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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5443424" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm a fencer.  I've trained with the Penn State team.  I've studied under fencers that won Olympic medals.  I'm also familiar with SCA martial arts, though granted not to the same extent with a longsword as I am with a foil.I'm giving Europe full credit!  I think Eastern Martial arts are far inferior to those in the West because the eastern martial arts are far less scientific and usually, even when they are functional and effective, are far more prone to giving magical and sometimes misleading descriptions to what actually happens in a fight.  I'm not even the first or even remotely most prestigious person to notice that.  That was the great insight of Bruce Lee and much of the impulse behind his Jeet Kune Do innovations.  But as much as the magical thinking about stances, forms, and manuevers pervades eastern hand to hand arts, it's at least as bad and if not worse in descriptions of eastern sword technique.  I'm not saying that there isn't something in there, but the formalizations of it are highly misleading and lead to something like... well Wuxia and Tome of Battle.Western martial arts give entirely different descriptions of what happens within a combat.  When you learn to fence or box, for example, you learn a basic fighting stance (or sometimes stances), but you don't learn 'forms' like you do in typical eastern schools.  You learn about engagement, beats, timing, and so forth.  Stances and manuevers is combat as envisioned by Mighty Morphing Power rangers or such, where you formally enter a stance and from there you can now do some secret technique which is then expended after its use.  Combat in the Western mind is a series of ever flowing engagements where each defense is the beginning of the next attack.  You may shift through some stances, but that's not what its all about.  Though I don't play them, I'm told there are some European swordsmanship RPG's out there that do a good job of capturing the feel of parry riposte etc.  I presume that they involve both sides of the fight secretly preparing a type of strike and/or defense, and then comparing the two and the weapons involved to determine advantage and more or less literally modelling the fight blow for blow.  But I gaurantee that if they are doing a good job, they won't have a character meditating to prepare before the combat a limited set of manuevers that he is then limited to during the encounter.  You know what that is?   It's not Western swordsmanship; it's Vancian spellcasting.</blockquote>

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