Belegarth

man I don't CARE what the weapon checkers think about it, what I care about is if some dude at my practice gets smacked in the face and has a lousy day when a couple words to the wise would have avoided it. and I'm not trying to make people think my weapon is special and dangerous, I was talking to a guy who said "hey, I've noticed this thing happens" and saying, "yeah, I've noticed that too."

"It conforms to the rules" is not the limit to being a decent human being.

Welcome to our game. It's full contact. That means it hurts sometimes. Man up.

Another aspect of the whole, 'not wanting to lend it out' bit is that this is easily the most expensive weapon I've ever made- what with the bandshoppe pole and the Kegg foam from Edhellen, this thing was about 40$ in materials, not to mention the time, patience, etc. So **** it- if anyone's going to ram my Mercedes into a dozen trees, its going to be me!



Not calling anyone out, but I'm sure all of us know a few people who are absolute fun cancer on the field as soon as they pick up a red weapon, regardless of the quality of the weapon itself. I've heard of realms even restricting fighters from using reds 'until further notice' for doing things that are dangerous even with the best made weapons (baseball swinging to the back of a lady archer's unprotected knee, for instance).

As such, while I agree the 'only I am skillful enough to use this weapon to the degree that its blatant safety flaws aren't an issue' argument is worthy of contempt, the opposite statement ('well, I'm afraid of an idiot swinging with the striking surface and hitting with the handle, so I'm failing it'*) is pretty lame as well.

* don't laugh, I've seen weapon checkers fail every single quarterstaff that came their way for that very reason.

If a person repeatedly hurts other people with ANY weapon, either the weapon is unsafe OR the person is a dangerous * and should be kicked off the field.

What i was agreeing to was not letting new people use reds. New fighters want to use reds more then anything in the weapons pile. This concerns my practices more then at events. In my practices i do not let new fighters use reds until they have attended a few practices and have been taught by someone with experience some basic safety guidelines. At our practices though we ask no one uses a weapon they are not trained in and I never turn down a request to train what i know.

Absolutely a piece of equipment needs to be safe enough for anyone to use at an event. When something of mine fails I ask (when the checker isn't busy) why so i may avoid the flaw in future builds. I walk away not upset but glad he is doing his job to make sure every thing on that field is as safe as possible. I prefer a checker to be too strict over too lax anytime.

I don't make reds as loaners.
We have several people who bring their own collection of loaners to practice, but I don't think any of us bring any reds as loaners. Some people loan theirs out. I do not. There are 5 people I will let use my red swords. 3 of them do not live in Utah.
Red swords are expensive to make and relatively easy for a new guy to ruin through negligence. No one should loan them out.
But they all need to made so that any moron can pick it up and not hurt some one with it.
The thing that gets me angry is the constant implication that large weapons are somehow inherently dangerous. If this WAS true, we would have a certification process in the BoW.
FB

Forkbeard wrote:Red swords are expensive to make and relatively easy for a new guy to ruin through negligence. No one should loan them out.
FB

Red swords also don't stand up well to bite marks, which is another reason to not lend them out, eh?

That Juicer homo still owes me a sword.
FB

The thing is that anyone can take a safe weapon and use it unsafely. This is something that I am dealing with in my home game right now, and its pretty frustrating. People are scared that an idiot will try to use some of the new tech, and hurt someone because they are gonna do something dumb.

You can't make rules for idiots, you can only try to get the idiots to not be idiots. Does that make sense lol? I think that this sword is awesome and more should look as good.