How a master fights

thanks man that really helps

Some duels are also fought only to first blood or until injury so loons don't go around murdering each pther

A master swordsman should always be on the offensive, because taking the initiative and making the enemy play of your rules is smarter than trying to parry, deviate and dodge enemy attacks, as any of them could be a feint, and unless the defender has superhuman speed, one of those feints is going to leave an opening

Martial artist here - don't know how much unarmed experience carries over to armed combat, but still.

Stance and small weight shifts can sometimes give you an inkling of what's about to happen when you know what you're looking for. Especially with lesser skilled fighters, you can often "read" what they're going to do based on how they prepare their body for their next action.

Mental aspects play a bigger role than you might think. How your opponent uses the space, are they a confident fighter, are they cautious or aggressive, what sort of mood are they in - an angry opponent will fight differently to a calm one.

Generally speaking though, and unfortunately for gaming purposes, it really does come down to instinct. Conscious thought is just too slow.

They're probably really good at dodging.

Kendofag here. 3rd dan, nearly 10 years' training and I work as a prison officer.

When I'm up against a young and very skilled guy, they're normally very explosive. I'll leave an opening without realising it, they'll cut from a ridiculously far distance and be away and through before I know it. If that fails, they'll normally keep the initiative and keep attacking until they score.

Someone better than me who's a bit more mature will keep up a mental pressure. We'll establish one another's cutting speed early on, and if we both live there'll be tension between us. We'll maneuver to try to create an opening and exploit it, but cutting carelessly can lead to a counterattack and a match loss.

Some sixty-year-old japanese fucker who's been practising since age six will be the worst opponent. He'll stand however the fuck he wants and maybe advance a little to put on some pressure. Anything I do he'll have seen a hundred times before, and he'll have fought many people just like me. He'll tend to move the minimum to avoid or deflect my attack and maybe cut me back. Because he's old his cuts will be slower, but he won't be falling for tricks and he'll alwyas be maneuvering into a position that works for him. If I'm too passive he'll just work his way in and take me out with an embarrassingly leisurely cut.

At the stage I'm at, when I'm better than someone I don't need to move too much. I've got a stance where I can do the minimum so that a careless attacker will just run onto my sword like a twat. It's not enough to be passive, I have to advance and make sone cuts to keep the opponent under pressure. I'll look for careless moments, like when my opponent is considering attacking, and take advantage. If they block my cut I'll try working in a combo next time. I'm at the stage as well where I can start predicting the opponent's cut or leaving them a "way out"; when they take it I can execute a counter with the right timing.

Hope this helps.

Stance informs you of what your opponent is trying to do. There's still a weighed RPS thing going on tho.

Can confirm, this guy knows his stuff.

>Kendo
>I work as a prison officer

So how often do the prisoners attack you with swords?

Only the guys who don't have kung fu ki blasts and can't employ henshin or summon giant robots use swords. So not that often, really. I get way more use out of my Gundam than the kendo.

If you want a little more insight into the mind and practices of a master weapon fighter, take a look at the Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. Pretty short, with a lot of interesting tidbits.

They just use the most efficient method possible in order to have the greatest time advantage. In real life, if you're hit with a sword, like actually hit, you're pretty much out of commission pretty quickly- one hit is a loss. I would imagine a lot of very good sword fights would be pretty similar to a one-on-one gunfight. If both parties are equally advantaged/disadvantaged, it is going to go to whoever has the first strike in (without being hit back.) If one person has some kind of advantage... cover, surprise, superior ranged equipment, body armor, or some friends, they're pretty much just going to win unless their foe is staggeringly superior to them in terms of skill.

A good swordfighter is probably somebody who knows to bring the right equipment, knows when to start a fight, is efficient in all physical actions, and presses their immediate advantages. A masterful swordfight is probably very brief and uninteresting to look at.

With the caveat that Musashi suffers a bit from the common genius ailment of not realizing that not everyone is as good as he is.

Still a good historic example of PTW.

Genius, or autistic?

Probably a bit autistic, if the things about his hygiene habits are true.

Yeah, you're talking bullshit. Plenty of people fought on after suffering heavy wounds that killed them later.

I never trained with weapon but I would say everything a swordmaster knows a amateur knows as well, and that is how to use a sword. The only thing the swordmaster has is muscle memory and experience. Am I right Veeky Forums?

Like, a real swordmaster, or that peculiar variety of swordmaster from most roleplay games who has that super duper speed and quasi-precognition bolted on?

I used to get the shit kicked out of me professionally. They always told me you'd eventually get to the point where your body would be executing bits and pieces on its own, while your 'conscious' mind was planning the fight.

That sort of happened for me, but I wasn't very good. Mostly, you go "oh, that looks like an opening. i'm going to stick my fist in there. Hey, he's got wonky footing. Going to sweep him." It's not exactly scientific.

That's like saying an amateur knows how to play the guitar, the guitarist only has muscle memory and experience.

I mean, I guess it could be technically true if you have a very lax interpretation?

To describe a master swordsman in action, you could present them as moving effortlessly and precisely. Like anyone who practiced something a lot, it shows in how naturally they make it look, no matter how complicated the movements involved.
A master swordsman would be very good at controlling space and have very good timing. So he's not necessarily very fast, but he's always moving just outside the threatened area and moving in to strike just enough to reach properly. His timing would also be impeccable, with no wasteful moments and unnecessary movements. Again, while not appearing super-humanly fast, he just seems to start his motions at the perfect time to evade, parry and hit effectively. And all of this is done with perfect form, that looks effortless, even if it definitely isn't so.

I mean more that one hit is generally a loss or tie at best, and that such a thing occurs quickly. Like, the hit, not death or incapacitation per se. Of course people can fight on, I mean it's probably easy to hurt somebody who is a better fighter than you if you don't care how much you get hurt.

The point is that fights between really talented people would probably be decided quickly, and anything beyond the first clash or blow would probably just be mutually assured destruction, revenge, or attempts thereof.

They don't, and when they use a broom or mop it's very different to how you use a sword. My point is more that I get paid in part to know when someone's about to hut me and when they're not, and that I spend a lot of my time around people who have killed other people up close. I've also gotten to see a sword injury or two (years after the fact, but it's interesting to see injuries left after an actual fight with a sword rather than training).

So with the sword injuries what happened? A guy over here in NZ went on a meth bender and cut up some ladies and chopped one of their hands off if I remember correctly. Her scars were pretty messed up. I think they reattached the hand but I'm not sure.

They honestly probably weren’t.
He was invited into some relatively nice places once his rep got really established, and they’d sure as hell require him to bathe first.

In HEMA tournaments (at least what I saw), scorings usually involve how well you defended yourself from the opponent's blow, along with being able to land a hit. It's not like Olympic fencing where you just need to tap first, because when you are fighting against another dude with a sword, he can very well still kill you after you landed a blow on him, even if it's fatal.

Well, the story is that he did eventually take a bath, but without undressing. And he didn't ever wear the fancy clothes that were required by etiquette.

One guy I'm doubtful about, he likes to talk. Had a stab over his ribcage that he said was from a sword. Right enough, it was angled so that the ribs could stop it so he may have been telling the truth.

The other guy had a huge scar, basically the outside of his forearm was scar tissue. This guy never really talked, but when I asked him about it he said it was from a sword. Looked to me lime he hs raised his hand to try and stop a vertical or diagonal downward cut; the blde had struck bone at a poor angle and skidded, peeling flesh from bone rather than cutting through the bone. Reminds me of those videos of test cutting gone wrong; if you have poor edge alignment, you ain't cutting squat.

Not that I'm any kind of professional but I'm a pretty smart guy and I have fought in belegarth fights for about 2 years before I moved out of state. Ran my group with daily practices for a while (we were all super hyped) until we got too banged up and went to twice weekly.

I have probably 500 hours of experience in H2H with a slew of weapons and techniques so take that for what it is. Studied a lot of historical martial arts texts to get a feel for techniques.

You really do everything, after a point, by feel/instinct which is trained by experience. Sometimes you see something that some part of you recognizes as an opening, or the beginnings of an opening, but you don't really think of it consciously. Your mind is ahead of your body, moving it, before the 'self' of you is really there to interrupt or contemplate. On special occasions I've had a whole sequence of moves pop into my head like an image, a picture that somehow contains multiple events, and in those moments I'll tee up the events that kick off the finisher. But usually everything is by feel.

I love that state of being, you never feel more present, more competent, than reacting to some tiny tell in an enemies stance or the pattern of attacks they keep executing.

Hope that was detailed enough to be useful for whatever you're working on friend.

Nowhere near a master, but I do Filipino martial arts and we move/attack pretty fucking fast it's kinda of a mix of instinct and muscle memory from drilling and sparing over and over.

I have near zero experience so feel free to ignore me but as far as I've been told actual fights are mostly muscle memory. In fact, kung fu actually means the time and effort you spent making learned skills into muscle memories. Not sure how it is in chinese but in japanese (my language) they say weaker fighters doesn't have "enough kung fu", as in "not enough training".

Depends on the fight. If you're running a "movie style" fight, sure you'd have breaks and stops in the fight where the fighters can think.

Like if you're fencing, you have a couple of seconds after winning/losing a point to regroup and plan your next approach.

But as everyone says, after the blades cross, it's instinct and muscle memory.