Whoa, I wasn't expecting this topic to pop up again, but, here we are. Fancy that.
Anyway, thanks for the tips, guys. And I should probably mention that, since the last time I saw this topic, I've gotten a book (with a DVD!) about swordsmanship. The book's called "The Samurai Sword" - by Kohshyu Yoshida - and while I haven't gotten to look at it in too grave of detail yet, it looks like there's plenty of info about stances, strategies, and even history.
So in regards to getting ready to write about swords and styles, I feel like I've made some progress. So thanks a lot for your help, I really appreciate it.
My Wattpad — A haven for delightful degeneracyAddendum: Disarms are hard, but if the sword is made for cutting then severing the hand holding the weapon is a fair bit easier. It's how most of my protagonists handle disarming their opponents.
No breasts/scrotum on that last post. Shit just got real. -Bobby GOne tip I can give is to see if you can get your hands on a replica (or even a wooden sword) and try out whatever moves you have in your head just to see if they work. Because if you describe something and it turns out to be pretty much anatomically unfeasible, that'll screw things up faster than erroneous technique.
It's not something everyone agrees with me on, but I find it to be very useful and it's led to some of the best bits of combat in my writing.
Re: disarms
In Hamlet, there is the line in the final duel that the fighters "exchange weapons". This is usually portrayed as a frenzied scramble after the they knock each others' swords out of their hands.
However, there is a specific technique taught in the Elizabethan era to disarm your opponent if you find yourself corps-a-corps with swords crossed. You reach across you chest with your left hand - palm out - and grasp the guard of your opponent's sword. You then pull outwards and rotate your wrist downward. With that leverage you can rip the sword from the other person's hand. The only defence is to do the same to them with the effect that you exchange weapons.
Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.To build upon that, European fencing had a lot of this kind of stuff. Picture this situation: Hero and villain cross their swords and both try to push the other. Seen It A Million Times, eh? Sometimes the villain kicks the hero, to show that he is Evil (TM). But in Real Life that was a common thing, judging by how many the fencing manuals have techniques for grappling with sword in hand.
Ah, while I am at it: if using manuals, it's good to remember they often were written for specific circumstances, like duels (so, explicitly one-on-one).
Also remember that fencing manuals are for formalized combat, which may have official or unofficial rules of gentlemanly behavior. And, yes, one-on-one only, by and large. A soldier's skills are different, as are self-defense when one knows one's enemies may not be gentlemen, and may not be sporting enough to only fight one-on-one.
A brighter future for a darker age.Then again, judging by the content of these manuals, a kick to the balls was, apparently, gentlemanly enough back in the day. As for one-on-many combat, they all have one technique: run away. Though if you're sporting, you may try to get them one by one if you've ran far enough. The manuals for unarmoured longsword fighting (by all means the most common) tend to include streetfighting (as in: when you have your sword, but only as much armour as the clothes on your back — I'll leave it to you if it's really streetfight, or just "an ad-hoc duel"), but the fact remains that you'd be hard-pressed to find battlefield tips for a commoner soldier.
When I mentioned "Disarms", I was referring to knocking a weapon out of someone's hand with your weapon. I can't comment on how easy it would be to take a weapon away from someone with your hands, but I will quote Neil Stephenson at everyone...
"When you are wrestling for the possession of a sword, the man with the handle usually wins."
However...I did once accidentally take someone's spear away when they stabbed for me, but I'm still not sure how I did it and that sort of strange transaction likely doesn't happen often in real swordplay.
I stand by my comment on backstabs, though.
If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~edited 8th Dec '10 10:53:47 PM by Pinata
No breasts/scrotum on that last post. Shit just got real. -Bobby GYes, but he suffers more my way. And costs his superiors more money/resources, or the effort of killing him themselves.
No breasts/scrotum on that last post. Shit just got real. -Bobby GPersonally I think attacking the legs would be better than attacking the hands, because if one of the legs was seriously injured the opponent would not be able to move as fast making him easier to kill.
Has ADD, plays World of Tanks, thinks up crazy ideas like children making spaceships for Hitler. Occasionally writes them down.
That is actually not true. You have more of a distance to his legs, than to his chest/head. It is very simple geometry: draw a right triangle, and it's all a^2 + b^2 = c^2. The cee is the distance to his legs.
So, it's one of the most basic techniques. He tries to hit your legs, you make a tiny step backwards and hit him straight in the head.
The simplest way to deal with the opponent is to kill or incapacitate him, and that is done best with a strike to the head. Falling that you can go for the hands, or thrust to the throat if you bind with him. The rest is a risk, you may run him through but still get hit before he falls, and then you're in no better shape.
edited 9th Dec '10 11:25:35 AM by lordGacek
As for single combat, I can't say much. But when you start to get multiple people, coordination becomes king.
If you were fighting the Romans, you had to worry less about the guy in front of you then his buddy at his side who would stab you in the side at first opportunity.
The Romans didn't build a massive empire because they had the best weapons and armor. Frequently they did, but that's not what won their battles alone. They won because of superior discipline, training, tactics and logistics. They also frequently took the initiative. When they began to loose these things, their empire began to crumble. And the rest is history.
If you're fighting multiple enemies alone, you need to be able to bottleneck them, split them up or outskill all of them by orders of magnitude. Preferably all of the above.
Alone against something like an entire roman legion? You better have a jeep or a tank with a minigun and about half a million rounds on the back.
"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — MadrugadaYou can find torrents for 19th century fencing manuals which are in the public domain. They cover the basic stances, attacks, parries etc.
Regarding leg attacks, when I fenced epee my "signature" move was to parry an incoming lunge and then riposte to the advancing knee. Technically speaking it was a circular sixte, bind to septime: if your opponent lunged their right knee will be the closest target to your point. The move even worked on an Olympic level fencer.
Regarding wrist attacks, epee fencers are trained to pick off an exposed wrist. Then again, if you are holding the weapon properly, the bell guard will protect your entire forearm.
edited 16th Dec '10 11:21:44 PM by 66Scorpio
Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.Go to Google Books, search "fencing", filter out everything that isn't full view, and there you have it — a whole bunch of really old, 19th century guides to fencing. I don't know how much they have on other types of sword fighting, though. Its been a really long time since I've last looked. Maybe you'll get more if you search some of the styles or weapons already covered in this topic?
Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit Deviantart.Also, read the Flynning article here. It tells you what NOT to have your characters do. Sorry I lapsed on my explanation of kenjutsu; I'm actually writing that up as a paid article elsewhere as the opportunity arose. Will link to it when I finish.
Swordplay and writing blog. Purveyor of weeaboo fightin' magic.I'm not sure if you're correct...especially because "leg & leave" was the second most favored tactic on the boffer field I used to frequent. Because if both legs were tagged out an opponent couldn't move, and leg hits were easy (probably because no one knew how to parry properly).
Sure, by math a person's chest is closer. But their weapon is naturally also closer, and if one sees an object (like, say, a sword) approaching at a high rate of speed its instinctive to swat at it. The instinctive (and in swordplay, wrong) move when something darts at our feet is to jump back. This just puts an opponent off balance and makes them easier to kill.
Again, I'm not certain how boffer combat translates to the real thing, but there's my two cents.
If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~You know, ARMA's got a reputation for being overly intellectual, due to our more-or-less rigid adherence to the manuals, and they focus on one-on-one combat, so I'd have to ask how the Renaissance techniques work in a crowd. Plus, my experience doesn't extend too much beyond longsword, so perhaps it's a bit different with one-handed weapons.
In longsword, if both persons have a proper feel of the distance, it's supposed to be like that: you make a step forward and swing your sword, and when you finish the swing to the legs, you're in an unhealthy situation. The other guy, if he got out of your range before you could hit, now has you on a silver plate to jump in and bash, and your stance is extended enough that you'd have it difficult to parry or dodge. My folks consider that maneuver to be better than parry — sure, parry will work too, but you'd have to, say, to twist your sword so that it points towards the other guy's chest and thrust (I know only the German name for this technique), or get out of that, anyway. The best option is always the one which minimises the risk of you getting hurt, and will hurt the other one at the same time.
As for jumping back, that's why one of the crucial parts of training is to develop a sense of proper stance. Besides, one doesn't have to jump, just a quick step backwards.
Not that I'm, dunno, downplaying your experiences, or something.

So, I'll add my three cents until Tomoe wakes up.
As for the European fencing, there's lots of the manuals (fechtbuch is the German word for it). The Other Wiki has quite a list
, and a quick web search should leave you with a couple, even downloadable ones. I'd recommend Hanko Doebringer (that's who you call a Badass Preacher) as a nice quote mine, as for the pictures Talhoffer seems to be a good one.
I think it'd be fun to point out that practitioners of Japanese and Renaissance European martial arts often discover their respective schools are not so different. Perhaps it's not that obvious in fencing since the weapon differences account for different usage (for one thing, European double-edged swords aren't that focused on being a slashing weapon), but as you can hold a sword in only so many ways, I can say that I can (judging by Tomoe's descriptions) name four of these five Japanese stances in German. Chudan-gamae seems to correspond to Pflug, jodan-no-kamae and hasso-gamae sound like two kinds of vom Tag, and gedan-gamae may be Alber. The fifth (waki-gamae) I can't because I know only the translated name, "the long tail" (and besides, I'm told it's more an Italian stance than German).
And here's
a modern reconstruction. I won't say it's how the duels were done back in the XV Century, but it may be worth a look.