Gladiators fought like gentlemen?

It's 8am trying to force some food down before I run off to SydCon, pictures from the event should be up sometime tomorrow or on Monday.

While eating here, in front of my computer as usual, I was googling around for information on Gladiators. As with any other subject that has become part of my hobby I always want to learn more to both get an idea of how tweaks to the game could become historically accurate and to get history straight.

So I stumbled upon this National Geographic article about Gladiators which I found very interesting. It's not very long but it made a huge impact.

The most remarkable bit of information was the suggestion that 90% of the Gladiators fighting in the arena got out of the fights alive. Huge contrast to any Gladiator spectacle movie/tv show that pretty much depicts every arena encounter as a foreplay to decapitation.

This little bit of information, along with the "no blows to the head from behind" part really got me thinking as I was wondering about whether or not to implement some "surrounded by enemy models" penalty for the Gladiator rules. As for the "low lethality" rate the Gladiator rulebook does mention that fights staged would often be determined to be non-lethal or to the death beforehand. As such I think if played "correctly", a Gladiator campaign with 1vs1 battles and their like should be played as "non lethal" (still keeping the wounds/after game chart events though) up to the point where the primus/champion of both teams face off each other in which case the "appeal to the crowd" would make sense.

Mass battles, or fights with slaves destined to die in the arena in particular would be played without any restrictions though.

In the end this would make sense game wise as well, considering the amount of fights won needed to advance between each Gladiator level (it's a long way from novice to champion).