Kampfringer, Kungfu, unarmed, ...

[chattius 2,522]

Part 1: Finding a name for these beasts of a character

I promised to do a wiki page about my unarmed characters. I always preferred to name them Kampfringer instead of Kungfu or unarmed.

Kampfringen was taught to knights in mid europe as an allround combat style. Being able to use everything as a weapon.

Ever looked at these strange knight plates, these pointed elbows and knees... They are weapons.

The points at shields, they are weapons...

The grip of a sword, it is a weapon...

...

All these Ivanoe and Lionhart movies they are not continental europe. The Kampfringen martial art was as complex as any other martial art. But it was not fully continued into modern times and many of it elements are lost. You know what happened when a dutch bodyguard of a redlight bar learned parts of Kampfringen from an expert? He became Karate world champion.

So why do I prefer Kampfringen as a name?

The build can use any weapon you put in its hands, it can fight unarmed, or with a shield, ...The closest martial art to this would be the Kampfringen.

For anyone interested into Kampfringen, a link to Talhoffers ancient martial book from the mid age with an english translation.

http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Talhoffer_Fechtbuch_%28MS_Thott.290.2%C2%BA%29

 

Part 2: Why the character is playable

The game considers holding a shield and not a weapon as being barefisted. So characters which have a hard hit attack do it as a double-hit attack. So we have the double number of attacks and a shield.

But what we lack is base damage. We have to get it in the form of x-x damage rings. This base damage has to be multiplied. Best it is by pushing the combat art. 12s regeneration time can be regenerated by a doublehit with 6s reg per hit.

The hard hit combat arts often have an explosiopn modifier, this will be chosen for crowd contriol. Death Blow is a very nice modifyer for this build, since we do double hits. If we have Deathblow at 67% and the first hit does more than 33% damage the second hit will be deadly. So not a single strike kill but a single CA-kill. The explosions of the deathblow to the target over to nearby enemies.

200 runes read into a defensive buff, why not, there is reg per hit.

...

Regeneration per Hit

This is the limitating factor... it was not in game before the AddOn.

 

To be continued ,worked out, typos corrected, ...

 

It was just for the question: how shall I name this type of characters and the page.

[essjayehm 58]

"The Knights who say Ni"?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTQfGd3G6dg

 

Unarmed Knights, need I say more?

[chattius 2,522]

Yes, but is is british and a parody. That proves the theory that unarmed was not popular there and only good for a joke.

They had these longbows and fighting in central european forests you didn't need their higher range. More useful to use an crossbow which was loaded and ready for firing right away. For loading a crossbow it took time. So they had big shields to hide when reloading. These shields had a thorn to be rammed into the earth to free the hands, they had pointed curves at the side to catch swords and allow shooting, ... And crossbow-men were trained to use these shields as melee weapons.

 

Talhoffer's Fechtbuch had a full capitel for shield combat. Like breaking a neck with a shield:

 

Don't get confused with the battle at Agincourt. The french battle order was stupid. If the british would have been forced to attack against a defense-line of crossbowmen it would have been an equivalent disaster.