On Melees, Marshaling, and a Mini-Manifesto

Sunday I playtested a new melee scenario I concocted on a very generous and patient group of people at the Darach practice. At first I was a little dubious that the scenario would work, and could see similar skepticism on the faces of the combatants as I described it to them, but when we were done running it, everyone came up and said they had a good time. Yay!

Playtesting the new scenario pretty much alleviated my fears of OMG IT'S GOING TO SUCK EVERYONE WILL HATE IT and now I've accepted that of course someone's going to hate it, because you can't please everyone, but most people will probably have a passably good time. Now I'm just down to finishing up a couple of props, making sure I don't break the prize for the tournament before Saturday afternoon, wrangling the eric up to site, and otherwise lassoing as many of the octopus' tentacles as I can before the event.

I was very lucky to have the crowd that I did--four White Scarves and a double-handful of Duelists, all of whom have vast melee experience and were happy to tell me what they thought worked, didn't work, and could be tweaked for even more fun. I was really happy to have such an experienced pool of fighters to test the scenario on, and really appreciated their honest feedback and enthusiasm to make the scenario even more fun. They even came up with a name for it--The Borgia Rings. ;) 

I plan to debut the scenario at King's Hunt, among some other tried-and-true melees that most folks seem to like. This is my first time running two days' worth of rapier and running melees, period, so I'm hoping it all goes well. I passed my Marshaling test almost two months ago, and while I've run tournaments and such before, they were always small (5-15 people) and I always had a Marshal supervising or signing off on everything that I did--I've never run multiple days' worth of scenarios and tournaments or been the Marshal-in-Charge for rapier before. It makes me a little nervous (I'm checking armor! I'm calling holds! I'm approving weird offhands! PEOPLE COULD DIE!!!!!!), but I'm excited too (I'm keeping us on schedule! I'm explaining things! I'm bringing up new scenarios! PEOPLE COULD DIE!!!!!...and then come up and tell me how much fun they had!) 

I really feel like this is one of those things that A Serious Rapier Fighter Should Do--become a marshal, try your hand at running some stuff, experiment with making up new scenarios, just to see what it feels like and to get some perspective. It may be that this weekend goes terribly and I come away from it never wanting to take on this level of responsibility again (although I doubt it will), but that doesn't mean the experience itself will have been bad. I think it's really important to try to do as many different things as possible, even if it only teaches you to appreciate what other folks put themselves through on a regular basis. 

On a more personal level, I'm looking forward to being able to give back to the community a little bit. I had an interesting conversation with a friend on Sunday after practice about getting and keeping new blood in Caid, and keeping the Kingdom going during a recession, and maintaining interest and contribution to the rapier community (and I'm totally summing up badly, but that's not the point). It came from a conversation about the roles of White Scarves as teachers in Caid, and possible methods for including more teaching and more teachers in the rapier community, not just from the White Scarves, but from the populace at large.

I'm sort of of two minds about this--I definitely believe any well-recognized (by awards, word of mouth, or whatever) fighter should be held to high standards in terms of contributions to community and behavior as well as skill, but I also think this kind of perspective can lead to people expecting more from better-recognized or higher-ranked fencers in the Kingdom (to wit, the White Scarves) than they do from themselves... which is, again, a good and a bad thing.

If that kind of expectation encourages the White Scarves, Duelists, and old hats in the community to contribute more, think of new and better ways to keep fighters interested and learning, it's a good thing. If that kind of expectation starts to impact the self-esteem of newer, unrecognized, or less skilled fighters, or encourages laziness because "Oh, So-and-So will take care of that, s/he always handles that stuff," it's a bad thing. We have a lot of really good examples for creativity, research, behavior, and skill in this Kingdom (plenty of whom aren't White Scarves), and I'd hate to see someone newer or less experienced stifle their own creativity because they worry they wouldn't live up to someone else's example or because it simply didn't occur to them to volunteer for something someone else habitually handled.

I don't know if this is a serious problem, or not, but it might be worth addressing anyway. I guess part of this (doing the marshal thang, running the rapier at King's Hunt, even, to a certain extent, this blog) is a gesture to less well-recognized fighters and also to myself--to put myself out there, do try new things, to be okay with screwing them up, to muse over questions and lessons, and generally to keep thinking, discussing, and talking. A lot. Like I do. ;)