What are some RPGs that have fun or cool martial arts in them

There's exalted, but while Siderals aren't out Martial Arts aren't all there. There's still some damn good Martial Arts in the core.

Why?

Yes, please.

Go for it.

Playing Anma with only low-medium level Tao and Technicists is actually quite fun.

Why you should and shouldn't play LotW

This is going to be weird, because first I'll start with why I love it, and then I'll give you a boatload of reasons not to play it.

Legends of the Wulin is a truly unique game. A Wuxia game (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon shit) with an extremely unusual set of design principles, combining a level of crunch, depth and detail with more narrative and story focused ideas. Usually, narrative design and crunch are considered opposites, but the game brings them together in a very novel way.

The best example of this is the combat system. Fights in LotW are great. They're mechanically engaging, with your mix of Kung fu styles interacting with your opponents in surprising and enjoyable ways, and they're also strongly narratively driven. Your ideals and beliefs, what your character cares about and why they're fighting, all these things can be just as important as the weapon in your hand. This even carries over to the damage system. Winning a fight might not mean killing your opponent- Conveying your sincerity through the clash of blades to win them over to your side, proving your skill and impressing them or even just coming to a greater mutual understanding are all perfectly valid consequences of a fight, and the system mechanically supports all of them just as much as injuring or killing a bad guy, giving them real mechanical weight in the system.

There's a lot more I could say... But now I need to get on to the downsides.

The first thing to say is that LotW is a very atypical system. It does a lot of things differently, meaning assumptions you've learned from other roleplaying games can trip you up, and things can seem very unintuitive until you grasp the systems internal logic. Even simple things like the idea of rolling dice first, declaring actions second can trip people up.

This is made oh so much goddamn worse by the terrible editing of the core book. I cannot stress this enough. For all the love I have for this game, it is oh so much harder to actually learn to play than it has any right to be. Internal contradictions, rules buried in the middle of fluff paragraphs or only stated offhand in an unrelated section, important rules not being explicitly said fucking anywhere in the book, and instead needing to be divined from implications and extrapolations... It's absolutely fucking appalling.

The system also has some core balance issues. Some Kung fu styles are way too strong or too weak, some things are really inconsistent, and there's a few insidious mechanical bugs that you notice more and more as you play the game. There's a fan made supplement, the Half Burnt Manual, which makes a good go at improving a lot of these, but even with that there's a lot of issues.

I love LotW, but that's why I think it's important to be honest about it. If you like the sound of it, then you might want to persevere in trying to learn it, there's a few people around on Veeky Forums, a IRC channel and a Discord server I'm aware of that are dedicated to it who can help explain some of its more twisted concepts and help clarify how it's meant to work, but even with a guide it isn't an easy road.

It also isn't a system for everybody. I've seen it rejected from both 'sides', narrative storygame lovers turned off by the crunch, and crunchy groups turned off by the narrative aspects.

Still, if you think you fit in that section of the venn diagram and are willing to get ready for an arduous journey into deciphering the ancient Kung fu manual that is the rulebook, I promise you it'll be a game experience unlike anything you've ever played.

Torg had a neat system for acquiring martial art moves in the Nippon Tech worldbook.

>Why?
Because in every cheap 1970s kung-fu movie, the guys with guns get their asses handed to them by guys who don't have guns.

i remember showing my Exalted group Wulin and internally roaring of laughter when they said "wow, it's about as good as exalted's rulebook, huh?" after a few hours poring it.

both games absolutely back up the insane kung fu with gratifying crunch but pure, unadulterated kung fu bullshit should definitely be run with Wulin.

Exalted CAN support insane kung fu but it's honestly more about snowflakes and special feelings (not a bad thing imo) than it is about the martial way of the white lotus and such.

GURPS Martial Arts for a super-granular, gritty experience if you think you're a Martial Arts nerd (although I've known actual MAs that praised it highly). It's a bitch to start up, like anything GURPS, but it's mechanically engaging, detailed and evocative.
D&D4e Monk if you want something simple but evocative and mechanically engaging.
Exalted, if you want a tedious mess tied to a setting that feels amazing and deep if you're 14.
Weapons of the Gods if you want a better system and a worse setting than Exalted.

Only GURPS has good support for non-magical Martial Arts.

As ably demonstrated by Sonny M.F. Chiba in the seminal classic The Street Fighter.

Weapons of the Gods is actually the predecessor to Legends of the Wulin, which is generally considered an overall mechanical upgrade despite the problems mentioned above.

Triple this. Despite the parody, its the greatest thing to happen to marials in D&D. Also, Path of War for Pathfinder.

Feng shui 1 and 2 are really fun fast paced systems but they dont dive into the different styles of martial arts a ton themselves. There is no difference between a karate punch and a northern shaolin punch. But the system was made to emulate hong kong action movies and totally plays by rule of cool. So its kind of up to the players to describe how there martial arts work. Though there are archetypes like drunken master and stuff like that. I honestly love the system for how fun and fast it is and how little rolling you have to do to do some real cool stuff.

Thanks. I didn't know about that.
But the point still stands - I'd prefer Exalted... given a good GM that can avoid the problems and if the focus of the campaign is AWAY from Martial Arts.
And if we ignore any 3e setting material.

In fact, fuck Exalted. It was great fun, but I'm glad I quit.

D&D

This is a legitimately good choice. Did a long and awesome Kung Fu Cop game with it. We had a Gigantic Italian as a master of Tai Chi and Akido, a FBI Agent Muay Thai Kickboxer, and my guy, a Irish Drunken Master (I had to, I couldn't resist). Game ended with an awesome battle against a ton of ninjas before facing the evil Death Touch master.

Exalted's pretty good for the higher end stuff. AM currently doing a Mortals Game and it's been fun so far.

Eyes of Death/Capricorn Ars Magnus AAPspam says thank you.

This is like, for real, the one time where GURPS isn't a bad answer.

Game is dated but great.

Exalted has a real problem and that is martial arts are ALWAYS an objectively worse choice than simply acquiring your Exalt type's charms.

Also 3E isn't even worth looking at because it doesn't currently have any appropriate villain splats.

LotW plays okay. You can see what they thought they were going to accomplish and you can feel your game smashing into the wall just below it.

A couple that didn't get mentioned:

Feng Shui 2 is literally written to be a Hong Kong action flick simulator.

Godbound has an excellent supernatural martial art system that can be used by heroic mortals.

Tianxia is Fate-based but it's designed entirely around telling kung fu stories.

You can easily run an excellent kung fu campaign using Genesys with a bit of light reflavoring of talents.

Hero System.
Ultimate Martial Artist optional.

Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. Probably one of the most interesting and flexible approaches to wuxia martial arts. Seriously check it out.

That is the biggest problem with LotW. You can make it work as intended, it just takes a shitton of effort and redesigning significant chunks of the system. If I ever solve the few last niggling issues I have with it, I'll post up my complete rewrite on Veeky Forums, but I'm still figuring out what to do with fucking Elemental Chi.

>Feng Shui 2 is literally written to be a Hong Kong action flick simulator.
Feng Shui 2 also has very little customization, especially right out of the starting gate. Unless you focus the entire game on kung fu, a guy with a gun will still be deadlier.

>Godbound has an excellent supernatural martial art system that can be used by heroic mortals.
Ahhh ha ha ha ha ha ha.

>Tianxia is Fate-based but it's designed entirely around telling kung fu stories.
Fate in general is not suited for any sort of granularity, especially when you want different styles of Martial Arts.

>You can easily run an excellent kung fu campaign using Genesys with a bit of light reflavoring of talents.
You can run anything in generic systems that you overhaul to fit your niche.

>I don't know what I'm talking about
Hey, thanks for stopping by!

This guy's right though. FS1 is better at customization but still doesn't have distinct MA styles.

Godbound is garbage.

FATE-anything is awful and certainly can't do martial art styles.

Genesys is flavor-of-the-month and generic systems are usually bad...except GURPS Martial Arts is indeed a very good supplement.

>samefagging for authority
Wow, user. You really are a piece of shit, aren't you?

>You can run anything in generic systems that you overhaul to fit your niche.
If it's a good generic system, you shouldn't have to do any overhauling.

>Also, Path of War for Pathfinder.
Only if you want the game ruined by shitty min-maxers.

>pathfinder
it was always going to be ruined by shitty minmaxers, at least PoW gives melee a seat at the table