As I'm Not Allowed To Be This Divisive On The Boards...

[magicaddict]

...I'll say it here.

Out of interest, what's it going to take? A broken limb? Someone being knocked unconscious? Brain damage?

Or just someone more influential's eye almost being put out?

We are, as a society, not safe enough with our fighting. We need a strategy to improve it across the board, from the most experienced players to the least, and we need it now. Simply assuming people will know what to do from five minutes of conversation and thirty seconds of practical demonstration, then being shocked and shouting at them when they demonstrate they don't, is not enough. It's being demonstrated over and over again.

I am not willing to wait until someone is permanently blinded before climbing on my soapbox. It's everyone's responsibility, it's everyone's lookout, and positive action needs to be taken, not dragging of feet at the prospect of actually having to do something, or indignance at the idea that you might be part of the problem. I am, and you are too. We all bloody well are. Get over it.

Safety workshops and weapons practice is one idea, and I think it has merit. I also think it should be mandatory until you can demonstrate that with each weapon type, in a range of different situations, you aren't going to have a brain fart that causes someone else to collapse while clutching something important of theirs. I also think that until you can demonstrate this, what right do you have to be swinging what has, over the past twelve months, proven to the world and their spouse to be a weapon perfectly capable of doing really unpleasant damage to the human body when wielded unsafely?

I don't care that I'm crap, I just want to be safe. Sign me up, every day until I am accepted as good enough not to hurt other people.

Anyone else? Any other ideas?

Comments

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the particular incident is, but have been thinking about this stuff recently.

Basically, fighting with weapons is dangerous. If you do it properly, people die. But, of course, we don't want people to die.

So we try to reduce the risks. There are broadly 4 ways to do that, dealing with the 4 main areas of risk - make the weapons safer, make the attacker safer, make the defender safer, or make the environment safer.

One approach, often the one chosen by re-enactment, blunts the weapons, does lots of training & weapon competancy tests, insists on helmets & padded gloves and normally fights on flat open ground.
One approach, from the SCA, is to use wooden weapons, train lots, wear lots of protective armour including full face protection and normally fight on flat ground.
The LARP approach sometimes focusses on reducing the weapon risk but not on dealing with the other 3 areas - we fight with foam weapons but the attackers often don't know how to fight, the defenders aren't wearing decent armour, and we're skirmishing in trees... This means that if a weapon is unsafe but no one picks up on that, there sometimes isn't anything that's stopping it becoming a complete clusterfuck. The other approaches have tried to tackle multiple areas of risks, so there's more redundancy?

I think all of them have something to learn from each other, but ultimately each system has to decide where the acceptable risk line is.

I've seen many more injuries from people tripping over in re-enactment and larp battles than from being hit, though - I think that terrain is the real risk to tackle if we want to reduce dangers. But woodland is so pretty and atmospheric to fight in, I'd hate to lose it.
And the risk of tripping on top of a dead person, battlefield awareness risks, would still be high.

[magicaddict.livejournal.com]

(Context: In what is universally accepted by all parties as an accident, someone got stabbed in the eye socket, driving their contact lens into their eye and leaving the eye requiring hospital attention and a course of medical treatment. We're not sure if longer term damage has been done yet. There has been a marked increase in the number of similar incidents in the past 18 months.)

I think you make excellent points.

I'd like to think that terrain training might alleviate the worry about losing the pretty settings? Our site is a nightmare and no mistake - if we could be suitably trained on that, I feel it might allow us to become the epitome of ground awareness, rather than the laughing stock of it.

There's a movement afoot to do workshops, and I think that increasing sure-footedness along with spatial (and peripheral) awareness would constitute an excellent start and address at least some of the issues you raise, beyond simply improving weapon safety technique which is an ongoing issue. Incidentally, it might also get away from the horrible idea of anyone who wants to LARP being forced to wear protective headgear. I agree that armour is there for more than just the hitpoints, but if it ever got as far as that, I may accept that the pastime is too dangerous for my liking and back out.