Old Man Yells at HEMA

The Three Wise Men

This is a silly name, but hey, I’m a somewhat silly person. One of my continued issues with the tournament scene, as I’m sure you’re all aware of by now, is that I don’t care for how we score things.

On one hand you have standard Olympic scoring, which is: if you get touched in one region by one part of the sword, your opponent gets a point. Now, I know we rejected this system for a few reasons. One, it felt like tag. Two, it doesn’t reward deeper targets. And three, getting touched is not the same as getting cut, especially through clothing.

Thus our solution was born: we will gauge for martial quality! Was it flat or not flat? (I think this is a silly distinction when applied to the head, but pretty rational everywhere else.) Did you fence to a deeper target? More points. Did you have blade control? More points. Were they able to hit you back in time? Maybe fewer points, etc.

Now this is fine. I don’t want to say it’s the worst way to score anything. I think it’s a great solution, but it’s not the only one.

So behold!

The Three Wise Men.

This is a scoring format and not a tournament format. You can apply it to anything, and it’s dreadfully simple.

A match lasts until one person lands:

The three wunders … you know them? The three ways to wound someone that are talked about in every Liechtenauer source.

You can keep any scoring for each of these you’d like. Do you want a thrust to the head to be worth 5 points, and a thrust to the head with control to be worth 6? A cut to the hand to be worth 1, a cut to the head to be 4? Cool! Do that!

Here’s the trick: you only get points for the first thrust, cut, and slice you land. Unless you want to substitute a higher-value thrust for some such modification. Heck, you can give the matches a time limit and take the highest point total of whatever combination of these three are landed if you want.

But this is why I don’t think you should. We already fight for points, but we don’t fight for techniques. You can watch five different tournaments and never see a slice. Why? Because we don’t value them in the point system. Yet a slice is one third of the possible ways to wound someone. In all our pressure testing we have neglected not just a way to wound, but all the mechanics it takes to even land it. We just default into throws, or nonsense — but no slices.

Odd.

Now you might find this scoring structure brings about more ties in a pool format than you like. I don’t know that it will, but it might. So the next mechanic you need is a clock.

IF two or more people at the end of pools have the same point totals. Then TIME to get those point totals is used to break the Tie. IE person A took an aggregate time of 6 minutes throughout their matches and person B took 5. Person B is the winner. If they are still tied, I don’t know. Think of something, have ‘em box or something.

Anyway, try it out. Let me know what you think, and Prove it with Iron.