(Theory) How to make a new TMA

[JusticeZero]

First, get some people who feel defensive and like they need to learn to fight. They don't need any sort of background at all.

Second, give them some sort of gladiatorial game with simple rules.

Third, let them play and tinker around with different techniques for awhile. Just enforce the basic rules and ask them to please not hospitalize each other.

After a couple decades, you have a TMA with masters and a set of distinctive techniques.

Say for example you give everyone a helmet, bulky mittens (not necessarily like boxing gloves, but something that makes grabbing completely infeasable), and a tight, non-grabbable uniform, put them in a marked space on hard ground, and tell them that a ring-out or touching their uniform to the ground (mittens excluded) gets the other person a point, but they have five seconds to see if it's a tied point. Also that if they have more than two points on the ground for more than 5 sec, they lose that point. I know of no competition with that set of rules, so you would get something unique.

You'll see a lot of very specific tactics come from that set of rules.. lots of very specific techniques that would be applicable all over the place. You would get a movement style, and a culture of practitioners. And you would not need any sort of lineage to create it. Just time and enough people to play and compete. You'd end up with transmission methods appropriate to the culture. And they would probably be pretty good in a scrap. Give them a generation and they'll probably come up with mystical stuff, too.

Any thoughts on the theory?

[sensei8]

I've no thoughts at this time because I'm still laughing to hard...ROFL!!

[MasterPain]

I think the theory is correct. A lot of TMA are fairly recent creations, really. People learn to operate under a ruleset rather quickly.

[bushido_man96]

I think you are on the right track. Throw in the idea that those who began it will begin to throw in their views on how life should be lived and other ideologies and personal philosophies, you'll get into the "traditional" ideas of the internal facets behind the art.

[ps1]

Excellent! I love it! This would work.

[tallgeese]

I think that you're defiantly hit on to a working theory here. It's probably how a lot of arts got their start. The "traditional" adjective might be a stretch but that's just a connotative label anyway, but certainly you'd see the development of a martial art.

[bushido_man96]

What constitutes "traditional," anyway? Just this year, the football coach at my daughters high school started a "new tradition." So, it has to start somewhere, and then it has to go on for some time and be upheld (for lack of a better word) in order for it to become tradition. Right?