Melee fighting

In my run-up posts to Uprising, I failed to cover one small detail, and it was pretty much shoved in my face Friday at Uprising. That little item was that the goal of a melee is different than that of a tournament. In a tournament, the goal is to take out your opponent without getting taken out yourself (and if you can do it with style, all the better). In a melee, the goal is to achieve your objective.

Sometimes, yes, that means kill everyone (like the keep battles or the battle of the sexes), but usually there's more to it than that. Thursday's bridge battles were a good example of that. In the first few (at least until the Marshal got tired of his 10-minute res battles lasting thirty seconds), the goal was to control the bridge. That simply meant get everyone from the other side off the bridge. In abattle like that, all you have to do (and all we did) was to keep advancing until you're standing on the far side of the bridge.

In a similar vein, the objective of the beer barrel battles was to get the beer and bring it back to your side. These ones were actually won by fencers who were not armed. Their whole job was to grab the barrels and run.

The family battles were where it became obvious that the majority of the fencers there were in melee mode. Yes, some of the objectives were to kill an entire family, but most were more selective. And when you think about it, why take on a dozen people when you're only trying to kill one person?

The big one, though, was the penultimate family battle, when the hero and heroine were trying to escape the father and all the father's troops had to do was catch them. Okay, it may be that I wasn't explicit enough when I explained the objective to my troops (I was the fater), but I have to give the hero's troops kudos on that battle. They presented my troops with a line far ahead of the objective and, in spite of multiple commands and haranguing to do otherwise, my troops chose to fight the line rather than go for the objective. In short, the hero's troops distracted mine from the objective and, in spite of any losses, won the battle. He picked the better tactics for that battle.

Of course, I got even in the final battle (and didn't even have to pay off the priest in the end), but that was because I did unto them what they'd done unto me and exploited a weakness in their tactics. Okay, here's what I thought was a no-brainer. If you're escorting a person and their death means you lose, don't put them in the front line. I suppose on paper, the hero's tactics were sound, almost, but they didn't adjust for the reality of the battle.

Their basic idea was to put the hero and heroine near the back of the line as they skirted the edge of the world. In theory, that put them as far away from the keep (and our troops) as possible while limiting the angles we could attack from. But we didn't come from the keep, we came from the ravine. This basically gave us a line-on-line battle, with the hero in the line. Needless to say, he died quickly. What would have been a better plan would have been to hug the edge of the world (as they did) but instead of forming a line, form a square, with the hero and heroine against the edge of the world. That might just have required me paying off the priest.