Sunday, September 25, 2011

Thinking about court . . .

A good friend asked me to bring this up for discussion:

Court is a fact of SCA life when playing at a certain level. Good courts can be entertaining, compelling, emotional and hilarious. Bad courts are like chewing on your own intestines. For three hours.

How would you make courts better? Or, barring that, shorter?

One proposal is to farm out AoAs for people living in Baronies to the Barons and Baronesses to give out. I'm of two minds about this. As a court herald, AoAs are almost always my biggest headache. They involve the highest percentage of wrong names, wrong information, missing recipients and AWOL scrolls. You rarely have to chase someone getting a Peerage around a Kingdom until they bother to attend a court. When I was doing Andreas & Gabriella's second reign, there was a guy we called for every single court who never showed up. I feel bad for the scribe who labored over that scroll that now lives in a dark corner of the herald folder somewhere.

On the other hand, for the vast majority of SCAdians, an AoA is the only award they will ever receive and the only time they ever get to shake hands with the King and Queen. Why rob them of that experience for mere convenience?

So, discuss this and your other ideas for making Court, particularly Royal Court, less like slow torture.

2 comments:

  1. "On the other hand, for the vast majority of SCAdians, an AoA is the only award they will ever receive and the only time they ever get to shake hands with the King and Queen. Why rob them of that experience for mere convenience?"

    I have first hand knowledge of what eventually happens if they are not farmed out to Baron and Baronesses either in their local group or near by. People who live in groups on the far reaches could end up never receiving their scroll, sometimes their only scroll, in court at all. This is especially true in large (geographically) kingdoms with no smaller functioning principality.

    I know 4 people just off hand who got their AoA outside of court, yet these are people who lived near, and attended, events that happened regularly in a Barony. For 3 of these people, it was their only award.

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  2. I am a firm advocate of giving out AoAs via Barons when appropriate. In this case, I've got the moral high ground: I got mine that way.

    It was the right decision for me. I was supposed to get it at Coronation, an hour away, where few of my friends were planning on going, but I was committed to helping at a local event that day, so I flat-out refused to go to Coronation. So instead, Baron Patri did both events, and presented my AoA in the evening. Instead of being surrounded by near-strangers, I had my nearest and dearest there, which made it a lot more special. That logic may not apply to everyone, but I commend it as a healthy way of thinking about priorities.

    As for the larger question: the highest priority is *organized* Royalty, with staff who are committed to helping things run on-time and fast. I took considerable pride in the way Court ran during Edward and Marguerite's reign, but I get only a fraction of the credit for that. Lots of the staff helped things run smoothly, by planning carefully, and Their Majesties took the lead in being organized and not wasting time in Court.

    That last is also crucial. The Royals and Herald need to agree that it is a priority to keep things flowing along; to be prepared for things to go wrong, and pick up and adjust as needed; and to not spend time on dull time-wasting. That doesn't mean no theater -- we took great pride in theater. But there's a difference between good theater and the Royals telling in-jokes to the front row.

    Overall, it comes down to compassion for one's audience. The Royalty and Herald have to constantly put themselves in the shoes of the people watching Court, and ask, "What would I want this to look like?" If you can honestly answer that, you're halfway there...

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