Grappling Mat: Joint Locks in Fantastic Dungeon Grappling

After the post on The Raid: Redemption, a comment popped up on the GURPS North America Facebook feed:

I find the grappling toward agony effects useful, though I understand it balance wise, I still feel a ‘why not both’ for damage and agony. Perk?

I thought this was interesting, because of course applying discomfort is very much the point of putting someone’s limbs in the compromised position to begin with.

Technical Grappling

In the original Technical Grappling rules from 2013 (and written rather much earlier; the Big Damn Ogre was in the way of publication), the sequence goes like this:

1. Attack to grapple (usually a limb)
2. Attack to apply the lock. Roll CP if you hit as well.
3. If you hit and foe fails to defend, the joint is locked. The only thing you can use a locked joint to do is break free.
4. Each turn thereafter, you can apply pain as a free action, but . . .
5. You have to spend CP each turn to set the upper bound on how much pain you inflict, after which…
6. You roll a contest of Trained ST vs Trained ST or Trained HT; double the margin is used with Inflicting More Pain with Locks (TG, p. 38)

That’s never sat right with me, because you get into a cycle of spend for pain, reacquire or increase lock, spend for pain, reacquire.

Game mechanically, ALL of Technical Grappling tends to work that way. You have to spend those hard-earned control points in order to get effects of pain and injury. Game mechanically, it’s sort of fine, because at least it’s consistent. But for certain things, especially applying pain with locks and chokes/strangles, this really feels wrong. In my own training, choking someone better doesn’t use up control…it usually increases it. Joint locks are done with stead pressure (for pain), or as a vibration (for injury). That vibration does spend control…but applying pain is part of the lock. It’s why you do it.

Fantastic Dungeon Grappling

Let’s look now at Fantastic Dungeon Grappling, my 2019 follow-up and expansion on the quick grappling rules that made it into Hall of Judgment when it first came out. These were a simplified version of the TG rules, and during the Citadel at Norðvörn kickstarter, I released Fantastic Dungeon Grappling as a stand-alone short product.

The goal was to learn from 15 years of play experience. Cut out a lot of the fiddle, keep the good stuff, and fix some things that didn’t feel right.

Joint Locks were on that list.

The new sequence is

1. Attack to grapple. You have to grapple a limb. (That’s only a -1 penalty, so it’s not hard).
2. Attack again. No penalty. There is no Arm Lock or Joint Lock technique in the Dungeon Fantasy RPG (there’s no techniques at all).
3. If you hit, and your foe fails to defend, the joint is locked
4. Right away, as the effect roll, instead of rolling control points (that’s a difference to TG), try and win a Quick Contest of grappling skill  vs. your foe’s HT. (That’s another difference; you win with skill here).
5. If you win, they suffer pain penalties equivalent to the DX penalties already applied. If DX penalties are -10 or higher, they’re in Agony, which is an Incapacitating Condition. Note that if you have High Pain Threshold, the pain penalties are halved; this pretty much prevents Agony as an outcome. If you have LOW pain threshold, you get to Agony pretty soon.

It says a successful attack to break free ends the lock. Obviously you can’t attack if  you’re in Agony. You don’t have to fully break free to relieve the joint pressure.

But note: those penalties are effectively doubled. DX penalties for the basic grapple, and pain penalties equal to those. So this substitutes quite well for the doubled effects from Technical Grappling. It’s also something that persists until you either stop it voluntarily or they break free. Note again, even 1 CP of “break free” ends the lock until the attacker re-applies it by another dedicated attack to lock it again.

You see this all the time, in fact. I’m putting an arm bar on someone, and they twist and bend the arm a bit. I still have two hands and both legs on their arm, so it’s not going anywhere…but there’s no pain pressure on the joint, either.

But you can also crank it up. Just attack to increase control points while not releasing the lock. It’s not stated, but no reason not to allow increases in the strength of the grapple to also increase the pain. Cranking on a limb is a natural follow up.

Improvements and Observations

I continue to be very pleased with how well the simple, 8-page book (and 2.3 pages of those rules are monster traits and spells) utterly replicates, replaces, and refines 50 pages of oft-times poorly presented material. That’s not entirely fair, of course. TG chose to deal in explicit detail with both armed grappling and all of the techniques in Martial Arts.

Of course, over at The Lair of the Chaotic GM, Exxar went through and wondered how each of the Techniques in TG would map to FDG. Are any missing? Anything not work?

Turns out not really.

Now, looking at the table of DX penalties in FDG, it turns out you really, really need to crank on the guy to get to Agony. Twice the foe’s Control Maximum. For ST 10, that’s 20 control points.

That doesn’t seem right. The thing about joint locks is they’re efficient. They hurt a lot, but I’ve seen an 8-year-old child use a finger lock to bring a grown man to his knees. And in both FDG and TG, control points are (almost) purely based on ST, with slight bonuses for skill (see p. 3).

So perhaps to make it a bit more effective to put the joint lock hurt on someone, instead of “you suffer Pain penalties equal to the DX penalty from p. 4” it should be “you suffer Pain penalties equal to the number of CP applied.”

Edit: This only works for folk in the ‘average human’ range, of course. The inability to easily and quickly scale is a problem for DFRPG application, which includes monsters and whatnot of fairly arbitrarily high ST. In the humanish range, it should work OK…but the point of “Fantastic Dungeon Grappling” is really to limit special cases, so something more needs doing to prevent someone from “joint locking” an elephant with 2 CP applied. Basing the pain penalty on twice the DX penalty would do more or less the same thing I’m trying to accomplish here, but feels clunky. If one looks, for a ST 12 person, hitting 12 CP is -6 to DX, so “half the CP as a DX penalty, or – and this is not coincidental – a -1 to DX for every 2 CP applied, which is the same rate as the original TG. But it’ll probably have to do.

Another possibility is to just slap on conditions. A joint lock at less than 1/10 the CM still gives Moderate Pain; then increase the pain level for each threshold. Severe Pain at more than 1/10, Terrible Pain at more than 1/2, and Agony at CM or more. That . . . might be the best way.

So if you have a ST 12 person in a grapple for 4 CP, that’s only -2 to DX, because it’s between 1/10 and 1/2 the Max CP for ST 12 (“more than 1” and 6 control points). But if you manage to lock the joint, they suffer another -4 to DX, IQ, and self control rolls as a Pain penalty. That’s -6 total. They “only” have 4 CP to spend to inflict damage – enough for 1d of injury with 1 CP left over – but the effects of the lock are magnified.

On the one hand, that might make it too easy. But you still have to (a) grapple the guy, (b) attack again to lock the joint, and if your CP are low, like in the example above, they’re only -1 to Parry, and (c) win the skill vs HT contest to apply pain.

Does that Work?

Might need playtesting; my impression is that applying a joint lock in other than a surprise situation is hard without a lot of pre-grappling, posture penalties, and other work. You rarely (not never!) see in an MMA match – which stands in well for a lot of fantasy RPG combat between folks expecting to fight to the death – a dynamically applied joint lock. You do see effective locks when one fighter massively outclasses another; MMA avoids that. I had a friend who was attacked by an untrained woman with a knife, using a classic overhead icepick stab. Once he – a trained martial art instructor in Hwa Rang Do – got over the brief surprise at being attacked in such a cliché manner, he applied an instant and final defense: parry, figure-four grapple and shoulder lock. Boom, one move, enough pain she dropped the knife.

But that was an AoA (Determined or Strong) with a knife, leaving her defenseless. Charles applied a two-handed grabbing parry (p. 3), and immediately on his turn applied a joint lock. Unopposed attack roll (oops), and his skill vastly outstripped his foe’s HT. Not being used to being joint locked, she may have even had Low Pain Threshold (most folks who’ve never had a lock applied to them are shocked at how much it hurts, but you get used to it).

But that’s a case of overmatch: she shouldn’t have been trying to knife him to begin with, he was trained and calm, and she quickly learned the folly of her ways as he disarmed her with no more harm done.

GURPS favors the attacker in these situations. The attack comes in at full skill, and the defense is at 3+Skill/2, so even a Skill-16 grappler is looking at a parry of 11, which invalidates the lock two times in three. Still…that’s a lot of invalidation, maybe enough to make the difference. Add Combat Reflexes and that dynamic lock gets even harder.

If it’s still too easy, throw on an effective +4 to skill (+2 to Parry, +1 to Dodge) the same way Grab and Go (p. 5) favors the defender, or simply provide the equivalent of a retreat: +3 defending with a grappling skill, +1 with a striking or weapon skill when resisting a lock.

My own game experiences is that low CP grapples are hard to make effective, and even in the Basic rules, it can be challenging to win all those sequential rolls. So it may not be a problem that needs fixing. But if it does need fixing, allowing that it doesn’t take much to wriggle out of a joint lock before it’s applied by foxing the angles and giving a defense bonus is a solid way to go.