Arena fight?

[bobcat_grad]

In the game I'm running - the party will be hitting a rather larger city in the next few sessions. They'll be getting there at the time of a festival of the war god - and in my campaign, when there are festivals for gods, the temple holds competitions for the populace.

In the past, I've run riddles or had the party put on a spontaneous improv play (best play judged by the populace got a reward).

For this competition, I wanted to run something that involved fighting - but something that is non-lethal. My first thought was doing something like an arena fight.

I would throw together 7-8 NPCs (from the monster builder) and have them available for the players to chose as partners - perhaps even bargain for their services. I'll contrive some reason about how the rules of the fight is to fight with someone you do not know - only the best warriors are able to adapt to unfamiliar situations.

But this is just my first thought - anyone ever run some type of arena fight? A last man standing type of fight? Thoughts?

 

[Aulirophile]

DMG...2? Has rules for companion characters, basically stripped down PCs. I'd look at that. It sounds like a cool concept. Defender would pick a leader NPC, Striker would pick a Defender, Leader would pick a Striker, etc., to assist them.

In small-scale fights in 4e there can be a lot of "stand there and slug it out so you don't provoke OAs" stuff going on. There isn't a whole lot of reason to move around.

If you wanted to spark their creativity I'd make up some sort of "crowd points" for badassery. If the Eladrin teleports straight up and falls with his spear pointing downward to skewer his opponent from head to feet, as an example, the crowd goes crazy. Just like actual Gladiatorial battles of yore. The benefit for the gladiators of course being if they were impressive enough, even if they lost they wouldn't get the thumbs down. If this is non-lethal you'd have to think of some other realistic motivation (though worshipping their God of Battle would be sufficient I think).

 

[TarionzCousin]

Dragon magazine #368 had an article about gladiatorial arena fighting.

Note that the preview says this is Part Two. I couldn't find Part One via Wizards' search engine.