One shot tournament games

[Vargo]

Greetings,

I was talking with a minion of my FLGS, and had this crazy idea during the discussion: A once a month high-risk crawl designed to test people's tactical skills. I announce the theme ("Crypt", "Desert", "Wasteland") and character level a month ahead of time, and people sign up for slots announcing their basic character build (Human Wizard) at time of signup. On game day, I throw them into a meatgrinder of a crawl with about a 50/50 chance of achieving a TPK. If the party is disorganized and doesn't work together, then they get rolled. If they work together, they can pull it through, but it's going to be a squeaker.

I know the basic idea is "crank up the encounter level until they squeal", but the problem is getting the balance right, especially with regards to the final encounter. I don't just want to do "throw large numbers of mobs at them" either - I'm currently disassembling encounters from various computer games I've played that I thought had interesting mechanics in them in order to use them as mechanics for boss fights within the tourney, with all the serial numbers filed off as well. I want winning to mean "holy crap, we worked like a well-oiled machine" not "oh boy, my uber-munchkin build completely cleaned out this encounter".

Any suggestions for a game in this format? Good resources for encounter "tricks" that won't one-shot players but will make them sweat and figure things out on the fly?

 

[aco175]

I remember one time at a convention, the DM had a giant arena detailed out in 5' squares, which was pretty darn cool. We all ended up in there after a few fights to combat against the other parties who made it that far. It was a long fight with 2 DMs, but was enjoyable nevertheless.

I find that a one-shot night of gaming would be nice to play new classes and combos that I have not gotten around to yet, or test something I may want to play in an ongoing campaign. This being said, playing a new class may take a while to make run well-oiled like, although depending on the number of encounters you can have may not be that important come the last fight.

Another point you may need to address is that of daily powers. Would players know when the last fight is coming and save their big guns, thinking they would need it. Would they use these to squeak out through the lead-ins and get chopped to bits in the last fight. I guess in a one-shot is doesn't matter, but players would/should know about how things will run. Is there a way to get a power back? There is an old thread talking about trading in a couple action points for a daily power which sounds reasonable in a one-shot. Maybe give them an AP every fight and allow them to trade in 3 for another daily power use. This gives them options to recover from during the night.

I would also think that time constraints would limit you 3 combats and a small introduction, and a small conclusion. The 3 fights would be 3.5 hours, even with some of the timesaving tips found in other threads. .5 hour for storytelling and introduction and you have a night of fun. Not really sure if you can run that many non-combat encounters in a setting like this, unless players know ahead of time or limit the encounters to half and half might work.

 

[talarei07]

You may want to premake the characters and just have people sign up for the game. thats what our group does a lot even for campaigns it works well for us