Seeking advice/critique for designing tournament

Trihelios

First Post
(Sorry if this is rather long)

The players have agreed to participate in a special tournament called the Can'claer, being run by a group of barbarians who live in a sort of 'lost world' environment of wildlands and dinosaurs. I'm looking for some feedback on what I've developed or new ideas to put in. It's going to be quite a big tournament that will run for about 8-12 hours or so of real time and several weeks in the game world.

The tournament has many events, but rather than a traditional sort of tournament in which you'll win or lose particular events a panel of judges determines the overall winners based on all events. I'm going to use a victory points system, where each achievement along the way will help to determine your final ranking.

I've based the tournament on one of those reality tv shows, where you race against other contestants to be the first one back but along the way you have to complete various challenges.

The basic route is they have to leave town, go through a dangerous forest, arrive at a sacred burial mound, climb a mountain and then return back to the town.

Along the way they must complete the following challenges.

1) The PCs can not bring any equipment with them and must pause to craft any items they need. They will most likely need cold weather gear and rope to get up the mountain, weapons to fight off monsters and for the combat tournament at the end and possibly anything else they feel they need like armour, shields, etc. They will also need to obtain food, water and shelter (it's at the very least a 10 day round trip if they were simply traveling the route). They will earn victory points for any impressive items they make.

2) During the trip, they must find a way to perform an act of charity. They'll earn victory points for particularly creative or impressive acts. They haven't finished the race until they've done this.

3) They must also hunt an animal/monster in the wilderness and bring the remains back to feed the people of the town. They'll earn victory points based on how successful the hunt is. They haven't finished the race until they've done this.

4) Around the burial mound they've hidden one token per participant, plus three more. Each one will be hard to obtain in a different way, using a different skill to recover it. However the different tokens will be taken up by NPCs in the contestant as they each arrive there, so the quicker you get there the more choices which challenge you choose to do.
[I'm looking for ideas on different challenges I can set for the players. It's a homebrew system, but it's basically like a low-magic D&D.]


5) There will be another set of tokens to obtain at the top of the mountain. [I'm looking for ideas for these too.]

6) The whole thing is a race, and the first person to get back after completing all the challenges will receive a large sum of victory points. The second will get slightly less, etc.

7) After everyone gets back, there will be a combat tournament elimination style. People will get victory points for winning bouts, but also bonus points for doing anything flashy/cool, showing good sportsmanship or having enough restraint to avoid doing serious damage to the other contestant.

8) There is a poetry/story telling contest at the end. PCs will receive victory points based on opposed skill rolls, but I'll also award special victory points to any player who tells the story in character.

Plus the area they are travelling through is full of dangerous monsters, random encounters and other travellers to interact with so it'll be pretty full on.

So if anyone has comments, criticism, ideas for new challenges or any thoughts about what kind of skill challenges to obtain the hidden tokens, then I'd be delighted to hear from you.
 

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Well, your game tournament sounds fascinating! Lots of work for you, though... Have you looked at "Tournaments, Fairs and Taverns"? It's a supplement that has many tournament games, challenges, etc... laid out. Some of them might give you ideas.

For your token challenges; STR is the easiest to do, I think, because you can simply hide the token under/behind some large barrier - a big boulder or fallen tree or perhaps at the base of a small landslide, so they have to use some engineering skill as well as STR to move the "right" stones.

One token could be hidden IN the mound, guarded by an ancestor spirit. The spirit could demand that a riddle be answered; possibly referring to some great historical deed that locals would know the answer to better than strangers, giving them the advantage.

One token could be hidden high in the trees, "guarded" by some native creature (monkeys, birds) that resent being disturbed. So climbing, animal handling, and tumbling skills could all come into play. Possibly the creatures are "sacred" so killing them is simply "not done".

Think about what other skills your PCs may have "bought" but not found a way to utilize, at least recently. Try to design a skill challenge around them.

Maybe they have to swim to an island in a small lake. But there are strong currrents that could pull the unwary down under the water. Maybe there's a friendly dryad or other spirit who's been recruited to "seduce" and delay unwary swimmers. She won't hurt them, but dallying with her for a day or two could put a PC way behind.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.
 

You can use acrobatics to squeeze into a cave entrance to get a token, or even athletics to move the boulder out of the way. Some sort of puzzle box or rune covered door could be opened with religion, arcana, thievery. You could have one of these be an easy check with others as a hard check.

You can even have other options/challenges for the characters to find equipment along the way. It can be marked with the seal of the games to prevent cheating, but finding a real weapon or implement or armor can make other encounters more rewarding.

I'm not sure how many nights of gaming this whole challenge is going to take, but the players may start to long for their own equipment as time goes on. Surviving off the wild is cool for a night or two, or if you are taken captive, but eventually everyone wants their stuff back.
 

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