2/15/00 - Latest News

Fighting Multiple Opponents
Berendir @ 18:41 EST

I received an interesting email from David on Fighting Multiple Opponents. I'm sure it was in response to the post about multiple opponents in Hero's Journey, and the comments I made on fighting numbers of enemies at once. Heres what he wrote:

One of the more important variables in determining how many people an experienced warrior can deal with is the degree of teamwork that the "many" exhibit.

Fighting 10 individuals at a time, while no trivial task in itself, is nowhere near as difficult as fighting 3 who act as a coherent team. 10 people fighting individually will only conduct joint attacks by accident and will more often get in each other's way. In practice, a really good fighter will only fight one of them at any one point in time.

I've seen a really top-notch swordsman take on 10 average swordsmen at one time and win on a regular basis.

I convinced one friend to team up with me and, together, we could neutralize him, though not defeat him. We added a third person to our team and ran the
poor fellow ragged around the melee field.

Well I'm not an experienced swordsman myself, but thats some interesting insight into how fighting multiple opponents might work. However I still think in the case of a war, that there should be no character who can charge into battle, kill hoards of enemies, and have no fear of injury or death. Though if they are an expert swordsman, I suppose defeating many lesser swordsman, is quite possible.