Ideas to streamline a tournament.

[Syrinth]

Hello everyone, I'm hoping you could give me some ideas here...

So in my game, there's going to be a festival and various tournaments being held, one of which is a melee tournament.

However, I don't want to go through I don't even know how many rounds of combat for the party fighter to be able to compete, I mean he'd have to fight at least five opponents minimum I'd imagine and that'd get boring FAST.

Any ideas on how I could streamline this process?

The party fighter does use trip and a guisarme, so combat tricks make the vague estimation harder.

[only1doug]

How many entrants to the tournament?

is magical healing available to all at the end of each round?

How many serious contenders do you want to have? (fully statted up for the fight)
Set up a numbers in a bag situation, with your serious contenders being numbered in one colour and then the riff raff numbered in another colour.

Any riff raff vs riff raff match is determined by rolling 1d20 and adding the riff raff numebr, higher result wins.

A riff raff vs Contender match is automatically won by the contender.

get the other players involved by handing them a character sheet for a contender and allowing them to fight each other (so you can get at least 2 fights simultaneously) the DM's role becomes that of judge, ensuring that no one "throws" their fight.

Edit: Stat up one of the Riff raff, just in case one somehow makes it to the final. (but it should definately be lower level than the contenders)