In continuation to your last answer: Are there are ways to incapacitate someone to the point where tying them up isn't the more efficient option?

Break them. Their arms. Their legs. Their hands. Whatever else they’re using that you don’t want them to use, like their jaw to keep them from talking. Their spine. Paralyze them.

It will probably do more permanent damage and will be difficult to move them if you have to, but you can cripple them for life.

Break them.

That is an option.

The guy with the fractured or snapped knee cannot chase you. The guy with the broken jaw can’t yell for his buddies. They may be able to swing their arm, but they can’t use it if it’s broken. You damage them to the point where they are no longer capable of fighting back.

Or… drug them.

However, this isn’t as simple as it sounds. Drugs affect people in different ways, the amount you need is based on their height, their weight, their body, and their susceptibility to it in the first place which is very difficult to judge if you don’t have access to their medical history. You gas a room and even if it takes out like 90% of them, you still have to stay alert for that 10% where it didn’t quite take.

Drugs are the other cheat which end up in fiction a lot as the easy way out. They don’t work as advertised. They are not any more consistent than anything else. It’s a situation where the amount you need to put one of the guys to sleep is just going to flat out kill the one next to him. There is no one size fits all dosage.

And you have to keep dosing them consistently at regular intervals or it will wear off. You have to come back and check to make sure they didn’t come to. And you should probably tie them up anyway, just in case.

Just to be clear, your choices are:

Cripple them for life.

Kill them.

Tie them up.

Run away.

Find a way to deescalate the situation.

Using your own body as the lock up point like in a hold or a throw or just sitting on them still counts as tying them up. The downside to that is you have to keep holding onto them or let them go. This is why breaking them is better if you need to exit a situation because they cannot pursue.

Lastly: superpowers. (Which will technically count toward “tying them up” 9/10.)

Introducing fantasy elements will change the game some, but doesn’t change the fact that a violent altercation between two people or more is about deciding “me or them”.

Any mook your character leaves alive is one that can come back at them later, even if they’ve tied them up. They can pass on information about them to their friends. They can holler for the guards. They can come after you while your back is turned because you thought they were incapacitated, but they really weren’t or only passed out for three seconds. Or your characters will run into them again later with more of their friends. Thought two mooks were bad? Try eight? Try fourteen and they turned on the gun turrets.

Depending on what they have access to they can really ruin your day.

It’s an interesting character choice.

Do they leave these guys alive knowing that they can screw them over later? Are they in a position where they can afford that possibility? What are their feelings on this subject? How does that conflict with other characters in the narrative?

This is the problem. Your characters choices actually have consequences outside of the fight, outside of their relationship with these very specific characters. While that can go on to become “a moral lesson” about the importance of kindness and pacifism, it can easy go the other direction.

Which is the chance you take.

Media tries to use the K.O. as a substitute for death. There is no substitute for death. Only dead men tell no tales. (And even then, they still do. It just takes longer.)

Fighting to subdue takes longer and it is more difficult that fighting to kill.

There is actually nothing more efficient in a fight than killing.

The question is not what is “most efficient”. It’s is killing really the best solution to this problem? Is it something your character or characters can stomach? Where do they draw the line? Is there a line? Does it line up with their goal?

Death can be just as detrimental to the overall goal as leaving the mook tied up.

You live in the uncertainty of the right choice. All your characters can do is make choices in accordance with what they believe and then live with the consequences. There will always be consequences. However, the question is: did they achieve their goals along the way?

Once your character chooses to engage in violent action, they are closing off alternate options and are signing up for not only the possibility of death but the likelihood. Violence is about hurting people, once your character chooses to engage then they’ve moved away from the options that lead to no one getting hurt or the vast majority of people surviving. If you don’t want to hurt anyone, then don’t fight. Really. There are always other options, even in your fiction and they are actually worth considering. The presentation that death is the worst thing that can happen to someone in regards to violence and that anything else that happens, so long as they remain alive, is… really screwed up, frankly.

Remember, knee capping some poor asshole is crueler than just flat out killing them. There are a lot of ways to inflict violence on someone that actually makes death the kinder option.

Plus, violence often creates as many problems as it solves.

Avoidance and death are both more efficient than subdual. Even if you incapacitate someone with a taser, you still have to tie them up.

That’s the problem.

They will become a problem. You have to eventually let them go. Or someone else will. (Or kill them.)

Hard choices.

-Michi

okay so my character is chained to a safe and the building is on fire and she has a chef's knife; is cutting her foot off possible? if so how difficult? or option C go ask another blog?

That’s… very drastic.

Self-mutilation is not usually the first option in these kinds of situations, or ever unless we’re dealing with a Jack London type scenario where the foot has gone gangrenous and the character is trapped in the middle of nowhere with nothing around them for miles. When it’s a choice between certain death (gangrene in the foot spreading to the rest of the body, the foot is already dead, already useless) and almost certain death (they will probably die or freeze to death before they finish the twenty to fifty mile trek through the wilderness to the next town, but at least this way they’ve taken a chance to prolong their life.)

Either way, removing a limb takes time. A lot of time, depending on the tools available. With a fire coming, this is time your character just doesn’t have.

The fire will get to her before she can get through the ankle bone. A chef’s knife is not a bone saw. More importantly, she will probably need that foot to escape. If she cuts it off, she has to hop/drag herself away from the fire. She will die of blood loss before she gets out. The more she moves, the faster she will bleed out. Blood will make her grip slippery, the knife will slip, she has to go through a lot of bone and a lot of living tissue. The pain will be extraordinary. Her survival instincts (the desire to not do this) will kick in long before she even starts cutting and get in the way, slowing the process down. She’ll die of smoke inhalation before the fire ever reaches her and before she can get the limb off. She will die in agony.

I understand this sounds like a very dramatic solution, but it’s not a practical one and it’s certainly not sensible. Harming herself will only impede her goal. The goal is to escape before she is killed and be able to keep moving until she finds safe harbor to hide from the villain. You’re looking at the situation with the manacle or whatever is holding her as being insurmountable.

It’s not.

Locks can be picked.

Chains can be broken.

Safes can be carried.

The goal here, for your character, is to get out. It doesn’t matter if she’s got to do it with the manacle still attached, dragging the chain as she goes. All she has to do is find a way to break the lock or get the chain off the safe.

She just can use the knife to worry the lock or look for loose links in the chains and use the blade to pry them apart so she can escape. She can use the handle of the knife bash at the lock. Maybe she has a paper clip in her pocket, a little luck and that manacle might just pop loose. A solid metal desk lamp, a piece of re-bar, any sort of construction material can be used against the chain in an attempt to break it loose.

It’s a matter of finding the point of least resistance, the place in the construction where the object is weak, and then breaking it.

Safes don’t normally come with chains attached. (I mean, why is it even attached to the safe? Why not the wall? Or the floor?) Someone had to spot weld the thing on and you can bet it wasn’t done by a professional (because who does that really?). Bash it. The fire is rising. Bash it. The smoke is coming. Bash it. She’s coughing. Bash, bash, bash. She’s light headed, barely breathing. Keep bashing it until it gives.

You get a nice moment of tension and then she’s free. Intact too and actually capable of facing the villain if there’s more to this story than just the escape. Getting over smoke inhalation is going to be easier in the long run than losing your foot.

How You Could Use The Original Idea:

So, the thought of using the knife to cut off her foot is actually a good one. Given the options she has and the situation, it’s a perfectly reasonable place for her mind to go. However, it’s important to remember that this is the despair talking.

"You’re never going to get out. You might as well…"

You can use this moment of terror to give the audience a “gasp” moment in the narrative because just the thought of her doing that is sensational as hell. You tease them with the idea, just the idea, and then have her realize all the reasons why it’s terrible and move on to a more sensible solution.

The audience gets their scare moment where they connect to the character.

You get to prove your character is an intelligent, rational human being and capable of overcoming in the face of extreme terror. She does this without giving into panic or despair. You humanize her and then you show how she’s strong.

Everyone wins.

The knife:

If she can keep it in one piece, the knife is better long term as a self defense weapon. It’s a chef’s knife, it’s not meant for combat, but it’s what she has. Even if she escapes the fire, she may still be in danger. Using it against the lock or the chain will most likely destroy it. She can still use it, but if there’s anything else in the room she might want to use that instead. (Especially if there’s construction equipment. Always go with the construction equipment.)

The manacle:

Why the foot and not the hand? Clapping it to the foot will give her more mobility. The hand limits movement and makes short term escape much more difficult as it’s harder to get the chain taut and yourself into a position to pry at it.

Did they get a manacle specially made to hold someone of her size? These are not one size fits all. If it’s too large, she can slip out. If it’s too tight… it might be cutting off circulation.

Why didn’t he just kill her?

I don’t really want to know, just like I don’t want to know about why the safe and not the floor but it’s worth noting your villain could have killed her and then set fire to the building to cover the murder (though chaining her up sort of debunks that aspect and the chain linked to the safe will provide a clear trail of evidence for the Police). It ultimately takes less effort.

This is very much a “Before I kill you, Mr. Bond” moment. All it’s missing is the sharks and the lasers. Sure, it’s an elaborate death trap but why? Really, why?

I ask because it’s a question you’ll have to answer in your story.

These are all just me spit balling. Whatever you inevitably do, it’s all good.

-Michi

how hard of a punch would it take to split knuckles? to break bones? and what would be the effect of them, respectively, on the target?

I realize this won’t be exactly quantitative, but, not a lot. A normal punch to anything other than soft tissue can easily cause tearing to the knuckles. This can be your opponent’s face, or just a heavy canvas punching bag. This is part of why things like boxing handwraps exist.

Breaking bones, well, breaking your own bones is disturbingly easy as well. Unless my memory is off, there’s 27 bones in the human hand, and none of them are particularly well suited to suffering direct abuse. An improperly clenched fist can result in injuries ranging from dislocated joints to multiple breaks. Handwraps help to stabilize the fingers, and reduce the risk of breakage, while boxing gloves provide the hands with limited armor.

The entire point of boxing gloves is to protect the fighter’s hands, not to protect their opponent. The extra padding means they’re not going to be as prone to breaking bones in their own hands, or cutting their knuckles. The other side of this is, it makes it easier and safer to break your opponent’s skull with your fists. Something that normally wouldn’t be viable, because you’d turn your own hands into hamburger in the process.

There’s a real irony when it comes to professional boxing. When the gloves were first introduced, body shots were the norm, and the gloves were supposed to make the sport safer. What ended up happening was they made head shots safer, increasing their frequency, and in turn, made head injuries more common, reducing the overall safety of the sport. But, at least they made boxer’s fractures less common.

Tearing your knuckles is… basically aesthetic. Unless your character suffers from anemia, or if they’re dealing with a situation where they’re exposed to a potential infection, and they can’t have their hands treated, anyway. It’s unpleasant, but if it’s a choice between comfort and being horribly murdered, a little pain probably isn’t too high a price to pay.

You’re looking at using a disinfectant and bandaging the injuries. Literally, it’s safer than getting scratched by a cat.

Now, if they’re also being exposed to a blood borne pathogen in the process, that could be an issue, but that should be somewhat obvious.

Anyway, boxer’s fractures are unpleasant. This is where you have direct force against the knuckle, and it breaks the fourth or fifth metacarpal bone. The fourth metacarpal is the first bone you probably associate as your finger. The fifth metacarpal is the bone that runs to your knuckle through your hand.

In either case, you need to immobilize the broken bone, seek medical attention, and expect to need three to four months before you can use that hand again. Breaking the fifth metacarpal can easily end up requiring surgery to realign the bone. Ignoring this and trying to continue using the hand can easily result in more damage to the surrounding tissue.

If you’re wanting more information on that, then you’re in luck, because boxer’s fractures are a semi-common sport injury, so there is an absolute wealth of information out there on the subject.

Breaking your opponent’s bones is going to vary wildly based on what was broken.

-Starke

Google isn't helping but I really need some reference on whip fighting. As searching for whips usually lead to fetishs and such. Wording my research correctly is almost impossible.

Whip fighting, you say?

Sorry, I couldn’t help it.

First off, I’m so sorry if you’ve been waiting for an answer for a while, tumblr never notified me I had a message >< Anyway, I can definitely see where you’d be hitting a block with this topic. I tried to do a little research myself and the majority of what I found tended to lead me down a BDSM path. If none of the resources I was able to find helped you out I’d try asking howtofightwrite, they focus solely on the combat and weapons side of writing so they’ll probably have more info on this topic than me. 

Articles and Online Guides

Videos

My advice when researching this topic, is to pick out the type of whip your character is using then google that name along with the words “fighting” or “combat”, what useful links I did find were all through googling “bullwhip fighting” or “bullwhip combat”.

- Mickey

I have a question, I'm wondering how to write a fight between two people using their fists. How do they defend themselves what are the right movements? I just wonder what is needed to be taken into account to write such a scene. I'm sorry if this has been answered before.

Don’t be sorry! Writing about fighting when you have no practical experience is a difficult challenge and writing fight sequences when you do is still time consuming. There are a lot pieces working together and figuring out how they function is difficult and something very few writers actually do well.

Here are a list some of our posts that may be helpful to you:

Five Simple Ways to Write Convincing Fight Sequences

Fight Write: A Basic Upper Body Primer (Open Hand)

Fight Write: A Basic Upper Body Primer (Fists)

Fight Write: The Art of Stepping

Fight Write: The Art of Blocking

Tip: Fights Start for a Reason

ObsidianMichi’s Real World Fight Facts

Fight Write: The Only Unfair Fight is the One You Lose Part 1

The Only Unfair Fight is the One You Lose Part 2 (Brutality)

Unusual Martial Art: Street Fighting

Fight Write: Art, Sport, Subdual, and Lethality

Also check anything in our Michael Janich tag, he is a very good instructor who teaches self-defense. I refer people to his videos for the work he does with concepts, where he actively explains what a technique is, what it does, and why it’s used before teaching the technique. As a writer, you need both technique and concept before you can put it on the page.

I plan on doing a write up on both elbows and knees in the near future. There’s a lot of misconceptions about how these techniques work.

Also check out Tamora Pierce’s Tortall series particularly First Test and Page in The Protector of the Small quartet. Tamora Pierce is one of the few authors that write fight scenes I feel comfortable recommending for reference.

Good hunting!

-Michi