Weapon damage does not get skill bonuses if the used skill is a technique of the main skill

[KaiKruschel]

Just found this problem while playing with the Banestorm templates. When using the Exotic Martial Artis Template punch damage is higher than kick, which it should not be.

After investigating punch damage gets the +2 from the Karate levels while kicking does not. Removing the Kicking(Karate) technique from the character sheet resets the kick skill level (to Karate-2) and the the kick damage (to 1d+1)

To reproduce:

Make a new character with the Banestorm Exotic Martial Artist Template. The template has skill Karate at DX+1 and technique Kicking(Karate) at -1

punch is at 1d cr kick is at 1d-1 cr

After removing the Kicking(Karate) technique, the kick damage adjusts to the correct 1d+1

It seems to me Kicking is taken as the skill used and therefore the Bonus for Karate gets ignored even though Kicking is itself based on Karate(in this case)?

[richardwilkes]

This is (mostly) a data problem, in that the Karate skill itself is what grants the bonus when the weapon in question is using it as its primary skill. In this case, the Kicking technique should probably be updated to grant a similar bonus. What isn't clear to me at the moment (having not read the rules for this in a very long time) is if the Karate skill level should be used for this determination, or the kicking skill level. Presumably, the kicking skill level, if that's what the final skill is actually using. If that's the case, then just adding the relevant features to the kicking skill, much like what is present on the Karate skill, should do the trick. If that's not the case, and it instead is supposed to use the Karate skill level for this determination even when the Kicking technique is being used, then some sort of change would be required in the code... although again, I'm not clear how that would work without breaking other feature resolution capabilities.

[KaiKruschel]

I just looked it up and the entry for Kicking on page 215 of the Basic Set explicitly states that the Karate or Brawling skill and not the Kicking technique level is to be used for the damage bonus. Hmm, i can imagine that this might get complicated.

[richardwilkes]

So one way to achieve this would be to have the logic that determines features that will be applied to a weapon cascade through to the controlling skill if a technique is what is being used as the basis for the attack. I'm not positive that is really a correct approach, but I think it would work in this particular case.

[richardwilkes]

After giving it some more thought, I think the right approach here is just to copy the same weapon bonuses from the Karate skill to the Kicking (Karate) technique. This doesn't run the risk of breaking anything else and uses the current capabilities. So... just a data change.

[richardwilkes]

Bah! That won't work. This will require some chicanery that I'm not currently comfortable doing, as the knock-on effects could be far-reaching. Anyway, re-opening.