Like all things, it depends. Mostly it depends on the skill of the target, of course, but it also depends on your style. Here's a contradiction for you--Society wide standards do not require any forearm or upper arm (vambrace or rerebrace) armor, only rigid elbow protection. However, I think guys who fight without forearm protection are asking for a broken bone.
Getting hit on your weapon arm (if using a 1 handed weapon) is not at all unusual. Even more so if the hand proper is a target, which is not the case in the SCA.
Getting hit on your shield arm is pretty rare, once you have some skill. In fact, it is rarer than getting hit on the trailing leg.
And Sandy, in response to Steve Lieb asked, "no one has yet mustered a unit in which everyone was armed with 10 foot or longer spears, have they?"
Nope. SCA rules limit spears to no more than 9 feet, though this may be changing in the medium future, perhaps heralding a new level of success for pike formations in SCA combat.
Until then, maybe even after, spear formations suffer the same problems that phalanxes did against legionaries.
Here's a good question that I don't have a ready answer to: during what
period of history did pike & spear dominant solid infantry forms face shield
& 1 handed weapon dominant infantry? The closest I can think of is Rome vs.
late Greece.
And we know how that went.
Mike
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