Re: (TFT) Re: Grouchy character sheet

["Neil Gilmore" <raito@raito.com>]

> His Excellency Kitakaze Tatsu Raito,
>     Heir of Northshield.  SCA Royalty, and suject of the Middle Kingdom.
I
> would like, If I may beg your indulgence, to re-post a little story about
an
> experience I had with the Society for Creative Anachronism.

> For All'.  What was the year?  Eighty-two, eighty
> three, I can't remember.

I've been fighting since 76? 77? (before you had to be 18). I'm pleased to
say that the rules have improved since then. One of the big problems that
far back was that the SCA was expanding faster than the armor technology. So
we had a lot of people fightig in stuff that was technically legal, but not
particularly safe. Once I had to have an Xray of my hand, and it turns out
that sometime in the past I'd broken it, probably fighting in hockey gloves.
Still, a better safety record than high school football, which isn't saying
all that much.

But also be aware of what sort of combat the SCA recreates, which is
tournament combat of a certain period. In those periods, for that activity,
full armor is what was worn.

>      The SCA believes in armoring the people and
> using unpadded weapons.  For swords they use rattan,
> a lightweight solid form of bamboo, and would club
> each other as hard as they could with it.  If the
> hit is not deemed hard enough to have gotten through
> the armor then it can be ignored.  Our system was

Another weakness was/is SCA history. The first combatants weren't
particularly scholarly when they set up the rules. Nowadays, research into
the actual fighting manuals of the period shows that you really aren't going
to cut through the armor much at all, even at full strength (I estimate that
an SCA killing blow is about a quarter to a third of as hard as I can hit).
There are references to pollaxe duelling as vigorous excercise. Ther's also
one master saying that the younger men don't parry correctly, because their
armor is so good that they don't have to.

I also practice with the Academy of St. Martin's, a group studying medieval
manuals. I find it interesting that virtually all of the period techniques
are disallowed by the SCA, mostly because they involve grappling with the
opponent.

There's always something that a particular rule system will find 'dangerous'
that some other group sees no problem with. Most LARP disallows blows to the
head, SCA disallows shins, that blunt steel group in Belgium doesn't allow
the wrap shot...

> promoted more finesse and technique.  SCA duels that
> I see involve people charging madly together and
> wailing away on each other.  Stroke after stroke
> after stroke, until one of them stops swinging and
> slumps over dead.  There is always bruising.

Well, that aspect has improves in the last 20 years, too. The
Coronet-winning blow for me was a single-handed spear shot around the edge
of the other guy's shield. He tried to put my point aside, and I disengaged
under it. He'd stopped moving for just a moment, and that was enough.

>      They used hit points.  Unlike my system where a
> single hit severed a limb, a sword did five points
> of damage, a long sword seven, and a bastard sword
> eight.  They actually expected people to fight and
> do math at the same time.  Of course every member of
> the founding council had characters with over a
> hundred hit points.  You could smite them all day
> and they still wouldn't die.  This had terrible
> consequences for the fights.

Yep. A former SCA student of mine moved to NH, where he went to the local
LARP group to practice with them. They were laughing at him because he had
such heavy armor (the SCA stuff), and told him that he'd never do well. He'd
only been fighting SCA for a year or so, but he took them all out.
.
>      It was to no effect.  The council would not
> even consider parting with their hit points.  I
> realized that if F.L.A.G. had been formed with TFT
> players and not old school AD&D types, it might have
> stood a chance, but hit points was the core of their
> game system and it was what they were out there to
> reality test.

There's room for all sorts of systems out there. I really don't like it when
HACA bashes SCA, or vice versa, and everyone dislikes the LARP groups.

And as far as boffer swords go, until I won Coronet I was the Youth Marshall
for Northshield, administering boffer combat for those from 6 to 16 (after
that, they fight rattan, but only among themselves).

It's rather like football. You have the full-contact variety with pads, and
flag football. I recall seeing the national flag football champions doing
pretty good against a team of NFL'ers, using the flag rules.

But you probably won't see the SCA allowing unarmored combat (fencing
doesn't really count here), because their focus is on the tournament, not on
back-alley brawls.

Also, as for using TFT as a tool, you think I haven't done that? Sure I
have. One thing that I do like about TFT, the combat is deadly. But I also
use my experiences in SCA and other martial arts in TFT.

For a tournament I ran some 10 years ago, which was a recreation of an
actual Pas d'Armes, I went and made armor of the period. Full padding, mail
shirt, plate breast and back, full plate arm harness (didn't have time to
get the helmet or legs done). Weighted more than I was used to, but not so
much as to really bother me. In one fight, I tried the ultra-fancy move, and
failed. I got hit pretty hard, being out of position. Didn't even really
feel it, but the blow left about a 6 inch dent in the armor. If I was doing
it for real, that's what I'd be wearing.

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com
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