Infiniti2000 said:
Why do you play D&D? It's not like you win, so what's the purpose? When you find the answer to that, then you'll also have the answer to your question.
I play it for many reasons, very few of which involve rolling dice, and many of which aren't applicable here. But that's not really the point.
The point is that this tourney is advertised as showing which Alignment Forces are "toughest". Which is not a bad question, and you could gain quite a lot of valuable analytical info along the way. And it's an incredibly massive undertaking. It could be incredibly boring, so an idea to make the process fun is a good one. And a "tourney" could be a pretty good test. Moreover, the fact that you actually run the battles vice doing pure number crunching is a good one, since it allows for the optimum use of abilities, and demonstrates real-game capabilities (something hard to extract with pure number analysis).
The question is what is meant by "toughest"? Whatever the answer to that question is what the tourney should measure and reward. Ideally, the overall winner of the tourney should be the one who excels at the most of the measured items. I'd submit to you that the items in the Battle Hall of Fame are all better indicators of "toughness" than the actual trophy, and that there is little correlation to winning those and winning the trophy. Which to me implies that the trophy is a poor measuring stick.
Analytically, the stuff that interests me are situations like the Fire Falcon combat, or the Dog's apparent strength, or the Baboon. Even the Ekrat points out a few interesting things.
But from a competitive viewpoint, the *only* thing that interests me is how the generals do.
What I'm suggesting is that Gansk would be better served by changing his victory conditions to bring the competitive and the analytical into agreement. One way to do this would be to treat each of the Hall of Fame awards as an "event", awarding bronze-silver-gold in each, and then calculating the overall winner based on an event-based point system. At that point, every combat matters. Alignments with more monsters still have an edge, but it's not an unassailable one.