I have a character that can fight their opponents without seriously injuring them. They do so by using pressure points that could render a limb useless or knock them out. But I have no clue where to start looking for this kind of information. Or what I should keep in mind when doing so.
Okay, I’m seeing a pretty serious disconnect here. Pressure point fighting is not about “not hurting” your opponent. It’s about inflicting so much pain the victim’s brain says, “screw this, I’m taking a vacation.”
The jury’s out on if it actually causes lifelong injuries; the masters who practice it warn against crippling or killing your opponents, while modern medical researchers can’t find any confirmed cases of someone suffering lifelong injuries from pressure point fighting. That said, they were looking at students of the form, not random bystanders who picked a fight with a stranger and suffered a sudden unexpected coronary. Either way, this is not a technique set to be taken lightly.
Beyond that, and with respect to the practitioners, pressure point fighting requires a little bit of sadism. I don’t mean you have to enjoy hurting people to learn pressure points techniques. What I mean is, in order to have the stomach to learn a style where you need to inflict massive amounts of pain on another human being just to learn, you need to either enjoy some part of it or become completely desensitized.
Because of the precision that pressure point fighting requires, and the availability of less vicious combat forms, those who don’t enjoy inflicting pain can find more humane ways to subdue their foes; for instance, setting them on fire.
This doesn’t paint a picture, to me, of someone who intentionally avoids injuring their foes. A pressure point fighting character will be the kind that flat out kills their foes before they realize there’s even a threat.
You can use youtube and google to get a good idea of just how fast and severe this kind of fighting can be. Just keep in mind, the youtube videos are of actual masters in a safe and controlled environment. Take that away, put your character on the street, and ask them to do it in live situation, and the risk of killing their foe is very real. Also, as always, please don’t try to mimic them, this is stuff that actually can result in serious lifelong injuries if done incorrectly.
The people who practice pressure point fighting tend to start in the upper mastery ranks (depending on their school’s belt system). This means, for your character to have internalized pressure point fighting to the degree that they can actually use it, you’re looking at someone in their late thirties, at the youngest.
Everyone’s pressure points are in slightly different places. You can find your own very easily, but finding someone else takes some time and effort. Exactly what you don’t want to be doing in a fight. Fighters can learn compensate for the minor discrepancies, but it takes years of practice.
There’s a few problems with pressure point fighting. First, it doesn’t work on everyone: some people have fused or dead nervous systems. Meaning they don’t feel pain, and have no nerve endings. This is actually a pretty serious medical condition. It also means that pressure point fighting will do, literally, nothing to them.
Second, there are less severe anomalies, where some people’s nervous systems just doesn’t quite match what you’d expect. This doesn’t completely invalidate pressure point fighting as a whole, but it does seriously impair a combatant’s ability to fight using pressure points. (Watch Serenity if you want to get an idea of how badly this can go, then realize, in the real world that it’s not even something associated with surgery, some people have just misplaced parts of their nervous system. Then forget everything else you just watched because that’s not how pressure point fighting works. But, you get the idea.)
Finally, anyone who’s overweight, has an extra layer of padding over a lot of the common nerve targets. This means hitting them hard enough in combat to actually get the result your character wants, without accidentally striking too hard is approaching impossible. Incidentally, almost all women have a thin subcutaneous layer of fat, which makes pressure point fighting against female combatants significantly harder.
If you want a character with a respect for human life, who doesn’t want to harm others, look at Aikido. We’re not huge fans of it as a combat style, but it is one of the best examples of a no-harm self defense system. Additionally, because of its popularity, there are a lot of Aikido schools, including self defense schools.
It may not be as unique sounding as you were hoping, but it’s a lot more plausible.
-Starke