Gratuitous Violence has been around for all of Human history. An archetype of those individuals who seek battle for no reason.
The Fighter seeks battle for battle’s sake. He carries no banner, though he may follow one if it gives him the combat he craves. He is not an idealogical warrior. At the same time, the Fighter is unconcerned with actual killing. A fistfighter who leaves his opponents bruised and bloody but still alive has no weaker a link to the archetype than a rifle toting soldier who piles up the corpses of defeated enemies after the battle. The Fighter is created countless times in fiction, from Achilles to Lancelot.
At its best, the Fighter is an adrenaline junkie or glory seeker with a bloody outlet. At its worst, the Fighter is a bloodthirsty maniac who revels in carnage. However, in both cases the most important thing is the fight itself.
Taboos: the Fighter is the manifestation of mindless, self-perpetuating violence. He must continually seek it out, or create it if none currently exists. Any Avatar of the Fighter who goes for more than a week without fighting weakens the link to the archetype. The Fighter needs more challenging opponents in order to grow.
In addition, the Fighter can’t be a peacemaker. Any actions deliberately taken to reduce conflict are taboo violations.
Symbols: Any kind of weapon, the more the better. The archetypal Fighter is armed to the teeth with a variety of weapons.
Masks: Achilles (Greek) Lancelot (Arthurian) Mars (Roman)
Suspected Avatars in History: Any street punk who picks a fight for fun or soldier who gets high off combat is channeling the Fighter at a low level. Miyamoto Musashi may have been the godwalker during his life, and many European knights channelled the Fighter as well.
Channels:
1%-50%: The Fighter revels in the chaos and horror of combat, rather than being repelled by it. At this level, Avatars of the Fighter do not need to make Violence checks related to combat. They may still need to to make violence checks related to torture or killing helpless opponents (GM’s interpretation).
51%-70%: The Fighter is is as deadly as it is violent. On a successful combat roll that is also under your Avatar: the Fighter skill, you may add up to 10 points to the result, even if the modified result would put you over your skill.
71%-90%: At this level The Fighter is capable of ignoring all but the most severe of wounds. He may make an Avatar check once every four weeks, and gain a number of additional hit points equal to half his avatar skill (round up). Otherwise, this functions the same way as the Masterless Man’s 50% channel.
91%+: By this point the Fighter has endure so much previous punishment that they are inhumanly tough. They take the sum of the dice or what the damage would be, whatever is lower.
This is my first submission. The idea arose out of the discussion that UA lacked a gratuitously violent archetype, despite it being a common theme present in fiction and mythology. The idea was to create an archetype that was a sort of combination of the warrior, the savage, and the masterless man, but different from all of them.
Is the gratuituously violent archetype really required? I don’t believe I’ve ever met a gratuitously violent person as such – more people who used violence inappropriately/ to solve problems not requiring violence.
I think it would be better to just play up the darker side of archetypes that include violence.
The Warrior *can* be someone who is gratuitously violent. (Say you’re a Warrior against Drugs. Do you really *need* to kill every pusher rather than jailing them?)
The Masterless Man *could* be a mercenary who doesn’t care *who* his employer is, in it for just money and action.
The thing about an archetype that is only about violence, is that it could make for boring stories. As a player character, it’d be all about starting fights. As an NPC, what are the avatar’s goals? If the NPC is starting random fights in order to strengthen his attunement, and thus become better at fighting people, I don’t see where the gripping story will set in.
Whilst violence is certainly frequent in the realm of Unknown Armies, it’s usually applied more discerningly, or in desperate situations. Deliberately seeking out gratuitous violence cheapens this I feel.
To be fair, when my GM and I originally came up with this idea it was not much more than a more violent/less durable permutation of the Masterless Man.
As for not many gratuitously violent people: there aren’t that many people like that, but they do exist, and moreover, the gratuitously violent fighter is a recurring theme in fiction and mythology.
I just question how strong a presence it has in the current consciousness. The only mythological figure I’m particularly thinking of is Ares.
Another possibility is to drop the idea that the Fighter is already in the Invisible Clergy, and instead insert an antagonist who is trying to Ascend. I think that might be more interesting in some ways, as it begs the questions of why someone wants to make that a part of the world. Ithink your idea has some merit, I just think there are different ways one *could* handle it.
The above points are very valid, I think this is very “warrior” like in its flavour. There is a case to be made that Warrior and fighter might be different things, but I think this would be better solved at the other end, with a “soldier” archetype.
Ares was the god of war…
Also, for me, the difference between a fighter and a warrior is that warriors use (lethal) weapons, so what’s with the weapons-are-cool bits? Might be different for you, but Fight Club had what, 2 pistols or so?
On the rules-lawyering side:
1%-50%: “At this level, Avatars of the Fighter do not need to make Violence checks related to combat.”,
dude, that is way to powerful for a measely 1% in a stat. Easily fixed with a sucessful roll on avatar to trigger the effect.
“51%-70%: On a successful combat roll that is also under your Avatar: the Fighter skill, you may add up to 10 points to the result, even if the modified result would put you over your skill.”
Kind of pointless if you fight hand-to-hand. The same goes for the last channel, useless for a boxer, karateka, full contact anything person, yet they are most definetly fighters.
I like it when one of the cannels deals with something not immediately connected to the very central core of the archetype (as flavour added by the last ascendee perhaps), in this case it could be intimidation, contact with the audience, leadership, picking fights well or even handling your drink or footbal fandom.
Here is a revision taking into account some of the recommendations.
1%-50%: The Fighter revels in the chaos and horror of combat, rather than being repelled by it. At this level, Avatars of the Fighter do not need to make Violence checks related to combat if they make a successful Avatar check. They may still need to to make violence checks related to torture or killing helpless opponents (GM’s interpretation).
51%-70%: The Fighter is is as deadly as it is violent. On a successful combat roll that is also under your Avatar: the Fighter skill, you may add up to 10 damage.
71%-90%: At this level The Fighter is capable of ignoring all but the most severe of wounds. He may make an Avatar check once every four weeks, and gain a number of additional hit points equal to half his avatar skill (round up). Otherwise, this functions the same way as the Masterless Man’s 50% channel.
91%+: The Fighter’s experience and ferocity in combat can intimidate even the most hardened opponents and take the edge off their skill. The Fighter’s opponents must make a Mind Check or suffer a -20% shift to all rolls while fighting the Avatar. Even if they make the Mind Check they still suffer a -10% shift.
I’m not so sure about the alteration to either the 50-70 or the 91+ channel alterations. They might be overpowered, but both make the archetype more relevant for martial artists. I agree that the original 50 channel was overpowered.
Maybe I picked a bad name. The fighter is not supposed to be an unarmed fighter, but rather someone who fight for the fun and/or glory of fighting. The Masterless Man and the Warrior aren’t the same. An especially violent warrior is still a ideological killer. An especially violent Masterless Man is still a rootless wanderer. A Fighter isn’t a mercenary. He could be a soldier, or a pro fighter, but he doesn’t need a cause like the Warrior, and he doesn’t need to be rootless like the Masterless Man.
I disagree with the trend of feedback that say this archetype is redundant or non-present. There are countless archetypal “warriors” who – unlike UA’s use of the term – are not warriors AGAINST anything.
Achilles, Lancelot, and Musashi are great examples. So is nearly every protagonist/antagonist in the whole kung-fu genre – the hero who only seeks to better themselves, and the villain who only seeks to slaughter challenging opponents.
It doesn’t have to be a kung-fu thing, either. Boxers who are addicted to the thrill of fighting, but not malicious people, fit right in (and there’s a PC-playable interpretation that won’t ruin team mechanics; note that the Fighter does not break taboo by NOT escalating every conflict – just by directly AVOIDING escalation). Ali could certainly have been a Fighter. Someone like Jesse James is almost certainly a Masterless Man, but a hot-shot gunslinger who prowls the saloons looking for brawls and showdowns is also easily within this archetype.
That said, I think the biggest issue with these channels is that, for an archetype that wants to distinguish itself from other very similar cousins, its channels are are really just a hodge-podge of other archetypes’ channels. This might work is the Fighter is in contest with the MM or Warrior archetypes, one to dethrone the other, but I’d like something a little more unique.
(CONT’D)
(CONT’D FROM PREV)
So what makes even the low-level fighters apart from MMs or Warriors? You could go with the ignoring-violence-checks (another good tweak would be that the avatar ignores violence checks with rank less than or equal to the tens place of the avatar skill – so someone with a “measly 1%” wouldn’t ignore any; someone with 50% ignores everything under rank 6 – and high-levels ignore virtually all violence checks). My play group is a fan of variants on the withstand-pain skills – and if you think about it, every movie where the hero is a Fighter and starts out as the little guy, what separates him from the crowd is that he keeps coming back for more, even when being beat down by the movie’s End Boss.
You could keep that closer to the get-more-HP type of channels and make it a higher one, or you could make a low-level version of it for the first channel, where the Fighter is not hindered by pain up to a number of wound points equal to their fighter skill. This won’t be overpowered at the low-levels (i.e. a 15% fighter ignores 15 dmg worth of pain – about the equivalent of withstanding a good punch or two), whereas it slopes upward nicely towards your run-of-the-mill movie heroes (whose 50% skill will let them take non-fatal gunshots without being, pain-wise, much worse for wear) and your royal Badasses (higher level Fighters would virtually not react to pain – consistent with all masks and representations of the godlike fighters). Note that in this case they’d still take the damage, so it’s not too kickass an early channel.
I really like the final channel, though. It seems nuts, but it’s on par with other high-levels (which also effectively grant invulnerability). I think turning into someone who can take damage on par with major clockworks is definitely A) worthy of Fighters B) an interesting variant on the it’s-really-really-hard-to-kill-me class of higher channel.
I think this would be a fine archetype with some more polish and elbow grease, and despite being a literally combat-focused archetype could still make for interesting and viable PC avatars.
I’ve got a character who fits this already it’s a simple matter of stacking enough hardened notching onto violence and then using either the MM or Warrior Avatar either of which lets you dish out far more violence in combat than this every will. It’s an unnecessary duplication, and the existence of such an Avatar would lead to a much steeper escalation curve in the violence level, and thus PC casaulty rate, of the game. If I were to use this Avatar I’d cut that taboo to never avoiding existing or empending violence and scrap the third and fourth channels in favour of something truely unique.