Originally posted by: C3PX

Originally posted by: lordjedi
It then turned into some kind of Jedi Academy type thing with Master and Knights and students "going through the trials" to become Knights and blah blah blah..

Hmm, I am guessing the whole Masters and Knights and trials changes took place sometime around the year 1999, am I right? My friend and I use to choreograph fights with metal broom sticks. Getting hit in the fingers by accident was incredibly painful. But it looked really cool we we could go at it full force. We broke a lot of broom sticks though.

Actually no. The Master, Knights, and trials changes took place just before ROTS if I remember correctly. We had actually just started meeting up as a local group of Star Wars fans in 1999. We didn't start our first lightsaber class until about 2003 (someone knew someone that did RenFair and could teach us the basics). We did it to learn lightsaber combat, which evolved into wanting to do a fan film, which then evolved into a choreographed battle for charity events. Somewhere along the way the officers of the club stopped caring about the age of combatants (it was originally 18+ only) and pretty much only cared about the ROE. Essentially, we had it setup so the club wouldn't be liable if you got hurt (hence only 18+ could fight) unless your parents signed a waiver and met with the Pres and VP of the club (we wanted the parents to know what their kid was doing and we wanted them to know who we were). That worked out fine for a while, but once we stepped down (I was the VP), nobody cared about enforcing it.

I pretty much stopped going when they started introducing a lot of rules meant to "protect me from myself". Like no hopping on one leg quickly, because you might not be able to stop and you'll run into someones blade. Of course, they let the "you must wear gloves rule" slide from time to time, again probably because they didn't really care to enforce it.

I don't believe anyone considered it "real" fighting except maybe one guy that was banned from the class for making threats.

As far as I know, it's still the biggest activity they do. I wouldn't mind getting into it again, but not with the group I use to fight with.