Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 3285332" data-attributes="member: 16574">All of the RPGA tournaments in the era when I was active (mid-late 80s) had pre-gen characters. Some non-RPGA events might have been BYOC, but I didn't usually play in those. RPGA events of this era were very roleplay-centric -- the "plots" were completely linear and usually beside-the-point anyway, tactics and problem-solving were afterthoughts at best; it was all about play-acting the pregen characters. At the end of the session the players would vote for the best player (which was pretty much synonymous with "hammiest actor") and the top 2 or 3 vote-getters would advance to the next round. This is actually almost exactly the opposite of what I like in D&D and in retrospect it's amazing that I played in as many of these tournaments as I did. Quintessential examples of tournament modules of this era include C6: Official RPGA Tournament Handbook, WG9: Gargoyle, WG11: Puppets, and (last but not least) the immortal "Terrible Trouble at Tragidore" (of 2E DM Screen fame/infamy).The AD&D Open at GenCon was a very different beast and by the late 80s felt like a relic of a previous era, not only because it had 9 players per table instead of 6 but also because it was judged by team instead of individually and placed a much higher premium on combat tactics and problem-solving (score was calculated based on how quickly the team completed the scenario and how many characters survived, with bonus points (and penalties) for particular actions, and the teams that scored highest moving on to the next round). There was very little roleplay involved -- it was all about "solving the encounter" and moving on to the next one as quickly as possible. See the A series modules for the quintessential example of an AD&D Open scenario (the A series was the AD&D Open for 1980). This style of play was much more in line with my prefered play-style, but, alas, because I was always a "wild-card" (i.e. I didn't have 8 fellow-players there with me to form a team) and had a hard time working as an effective team with a bunch of strangers I actually tended to have less success here than in the standard "play-acting" tournaments. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />  In the 2E era the RPGA introduced the Living City campaign, in which players brought their own characters (which had to be generated using specific guidelines and could only be played in official Living City tournaments) but I was already distancing myself from the RPGA (and "official D&D" as a whole) by this point, and only played in one or two of these, so I can't speak much to them.</blockquote>

Verification