Tournament Adventures: Always Linear?

[Silver Moon]

I recall a three-round RPGA extravaganza that set up mulitiple scenarios but didn't require them to be played in a particular order. The charcters were all pirates on a pirate ship with a female captain. The characters were all well written, with many individual motivations and varying interactions to the other charcters, which leant heavily to role-playing. So it was a character-driven rather than plot-driven game.

 

[grodog]

There are many non-linear D&D tournament adventures out there. I'll do some digging in my archives, but off the top of my head, Frank Mentzer's classic RPGA R-series modules weren't as structured as the A-series modules were. Details at http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/modpages/r.html and http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/modpages/r2.html

Many of the early modules were also run as tournaments, including G1-3 and D1-3, and they're decidedly open in design. Rob Kuntz's Maze of Xaene (later published as The Maze of Zayene in both AD&D and d20 versions) was run as a tourney at EastCon in NJ in 1983. For other instances of such events, see my tourney history at http://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/gh_tourneys.html I'll be adding a lot more detail to the early history of these, since I recently picked up a batch of the earliest Origins convention programs.

My general impression is, though, that as D&D grew and the RPGA began to rely more and more on modules created outside of TSR, that the tourneys grew more linear. We'd have to get some input from some RPGA lifers to confirm that, but that's my general sense of things.

 

[MerricB]

Most RPGA scenarios I've seen have been mostly linear. There are some that have been surprisingly non-linear, however.

Cheers!

 

[RFisher]

I have heard that different tournaments have had different means of measuring success as well: Some choose the party that had the most "in game" success. Some had everyone at the table vote for the best "role-player" & just that player moved on to the next round.

I would suppose that this could have an impact on how well a linear v. non-linear module works for the tourney.