As an indy RPG developer myself, I can tell you chances are I will not break even for how much labor and time I spend making a quality RPG product. When doing a cost-benefit analysis on weather or not to produce an RPG product, one consideration is ALWAYS: will this get me sued? Because if I have to get a lawyer to publish, that's a lot of money I have to raise that has nothing to do with making or distributing the product, before making any money from the product, and I already know odds are against me breaking even on what product is going to cost me in time.
Once upon a time there was a Game Company called TSR, who were really mad that anyone but them published table top RPGs, because they owned the original table top RPG, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D.) TSR decided to sue Palladium, who in turn decided to sue so many other new RPG system developers that in the 1980's and 1990's people were scared out of trying to get into the table top RPG market.
We (the team known as the Game Arts Guild, previously known as Galbraith Games,) were one of these groups in exile. Before 2000 our plan was to make a computer game version of our RPG first (the precursor to Squawk RPG and The Dark Woods,) and then make a computer game hand book that could coincidentally double as an RPG book, to try to avoid all that threat-of-lawfare we could not afford.
Then in 2000 the OGL came out. It ended the two decades old threat-of-lawfare preventing indy RPG development, and we entered the golden era of indy RPG publishing that we are in today, which has grown rapidly because of print-on-demand technologies and services. We at the Game Arts Guild never did embrace the OGL however, and instead relied on traditional open source licenses such as the LGPL and later Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike. As Quake 1 Total-Conversion developers we had started one of the world's first open game projects called "The Free Models Project" (the inheritor of which is Open Game Art who we endorse,) and as a result of that experience we realized at the time the OGL was suspect.
That's right, THE OGL WAS NO-DAMNED-GOOD ANYWAYS. The ONLY thing it did was end an age of lawfare-threat preventing indy RPG development. The problem then and now is the OGL grants Wizards of the Coast the ability to revoke your right to use the OGL at any time:
Hasbro (the now owners of Wizards of the Coast) has a parallel process going on with their most popular product, the board game Monopoly; they really think like that game, hate competition, lock down intellectual properties in ethically questionable ways, etc. What all of this "new proposed OGL 1.1" drama described in the above video has really signaled, is their intention to reengage in TSR style THREAT OF LAWFARE by way of OGL-license-revoking (remember it is only the THREAT that prevents indy game development as per my first paragraph of this post,) to shut down indy RPG development. The current OGL everyone seems to want to preserve will NOT prevent them from doing just that!
As a byproduct of working on Squawk 2nd Edition for the last 10 years we have produced a role playing game system we call "Resilience" (www.ResilienceRPG.com) licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license (which is set in the modern day but has been designed to adapt to other settings,) which I hope disgruntled indy developers will consider as they exodus D&D.
I know people don't like to be gas lighted, being told they are crazy when they are normal. However the DSM is the DSM, and Substance Use Disorder is clearly defined therein. If you don't want to be called crazy, don't roll around in piles asbestos, don't play in burning tobacco fields and don't drink, ever.
There are NO health benefits to drinking alcohol, AND alcohol is deadly for you to consume on a regular basis. Virtually every health study that says alcohol is good for you divides people into three categories:
Those Who Don't Drink.
Those Who Drink Lightly But Regularly.
Those Who Obviously Have a Drinking Problem.
When studies show this, what happens is Those Who Obviously Have a Drinking Problem have the most health problems, but Those Who Drink Lightly But Regularly have the least health problems.
The problem is that they have put two TOTALLY DIFFERENT groups of people into category 1. The two groups are Those Who Never Drink on a Regular Basis, and Those Who Were Forced to Stop Drinking Because of Alcohol Related Health Problems. If we separate these groups from each other, we then have the following groups, listed here in order of most healthy to least healthy:
Those Who Never Drink on a Regular Basis are by far the most healthy statistically.
Those Who Drink Lightly But Regularly are starting to have some health problems likely related to their alcohol consumption.
Those Who Obviously Have a Drinking Problem almost always have alcohol related health problems that could be potentially fatal.
Those Who Were Forced to Stop Drinking Because of Health Problems have already had their health wrecked by alcohol.
The fact is Alcohol is a deadly poison, and the more you drink, the more it harms you. That's what the science actually says. Back in the 80's in public schools we were shown videos of what alcohol does to the human brain: turn into swiss cheese, literally putting liquid filled cavities where there used to be gray matter in the brain. Science never has refuted that drinking reduces brain volume:
Nothing is more YOU than your BRAIN. Alcohol attacks THAT, Alcohol attacks YOU. Those who are selling you alcohol are directly undermining your existence. You voluntarily drinking is literally self-destruction!
Alcohol is one of the few drugs used for recreational use that can penetrate through all of the cell walls in your body's tissues. Some of the Ethanol when digested is converted into Acetaldehyde which can damage (if not destroy) all types of human cells before the human body can purge it. Alcohol wrecks some parts of your body (brain, lungs, liver) more than other parts (bones, muscle,) but it's bad for ALL of your body parts:
Consider the typical alcohol-related health problems that you normally hear about such as:
When alcohol is brought up, people almost always forget to mention that it is a "Level 1 Carcinogen" on the level of "tobacco and asbestos" known to be a risk for every type of cancer. There isn't any "moderate" amount of Level 1 Carcinogen that you should be intentionally exposing yourself to:
What if I told you I had a combat strategy that could shrink my enemy's brain volume, put them at much higher risk of cancer, and attack every cell in their body? That's what drinking alcohol actually does to any enemy of mine without me doing ANYTHING. Opposite of self defense, drinking reduces:
your ability to think strategically, both long term and short term.
your ability to reflect and learn.
your brain's over all health.
your body's over all health and performance.
your ability to stay out of prison.
your ability to avoid dying in a violent crime.
your ability to avoid dying in an accident.
your ability to live a longer and more enjoyable life.
Abstinence from alcohol should be a training strategy of any serious self defense system or martial art. "What about drunken Kung Fu?" Those kung fu practitioners are intentionally pretending to be drunk to throw off opponents, to get their opponents to underestimate the Drunken Kung Fu Practioner. Actual drunk people per say are known to be clumsy, awkward, make poor decisions and otherwise be bad at defending themselves.
On a deeper level I must say my religious views have been even more reinforced by study of addiction: If there is any Higher Power out there that is benevolent towards you, wouldn't that benevolent Higher Power discourage you from drinking?
It's nice to have competitions so we can evaluate how effective training methods are. However in competition as it is commonly practiced today, we have overconfidence in the reliability of our results. Instead of assuming that the champion is the best in the world, we should assume that he was adequately trained to defeat his last opponent: in a tournament you do not know where one fighter stands against all the other fighters unless he fights them all, and you don't know what training methods were most effective if one fighter is excluded from losing only two matches. Double elimination means the best over all fighter could easily lose because he just happened to be beat by two individuals who could take him, while most of the rest of the individuals in his division could not take him.
Sounds crazy, right? This is me fighting Zack, everything he knows about knife fighting he learned from me, and when I fight him you can see the disparity between my superior knife skill level and his:
Since I started participating in the North West Warrior Tipon Tipon in 2017, the fighter who has given me the most grief goes by the name of "Scott." There are no official winners or losers at a Gathering like this, but the tale of the tape speaks for itself. Mine and Scott's first match was something like a draw, maybe slightly in his favor, which was strange for me because he was spastic and new a the time. A year or two later at our second confrontation, it was very one sided over all in his favor as he caught me with a snake-arm disarm, landing many knife thrusts to my mid section in less than 30 seconds, and otherwise seemed to outpace me with his footwork. But most problematically a year or two after that, even after I had specifically trained to fight him and integrated more of my Tai Chi push hands into my knife dueling, and even as I hit him with an epic push hands projection counter throw, he still clearly dominated me in over all deadliness, and the commentary behind the camera says it all:
Going by tournament logic, if Ben can take Zack, and Scott can take Ben, then Scott can take Zack, right? Wrong:
And I have numerous other examples, but this is the one most obviously involving my own personal practice of the martial arts that has video evidence. Going forward keep in mind that being able to beat one person does not guarantee that you could have beat anyone that one person has beaten. Competition is a great metric for us to have for evaluating training methods, but we often have more confidence in that data than we should.
Submission holds have extremely limited application to civilian self defense scenarios. Submission holds can be faked out of. Submission holds can have severe asymmetrical consequences. Submission holds are complex movements prone to failure. Submission hold alternatives take less time to learn and are more valuable to civilian martial arts consumers.
In the South East Asian martial arts we sometimes see the "Principle of Overkill," were they refuse to stop attacking after the opponent goes down. These arts aren't training for casual bar brawls to defend the honor of open minded girlfriends, these arts are training for life and death combat between rival feuding parties. One sneaky strategy is to fall down early in a brawl, act incapacitated, wait until an opponent is not paying attention to you, then pull your knife and attack them from behind. Because of that these arts specifically train to overkill a downed opponent, to make sure that opponent isn't being sneaky.
The application to this for submission holds is obvious: in a serious self defense situation, what do you do when your opponent taps or says "uncle" or "ok, I give up, sorry!" How do you know they have sincerely repented and aren't going to attack again? How do you know if they just realized how outmatched they are and are about to pull a weapon?
The obvious alternative is to turn the hold into a full damage attack, dislocating a shoulder, breaking a leg, or choking them unconscious. This cure can be worse than the disease; the consequences from going that far can be worse than whatever the attacker was trying to do to you in the first place. Prison time itself can be life threatening. Any allies they have who are prone to drastic violence aren't going to soon forget that you maimed their friend. What happens if you hold a choke too long because you were worried they were "just faking it"?
That's assuming the submission hold works in the first place: all submissions are more complex movements than most strikes. Beyond that your mobility is compromised while you are executing a submission hold. Even if you somehow manage a submission hold while up on your feet, you are still giving up options to run or otherwise maneuver as long as you are applying the hold.
"But why not use a submission hold to control someone until authorities arrive and arrest the attacker?" Let's put aside the problem with the attackers friends showing up before law enforcement, and instead ask if a submission hold is actually the best way to control someone. Many grappling styles have various pins and other control positions that are far less complex and thus more likely to work than trying to use a submission hold. "Position before submission" is a best practice for grappling arts anyhow, and position is more key to controlling the attacker, not so much joint locks applied thereafter.
Training for superior position both on the ground and on your feet is much more valuable to the average civilian martial arts consumer than learning submission holds. If a well thought out self defense paradigm is used, grappling instruction can improve a civilian's mobility in a real confrontation instead of compromising mobility:
I got two shoulder impingements: one in the right shoulder in 2019 from a martial arts training injury, and the other in the left shoulder in 2021 from a car accident.The physical therapy required from the second helped me more fully recover the first and reminded me of many things my martial arts instructors taught me back in the 1990s. My martial arts injury was from taking a bad fall from someone accidentally isolating my arm while we were doing a double leg throw DRILL. (I have never been inured that seriously sparring no matter how crazy and gym-fight it got.)
I was studying JKD/Kali with an instructor who was teaching as directly as he possibly could from Dan Inasanto's system. I got to cover many bases in martial arts I hadn't tried before, namely Kali (my previous formal FMA training was in Arnis,) Wing Chun (my previous close range Kung Fu was Yang Style Tai Chi,) JKD (my previous long range Kung Fu was Choy Li Fut,) Silat (my previous joint locking outside of Kung Fu was Aikido,) Muay Thai (my 90's Sifu taught what would now be considered Dutch Kickboxing) and I got to stick fight a Bujinkan black belt (I am in the red shirt, and I am a founding member of weapon free sparring group Tres Espadas going back to 2010):
This Guro was very knowledgeable, but I have been doing martial arts off and on since the 1980's and in the year I studied with him I only learned a handful of techniques I hadn't seen before, and only a few of those techniques were good enough for me to add to my personal arsenal. The problem was that the shoulder impingement I got training with him was not worth the few techniques I was able pick up. This was the last straw: I realized that I already know more martial arts techniques that I would like to master than I have time left in my life to train.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a martial arts system that focused on the practical weapons, dirty boxing, and good posture to help old people like me be better fighters? Ironically I already practice that art, a sparring oriented form Yang Style Tai Chi heavily influenced by Choy Li Fut, Arnis and cross training in MMA, which I have abbreviated for my own use. This is me practicing against someone I taught Tai Chi saber to with real-weapon-weight sparring weapons:
I have considered martial arts lineage and rank a legal liability for decades. I don't charge money for teaching martial arts, so when I do teach others martial arts it's so that I can have sparring partners to train with. What I am actually known for publicly is my knife fighting, and I have demonstrated numerous times that I am reasonably good at it.
Some YouTubers talk about martial arts as if the most dangerous situation they will get into is someone insulting their girlfriend at a pub. My personal interests and professional requirements have taken me regularly through dangerous urban areas in Seattle and Pittsburgh. In MY environment knife fights happen more often than fist fights, and that is what I prepare for.
Why not just go to my local MMA gym? The first problem is most MMA coaches are too young to understand the training needs of a 50 year old martial artist. For example no I can NOT do 50 burpees for being late to class, the potential injury from that might take a year of recovery for me. In order to continue training injury prevention has to be my top priority, and it appears that I am the expert on that subject.
The second problem is MMA doesn't get there. Muay Thai gets close, but I have to prepare for very specific scenarios. For example: when on the ground I have to train to get up from the ground, which means I have to also train to retain others on the ground so I can understand the full dynamics of getting up. No, I am not concerned about someone on the street trying to catch me in a triangle choke or arm bar. Yes I may cross train MMA or Muay Thai more in the future, but no I do not necessarily need to. I need Wrestling for the Elderly you say?
There's Tai Chi again.
After I got that shoulder impingement in 2019, I was on the mat with a number of new people who were able to muscle through my superior technique because of my weakened state. No matter how tough you are, one shoulder impingement and you are the weakest person in the room, less able to defend yourself than if you had never done martial arts in the first place. This reminded me of my MMA coaches in 2018 encouraging me to focus on strength building as I largely already had the skill to execute techniques, but I generally lacked the over all body strength to execute them against people much larger or stronger than me.
This also reminded me of the focus on training good posture Tai Chi, as bad posture is what you have to correct to prevent or recover from shoulder impingement. I am going to continue training with friends in Tai Chi and participate in Tres Espadas, and I am not retiring from being a martial arts consumer advocate, but I am retiring from being a consumer of martial arts lessons. I need training time for strength training and perfecting the fraction of the techniques I already know that I find valuable to me personally.
The most formative sparring I have ever had happened in around 1995, when I weighed 135 lbs (61 kg) and went 3 hard kickboxing rounds against a friend of mine with 10% of my training but who was 6 inches (15 cm) taller than me and weighed 350 lbs (159 kg.) I thought I could take him because at the time I was the most advanced student in class (kickboxing & kung fu,) and was able to have my way with other students who weighed 200 lbs (91 kg.) The result was the worst beating of my life, as him landing a simple jab on the gloves protecting my face would knock my feet back 6 inches and afterwords 8 Ibuprofen didn't put a dent in my headache.
I committed myself to the study of how to beat larger opponents for the next year, grilling my Sifu on everything he knew on the subject and considering my previous training and experiences in self defense situations, Karate, Arnis and Aikido. The 350 lb opponent was only shook in those three rounds by one attack: my wide overhand right hook. But about a year later, I knocked out another friend of ours who was also significantly taller than me who weighed 325 lbs, using the lessons I learned since the first beating.
Since then I have had numerous experiences on the street that were dangerous self defense situations, where these lessons I learned above arguably saved me from being injured, killed, or going to jail. Here are the 5 tips in order of importance from first to last:
Stay off the line of attack.
Wide overhand hooks.
Leg kicks.
Rear Naked Choke
Weapons
1. Staying Off the Line of Attack
The key with this strategy is "evasive footwork" as is often taught in martial arts and combat sports. The line of attack is the front of your opponent where he can most easily strike and grab you. Don't be on his line of attack; don't stand in front of a larger opponent. There are many effective techniques for evasive footwork, but it's important to train in something simple enough during free sparring that you will use it for real if you have to:
Evasive footwork is the most important thing I learned in the aftermath of that original beating I mentioned above. I have actually used evasive footwork to resolve numerous violent situations without having to inflict injury on anyone. Evasive footwork buys you the time you need to act like an adult, and then only if necessary, attack like and adult. Notice how evasive footwork buys this fighter time against a much larger opponent:
2. Wide Overhand Hooks
In the NES game "Mike Tyson's Punch Out" the player character uses uppercuts to attack larger opponents. This is OPPOSITE of reality: as a shorter opponent your are LESS able to land uppercuts against larger opponents, because you are swinging your punch up against gravity above your own head. (And I have been knocked out twice in hard sparring from uppercuts from taller opponents, but never from shorter opponents.)
What really works on larger opponents are overhand hooks that swing down onto the opponent's jaw, with gravity on the side of the shorter opponent. Notice how this wide overhand hook palm strike -backed up with evasive footwork - brings down the larger opponent in the most famous David vs Goliath early UFC fight:
In that original beating I wrote about above, the ONLY strike I through that phased the 350 pounder was my wide overhand hook. Mike Tyson himself used hooks effectively against numerous larger boxers:
These wide overhand hook strikes are a potent tool that have been successful in MMA ever since that above early UFC fight:
3. Leg Kicks
Later when I KOed our 325 lb friend, it was with a right leg round kick to the jaw well above my own head level, BUT which I set up with numerous low leg (calf) kicks. (It would have been wiser for me to use a wide overhand hook instead of a high round kick.) As you may have noticed in the early UFC fight above low kicks to the leg tend to land on larger opponents. Bas Rutten established leg kicks as the solution for taking out larger opponents with iron jaws:
As you get older, or in real self defense situations where there is no time to warm up, it is harder to throw high kicks. This means that the most effective kick in MMA (the leg kick) is probably also the most effective kick on the street. The one time I used this kick outside of the gym, I landed three of these kicks and the whole confrontation concluded in less than 30 seconds, as most aggressors have no defense against this whatsoever:
4. Rear Naked Choke
I am not a fan of trying to use grappling submissions on the street, because it is so chaotic that once you have someone pinned down, you are still in danger. However the "sleeper hold," aka Rear Naked Choke (RNC,) is highly versatile and can be applied once you have a hold on someone from behind, and it renders them fully unconscious (and not simply trapped.) You could become very proficient with this technique after a few years of training in grappling a few times per week. Here is one of many examples of a smaller woman pulling this off on a larger man:
Though I personally have not used the RNC outside of the gym, it is a natural movement that you can use even when under pressure. It is also great move if you are looking for a nonlethal way to defend a friend who is being attacked:
5. Weapons
The elephant in the room is that martial arts without weapons are naked. When people are serious about protecting themselves they access weapons to do so:
The problem with guns is they usually cause more problems than they solve. However if you are a careful person who has disciplined lifestyle and you seriously train in firearms, the gun guys are not wrong about the self defense value of the firearm:
But what if you don't want to use lethal force? In my training and experience I have found that pepper spray is more versatile than advertised. (For example, you can shoot it behind you as someone chases you down a hallway or stair well.) Here's what it looks like to use pepper spray (with evasive footwork) against someone menacing you with a knife:
What if the attacker isn't even human, but a lion or bear? It turns out that bear spray specifically is effective enough to take on whole groups of predators:
