Stop making sense

I have shamefully taken the title of a couple of articles found on the Internet that tackles the question of sense and realism in videos games, and that have helped me on my particular issue.

From the beginning, I was trying to wright my fighting system as a reflection of real-life boxing or martial arts. And this has been very helpful for me to uncover ways in which I wanted to go, for instance on how to chain combos (in the real world, you give a punch, and your body is pushing forward. It is thus easier to chain with another punch (the one-two) than with a backkick for instance).

However, it has implicitely set boundaries to my imagination. Since then, I had been trying to fit every move in this "moving forward", "unbalanced", etc. framework, while it should have been only a means to help me figure out what I wanted to do.

A friend of mine helped me find fighting board or card games, to look at how they are built. Two of them caught my eye:

• The Universal Fighting System, and
  
• the Yomi card game
  

I have learnt a lot, and had quite a few ideas, simply by reading the rules and reviews of these games. The important point here is that they do not sacrifice gameplay for realism. I have now taking my basic concepts ("forward moving", "balanced", "unbalanced", etc.) and abstracted them (I am using resources like "fire", "wind", etc.). This allows me to simply create fun moves, or moves that would go well with each other, without trying to stick to a realistic representation of a fight (which no one really cares about). Reading these games have given me quite a few ideas though, and I am in the process of changing some parts of how the fight should be run. I have a few basic ideas for the general moves, but I want now to focus on a big part of every fighting system: the combos.
And hopefully, this will also affect how standard moves are dealt with, so I will likely need to review my whole system soon.