Lisa's Dojo

Lisa's Dojo contains Lisa Chan's collected martial arts wisdom.

Offense

1. An effective skill roll greater than 16 is generally unnecessary and wasteful.

A skill of 16 nets the highest possible critical hit chance of 9.26%. Since you cannot score a critical hit on a 7 or higher, having an effective skill of 17 or 18 does not improve this. A skill of 16 also reduces critical failure chance to 0.46%, down from 1.85% for an effective skill of 7-15 since, for an effective skill of 16+, a 17 becomes a normal failure and only an 18 results in a critical failure.

2. Always make a deceptive attack if your skill is 20 or higher and you cannot think of any other special attack to use.

As a consequence of Rule 1, rolling an ordinary attack against an effective skill of 20 is never better than attempting a deceptive attack at an effective skill of 16. This assumes a static -4 penalty to hit for a penalty of -2 imposed on your opponent's defense.

3. Choose only one or two techniques to specialize in, or at most three in special circumstances, assuming they aren't all hard techniques. Otherwise, it is better to improve your overall skill.

It is pointless to spend points in many different techniques. Raising four average techniques one level each has the same result and costs the same number of points as raising the base skill. Think about what technique(s) you would like to specialize in and build around that.