[Ansteorra] Armor standards and the SCA minimum

Jean Paul de Sens jeanpauldesens at gmail.com
Wed Nov 8 08:10:43 PST 2006


Ansgar, here was the post I had written.  I had sent it privately to Lyonel
to make sure that I was making sense, as I respect his technical writing fu
very much, and he thought it was another post sent to the main ansteorran
list.

Anyway here it is, with some minor addendums:

Ansgar, you said:

Reason 2. I'm not sure this would actually result in a simplification of
> training.  As far as applying wrong rules with only one set, we do have only
> 1 set.  The Ansteorran set.  Which also covers any Society
> regulation.  There is no reason for a fighter or a marshal to be applying
> rules from both the Ansteorran rules and the Society rules.


Except for the fact that the Ansteorran superset does NOT necessarily
contain the Society minimums subset.  This actually shows up significantly
more in weapons than in armour, but variances in interpretations of rigid
material, weapons length, weights of leathers, and construction requirements
can often lead to the situations where an item is legal under Ansteorran
rules, but not Society.  It is not a big deal if the item is legal under
society, but not Ansteorra, because that is our prerogative.

An example to start off with would be the rules on thrusting tips.
Ansteorra permits low-profile thrusting tips on one handed weapons.  Society
rules allow low profile thrusting tips on 1 handed weapons up to 48" in
length.

So a fighter reads our rules, and makes a single handed thrusting spear 5
feet in length.  A local marshal who knows Ansteorra rules (and thinks he
therefore knows society rules) approves it.  Fighter uses it for months,
till someone comes along who knows the current society rules or until he
goes to an out of kingdom event where the weapon is failed for not having
the correct size thrusting tips.

The rules are full of situations like this.  Is it because of any laziness
on the parts of previous Earl Marshals and Society Earl Marshals?  Laziness
on the part of the local marshals?

Emphatically *NO*.  It's because there's over 40 pages of techinical
specification regarding the construction of armor and weapons in the
Complete Participants Handbook and Society Marshal Handbook.  Add in the 10
pages of glossary of each, and the amount of information is around 60
pages.  And they both are changing at a pretty constant rate.

It's impossible to keep up.  I can't memorize 40 pages of technical
specification.  I don't want to have to.  I want to hit someone with a
stick, be a knight, and allow myself and others to have a good time.

To do so, I want to minimize the amount of time someone has to spend reading
manuals, trying to figure out if they are doing things correctly or not.

That way they have more time to sing songs, listen to stories, fight more,
and do all the things that are Ansteorran.

I want to minimize the amount of work necessary in the marshallate so that
people are willing and able to become marshals, and spread out the burden so
that none of us have to carry a huge share and burn out.

This is the reason I'm asking the questions I ask.  Not because I have made
decisions, and I'm looking for a way to justify them, but I'm soliciting the
input of the populace of the kingdom, so that I can make recommendations to
our crown.

The fact of the matter is, we *will* have to re-write the Ansteorran rules.
The massive changes to the armored combat portion Society Marshallate
handbook gaurantees that revisions will have to be made due to the many
places of weapon and armor construction that are no longer in line with or
contradict society.  And honestly, it's an almost impossible task to figure
out all of the places where we have to change.  It's why one line of thought
of mine was "strip out all the common stuff, say 'see society', and add
all-asteorra specific changes".

As a idea of the difficulty of the process, see if you can see how many
conflicts you can find between Ansteorra's rules (which at the time of the
writing were either perfectly in line with Society minimums or were above
them) and the new ones.

Sieur Jean Paul de Sens
Earl Marshal


-- 
"Everybody works, no one quits."



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