They had the monk class in BG.
As well as in the D&D series after the last AD&D one.

I'll use BG as the example.
Start off not that great, by the end however you'll deal tremendous fast, multipule blows that ignored weapon resistances.
That could paralyze and slay in one hit, you could sneak as a rogue, heal yourself as a priest.
Where immune to many types of effects and certain spells, I think spell resistance and normal weapons.

If using Oblivions set up, this would be a modded max Hand to hand skill, heavy spell enchantments as base abilities..
Such as magic resistance, resist normal weapons, drain health 1 second 100+ damage, paralyze, fortify speed, a heavy heal spell.

So I'm not saying hand to hand itself would beat a dragon irl, but fantasy and roleplay allow it.
All it takes is watching films, reading books and thinking about what a monk character on Nirn would be able to do.

Myself playing a modded game with a pure hand to hander and no spells it's fun.
For Skyrim I may go for using these skills.
Hand to hand, sneak, illusion, restoration and destruction mostly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCNrj0lfGb4

If this game can do it, Skyrim should be able to.

Thats close minded for a game thats strives to touch on everything that may intrest ppl in an RPG, if you dont like monks and ninjas dont explore that part of the game thats the beauty of the elder scrolls series there so many possible things to do in the world and the freedom to choose what to do and when to do it. Improved hand to hand is a must for a game that has so much combat involved in my opinion

And what If I want to be a brawling Nord, should I get stuck with animations and forced to use weapons out of Crouching Tiger? No thanks, not everyone who wants to play an Unarmed character wants to do the whole Shaolin monk thing.

Im not saying there shouldnt be both, just that they wont include both.

Thats where the perks system could help, todd has talked about a family tree of perks (so you have to go down certain paths with the perks) for every skill. So if you wanna be a a punch throwing, beer drinking, head smashing nord i could see that as a possible path, but if you wanna be a high kicking, counter puching, lethal monk i can see that as a path. really we wont know til the perk system news starts coming out, and we see how the hand to hand plays in game. But i have high hope for the combat system in the game as a whole

This actually looks pretty good tbh.
It could fit pretty nicely in TES imo.

lol i thought it was a little outdated, skyrim would have to work a little better with the detection of hits and counters, etc. and also body physics and how the attacks effect the player and NPC's

True.

But I like the idea you had of perks effecting your fighting style.

Really this can be applied to all the weapons.

Well i am generally play only as a pure mage or stealth/mage caracter but once i tried to play as a monk in Morrowind and it was really fun,i beat up ordinator 1 vs 1 on lvl 1 on max difficulty with my bare hand,thats felt great! :slap:
Hope they put in a decent hand to hand system in Skyrim.

Really I want to see what kind of finishers they put in fr hand to hand.

Can we disregard the words of Mai'q this time and actually kick someone?

The game doens't need to be realistic, it needs to be believable. And it is very believable to kill something much bigger than you with gauntlets you got from a daedric god.

It's funny how people actually believe this - assuming the combatants are equally skilled, the person with a weapon has all the advantage over the person fighting with their fists and feet. There's nothing magical about fistfighting that gives it an edge over steel.

There's a reason the sword and spear were the weapons of choice throughout practically all of human history.

iv had 6ish years of martial arts.

nords COULD do martial arts, this is a made up culture- not sweden. i can imagine khajits,argonians,dumner and even orcs having their own martial arts (bosmer's are confirmed to have their own) and these races would influence skyrim.

You receive special training from Chuck Norris, located far in the mountains of Skyrim..

well i think todd said there are fewer weapon skills this time because they just condensed all the weapons in to a few skills,each skill covers more than just one weapon set this time around and for each weapon skill you have to choose which perk path you wanna master because todd has also said that you will no be able to master all skills and perks with one character. Also the perks applys to every skill in the game so magic,armed combat, hand to hand, sneak, speechcraft, smithing, etc. these will all have there own perks tree to deal with. kinda kool when you think of the things they could do with a system like that.

If they are equally skilled, then how does having a sword give one an advantage? You just said they were equal. A sword is just a tool, an extra sharp extention of the arm. If the arm itself is just as deadly as the sword, and has gaunlets on to make the fist just as hard, so everything is equal then how does one give the advantage over the other? They're equal, so they're equal.

This isn't human history, this is Tamriel. Why hold hand to hand combat to realism when none of the other combat styles are? And don't tell me they are, because a daedric sword by no means playes by our laws of physics.

I said they were of equal skill - not that the combatants would stand an equal chance if they fought. Most of the oriental martial arts focused on fighting with weapons. We tend to forget about this because the west fell in love with unarmed martial arts, but empty handed fighting was a small (and weaker) part of eastern combat, which as every bit as much sword and spear dominated as European combat. You can't parry a sword with your arm, and assuming the swordsman knows how to use it he has a huge advantage over the stereotypical martial artist.

I never said anything one way or another about the game, I was just pointing out that the person I quoted was dead wrong about the effectiveness of (unarmed) martial arts. From a gameplay standpoint, unarmed should be every bit as effective as swords.

There's two way I see hand-to-hand could go in Skyrim. One is like you said, to make it stronger and really different than the h2h we had in oblivion, by giving us things like disarm (maybe it could be a perk) and maybe fist weapons (or give beast races a noticeable bonus to h2h damage) That would be my favorite option since I like monk characters
The other way is to get rid of h2h as a skill but make it a way do deal with ennemies in a non lethal way. So if there's an npc that bothers you, you could fight him with your fist and knock him unconscious (and you get a fine, maybe 100g)

As long as it's a more manly martial art than that eastern-style stuff.

Real men practice pankration.

[img]http://images.uesp.net//9/94/OB-class-Monk.jpg[/img]

Bethesda already Asianed it up, sorry to disappoint you.

In D&D i would always make a defensive monk. very hard to hit with normal attacks and nearly impervious to magic. it was funny to beat bosses dealing a flurry of only 1 to 2 damage but rarely getting hit. id like to see another game where unarmed can be a vrsatile combat style leaning more towards defense (evasion) and disabling rather than just another way to deal damage

Wait who said anything about a brawling Nord?

Read the thread title again. This is talking about martial arts for monk-type characters, not hand to hand for brawling nords. Please pay attention.

Thats great, but you didnt actually read what I said. If they use martial arts animations for Unarmed, then they would be the default animations. Bethesda isnt going to implement two completely different animation sets for one skill just for variety, and I think drunken Nord brawls are more inline with Skyrim than an eastern Asia themed combat style.



That looks like more of a Friar Tuck than anything eastern-asian.

But look at his stance, thats not a western fighting style and can tell you that much

By casting a spell that gives you an enormous amount of strength while simultaneously delivering electric shock waves through the creature every time you connect.

At least that's how I imagine a monk fighting.

Don't know what gave you the impression that I would want a Monk to ONLY be able to punch and kick. Obviously he would be heavily trained in meditation and magic that added buffs to himself.