Notes from Practices

There were a couple of practices. I write down what happened in them here, so I will remember them better in the future.

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First, I spent time using my old style, described here. It was interesting. As expected, it worked better against people who had not spent time fighting me when I started using that style in the first place. This makes sense - if someone has never had to deal with that extremely specialized game, then they won't necessarily know the specific techniques and principles necessary to counter it.

This makes me wonder if my modern fencing game (vaguely outlined here, though I've never gone through a full description, looks like) is just the latest in a series of finding new things which work against the current meta-game. If so, it means I would need to synthesize my old style and my new style, and figure out more specifically when to use one or the other. Perhaps I should just tack my old style on as what I do in my blade-forward stance. It does, however, show promise in positions that, in theory, I would use my dagger-forward stance against. So that might be a thing.

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After the dismal failure of my simplified bargain-basement destreza at Pennsic, I started thinking about what I could do differently. One primary issue I ran into was that people would instantly respond to large Line in Cross and Narrowing atajos. As such, I wasn't able to attack effectively from them. And sadly, my bargain-basement destreza doesn't take into account the idea that you might push through their sword.

Additionally, the mutating circle seemed like it kind-of worked out. It always felt like I was spending too much time calculating where the circle was in relation to their sword, given that halfway through Pennsic I realized that it would need to resize based on how close to the right-angle position their sword was. This, combined with the fact that in my old fencing style I pay attention to the division of weak and strong in people's swords, led to a minor breakthrough.

The thing I have been trying recently is to center the circle on the middle of their blade. This means that as they lower or raise their blade, the circle gets smaller or larger. Additionally, instead of using Line in Cross or Narrowing as initial positions, I have been using Weak Over Strong and Weak Under Strong as positions. Only instead of trying to keep my tip hovering near their guard, I have just been trying to maintain the middle of my sword against the middle of their sword. This allows me to more effectively control the position of the weak of their sword.

So again - everything I do happens to and centered around the middle of their sword. This is not necessarily the exact middle - this is the division between the "weak" and the "middle" of their blade, as I have described in previous posts that I do not care to hunt for. This just happens to be in the center of many blades, given that many blades have more weak than strong. But that conversation is not super-relevant here.

This new operation of weak-under and weak-over as being things I do to the center of their blade has allowed me to control their sword much more thoroughly. If someone attempts to attack, I twitch my hilt up or down to Narrowing or Line in Cross, and then proceed accordingly. If they don't, then I proceed to attack either by moving my sword toward a weaker part of their sword while I thrust, or by detaching my sword from theirs while I step away from their sword. It is fun times.

tl;dr: I've started using both the point of blade-contact and the center of the circle as the middle of their blade. This has resulted in good things.

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That's all I've got for now. Ciao.