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At a recent event, I was settling in to watch the armored fighters when I noticed a developmentally disabled young man walking over to see what all of the noise was about. I looked around and saw a few other mundanes wandering over in addition to the usual assortment of onlookers. So I looked around again - no marshals. The fighters were still just warming up, so it was a fairly low-risk situation - as far as fighting goes - but I was still just a bit nervous, so I walked over and offered to marshal. I wound up marshalling through all of the fighting and afterwards, the knight marshal came over to thank me. I said it was no problem, but I was a little disappointed that none of the locals stepped up to do the job. After I said that, he did admit that he should have gotten someone to marshal beforehand.
And he should have. Every marshals handbook we have says that you need to have a marshal if you're going to fight. But he wasn't the only one who screwed up. Pretty much every local member who wasn't tasked with doing something screwed up, too. They should have been able to see that there wasn't a field marshal and stepped up to pitch in. Yes, in an ideal world, you want an authorized marshal, but you don't have to be authorized to marshal. You just have to have an authorized marshal present to supervise.
Events - especially smaller local events like this one was - are not for the locals. They are a chance for the locals to show their guests from out of town a good time. You don't ask dinner guests to do the dishes, do you? Events are the same thing. Yes, there will always be people who come and offer to help, but you shouldn't count on someone just showing up and volunteering to do whatever jobs have to be done. Yes, it's true that at larger events like Uprising, you have to plan on using volunteers, but they also plan on paying back their volunteers in some way.
Back to this particular incident, it used to be fairly common to have people who weren't fighting do double-duty as marshals, but that seems to have slipped to the wayside. Another option that would have worked would have been to do a trade-off with the rapier fighters. Since rapier and armored fighting usually doesn't happen at the same time at these smaller events, the armored fighters could have marshaled for the fencers and the fencers could have marshaled for the armored fighters. Whatever the answer, the marshal in charge needs to have a plan before the fighting starts.
I do have to say, though, that beyond this one oops, the event was wonderful, and I had a lot of fun (even if I did miss the fencing).
