About Arts and Sciences Tourneys

Rolando Darkjester

There are MANY different styles of judging, styles of tournaments, and they all have their pro's and cons. There are the tournaments that are best in show, I.E. the single best item wins. I could make one hell of a Jello Shot ( and I do) and beat out a wedding dress. It may not be fair, but the scores don't lie, especially since unlike the Olympics/Gymnastic style events, we don't have "Difficulty rating" points associated to items its all subjective.

There is also the "shot gun" style tournament, enter as many different items into as many different categories, and the person with the most aggregate points at the end wins. What does this mean? An artist who takes 1st place in 3 categories, Armor Construction, Court Garb, and hell Bardic.

Could be beaten by someone who took 3rd place in Armor, Court Garb, Bardic, Fighting Garb, Brewing, Cooking, Heraldry, etc.,

So is it better to excel in a few mediums or place 'moderate' in multiple?

Depending on the size of the tournament, and the number of judges you might end up with using from a large pool of judges, it would be good to have enough judges who knew enough about ALL the mediums of Arts and Science to be effective, and not enter into the tournament, but generally it is those who DO partake in Arts and Sciences and enter the tournaments who are unfortunately also best qualified to judge. It would be good for the judges to have honor and request an alternate to judge any peice they entered, but at the same time there is just as much bias shown either positive or negative for friends, family members, beltline. I've heard of friends scoring 1 peice made by a newer garber less difficult than they scored a peice made by a person with their 8th Garber because " So and so should have known better". I've also raised a ruckus after one Olympiad where there definately seemed some impropriety going on. A albiet wonderful seamstress entered some wedding garb, One judge was the best friend of the seamstress and had one of the peices tailor made for her, the other judge was the "Amazon mom" who invited both the judge entrant to be sponsored into the Amazons under her. Even if the peice was fabulously done, it REALLY looked like favoritism.

In the end what can you do?

Just keep producing your top work, entering tournaments, and let the politics lay where it may.