Non-lethal combat help

[Lightlawbliss]

In a game I am running right now, I am trying out the concept of an entirely non-lethal tournament (magical combat and non-magical combat separated) which the players seem to want to participate in. Magical and non-magical combat each have 2 types of contest: a large brawl where the last man standing wins and a sub-tournament of duels where two participates try to convince a crowd they are "more powerful".

I want to make a very diverse range of competition, so what ideas does the playground have on methods that could be used in 1 or more of the contests?

To start things off, one I have so far is to trap the other guy in a box made of wall of stone.

[Azoth]

For the grand melee make every contestant use a +1 Merciful (insert weapon) provided by the tournament commity. They can go buck wild and not worry about killing anyone.

[Tibbit Tamer]

Check out Complete Arcane for more info on Magical Duels and Arcane Tourneys. They even have rules for non-lethal magical duels.

[sideswipe]

a few cool ideas for duals i have,

1. two iaijitsu masters in an iaijitsu duel with either a sap or the merciful x.

2. a no strikes grappling competition.

3. for the magic duals. for the one on one duals it is easy. have 8 dual types, one for each of the main schools of magic. where the only spells they can cast are spells of that school otherwise they are disqualified. fined and kicked out of the competition.
for example, the easy ones to design are conjuration, evocation and transmutation. have them all, summon/blast/transform to victory. and have a psion nearby (or a healer) to use revivify. i personally think the psionic one is better. cheaper for the caster.
if you want no chance of death then they both have a construct or some other thing that they have to protect/ destroy the opponents.

the rest are harder to do.
have the abjuration one be a protection mission. have npcs attack a construct and they have to protect it for as long as possible.
divination has a few spells that are good at bypassing defences. but i guess the design would be more about a thing they have to identify that has a few defences against divination on it that can be unravelled if done well. something like that.
illusion would be interesting, there are save or die/save or suck spells as well as a few damage spells. but you would know they are illusions. so it would again involve npc's and trying to manipulate them into doing a thing or getting somewhere. like sheep herding sort of.
enchantment would be a battle of minds, and who can ensnare first.
necromancy would be varied between direct attack spells and minionmancy. so would be fun.

all participants are stripped of all items before entering and are then disjunctioned a few times and they both start in an anti magic field that turns off when combat starts.

as the free for all magic. i guess it would be. they all have a construct to protect and anyone can use any spell to protect or kill the others.

the construct is an example of a lifeless thing that can be destroyed. using braindead undead or some equally lifeless thing nobody would care about if it died would work fine.

[TSED]

It makes sense that the majority of the combat brawlers would just be using unarmed strikes, improved or not. The winners of that meleestrom would be the types that actually invested into dealing non-lethal melee damage. Exotic weapons from the Book of Exalted Deeds, a monk dip here or there, people that actually blew a feat on IAS, or possibly even unarmed swordsages if you're running ToB.

The duel type stuff will probably have a bunch of different grappling builds, a couple of people using bolas, the odd net or two, plus the above options.

I would not recommend using merciful weapons in these kinds of tournaments because it defeats the letter but not the spirit of the tourney. Also, very low level goons COULD be killed by an unlucky crit - that 1d6 isn't going to be the difference between a KO and death if you have 6-10 hp period and just took 30 slashing and whatever nonlethal from a greataxe crit.

[ace rooster]

Not exactly combat, but how about a planar fishing tournament. Mages use planar binding and their knowledge of the planes to try to catch the largest/strangest/whatever non-intelligent outsiders that they can find. Spellcraft, knowledge the planes, and some other fluff for mechanics.