Tournaments in Roleplaying Games

[canyonwalker]

The other day I mentioned a roleplaying game (RPG) blog I find interesting. See Electronics at the Gaming Table. That's the title of my blog entry; the other blog is called Gnome Stew. Another interesting post on Gnome Stew recently was about using tilts to drive intrigue in the game. By "tilts" they mean jousts; tournaments. It reminded me how years ago I plotted a D&D adventure around a tournament in my long-term game. The Tournaments of Duke Cassavette was a huge success. Here are Five Things that accounted for the success:

1) I was inspired by A Knights Tale. There are plenty of possible source for inspiration; mine was this underappreciated movie from 2001 starring Heath Ledger. It gave me the ideas of focusing the story around just three combat tournaments, introducing bitter rivalries, and using an element of mystery with a "black" knight.

2) I kept the story simple by focusing the action on three martial competitions: the Tourney of Lances, the Tourney of Swords, and the Tourney of Arrows, with the joust being the top event. I let players know there would be much more than this going on— I characterized the tourney overall as a combination of the Olympics and a County Fair, so there'd be competitions for biggest pumpkin and longest dancing, too— and invited them to work with me to develop their interests. They thought the adventure would be plenty rich with the 3 sports I proposed. I then customized the combat mechanics for each of these sports (we were using D&D 3.x rules in the game) to keep them simple, fun, competitive, and not totally deadly.

3) The group bit hard on the Black Knight subplot. Historically a "black" knight was a combatant who wore a black shroud over his coat of arms to conceal his identity. One joust entrant did that, and the group really got into trying to figure out their identity. It turned out to be an NPC ally of theirs. She was concealing her identity so as not to give offense to Duke Cassavette as she'd recently spoken out against a misguided peace treaty he'd signed with a hostile foreign power and didn't want her success or failure in the games to be seen as a proxy for her political movement. This tracks with why knights went occasionally entered tournaments incognito; it wasn't necessarily to be anonymous as must as to compete without exacerbating political difficulties.

4) Intrigue, intrigue, INTRIGUE!! The Gnome Stew blog is all about the intrigue that swirls around jousts. I wove in plenty to my own. I already mentioned the Black Knight subplot above. Even the occasion for the tournament invited intrigue. The duke was celebrating the marriage of his youngest daughter to the sheriff of a remote town whom he was also ennobling as a baron. Well, the PCs had crossed swords (literally) with the sheriff's men in the past and considered them to have been protecting illegal slave traders. They had to decide early in the adventure whether and how much they'd poke into sheriff/baron-to-be's business and potentially embarrass Cassavette over his new son-in-law.

5) Even combat can be intrigue. The intrigue didn't stop with roleplaying scenes; it continued into dice-rolling combat. I mentioned the sheriff becoming a baron.... Well, the town of which he was sheriff was also claimed by another duke. That rival duke sent his best champions to compete in the tourneys to show up Cassavette. Oh, and the hostile foreign power I mentioned sent a champion, too. He'd show that the Russ— I mean, The Empire of Tarrentum was superior. BTW, they were also the power with whom the barely-legal slave trade was being conducted. Oh, and remember how I wrote "not totally deadly" above? Well, there was a fatality. Someone killed Tarrentum's champion— in a contest. It was an international incident! That colored what the group did in a few adventures later in the campaign.