Combat Safety

Combat is one of the things which differentiates Live Action Roleplaying from Live Roleplaying. In a Live Action Roleplaying game, your physical skill determines if you hit your target, not dice rolled and checked against a table.

Basics of Combat

Illegal Activities

Force Of Blows

Calling Damage

Parrying Weapons

Basics of Combat

Getting skilled with one of the padded weapons used for Magic Horizons is simply a matter of practice, and will be covered in a future essay elsewhere on this web site.

Being safe with the weaponry is a matter of rules observation. The safety rules for Magic Horizons were written with the aim of keeping combat fun and safe for all parties involved, from 90 pound women to 350 pound men. Safety is the single most important aspect of combat. Marshals observing unsafe activity can pull fighters from combats, and even restrict fighters from fighting in the game at future game days.

The first rule of safety is the word

"Hold!"

• Someone is about to step into dangerous terrain, such as brambles, or into a clump of poison ivy.
• You have been hit by a blow that is too hard, or lands in an illegal area.
• Physical contact (charging) has occured.
• You are unsure of the amount of damage you have taken from a foe.
• Any other reasons deemed suitable by a player or a Marshal at a combat.

During a hold, you may not make tactical plans, move from the place you were in when a hold was called, cast spells, pick up dropped weapons or do anything else that would effect the course of combat.

Safety is the single most important aspect of combat.

Illegal Target Areas And Illegal Activities

The following areas of the human body may not be targeted for feints or blows. Blows that land there deliberately do no damage, and person so hit may call a hold.

The head is defined as being from the collarbones on up to the top of your skull.

The groin is defined as being from the pointy bones of your hips down to the bottom of the crotch, forming a triangle.

The hands are defined as being from the bones of the wrist to the tips of the fingers.

Parrying weapons strikes into illegal target areas is not a valid tactic for avoiding damage. Likewise, deliberately moving your hand to interpose against a shot is not a legal tactic. Doing either of these activities will cause a Marshall to call a hold; repeated violations of this can get you removed from the game for unsafe behavior.

The other illegal activity in combat is charging or physical contact. Charging is defined as running into someone, and is called against the last person to change direction before the hold was initiated. Thus, if you're running away from someone, and they're chasing you, if you stop suddenly and they run into you, the charging call would be on you.

Charging is also called when someone's shield makes physical contact with someone else's body.

Force Of Blows

Care should be taken when striking blows at an opponent to keep the blows crisp, clean and light. Fighting in a LARP should not result in bruises or contusions or welts. At most, a sword strike should sting for a second after a hit.

Making sure that blows come in cleanly, without excessive force, is something that only comes with practice. If you feel that someone is hitting too hard, call a hold, tell them in a polite manner that they're hitting too hard, and offer to let them take a few calibration shots on you during the hold.

Two handed weapons are particularly prone to heavy handed chopping. To avoid this, get in the habit of pulling your hand back just before the swing hits. This makes sure that your blade hits lightly, and gets your sword back into a ready position for your next strike faster.

Thrusting weapons hit differently than swinging weapons do, and can have a tendency to point-mass. Point-massing means that a when the thrust lands, the person using the weapon puts some of their weight behind it, or their momentum, as with doing a fencing lunge. Care should be taken to avoid point-massing with a thrusting weapon. If you use a thrusting weapon, it's often a good idea to talk to your opponents in a hold to see if you're on the verge of hitting too hard.

Charging is defined as running into someone, and is called against the last person to change direction before the hold was initiated.

Calling Damage

When you swing a blow at a target and land in a legal area, you need to call your weapons damage out for each blow struck. For example, if you swing for 5 damage, each time you hit someone you need to call out "Five Damage".

If your weapon is silvered or magical, you need to call out "X silver" or "X magic", where X is the amount of damage you do.

When throwing combination shots at the same part of someone's body, you must bring the blade of your weapon back a minimum of 45° between shots. Failure to do this is referred to as "machine gunning", and only the first blow struck will be taken. (Obviously, a hold should be called to tell the person doing this what they're doing wrong.) Blows that land on different parts of an opponent's body will will never be considered machine gunning.

If a blow is parried, and the attacker still calls the damage, it is the obligation of the defender to say "No" to the damage.

Parrying Weapons

There are two types of attacks used with melee weapons in Magic Horizons. The swung attack (the classic sword swing) and the thrust (what you do with a spear).

Swung attacks cannot "power through" a parry. Interposing the blade to the line of attack is sufficient to parry the weapon, even if the force of the swing makes contact with your body through the parry. Sweeping the weapon into another part of your body is not a parry. You must interpose the parrying weapon into the line of attack.

Thrusts are handled differently. To successfully parry a thrust, you need to move the line of the thrust by a foot or more. Failure to do so will result in the weapon hitting for legal damage. For most people, this effectively means that you need to make the thrust miss.

In either case, parrying the weapon into an illegal target area will result in that weapon doing no damage.

Problems with the page? Email Ken Burnside.