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Your chance of dropping a sword really isn’t one in twenty if you are paying attention to what you are doing. Especially if you are experienced.
Unless you’re me. 😀 I always feel like I lose that thing more often than I should!
Well, yeah, although maybe if you add in when I fall down it starts to get closer! 😉 Still, if we think of it in terms of exchanges during a 6-second “round” (in common game terms) and that it’s not each individual exchange then maybe 1 in 20 for something like that isn’t too far off. I mean if you and I are fighting we’ll have several exchanges in 6 seconds then back out and spend maybe 6 or 12 more seconds rethinking strategy before closing again. So even fighting for a few minutes not all (or even most) of those rounds will be actually exchanging blows. So in that sense having some kind of “fumble” (dropped sword or falling over are really the two most common ones I can think of, although much more rarely maybe hitting yourself with, say, a quillion or, more commonly depending on the clothes worn, getting those caught in the “slashes” of your pantaloons!) may very well happen once every 20 of those 6 second rounds.
Not that I am saying it should happen that often in a game anyway, though, let alone for guys who lived in a time and place where learning to fight would have far more importance placed on it than I probably ever have. Recognizing that I may be a “decent” fighter by today’s standards (despite my age 😉 ) doesn’t mean I would have been anything more than a “poor” fighter by Medieval or Renaissance standards. Not as if I can hop into my time machine to really find out, after all.
Yeah, I don’t know – I think I’ve probably dropped a sword maybe 1 out of 6 practices at some point, (with each practice typically on a Sunday, I don’t know 3 to 5 matches with ~10 bouts each, so 30-50 bouts?) but I’d attribute even that to a generally lackadaisical or relaxed atmosphere during routine training / free play. As in literally holding the sword looser so as to more easily ‘pull’ a blow if I strike someone. I’ve been in I think about 15 tournaments and I never dropped a sword in any of those matches. Which I’d attribute to taking the whole thing a bit more seriously. So I think 1 in 20 chance of a serious fumble is really exaggerated, personally.
Maybe a partial stumble or something, I could see one out of twenty, but falling over, as in landing on the ground? I don’t think that happens often, unless we are doing grappling or demonstrating a disarm or something. Once a year or every other year maybe, if that? I can’t say I remember you actually falling down at practice before? I think I have once or twice in the last several years.
Oh, I definitely fall with some regularity, usually when back-pedaling. I think I might have lost a sword once in tournament? But you might be right regarding attitude to the fight (although I try to maintain the same attitude in tournament because in my case if I don’t try to be relaxed and “play” with it I will do worse, which is almost the opposite for many others). But, yeah, 1 in 20 is pretty high. I’d probably say I MIGHT have something happen once in an entire practice (dropped sword, falling, catching a quillion on something… which was more common when wearing period clothes for me such as in back in my SCA days of rapier fighting, or the like). All of which I would certainly consider “fumbles” in the sense of they would each present an opportunity for my opponent to take advantage of (assuming they noticed it happening). Some of those (lost sword being the main) take longer to recover from, falling could be recovered quickly with a roll, but I don’t always trip in a way I can quickly roll out of it. Clothing catches are quite momentary, though. So certainly in the sense of the longest to recover from being true “fumbles” then, yeah, not THAT common.
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