A few months ago, Mike Edelson asked me to help him run the FNY Mass Melee event along with Jeremy Wolf. In this post I’ll discuss the game design and philosophy, my narrative of events, and what lessons I think we have learned both as participants and as game designers.

Introduction

First, a bit about myself. I went to graduate school for a PhD in economics, and specialized in game theory. I currently work for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a financial economist, using theory to help analyze new regulations and products.

Economic theorists use models, which are essentially mathematically formalized games, to describe strategic environments, and try to link properties of the strategic environments to observed, real world behavior. It is with this mindset that I approach the design of games – as models of strategic environments that link incentives to behavior, and not as sport.

Initial Idea and Overview

Mike and Jeremy initially wanted a melee inspired by the Battle of Hausbergen in 1262. In it, a pair of knights duelled in front of two armies. When one of the participants lost, the two armies charged to save the two knights from the opposing army.

We initially began with a set of rules with incentives for saving the knight. I playtested a rough draft set of rules at CKDF, but I and nearly all of the test participants concluded that it would be difficult to run safely. Two groups charging at each other full tilt, not to mention the potential for downed knights who might not be able to strike back, meant it would be difficult to run safely, especially as numbers grew.

I pushed back to Mike, who, to his immense credit, listened, and gave me new objectives. A mass melee that was 1) Safe, 2) Entertaining, and 3) Educational, in that order.

Game Design and Philosophy

While safety is not a difficult objective to parse, entertainment and education are. What makes a game entertaining, and for whom? The participants, or the spectators? And what makes a game educational?

One practical constraint on rules is the cognitive load of rulesets. The basic idea is that the more complicated a ruleset is, the less likely it will be followed correctly in a fight. Because of the sheer number of participants involved, it is inevitable that someone will not remember a complicated ruleset, and potentially spoil the fun for everyone. Thus, I tried to stick to a simple ruleset that did not differ too much from everyone’s normal HEMA longsword tournament intuitions.

I had several normal tournament constraints I was not bound by for the melee. First, I did not have to be fair or symmetric. While grossly unfair games are not fun, sometimes unfair or asymmetric games can be immensely fun and educational. Second, I did not have to provide participants full information about what would occur. In HEMA tournaments, the full set of actions or events that could occur is fully described by rules. I did not have to do so, provided that the melee was Safe, Entertaining, and Educational.

© Harley Jelis © Harley Jelis © Harley Jelis

What makes a game entertaining? First and foremost, a huge part of it is being able to play with your friends. To be able to make decisions and form narratives with your friends is a ton of fun. Getting to feel like one is actually fighting with one’s clubmates as a team is an immensely powerful feeling, and it was important to harness (and develop) those feelings of camaraderie. Second, it was important that the game be legible, both for participants and spectators. Being able to see the ebb and flow of a battle, and understand the inherent drama, was important in capturing the visceral feel of a battle as a participant, and to its entertainment value as a spectator.

For educational objectives, I tried to prioritize ideas or lessons that we could not otherwise learn in single combat tournaments. Situational awareness, formations, teamwork, and group cohesion would be ideas that should naturally emerge. On the other hand, I did not prioritize lessons from individual equipment or armor. For safety reasons, I did not allow polearms, the actual primary weapons of the battlefield. In theory, I could have developed complicated rulesets that could have everyone simulating full harness and/or polearms and injuries, but I would run into my first constraint, rule simplicity. We’d essentially see what we could learn about mass combat, by fighting in blossfechten with our usual weapons.

Thus, I transformed into Mike’s objectives into several properties my rules would have.

Safe. Simple and as close to “normal” HEMA as possible. Keep fighters with their club. Action is legible to everyone. Visceral feel of mass combat preferred over individual details of weapons and equipment. Give fighters time to strategize.

Rules

Field. The field was 1 yard wide per fighter, and about 25 yards long. Each side had a starting line, from which it began each scenario behind.

The width of the field is crucial for the feel of the game. Too wide a field and it devolves into 1v1 skirmishes and everyone running around each other. Too narrow a field and too few get to be involved at the front. We found that 1 yard per fighter was about right for a single rank to engage across the entire field if they chose to do so.

Equipment. Full longsword tournament kit, and can bring longsword, arming sword, messer, and/or buckler.

The basic idea is to restrict equipment to those from known competitive tournaments that have been demonstrably safe.

Injury Rules. Light Injury: If a fighter is struck with a thrust or cut on the limbs, they have been lightly injured. They yell “HIT!” and immediately begin to retreat. They must defend themselves and can strike and injure anyone in arms reach as they retreat. When they reach the starting line, they must do 10 pushups, after which they can reenter the field and continue play as normal. However, the next strike to a fighter that has already been injured is a mortal injury.

Mortal Injury: If a fighter is struck with a cut or thrust to the head or torso, or receives a strike anywhere on the body when they have already been injured, they have been mortally injured. They must yell “HIT!” and immediately begin to retreat. They defend themselves as in the lightly injured case, but when they reach the starting line they are out of the game.

The injury rules do several things: i) Promote safety by having no fighters turn their back on an enemy, nor fall down trying to simulate being a corpse. ii) Simulate the fact that injuries rarely immediately incapacitate a person. iii) Simulate a reasonable psychological response to being wounded. iv) A retreating fighter gives ground more slowly, which allows a line that is being flanked to be observed for a bit longer before being completely turned.

Forbidden: No takedowns or groundfighting.

I was concerned about trampling, kicking or fighting from a downed position, but also the fact that I or Jeremy as marshals might have limited access to prevent subsequent injury on the ground.

Scenarios

Elimination. Destroy or rout the other team off of the field.

Kill the Noble. One person is chosen as the noble of the opposing team. If they take any injury, they die. The goal is to kill the opposing team’s noble.

Escape. One team is trying to get a banner through to the enemy’s starting line. The other team tries to prevent it.

Preparation

The day before, I did two things. I saw Paul Butler with his taiko drums, drumming for a martial challenge. I immediately asked him if he’d drum for the melee, and he obliged for both melees. I felt that music would be a great way to intensify the drama, and I wasn’t wrong.

The other thing I did was ask Josh Parise to issue a single combat challenge to the other team at the third fight. If you know Josh, he is the perfect person for this task. I told almost nobody about this, not even Mike, and did not even script who on the enemy team would respond. I wanted to see what the enemy team would do organically.

The purpose of seeding the fight with this challenge was threefold. First, to give Mike a semblance of the original idea he wanted – a single combat between two closing masses of fighters. Second, to inject a sense of drama into the fight from an unexpected change in the narrative. While the single combat has little strategic meaning, one is able to interpret it through a purely dramatic lens, without having to endow it with rules, and thus eliminating the surprise and drama of the challenge. In addition, this is a great example of how scenarios have strong training advantages over sportive tournaments – one can introduce unexpected or asymmetric ideas to scenarios to further training objectives. Last, having the semblance of an organic single combat challenge might encourage others to challenge others to single combat.

Summary

First Day. As soon as I told people to sit down with their clubs, and that they’d be fighting as clubs, they began to taunt other clubs, as well as form alliances. The split appeared to be Blue NYHFA/MEMAG vs. Yellow CKDF/MKDF/RKDF/Plow/Tristate. Roughly 20 v 20. I had staked a field roughly 20 yards wide, 25 yards long.

I ran two skirmishes with half of each team first. This was so that all participants could observe a small run-through of the rules as a spectator, but also try out the rules with a smaller group. These went well, without any problems.

The third melee involved everyone, and Josh issued his challenge via Scott Barb. Stephen Cheney accepted, and the drama was palpable. I started the match, and both sides inched towards each other. Stephen dispatched Josh almost immediately, and began to charge the yellow line alone. He told me later that for a second, he thought he could take them all on, but that he changed his mind as he got close to their line and ran to the flanks to rejoin his team. All of the fights ended with the losing team being pushed back to their starting line.

We eventually finished the Elimination scenario with all fighters twice, and switched to the Kill the Noble scenario. It appeared that both teams formed a more coherent line, but had also chosen bodyguards tasked specifically with protecting the noble from flankers. Unit cohesion was generally much higher when fighters were given both a defensive objective in addition to an offensive one.

In one scenario, Meredith showed up on her horse in tournament kit, wielding an arming sword. She pranced around the back of yellow team, terrifying blue team, but then just did a loop around the field and left.

In several scenarios, Josh charged the front line and was killed immediately, but managed to punch a large hole in Blue’s line.

The first day ended, and spirits were high. I believe letting fighters work as a club had the largest impact on the fun that fighters had, moreso than any individual rule.

Second Day. Jake asked Mike to run it again on Sunday morning. About 21 instead of 40 people showed up. I allowed people to bring axes and rotellas. We used a thinner field, but still roughly 1 yard per fighter. We altered the respawn rules – lightly injured fighters could heal if they touched a banner or the bannerman for 10 seconds. If the bannerman died, then he dropped his banner on the ground and anyone could pick it up.

I chose these rules because people had told me the previous night that the starting line respawn zone was too spread out, and people were respawning too far away from the action, and getting picked off. By concentrating the injured at the banner, the injured would be guaranteed to be near at least some other fighters. In addition, the rule allowed some great imagery of desperate fighters on a losing side making a last stand at their banner.

Part of the way through, I switched to the Escape scenario. Yellow was outnumbered 9 to 12, and I thought it might help them to have asymmetric objectives.

© Kristin Reimer/Photomuse © Kristin Reimer/Photomuse © Kristin Reimer/Photomuse © Kristin Reimer/Photomuse © Kristin Reimer/Photomuse © Kristin Reimer/Photomuse

Jeff Wasson showed up in his armor. I placed him on Yellow team to even the odds. I gave him a quick review of the rules we had so far, and asked him what he thought reasonable and safe rules for him were. He said couched thrusts to his shoulders, armpits, back, and hips were scoring. Shoulders and hips were light injuries, and back and armpits were lethal.

He ended up being nearly unstoppable, and consistently able to punch a hole straight through the opposing lines. He would eventually taken down when flanked. At the last round, Jake saw Blue team forming a wedge, with Jeff at the tip. He decided to challenge Jeff to single combat. He would most likely die, but he knew that separating him from his support would improve the chances of his team’s victory.

Lessons Learned

© Kristin Reimer/Photomuse © Kristin Reimer/Photomuse © Kristin Reimer/Photomuse

The two big ones:

The width restriction of the field had a large impact on the feel of the game. We saw organic formations, with a reasonable amount of flanking and 1v1 action. The ability of a few motivated individuals to punch through the lines turned out to be decisive several times. Many mentioned that there was a large psychological advantage to being shoulder to shoulder with other people, and that being out in a field alone felt terrifying.

Having clubs fight as units was the second major factor that shaped the feel of the game. Although it was clear none of the groups had trained to fight as a group in formations, the advantages of knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your group, as well as good unit cohesion, meant organic formations also formed.

Minor observations:

When Meredith entered the back field on her horse, Blue team was visibly shaken at the prospect of having to fight a mounted opponent, even though I knew they actually did not have to. This was an incredible moment, getting to viscerally feel the fear that cavalry could produce in infantry untrained to repel cavalry.

Because people organically formed formations, it was now possible for people to do things to undermine them. For example, some would charge in and punch a hole, knowing that they would likely die. In Jeff’s case, he died as well, but did much more damage to the formation. Others used different techniques to cope with formation fighting (pfobenczagel appeared to be useful). Few did any traditional KDF techniques.

Jake’s use of single combat challenge for tactical purposes was eye-opening to me. I will have to go back and see if there are similar accounts, to take important people out of the formation or otherwise impede formations and planning.

Conclusions

Planning the melee was an eye-opening experience. I was initially very skeptical, as I was worried we had no target source techniques we expected to see. I think what this ruleset provides, though, is a logistically simple benchmark from which “experiments” can be run. Given that the setup created reasonable organic behavior – formations, with limited flanking, unit cohesion, one could introduce novelties – a single montantenero, a small block of spears, elite/professional units with different injury rules etc, to get a taste of how these systems, which are designed for just this type of setting, might perform. I would, however, only admit these novelties in a controlled manner. For example, as a base, everyone would stick to the original rules, but only a few well-trained people would get access to their different weapon (e.g., montante). Thus, everyone involved gets a firsthand lesson on the qualities of the treatment weapon, and can compare it to a baseline of the standard ruleset. Letting everyone choose whatever weapon they want leads to a jumbled mess of untrained fighters with size issues, and it becomes much more difficult to see the art through the chaos.

I hope Mike runs a Mass Melee at FNY next year – this experience has given me many more cool ideas on what can be done to have a safe, entertaining, and educational event.