Building drills

A post about building drills seemed particularly apt as folks in the area go about taking the time to learn the skills they do not yet posses especially when it comes to working with a group of people.  The reason being that unless you're focused on what you want to accomplish time spent training is often wasted.  In order to get to where you're going you need to focus and put the time in.  Drills are an excellent tool for isolating new skills but only when you make sure that the drill that you are doing is actually training you to develop the skill you want.  I know that's vague... we'll get into it.

Tell Me What You Want

The first part of making any kind of drill is being able to come up with an idealized end result of a drill.  Once a person has participated in your drill what specific thing, or mechanic do you want that person to have learned?  Try to get it down to as concrete an idea as you can.  As one example when teaching footwork, one of the goals in pursuit of mastery, is to teach a person to keep their legs the right width apart.  This is to avoid letting that person get flat footed or off balance.  As a sort of counterbalance I have a separate goal of making sure that the person I'm teaching doesn't cross their feet, by either having their feet be parallel (flat footed) or by putting their back foot directly behind their front foot (a common fencing technique which is bad for bel).  I start by knowing exactly what the outcome I'm trying for is when I start thinking about what the drill I'm working on needs to teach.

Keep It Simple Stupid

One of the mistakes that's common when trying to teach a person something new is information overload.  When a new fighter is trying to pick up the basics there is SO much to learn.  While it may be tempting to give a new person everything at once that likely means that they won't retain much of it.  The bits that they do manage to hold onto may have also been learned incorrectly because they were distracted by trying to hold onto too much information.  So, when teaching someone anything, it's important to make sure that in addition to isolating what you want an end outcome of your training to be, that you also make sure you have small, attainable goals.  If your end goal is to be the best florentine fighter you can be that's not something that can easily be cut down into a series of discrete drills.  If however your goal is to stop giving up the chicken wing, that's a much easier task to break down and is easier to build a drill for.  When I teach people I tend to do it in sections so for one day I do JUST footwork.  Another day is JUST upper body stuff (blocks, strikes, etc).  At each stage I check to make sure they retained the information from before and either move forward, or go back to bits that haven't stuck yet.

Just The Shiny Bits

Another common mistake when teaching/building drills is to build a drill in such a way that you don't actually have to learn the skill you are trying to impart to a person.  People will tend to do the things that they know how to do, or whatever comes naturally to them, so when you're trying to get a person to do something new you have to set up a scenario where it's the ONLY way to be successful.  If you set up a scenario where it's possible to do things the "wrong" way or to avoid learning the relevant skill you're trying to teach then you've reduced the effectiveness of your drill down to sparring.  Sure, a person may eventually learn the thing that you're trying to teach them but as far as building a drill you've pretty much failed.  As one example of this there's a closing drill that I built wherein one person gets a short blue weapon and the other person gets a long red weapon.  It's to first blood.  This means that if the person with the short weapon doesn't engage they'll eventually get hit by the red weapon.  If the person engages but fails to block then they'll get hit first and still lose.  The only way for them to win is to close the gap first, block their opponents attack second, and then when they are in range of their opponent swing.  While they can certainly experiment with other approaches they'll keep being punished by their opponent until they learn to do that particular thing.  As a person having been on the short sword side of this, it is a hard drill, but totally doable and totally valuable once mastered.

Setting Up The Right Scenario

As important as it is to make sure you don't teach the wrong things it's important to make sure you've set up a scenario that teaches the right things.  This tends to be more clear when talking about drills related to field work rather then when talking about drills where it's one on one.  If you fail to do a good job of setting up a scenario where a person will need to use the skills you're trying to impart on a 1v1 you basically get a spar.  In a field scenario if you don't manage to isolate the relevant skills then you wind up getting some version of a field battle.  Both of these scenarios have their place in order to hone an individuals or a groups skill, however if you're trying to teach something specific you need to be very careful in how you set it up.  Recently at a moot Norcalia was attempting to set up training for "kill squads".  The idea was to give us practice at beating groups that had effective groups of flankers with lower numbers.  The scenario that was set up had uneven teams (a good start) where the more veteran fighters were on one side (also an important component) and the newer fighters were on the other side.  Then the field was set up so that an objective was placed behind the newer but more numerous group (henceforth team noob) with the idea being that the smaller more veteran force (henceforth team vets) was supposed to make it back there in order to score.  If they were able to do the idea was (presumably) that someone from team vets (from the perspective of a field battle) would have been able to do significant damage to team noob.  As the field was set though an important piece of this battle wasn't implemented, which is to say that team vets didn't have an room to move.  Team noob was wide enough that they took up the entire width of the field, so rather then having to practice working together and avoiding giving up their flanks the drill wound up being about line tactics and teamwork for killing more veteran fighters.

While this is a valid skill to learn, from what I understood, it's not what the drill was designed to teach because part of the scenario that was needed was missing.  In order for this to work the field would have to be rotated so that even though team noob greatly outmassed team vets team noob would feel the press of being engaged from multiple angles and would have to try to find a way to be both cohesive, so they didn't get split up and then backed repeatedly but also in large enough numbers that they could win against superior opponents.  To do this effectively team noob would need to find a formation that's looser then a line but still packed close enough together to avoid losing their numbers advantage to angles.  Theoretically they'd eventually come up with small independent groups that moved near each other without actually being one single formation.  Additionally if they made the gaps between groups too big they'd get punished by having a cone in back which anyone from team vet could easily get to.  This is the difference between teaching a thing that's useful and the thing you actually wanted to teach.  Usually when designing drills it comes down to the minutiae about how and why a person can exploit the idea you've initially set up to help teach something new.

Have Fun With It

Assuming that you've - 1) identified the concrete skill you want to teach, 2) have limited the scope of what you're trying to teach to either a single concrete idea (like closing) or simple skill (like basic footwork) set 3) have set up the drill in such a way that a person can't complete the drill by doing something other then learning the skill set you're trying to teach and 4) you've managed to replicate that appropriate scenario in which that particular skill set is relevant - the last thing remaining is to try to make it fun.  One of the old fallbacks for learning any kind of new skill is simply working on a pel to try and perfect the body mechanics behind a set of strikes or footwork.  As you scale for number of people this becomes problematic but for most people it's also pretty boring.  If you can turn the drill into some form of game so that it's something that a person actually wants to do even when they aren't trying to learn the particular skill your drill will impart.  I've got a host of these if anyone is ever curious but for now I'll just do a few examples of silly drills and what they teach as some concrete examples of these theories in action.

No Soren Left Behind

Probably my favorite battle modifier of all time is the no Soren left behind drill.  In this scenario you play with small teams, once any member of your team dies, the entire team wipes.  Typically this is done with small numbers (because the more people you add the more confusing it can be).  The idea behind this drill is to teach teamwork, so that no member of the team runs off by themselves and gets killed (taking the team with them).  It encourages people on a team to block for each other and try to fight when they have advantage so that they can get kills without taking injury as anyone who takes 2 injuries then wipes their team.  It encourages people not to go for suicide kills in which they take out an enemy by throwing themselves at that individual because even if they get the kill their team still loses.  The drill came about when during training a guy named soren refused to work with his team.  He would run headfirst into the enemy and either win on his own or lose instantly after which point his team then also usually lost because they were now down a person.  This drill forced him to work with his team because if he ran into the enemy headfirst and died then his team wiped.  If he ran away from his team and one of his enemies was able to kill one of his teammates then he also died even if he was the better fighter.  Eventually he had to learn to fight with his teammates, trying to use them to avoid getting killed himself, while also protecting them from other fighters.  As I close it out going through those 4 tenants again.  1) At the end of the day the skill to impart is covering one's teammates and learning to work together 2) the scope of drill is limited only to teamwork without respect to positioning, skill, or gear 3) if a person doesn't work with their team and either dies or lets a teammate die then they immediately lose 4) the scenario is one in which you have a team fighting multiple other teams so that you can only win or lose together.  As for it being fun, you'll just have to try and it see if you like it as much as I do :-P.

Circle of Fire

The circle of fire is fun but also on the more brutal side of things.  It starts with between 1 and 3 people in the middle of a ring of fighters depending on how many people you have left over once you form the ring.    All of the participants are armed with whatever weapons they desire although projectiles are probably not a good idea.  The people in the circle get to weapons length from the people in the center of the ring.  Then they take two BIG steps back.  Lay on is then called by the people in the center of the circle.  At that point all of the people in the circle can start walking towards the combatants in the center.  The combatants in the center's goal is to get outside of the ring, or, kill a person who is closing in on them before they are eliminated.  If they simul with another fighter when the battle resets they go back into the middle.  If the combatants in the center don't immediately go for an engage after lay on is called they'll quickly be surrounded on all sides and killed because they'll have no way out.  What most people do is try to shoot the gaps between individuals in an effort to get out of the circle.  95% of the time this leads to them getting killed repeatedly as it means 2 people are swinging for their back.  The way to be successful is to hard engage DIRECTLY AT one of the people on the outside of the circle, either killing them outright or going through them.  If a fighter does manage to make it to the outside of the circle they then get to choose which person adjacent to where they exited takes their place in the center.  If they managed to kill someone outright before dying then that person takes their place.  1) The skill to impart is being able to win a hard engage 2) the scope of the drill is limited to breaking through a line 3) if a person fails to hard engage or fails to break through then they have to keep trying until they are successful 4) the scenario is one in which the only way they can move is by breaking through a line.  I happen to have a blast at this one, but it may well be because I'm just a masochist.  That having been said when you start on the inside and make it out there's a huge adrenaline rush for it.

FAD / Samurai

Ah... the Fucking/Fairly (depending on if there are kids nearby) Awful Drill which also became a tournament one year at Phoenix Rising.  Really made my event :D.  For those of you who weren't there here's how it works.  Everyone participating fights with a single blue sword or bat (no flails!).  The weapon may only be wielded with one hand on the handle.  The weapon is then held at a person's waist with their other hand as though being held in a sheathe.  When the weapon leaves their hip the individual is allowed to swing ONLY ONCE although they may block as normal.  Before the individual can swing again they must first return their weapon to their hip.  This simple modifier can be applied to any battle and we've been generically calling it "samurai style".  The point of this bit of the drill is to teach accuracy and the value of feints over throwing many shots or relying on shot combos.  To get all the way to the fucking awful drill two additional components are usually added.  The first being that instead of doing the fights with your dominant hand you fight with your off hand in order to increase it's dexterity without having to worry about putting as much strain on it from repeated swings and blocks.  Finally the fights are done to first blood (/first injury) so that if a person doesn't land their first swing their chances of dying are much higher.  Regardless of whether or not you use your off hand this drill requires you to be accurate because you can't use shot volume in order to win.  It also requires that you block or dodge successfully since you can't trade limbs, as any loss of limb is an instant loss.  Since this is simply a set of modifiers you can apply it whenever you want to to add some spice to whatever you're doing.  At phoenix rising we did it as a tournament in which people had to fight 1v1 but when it officially got its title we were doing it with ditch king battles (which we started calling shogunate battles instead :-P).  1) the concrete skills are; shot placement, shot speed, and effective blocking 2) the scope of the drill is limited to fighting with single blues so that everyone has approximately the same reach 3) if a person fails to block they die, if a person fails to land shots quickly they'll trade and simul, if a person fails to throw shots accurately they'll miss and then likely die due to retaliation 4) the scenario for this one is more nebulous as all that's really required is people to fight using the same rule set as you are.  I find that this set of modifiers tends to instantly up the intensity of fighting because it makes each swing so much more precious.

The Possibilities Are Infinite

In the end so long as your rule set for any particular drill revolves around the basic book of war rules for combat your only real limitation is your imagination.  There are more drills I have dreamt up then I can probably ever write down but if you're ever curious come talk to me about it and I'm sure I'll be able to either pull something out of my archives or come up with something new custom tailored to fit the situation at hand.  But until then feel free to try any of the above drills mentioned and let me know if you had fun with them.