Round Up Your Marshals

Here’s an easy move you can implement in order to make tournaments a better experience for everyone involved.

Fundamentally there are two different ways to think about how recreating trying to hit people with swords should work.

Option #1: Swords are sharp, learn to parry

The idea here is that it takes incredibly little for the point of a sword to pierce right through a wool doublet, past any layers of fat and muscle, right into your internal organs. Sure, it can be difficult to tell which shots would have hit a corner and poked right through out the skin as opposed to which would have gone straight through, but if you were in a real swordfight how much would you want to gamble that the shot coming in would only leave a scar without giving you gangrene or causing organ failure? Very few tournaments you see in HEMA or SCA fencing are trying to recreate fighting in any sort of armor. Our equipment is primarily there to help us safely recreate unarmored fighting at full speed, not to serve as armor in and of itself.

Option #2: Swords aren’t lightsabers

For anyone who’s done test cutting with tatami mats, you’ve experienced first hand how hard it can be to slice through something. Edge alignment is incredibly important and being just a few degrees off can easily turn what would have been a lethal strike into just an unpleasant thud. Relatedly, just because a point landed, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to do anything. Sure, when we lunge forward we should be aiming to hit the surface of the target in front of us as opposed to trying to punch through. However, if I throw a thrust that just barely touches as I’m fading back, it probably won’t do anything but piss off my opponent’s tailor. As well, I can’t even count the number of times someone asked if a blow was good to their mask when in reality I had really just missed a thrust and was trying to disengage over the top and my flat happened to just graze the side of their mask on the way over. Yes, I get that head wounds bleed like nowhere else, but that doesn’t mean your skull will explode like a melon just because it came into contact with a piece of steel. None of this is saying that you have to hit hard, that a thrust requires a significant bend to be counted as valid, or that people need to wear heavily padded jackets and plastrons in order to avoid bruising. It’s just that we want blows to be clear and decisive and if reasonable people are asking if something landed, then we should just throw it out and keep fighting.

Now neither of these options are inherently the correct way to run your tournament. Not only do they both have their merits, but I’m also firmly of the belief that having to play to multiple rulesets throughout the season makes you a better fighter and brings us closer to “real” swordplay. Instead, my recommendation is a simple one. Before your tournament starts, preferably the day of, get together all of your marshals/judges and make it clear which option everyone should be going with that day. In the same way that car crashes happen because of people trying to drive different speeds on the same road, injuries as well as just general frustration happen in fencing when the two different sides walk in with differing expectations of what should be considered “good”.

If one person thinks they landed the last five touches, but none of them were called in their favor, the result is likely going to be that they are going to overcorrect and come in way too hard in order for something to be called in their favor. Incidentally, if you see someone calling “HARD” at tournament after tournament, particularly in ones that are self-called, this situation right here is likely the culprit. At the same time, if you are used to dressing like the Michelin man and show up somewhere with folks fencing in t-shirts, you’re either going to have to take some time to recalibrate lest you get shunned for throwing your “normal” shots. If it’s just at a practice you have time to deal with this, but in the heat of a tournament it can be a lot trickier to adjust.

Getting people together to clarify which way things should be going doesn’t cost any money and only takes up a minute or two. That small investment will save you hours and hours of paperwork and scrolling through comments sections to see who was in the right.

For more of my ramblings, please feel free to pick up a copy of my book at FoolOfSwords.com.