ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So... an excerpt from Brawler's description:

The unarmed fighting styles the Brawler uses rely on maneuverability and having both hands available. As such, they may not be practiced in massive armor or while a weapon or shield is equipped.

Wut.

I would guess this should read: The unarmed fighting styles the Brawler uses rely on maneuverability, as such, they may not wear massive armor.

They're fighting with their bare hands. I think it's pretty obvious you can't hold a weapon or shield.

The shield bit may not be so obvious. I'd suggest for clarity changing the second sentence to "As such, they cannot make use of their training wearing massive armour or while a weapon or shield is equipped."

Hm. Other issue with brawlers:

Unlocking the Grappling and Unarmed Discipline trees does not expand them like other trees do when unlocking, like the Dirty Fighting and Survival trees.

I don't understand what the issue is with the original text.

The unarmed fighting styles the Brawler uses rely on maneuverability and having both hands available. As such, they may not be practiced in massive armor or while a weapon or shield is equipped.

It looks fine to me. Can you be more specific about the problem(s) you see with it?

Looks fine here too..

It could be reworded to change around the sentence a bit but it probably wouldn't 'flow' as well then.. E.g, "Since the unarmed--etc--both hands free, they will not be usable when wearing a weapon, shield or heavy armors."

Edit: oh, okay, I get it now - Talonj is just saying that the part about wep/shield is redundant... But I don't think so since I know of other games where you can have 'unarmed' skills (kicking or punching etc) in combination with 'armed' skills.. As in extra hits you can do using other parts of your body in between weapon hits.. I haven't used this class though so I don't know what the talents are like, but if they're stuff like headbutts and knees in groins and jabbing people in the throat and such then making the distinction still makes sense..

This isn't a bug. Yes it's probably a bit redundant but a lot of people like to skim, myself included, so some redundancy on important things is good imo.

Grey's suggestions for a rewrite of that sentence is good though.

You're missing the point. Read the second sentence carefully. It says you may not have practice in wearing massive armor while wearing a weapon and shield. That has NOTHING TO DO with brawling. It just says you can't wear massive armor while using weapons.

The weapon/shield thing is redundant also, but that's my main point.

It says no such thing. "The unarmed fighting styles ... they may not be practiced in massive armor or while a weapon or shield is equipped."

"They" is a pronoun whose antecedent is "The unarmed fighting styles."

If you expand the pronoun, you get "The unarmed fighting styles may not be practiced in massive armor or while a weapon or shield is equipped."

I don't know why this is confusing you.

Right but this isn't a code bug it's a typo or grammatical error. The second sentence is referring directly to the styles mentioned in the first sentence.

Perhaps this should be one sentence?

The unarmed fighting styles the Brawler uses rely on maneuverability and having both hands available, as such they may not be practiced in massive armor or while a weapon or shield is equipped.

You need an "and" if you write it that way. Otherwise it's a run-on sentence. However, I still don't see how that's substantively different from the current pair of sentences.

I'm not a grammatical expert, but it's clear enough as is. Not to be rude, but TalonJ's interpretation does not logically follow.

greycat wrote:It says no such thing. "The unarmed fighting styles ... they may not be practiced in massive armor or while a weapon or shield is equipped."

"They" is a pronoun whose antecedent is "The unarmed fighting styles."

If you expand the pronoun, you get "The unarmed fighting styles may not be practiced in massive armor or while a weapon or shield is equipped."

I don't know why this is confusing you.

"The unarmed fighting styles the Brawler uses ... they may not be practiced in massive armor or while a weapon or shield is equipped."

Ah. That is what was confusing me. I was reading "they" as "The brawler." Perhaps the best change would be "be practiced in massive" to "be practiced while wearing massive"

The most common use of "they" in all of the class descriptions is referring to the class themselves.

((Rant that I can't convince myself not to write follows...))

The only two other classes that use "they" in reference to something other than the class themselves (of the classes I have unlocked, which isn't many) are the rogue, in reference to their traps, and alchemists, in reference to their gems. Even the alchemist's golem and the summoner's summons are not referred to with "they." I could advocate for changing this, but it would be more or less pointless. I was genuinely confused at the brawler line and had to read it a few times over, wondering how it made sense.

Since I see how it actually does make sense now, I can bear with it not being changed, but it still reads weird to me. I don't know why but it's difficult for me to avoid reading that line with the brawler as the subject.

Well, that's somewhat understandable. My suggested change near the start of the thread changes "they" to be about the Brawlers.

Indeed. I'll change it to how Grey said.

The current wording seems both clear and grammatically correct to me; I'm not seeing the issue, either.