Karl Crux (Principal Herald of the College in Lochac) said nice things (in public, too!) about my device conflict-checking the other day (I still know absolutely nothing about Names), and I'll admit it made me feel good, because Crux is a mean conflict-checker himself and he compared my self-taught method to the one he was taught at the knee of Master Giles the Extraordinary. It came with a challenge, though, if I'm going to conflict check, I should try to show my working to help others do so, and be ultra careful that I don't stuff the whole thing up. Oh, the pressure! I know not to let Crux down, too, or he might write a song about it.
Conflict checking is essentially a logic puzzle in which the herald needs to prove that their device had at least two distinct differences from everything remotely similar. I'm a decent logician, often being accused of thinking like a computer programmer, but conflict checking can be made a lot easier by the application of a little bit of intuition. SENA rules give us a lot of leeway to clear conflict, just two elements need to be different, so for more complicated arms, a lot of work can be saved by picking the rarest elements to check against.
Take these arms I recently checked to cause Crux to say nice things. It just so happens that before he said those nice things I was composing a post about checking them, so strap yourself in for a look into my brain for how I conflict-check, and let me know what you'd do differently.
<Per chevron inverted azure and argent a sinister gauntlet aversant and two arrows in saltire all within an orle of chain counterchanged>. It's a big blazon which looks scary, but it can be easily broken down. There's a field, a primary charge group made up of the gauntlet and arrows in saltire, and an orle of chain. In order of commonality, I'd expect the field and orle of chain to be the rarest, thus requiring me to check against fewer devices, so I'll try them first, then progress to the arrows and gauntlet if I need to later, besides, I hate dual primaries, so I'll avoid them if I can.
For plain fields, using the Field Division - Tincture section of the ordinary is hard work, but for a more rare field division like Per Chevron Inverted - Azure - and Argent, it's actually only a small list of devices (21, as of April 2014) that we have to look through, and it has the added bonus of including things like <Argent, a pile azure>, which need to be checked against but aren't always intuitive. To prove a DC for tincture, I have to prove either that nothing in this category has the other elements in my design, or that those that do have two DCs to my design. Since there's only a few items, I'm choosing to go through it manually, always a better idea if it's feasible, as that way I'm much less likely to miss anything by a poorly planned text search.
I'm looking for anything and everything that has anything remotely like an orle of chain, a hand or a saltire of arrows. If I'm not sure, I look the charge up, and then I'm learning other stuff (this keeps an otherwise boring process interesting, too), it's not uncommon for me the end up with 30-40 tabs at the end of a good session of conflict-checking, but then I'm easily distracted... In this way I learn that a senmurv is a mythical bird like a roc, and a chamfron is armour for a horse's head, but find nothing remotely like my charges. I find a couple of devices that have dual primaries countercharged like my device, but they don't have an orle, so I've got two DCs, one for the type of primary charges (a bear is different to a hand) and one for the orle (if this gentleman hadn't been a knight, his arms would conflict...maybe that's why he's never submitted them?), so I can discard them and happily declare that everything else remotely similar has a DC for the field.
At this point I forget that I was going to search the orle next, and foolishly load up the Hand - 1 - Argent category. Not too bad, though, just 170 odd devices, and I'm planning to just do a simple text search here to ensure I'm clear. At this point I already have a DC for the field, so for everything outside this category, including other tinctures and numbers of hands, I have a DC for the hand, enough the clear the device. I check the category for every key word I can think of to describe the other primary charge, arrow, bolt, quarrel and saltire, and find it well clear of them all (can never have too many search terms, particularly if I'm worried about variable spelling). There's a couple of cases of a hand grabbing some arrows, but I'm satisfied that it's clear.
At this point, I comment on OSCAR (the first time I've ever posted methodology instead of wimping out and just saying "No conflicts found), and sit back to see other heralds identify what I've missed. I think the only likely possibility is it there's another synonym for arrow or a similar charge, but as I then went back and double-checked through Orle - Multicolour, just to be sure, I'm quietly confident that we're fine and that I've done my small part to help make this knight a proud armiger of Lochac.
And there you go, that's the whole process. It probably took me twice as long to write it all down than to do all of the checking.
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