wargame out scenarios and use alternative means to teach and convey martial arts strategies and tactics.
Probability, to create tension and high stakes similar to realistic violent encounters.
Distillation of entire fighting systems like Mantis Boxing and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, to produce fun and engagement, without dragging the combat into an unwieldy hellscape of boredom and confusion.
The evolution and streamlining of Chinese martial art ‘styles’, to capture their essence and give the player a sense of why each is unique and can bring various facets and advantages to the group they travel/fight with, while also facing the inherent weakness of styles which over specialize.
ABSTRACT
Roll the Bones - Alternative Teaching of Martial Arts via Tabletop Roleplaying
Randy Brown, https://fistsfiends.com/
Board games have a rich history at the highest levels of military organizations and are valued as a tool to ‘game out’, or simulate strategies before committing valuable resources to battle. Tabletop Roleplaying Games (TTRPG) are excellent vehicles that facilitate fun, learning, and experiences through ‘theater of the mind’ gameplay and have untapped potential to help teach martial arts.
When the pandemic hit US shores in earnest in early 2020 I closed my gym and moved our teams online. The kids' team was the most vulnerable with a high propensity to lose focus and/or quit due to remote learning. Knowing martial arts could be a rock through these turbulent times that could keep them healthier physically and mentally amidst the turmoil, we needed a means of encouragement and inspiration to keep them engaged.
To stimulate their training, and rivet their minds on ‘how to’ use their martial knowledge in a variety of situations, I devised a Martial Arts TTRPG with built-in incentives. Accomplishing their real world weekly missions, watching instructional videos, and/or reading training articles awarded buffs and additional experience points to their in-game characters, equating to an increased pace to level up.
Converting rich, dynamic, and realistic martial arts combat into a comprehensive and comprehensible ruleset of game mechanics that others can follow and run, has been rife with challenges that needed to be addressed. The use of probability with dice to reflect the randomness of combat, conveying agency upon the players through low threshold hit/damage models along with instituting an economy of time and actions, became integral parts of the design in order to convey the anxiety and tension of a real fight, as well as the exhilaration of winning, or consequences of losing.
This process revealed that the systematization of martial arts styles in such a format can be a strong tool to teach the intricacies of fighting albeit in an unconventional format. Additionally, the design and development of Fists & Fiends yielded the unexpected outcome of a deeper understanding of my own martial arts that would otherwise have escaped me.
Using a TTRPG to help a wide spectrum of martial arts learners simulate not only skills, but physical and social conflicts, multi-attacker scenarios, unarmed vs armed encounters, and even learn history and culture has much promise, and has shown validity.
Keywords:
Game Theory, Game Design, Alternative Learning, Martial Arts
Biography
Randy Brown
Randy is an owner and teacher at Randy Brown Mantis Boxing, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Massachusetts, USA. Randy has over twenty five years experience with praying mantis boxing with additional cross-disciplinary training in various Chinese martial arts including: eagle claw, Hung gar, long fist, Yang taijiquan, xingyiquan. Randy has trained in 17 Chinese martial arts weapons and specializes in staff, saber, sword, and military saber, and holds a Black Belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Randy has published a number of articles in martial arts journals, including Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine and Journal of 7 Star Mantis, and has competed and placed in both the U.S. National Wu Shu Championships and the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation. Randy holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Franklin Pierce University.