2 more cents from a non-expert
… what I'm wondering is: What are the basic features in common with the most effective martial arts styles? Do the best ones teach really powerful blows and kicks, or strikes at vulnerable spots, or bending joints, or whatever?
Yes to the second sentence, which is where you‘ll find your common, basic features, or, in other words, the things that are most easily learned, executed, and effective. The key to most of these is to strike a crippling blow as fast as possible. This often occurs when the attacker closes with his opponent or when the defender, in the course of his defense, moves inside his attacker’s reach. These blows may be ankle or knee breaks, thereby destroying mobility, or they may be breaks of the hand, wrist, or elbow, destroying the usefulness of the limb. They may in turn be nerve strikes that destroy the usefulness of a limb, or eye rakes/gouges/pokes that destroy vision. Once the defender is inside his opponent’s reach, the heavy striking weapons are knees and elbows, though certainly other strikes may be employed at various distances to attack the throat and various nerve plexuses (the oft-mentioned solar-plexus and brachial-plexus, for instance). Joint locks/breaks are also common fodder, and a very common idea among the styles I’m familiar with is to avoid going to the ground for the very reasons that
semilargeintestine mentioned. And, as
quixote100104 pointed out, the objective is to stun, control, or destroy the opponent.
Common features that aren‘t so martial arty seeming:
- Situational awareness. (Be aware of what is happening around you and who is around you).
- Avoidance. (If you don’t have to fight, don’t. As Bruce Lee put it, learn the art of fighting without fighting.)
- Planning and preparation.(Have a plan and prepare yourself to carry it out. This is often simpler than it may seem. Perusing the fire-escape routes in your hotel when you arrive is just as useful as carrying a flashlight on your keychain, jogging regularly a few days a week, learning Krav Maga, or deciding what to do if that big, mean-looking guy striding up to your car while you‘re stopped at an intersection knocks out said car window with the brick he has in his knobby hand.)
- Mindset. (Understand that, yes, bad things really can happen to you, and that your determination to prevail may determine the outcome.)
More martial arty ones:
- Three ranges. (Versions of close, middle, long, and what to do at each.)
- Move off of your opponent’s line of attack (also known as “Get out of the way!” and “Get off the X,” or, “Don‘t just stand there and let him hit you!”)
- Do not merely “defend,” but “attack.” (Offense is easier than defense.)
- Simple is better. (Choose the simple techniques over the complicated, e.g. eye pokes and groin kicks versus Van Damme‘s skyward-leaping and helicopter-blade-like twirling hook kick.)
- Stay on your feet. (You don’t want to be used like a soccer ball if you get knocked down, and you certainly don’t want to find yourself "successfully" choking out a bad guy while his four buddies take turns sticking knives into your neck.)
- Use anything that gives you an advantage over your attacker(s). (Gun, knife, handful of dirt, rock, stick, jawbone of an ass…)
Even more martial arty ones that seem commonly shared:
- Elbow strikes
- Knee strikes
- Forearm strikes
- Fist strikes
- Heel hand strikes
- Thai kick
- Knee breaks
- Elbow breaks
- Shin kick
- Eye poke
- Groin kick
- Foot stomp
- Basic joint locks for wrist, arm, leg, shoulder
- Hold breaks
- Chokes
- Throws
And now for a few examples of what you may see if a goon launches a face-mashing punch at practitioners of the following:
A Silat practitioner might break a fist punching at his head by bouncing it off his pointy elbow, then attack the brachial nerve of the offending arm with a gunting strike, break the elbow of the attacker’s now broken-handed and nerve-damaged arm, break the attacker’s knee on the same side as the already nerve-damaged and multiply broken arm, then scoop the neck and break that, too.
A JKD guy might parry an initial punch and gouge eyes on the fly (driving forward off the parry), then trip the blinded guy and look for more opponents. Then again, he might simply lean away from the punch and groin punt.
A Combatives guy might parry, block, or slip an initial punch and club the villain in the throat.
A Thai boxer might parry the initial punch, clinch with the attacker, hammer a bunch of elbows into the temples, jaw, and face, pound some knees into groin, throw the attacker to the ground, jump up and down on him a few times.
The point is that the “best” styles share similar features, which should allow their practitioners to deal with as many defensive problems as possible as quickly and decisively as possible. Here’s why:
The less time the defender spends in a fight, the less he’ll get hurt. Thus the objective is to end fights as quickly as possible.
Those things said…
William Gibson skipped all this sort of truck in, I think,
Pattern Recognition, in which his protagonist employed a simple series of blunt-force trauma techniques taught to her by a long-time prison guard. Get close. Head butt. Knees to groin. Heel hand to face. Smash and bash. Nothing overly technical, and only just enough to make us believe that the character could take care of herself in some situations.
Thus in a low-tech fantasy, I’d think your characters, too, would smash and bash. At least the disarmed warriors would, and they’d only do that if they couldn’t up-arm, which simply means that they’d use anything at hand, were it available, before they’d go bare-handed against armed opponents. A cooking pot plucked by bail from glowing coals, for instance, might prove useful. Or a garden rake. (Then again, you might want to write about a super expert who could, empty-handed, defeat a dozen men armed with knives and axes and swords.)
Women might be similarly prepared, perhaps, with eye-gouges, shin, knee, and groin kicks, biting, and the use of anything at hand that gives them an advantage (frying pan, knitting needle, who knows…).
Guerrilla warfare and assassinations are usually carried out on the sly. Avoidance of detection is what usually makes them successful, so bare-handed up-close and in-person violence is perhaps the least likely means of operation (unless, of course, the story demands otherwise). Poisoning has a long well-used history, as well as the occasional ambushes and unfortunate accidents.
That's all I can think of at the moment. Maybe someone will come along and correct a few things.
