Martial Arts-Esque Fighting Styles for the various Splats

[TerrorCooper]

So, a couple days ago I was watching some Baki (2018) and was struck by an idea right between the eyes. The idea is thus;

The various Splats both 'Canon' (such as V:tR, W:tF, M:tA, P:tC, etc, etc) and 'Fan-Made' (like G:tT, P:tH, L:tCC, M:tE and so on and so on) have all been around for extensive periods of time In-Universe, right? Right. Ergo, what if some of them had had the Idea of creating their own racial Martial Arts? And by that, I mean a fighting style that incorporated that specific race's own capabilities, both in-born (take, for example, a Werewolf's sheer regenerative power, a Vampire's ability to just keep going in the face of everything short of applying fire and sunlight to their everything and a Leviathan's or Monarch's shapeshifting capabilities) and acquired (think along the lines of a Mage's spells, a Genius's Wonders and a Hopeful's Charms). Of course, there'd be quite a large number of styles, sub-styles, schools of thought and so on due to the sheer variety within each race.

Naturally, of course, upon learning of the fighting styles of the others, each race would attempt to co-opt the fighting styles of every other race to use (though said copies would be lesser to the originals due to the need to substitute powers required for the original with the closest approximate equivalent). And that's not even getting into the copies developed by mortals!

So! Waddaya guys think? Yay or Nay? Anything you want to add or change? Please let me know!

[Tessie]

For there to be Fighting Styles for different splats, the splats would need to fulfil two requirements: They should be uniform enough that a Fighting Style can actually be shared by a significant portion of them, and they need a coherent culture in which such Fighting Styles can spread. I think most official splats that fulfil those two requirements already have splat specific Fighting Styles in their core books. Vampire in particular has tons of them, relatively speaking.
The only notable exception are mages who, while relatively uniform in terms of having access to a limited pool of powers, are still too diverse in how they apply their powers. Despite this they do have Fighting Merits that ties into their powers; just not any published Styles.
You could definitely turn up how many such Fighting Styles exists, but many splats are too disorganised to spread them very far or straight up don't share enough traits for there to be splat-wide Fighting Styles. They'd instead develop individual Fighting Styles with weird prereqs very few could learn without changing how they work.

[TerrorCooper]

Okay. It seems to me that you may have misunderstood parts of what I was saying, and/or have some misconceptions about this topic. Not sure which, or even if its true/accurate or not, I'm nowhere near competent enough at debate to even try to engage you in that way, or at reading people through text to determine it, but I'll break down your response into segments and try to explain/elaborate on what I was meaning.

For there to be Fighting Styles for different splats, the splats would need to fulfil two requirements: They should be uniform enough that a Fighting Style can actually be shared by a significant portion of them, and they need a coherent culture in which such Fighting Styles can spread. I think most official splats that fulfil those two requirements already have splat specific Fighting Styles in their core books. Vampire in particular has tons of them, relatively speaking.

Admittedly, I'm not very familiar with COD's take on vampires and the Fighting Styles the team developed for them, so I'm not able to comment on them. Still, I specifically said some of them, not all of them.

The only notable exception are mages who, while relatively uniform in terms of having access to a limited pool of powers, are still too diverse in how they apply their powers. Despite this they do have Fighting Merits that ties into their powers; just not any published Styles.

And don't you think the mages trying to develop the Martial Art would at least attempt to take that into account?

You could definitely turn up how many such Fighting Styles exists, but many splats are too disorganised to spread them very far or straight up don't share enough traits for there to be splat-wide Fighting Styles. They'd instead develop individual Fighting Styles with weird prereqs very few could learn without changing how they work.

I wasn't speaking of the Fighting Styles being Splat-Wide, Tessie. Just that somehow, someway, a small number of each splat got together and decided, for one reason or another, 'Hey, we have all these powers, why not try to develop a standard-ish way to cohesively leverage them all in a fight?' And following that, they merely worked to ensure a sufficient enough number of their splat were somewhat competent at it for it to not die out and remain somewhat notable. Said individuals would also try and keep the prereqs simple enough that almost anyone could learn the basics.

And above all, you don't have to focus on the 'Canon' Splats if you don't want to. You can just as easily go for a Fan-Splat, if that is what you so desire to do.

[Heavy Arms]

It feels like you're over-stressing the "style" part of this. Style is just a system short-hand for Merit that provide a distinct mechanic at each level rather than individual levels just scaling the bonuses up (if there are varying levels).

Splats that have access to a bunch of Fight Merits that aren't Style Merits doesn't mean that, in-universe, there isn't a "martial arts" approach to thing, but rather that leveraging their powers in combat tends to come in discrete "techniques" rather than full on "styles."

There's plenty of Fighting Merits in the CofD, many of which are splat specific, they just tend not to be organized as Styles as frequently as human Fighting Merits are.

Mages have one of the smallest selections, but that's for a simple reason: A mage's best combat arsenal is to take human stuff up to 11. Mages that want to be awesome fighters learn normal human martial arts, and then stack magic on top of that, because that's the most effective way for them to leverage their power.