this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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I've seen a few videos of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) practitioners trying out 1 vs many situations. Call the 1 the "good guy" and the many the "bad guys". You often see "bad guys" tripping over each-other, putting them off balance, and making them vulnerable to the "good guy". OTOH, it's absolutely exhausting for the "good guy" because they have to keep on moving extremely quickly so they don't get surrounded.
The "good guy" is free to swing wildly because everyone nearby is an enemy. The "bad guys" need to be careful because there's one target and lots of other allies you don't want to hit.
The movie portrayals are almost always BS, showing one "good guy" easily keeping track of every bad guy, even the ones behind him, and smoothly countering every single attack. On the other hand, a coordinated attack is harder than it seems, and it is realistic that if every "bad guy" attacked at once they'd just get in each-other's way.
Looked up HEMA and found Bartitsu:
๐คฃ๐คฃ
Nice, they say it's been having a revival lately. I hope that all practitioners are required to wear a stylish hat and a handlebar mustache.
It's fun that one of the influences is Savate. That's another fun martial art. The theory is that hitting someone with a closed fist was seen as attacking with a deadly weapon in France, so the sailors (who liked to brawl) developed a fighting technique using kicks and open-handed slaps.
Bully!
That's the martial art that Sherlock Holmes practices.
(Well, it's called "Baritsu" in the stories, but most agree that that was a typo.)
Yeah, my experience as the "good guy" is that, eventually, you go down, no matter how well you use lack of unison against the "bad" guys. But, it's also the case that you can whittle them down if the rules of the session remove them if you would have removed them from a real fight. Not HEMA, Japanese martial arts, some kali, etc, but the same basic idea.
It's one of those situations where you have to be perfect, or near it, every single move, but they only have to be perfect once. But it is possible to come out of it "alive", if injured (and likely beat all to hell for real).
The "good guy" being perfect is a big part of what I saw. The "bad guys" can afford to be imperfect because there are so many more of them, and eventually their numbers win.
Also, from what I saw, the tempo of the fight goes way up, which is hard on the "good guy". Like, maybe in a normal 1 on 1 fight each person makes roughly 1 attack every 3 seconds. In a many-on-one fight the "bad guys" might attack at 1 attack every 5 seconds, a bit slower because they need to chase down the good guy and avoid their own team. But, if there are 5 of them, that ends up with 1 attack per second on average that the "good guy" has to deal with, which becomes pretty frantic.
Overall, I'd definitely rather be on the "bad guy" team, because you're almost certainly going to win. But, I wouldn't want to be one of the closest / first attackers because they have to deal with a fresh "good guy" while avoiding running into their own allies, or getting hit by a wild swing.