"DnDSports": Competitive Play With Prizes

It seems like the rumours of D&D as e-sports weren't so far off after all in today's bit of unexpected news, as D&D Beyond and Encounter Roleplaying have announced DnDSports. "DnDSports is the first online D&D Tournament in a cooperative Party vs Party setting from Encounter Roleplay & DnDBeyond with a grand prize of $5,000."

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[FONT=&amp]Here's the full announcement:

Imagine if two parties fighting for opposite sides found themselves in the same dungeon. It’s kill or be killed. What will they do to survive?[/FONT]
DnDSports is the first online D&D Tournament in a cooperative Party vs Party setting from EncounterRoleplay & DnDBeyond with a grand prize of $5,000. Over the course of 4 weeks, 16 players will compete in teams of 4 in single elimination games. Each game is a best of 3 arena battle and played via Roll20.

How is it Played?
The full rules for DnDSports will be released shortly after our next round of Playtesting. We don’t claim to have created perfect balance, nor is that our aim, as every competitive game has an element of strategy. We’re also implementing MOBA-esque mechanics such as a Pick/Ban phase to help expand the strategy. We’ve been working closely with over a dozen talented DMs to create 15 pre-generated characters from which the players will choose, and adapt the pre-existing Dungeons & Dragons: 5th Edition rules.

We know that this will be an incredibly fun new way to play D&D, because as long as you’re having fun, you’re doing it right!

When is it?
Day 1: November 10th at 12pm PST
Heat 1: Team Beholder vs. Team Mindflayer

Day 2: November 17th at 12pm PST
Heat 2: Team Kobold vs. Team Tarrasque

Day 3: November 24th at 12pm PST
All Stars Charity game for 826LA foundation

Day 4: December 1st at 12pm PST
Grand Finals

Where can I watch it?
Watch live on Twitch here.
The VODs will be uploaded to Youtube here.

Who is involved?
The EncounterRoleplay & DnDBeyond crews have teamed up to bring this production to life!
As for who’s competing? Keep an eye on the DnDSports Twitter & here on the blog to learn more about the teams as they are revealed!

But D&D Shouldn’t be an eSport?!
It’s not an eSport. We created something that would make competitive gamers feel safe and comfortable trying out D&D5e for the first time. It’s a new way to display the versatility of combat in D&D5e in a unique setting. We encourage you to respect the way different people play D&D because we know that this will be a fun event and there is no wrong to play D&D, as long as you are having fun!

(Thanks to Jeremy for the scoop!)

Many feel competitive play isn't what D&D is about, historically that's not entirely true. Here's a history of D&D and competitive play, going back to the 1970s.

"D&D has always had a competitive streak. Many of co-creator Gary Gygax's published adventures were adapted from tournaments that were played competitively at conventions, like Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and Tomb of Horrors.

Thanks to its wargaming roots, tournament play was well-established by the time D&D came along. Tournaments were associated with wargaming conventions. The first large-scale D&D tournament took place at Origins in Baltimore, MD on July 25-27. An estimated 1,500 attended, with 120 participating in the D&D tournament."

 

[Parmandur]

Hiya!



First...I'm going to err on the side of caution and just assume that roughly 20% to 25% of the CEO's and other 3-letter-acronym'ed suits running Hasbro are psychopaths/sociopaths. Maybe Hasbro is an anomaly with zero of these types...but the odd's are stacked against them.

Second...then why is WotC trying? To me it looks like someone who wants more power/money saw the cash bring brought in by Computer RPG games (and CCG's, to be honest) and then the uptick in RPG'ing popularity and figured "Chocolate...Peanut Butter....PERFECT!". But that's just what it looks like from my perspective, on the outside of the board room. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am, but I guess we'll see over the next year or two.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

WotC isn't trying anything here, this is entirely third party.

 

[DQDesign]

I don't know why people are so desperate to keep people in D&D. If someone wants to abandon the D&D ship because of some phantom event that might happen in the future... I say let 'em! If they have some bizarre moral issue about seeing their $100 they spent on D&D books going to some odd facet of the game that they can't stand the thought of... then fine. Go play something else. Their spot in the D&D multiverse will get replaced in a matter of seconds and not a single other person will care that they've stopped playing.

And of course, this all assumes the player actually stops playing... which if history is any indication, is not actually going to happen. People talk a good game, but rarely ever actually follow through.

ok ok, I understood I'm minority here and I'll leave without disturbing.
what I'm pretty sure is that outside here d&d fans willing more campaign settings/books to play with instead of bizarre TV shows to watch are the majority.
you know, voyeurism is less common that actual fun

 

[Aoirorentsu]

I totally get the desire to appeal to new players and continue growing the game. And it's even kinda cool that they're going back to the game's roots to appeal to the kind of players who originally migrated to D&D from war-games.

My objection to this is not so much that D&D "can't" have competitive elements. There's no wrong way to play. It's that other games are much, much better at doing them than D&D.

But back in the 70s, there were not competitive computer games that were accessible to a wide range of people. Now practically anyone with a PC can play LoL, and Overwatch's requirements aren't that onerous, considering. To say nothing of DOTA. The notion that D&D can crack that market strikes me as far-fetched. Like, if I were currently playing LoL, what about the tabletop D&D MOBA would appeal to me?

Competitive eSports live and die on balance, because balance between characters (along with level design) determines what constitutes a good strategy and what keeps those kinds of games interesting. Handwaving at balance the way the announcement does does not bode well. D&D5e is not designed to be balanced in combat the way that eSports games have to be. "Over a dozen DMs" is... not an impressive number of DMs. Moreover, D&D's combat system is, frankly, not that interesting anymore because elements of it have been copied and innovated on a million times.

D&D's recent explosion of success has been because people realized that you can use D&D to tell interesting stories together. To the extent that DnDSports diverts resources and attention away from cooperative storytelling, it is backtracking on precisely what has made D&D successful in the 5e era. It also appeals to the kind of player who Mearls specifically recently called out as the focus, and ultimate cause of the tanking, of 4e (which I really enjoyed, FWIW).

All of this is to say that the idea seems kinda poorly conceived, for a market that now has readily available and far superior substitute goods, on the assumption that you can appeal to that market for... reasons, while distracting from what has made D&D successful. Maybe there's room for both. But attention is finite and folks will be quick to abandon D&D if they think the culture is toxic, and competitive play encourages toxicity.

Maybe they'll do it better than their announcement suggests. *shrug*

 

[TwoSix]

ok ok, I understood I'm minority here and I'll leave without disturbing.
what I'm pretty sure is that outside here d&d fans willing more campaign settings/books to play with instead of bizarre TV shows to watch are the majority.
you know, voyeurism is less common that actual fun

I don't participate in the "D&D streaming" aspect of the game myself, but it's fairly obvious that streaming is a major part of the explosive growth that D&D has seen over the past several years. A lot of people like watching D&D on TV.

Also, setting development is dead. You're welcome to agitate for what you wish, of course, but you're almost certainly going to lose.

 

[cmad1977]

I’m not much of a streamer guy. Not gonna sit and watch people play while I could be doing something else(playing my own games!). However, I do listen to the CR podcast lately while driving and found, to my surprise, some value in it. It’s like ‘watching the tape’ after a game. I listen to the situations the party gets into and see how another DM handles it. Also, a few times a question I didn’t know I had gets answered(mostly how some edge case class features work).

Anyways... on topic....
I’m not gonna watch but good luck to the participants and have fun watching if you watch.

 

[jhilahd]

I started playing in 1980. My very first game I was DM. And I remember competitive play, in fact some of my very first adventures had instructions for doing just that.

But you were judged(usually) based on the amount of time it took you to complete the dungeon, what tasks you fulfilled/didn't fulfill(i.e. puzzles and traps).

This seems more like a dungeon crawl with PVP elements not like the old school tournament modules where you competed to move on to the next chapter of the adventure. If it's that way, it'll start to incur the dread meta builds akin to alot of MOBA games. Where you only play this healer because X, and only take this spell because of Y. Forget narrative play. I don't know. Not sounding too great at the moment.

But what do I know.
Heck, I ran a game for the RPGA back in the early 90's where only 2 of the 6 man team I DM'd through the module provided made it on to the next round. And they had a blast, but it was limited RP and the end result was a group vote on players.

That, in my opinion, is different from what is being presented. But I could be completely wrong.
I wish them luck, but this isn't for me.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Well reading more this is not quite what I was hoping for. Not into battle royale with 5e rules, or any rules to be honest. If you want to have a combat simulator honestly 5e is fairly mediocre in that regard. 3.5 or 4e would be a better fit. I could watch classic tourney style table vs table gaming, not just combat but a ton of things that challenge the players at the table, puzzles, etc. Modules where rules mastery and dice rolling takes a back seat to clever play when its all said and done. Would be interesting to see how different tables approach the same problems and overcome them. Part of nostalgia for old AD&D tourney games I guess. Best of luck to them though.

 

[Satyrn]

‘There goes Mearls with the left handed grab on the Cheetos’
‘Not a great move by Mearls there Bob. The dust on his fingers could give away his next move’
‘That’s true Jim, a real rookie move by the veteran player/designer, he should know better.’

Oh my. I read that in the voices of the commentators from Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax.

I want more.

 

[Satyrn]

Also [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION], [MENTION=6801204]Satyrn[/MENTION], what have you got against darts?!

That blasted doubling out rule. It makes me lose, like every time.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Hiya!



First...I'm going to err on the side of caution and just assume that roughly 20% to 25% of the CEO's and other 3-letter-acronym'ed suits running Hasbro are psychopaths/sociopaths. Maybe Hasbro is an anomaly with zero of these types...but the odd's are stacked against them.

Second...then why is WotC trying?
^_^

Paul L. Ming

You have no proof of this.

And WotC is not trying. This is a third party event.