A Fresh Look at Grappling: What's Missing in ANTOG?
Grappling in GURPS is beautiful. While some other systems may struggle with grappling, GURPS comes not with one, but with four different grappling systems, and each one of them is good. The systems are the following:
1. The default grappling system that was introduced in GURPS Basic Set and expanded in GURPS Martial Arts and a few other books. (I'll title it "Default" as a shorthand).
2. GURPS Technical Grappling that transforms the binary "grappled/non-grappled" state into a new resource track of Control Points that can be accumulated and spent to negate penalties and accrue bonuses. It is very detailed and if you're using it, make sure you have the latest version of the book, because the changes between 1.0 and 1.2 are significant. While the system may seem complicated, the most fiddly part is that you have to recalculate your effective ST depending on how many Control Points are applied to you. Aside from that, it's not as unplayably complex as memes might make you believe. (I'll use TG as a shorthand).
3. Fantastic Dungeon Grappling, colloquially known as FDG. This is a streamlined version of TG for DFRPG that takes the core (Control Points) and streamlines everything down to four pages.
4. A New Take on Grappling from Pyramid #3-34 (ANTOG) - something not everyone is aware of, but something that everyone should be aware of. Essentially, this article reworks the Default grappling system and streamlines it, fixes some "bugs", and expands it with some new stuff. The gist of it is that now instead of a flat -4 DX penalty or a variable penalty that depends on Control Points, every action performed during a grapple is a Quick Contest between the grappler and the grapplee, which is very GURPS. It may take some time getting used to it, however.
I've played full games with the first three systems, and tested out ANTOG in an arena environment. Lately, I've been using FDG a lot, thinking that it's the best option, but... the more I used it, the more dissatisfied I became. Due to the extreme streamlining, a lot is left up to the GM, and while people online will scream at you that it's the job of the GM to make rulings on the fly and that the book covers everything except the edge cases, these edge cases happen all the goddamn time. It's frustrating. However, what's even more frustrating is that each of the four systems has some things that none of the other systems can do, so there is no "ultimate" grappling system that can do everything.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but it seems that ANTOG is the best one out of four. However, it suffers from the same thing FDG does - low page count didn't allow the author to cover everything. Thus, I will go through everything all four GURPS grappling systems can do and compile a list of what ANTOG can and cannot do just to see what is missing and what has to be done in the future to turn it into an "ultimate" grappling system.
