Abusing the GARU rules...

[Onisuzume]

Would it be possible to swap the Small Arms for Martial Arts?
Your attacks will be laughable at start; but totaly annihilating later on after you're fully GARU'd.
While guns pretty much stay the same throughout the game. (DC10 is still the limit for Small Arms, right?)

And, if you pick the right career, you can even start with a combat skill at 6. (goes for any skill really, as long as your career gives it a bonus)
So with a Lawyer; you could have conversation at 6 right from the beginning. (still, what's the point?

[jefftest]

I'll have to give it a more serious try, but I was having trouble with even the rats, and that was with Heavy 6 and Dodge 6 (although that mistakenly low Perception would explain some of the problems I had hitting em with Heavy).  Still, the low Speed/no Initiative meant that they really got the swarming going - I couldn't move very far from the stairs and hope to survive.

Martial Arts, geez, good luck, I have enough trouble with a regular starting character trying to use Martial Arts in level 3 or 4 of the Hogye mine.  I guess if you were patient and built up skills a bit more somehow, maaaybe...

[macksting]

On an almost unrelated note, I had my best luck with MA while playing a character whose primary fighting style was Heavy Weapons. Nothing invested in Armed Combat, nothing in Small Arms, but Heavy Weapons and Martial Arts complimented eachother from the first moment I strode into combat.

[Michael]

Quoting: Onisuzume

Would it be possible to swap the Small Arms for Martial Arts?

I don't think that would work, for two reasons.

First, Martial Arts is like Robotics in that while there are many skill rolls that follow the usual rule (one point of skill equals three points of stats), other calculations ignore the stat and care only about your skill level.  In this case, it's the "funky martial arts".   So a Body 33 Martial Arts +1 character can hit as accurately as a Body 15 Martial Arts +7 character, but cannot do any special moves.

Also, the DC of Martial Arts attacks depends not on the Body stat, but on the size rating of your limbs.   The Body stat determines that size, but the game only constructs your limbs once, at the start of the game.  As this character starts with Body 1, his Martial Arts DC is going to be the lowest possible, even after transformation.

[macksting]

Quoting: Michael

Martial Arts +1

Why would you do that? It's not like this character has terribly many other skills to develop.

Quoting: Michael

Also, the DC of Martial Arts attacks depends not on the Body stat, but on the size rating of your limbs. The Body stat determines that size, but the game only constructs your limbs once, at the start of the game. As this character starts with Body 1, his Martial Arts DC is going to be the lowest possible, even after transformation.

That's not fun.

[PotatoEngineer]

Well, I went through with it, taking a character with Heavy Weapons and Mecha Gunnery.  I got the serum relatively early (somewhere around day 2 or so), so I didn't have to spend much time tooling around with low physical stats.  That said, I went with Pe 15, Cr 15, Eg 11, and two sniper rifles.  I'm bad at dodging, both in a mecha and on foot, but as long as I take out my enemies at long range, it's no problem.  And at low-renown levels, it's easy to take out my enemies.  (Though that didn't stop me from getting head-shotted on my first time into the Mecha Sporch arena...)  It took about 8 days for the serum to finish working its way on me.