Miguel and I trucked up to Caer Maer Saturday morning to fight in Summer War, and I am today exhausted and well bruised.
This was the friendly skirmish between Windmasters and CM, and it was a little sad to be the only two WH fencers there, and only a half dozen WH armored fighters showed. I’m curious to see who shows up to Assessment and WotW. I’m worried that the dozen fighters we had at last WotW, and at Pennsic, has dissipated. But then, it’s sort of my job to worry what with being Baronial Rapier Warlord and all. And then there’s worrying about my job: I need to find somebody to foist this Rapier Warlord business on… anyway, moving on
We split the day between a woods battlefield and the ravine, which was lightly wooded and had a wall of hay bales running down the center.
The Fields
The woods had three flags in line perpendicular to the line of approach from rez point. From the “East”
side of the field, the left most flag had an easy approach from both sides, the center flag was slightly easier to approach from the East, and the right flag had substantial cover against an approach from the West. Rez points were equidistant from the center flag, and a fallen tree halfway between the center flag and the West rez point constrained the path coming back from there. All in all, the West’s approach sucked balls.
In the ravine, the wall was equidistant from the two rez trees, but due either to a slightly steeper hill to run down or some other factor, it seemed one side did have a terrain advantage.
My own performance
I went into the day really not in a mood to command. I’m not sure why, but I’ve been getting a bit burnt out on it, or doubtful of my abilities. Aedan even commented on it at one point (he was in command, but told me he needed me playing traffic cop more).
Part of it is, if there’s a lack of a path to victory, I don’t really see the use in giving commands. Which, given that we were trying to train a batch of new people, isn’t helpful. But pitting those new people against the Dragoons just struck me as a great way for them to die quickly and not have a clue what happened.
So, being already down on the composition of my side, I tended to not pay attention to the people fighting alongside me, unless it was Miguel. I knew I could trust him to do what needed doing, but everybody else was pretty much an unknown quantity at best. I also talked with Aedan about this: Even when you have numerical advantage, how do you get your fellow fighter to do what the situation requires? His suggestion was to tell them to sweep, and be ready to jump in. I guess that works, but were I the single I’d feel pretty well warned and be ready to counter attack (actually, this happened at DtG: Matteo and Rachelle were trying to dispose of me, he gave her that same order, and I jumped away from her, stabbed him, and then finished her off). Maybe the Kappellenfechters have spoiled me. As has been mentioned, I hate it when two people stand staring at one and don’t do anything, but I almost never felt confident enough in the person at my shoulder to try anything.
At the end of all the melee I was fully spent (to the point that Sir Falcone took one look at me, reached into his truck, and handed me an ice cold beer. I love that man). Dante gave me shit for not doing pickups, but I’d put a crease in Constanza’s mask in one of the last melees, and knew I wouldn’t have any control in one-on-ones and didn’t want to risk injuring anybody. But, I do still need to build up my stamina for day-long fighting.
I’d gotten a little frustrated by what I thought were some shrugged blows by a couple of fighters, but couldn’t figure out how to address it. I’ve since talked with Dante (Hi Dante, that wasn’t about you! 😀 ) and figured out a path forward for the future.
The last excuse I’ve got is “I didn’t have my 30”. I was using my leftie 35”, which doesn’t have nearly the leverage for sweeping, but my 30 was at the Sword Hospital for the last few months. I got it back on Sunday, so we’ll see if my case game improves.
Overall event setup and scenarios
The woods at the Summer War/Sapphire Joust site are fun. Lots of little nuances in the foliage and topography make for some pretty steep gradients in defense and offense potential, and experimenting with these was intellectually interesting.
With only 12 people, fighting over three flags made it really chaotic (any sort of disadvantage at one flag led to a swing across the entire field) and a difficult teaching environment. When we cut down to fighting over one flag it was better, but the terrain still played more of a role than anything else. Still, the WotW woods have a terrain bias, and the Pennsic woods do, too, slightly, so might as well learn to deal with them. In the future, though, maybe instead of 25 paces from the flag to each rez point, how about a 15 second run?
With 12 fencers, 3 of whom were provosts, four free scholars, and the rest scholars, there was pretty much guaranteed to be an imbalance in the team breakdown. Doing the “kickball” selection of the teams for half the day (when there were 13 fighters) also meant that the numerically superior team also had the two provosts. Again, from a training perspective, it really doesn’t seem useful to have the newbies get run over without a clue as to why. And, it was really damn frustrating for me, but I’m trying to suppress my whiney three year old mode.
What I learned
Dante was working with Alric on A’s lunges, and I listened in. Dante has that very period Capo Ferro “lean your whole body out over your front knee” lunge that makes my knees ache, but he brought up an interesting piece of lunge form that almost nobody thinks about: recovering. Basically, we lunge, make sure our lunge form is great, and then “recover”, whatever that means. Dante’s lunge recovery, bending the back knee and letting gravity pull him down and back, looks worth trying. We’ll see.
Also, the aforementioned shot shrugging problem. At the past two melee events I’ve been at I’ve gotten frustrated with other fighters not calling shots when I know they’ve landed. We’ll see if Dante’s suggestion (basically “Did you feel anything on your chest there? No? Okay” pays off).
Lastly, I need to work on having confidence in new fencers to be able to act if I give them the right orders, and on figuring out what the right order is.
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