Open Rules Project

[Rob]

Tournament rules and other documents used at Rapier 2011, World Wide Open Longsword and Rapier Champions, and SwordFish, can be downloaded here. These rules will also be used at this year's World Wide Open Longsword and Rapier Champions, Rapier 2012, and other competitions

As stated in the Open Rules document, 'thanks as always go to those people who have contributed to the project so far including Caroline Stewart, Phillipe Willaume, Phil Marshall, Matt Galas, Reinier Van Noort, Scott Brown, Michael-Forest, Martin Auswick, Matt Easton, Jake Norwood, Paul Wagner, Vincent Le Chevalier, Fabrice Cognot, Andrew Feest, Colin Richards, Dave Rawlings and many others for helping to form these rules through open debate, and to those schools whose willingness to participate has forwarded this project.

In particular, the original research into the after-blow comes (I believe) from Matt Galas’ work on the Belgian fencing guilds. Credit must also go to Sven at Arts of Mars for his input into the score sheets presented within.'

To pre-empt any misguided comments, my involvement has been practically null outside of posting this link: all praise to the individuals listed above.

[MugginsToadwort]

Two immediate thoughts:

1) Who is responsible for awarding penalties? The referee alone, the referee in consultation with the judges, or the judges?
2) "Exchange" is a terrible word for a referee to call- two syllables, and a hard "k". Surely the referee's call should be short and sharp?

Other comments are less direct- why the immediate show of flags, not the system used in Swordfish last year (eyes down, simultaneous show)? How should the 5 second wrestling move be applied- from the close, from the clinch, from the drop of a sword? And how broad is the leeway for the ref stopping a wrestle- if he calls it for safety, can he award a point to the dominant (and possibly dangerous) wrestler?

(and remember, I'm supposed to ref at WWOC this year, so these are important points...)

[Gordon L]

The Open Rules is a great project.

Would it be possible to re-structure slightly, to have several rulesets in the project, for several weapons and competition types?

So it becomes a site for all Open Rules, rather than being for 'rapier, but you can easily amend for use with other weapons'?

A lot of it is common to all weapons. Some of it is rapier-specific. What I'd suggest is pulling rapier-specific parts into a rapier section, or splitting the document in two.

What's the preferred route for making comments? I'm going to guess via the Open Rules site.

I'll give it a proper read sometime soon.

A quick point caught my eye as I glanced through, and that was to improve the bout order to even up the bout on/off rhythm for the various fencers in a pool of 5.

But it turns out, I created the same bout order for my rule book (about to be used for a Scottish Championship), so I'm guessing the Open Rules folk used the same constraints I did! (1-2 to be the top seeds, and to fight off first, no fencer to have two fights back-to-back)

[Rob]

What's the preferred route for making comments? I'm going to guess via the Open Rules site.

Hi, just register and place any comments, questions here.