Tournament Adventure

[Bartmanhomer]

Is a tournament adventure useful in the campaign? (Such as singles or team tournament as an example.)

[Blackhawk748]

Is a tournament adventure useful in the campaign? (Such as singles or team tournament as an example.)

They can be fun for early in the campaign. But for much more than maybe 2 sessions? Probably not terribly exciting

[Bartmanhomer]

They can be fun for early in the campaign. But for much more than maybe 2 sessions? Probably not terribly exciting

Oh hey Blackhawk748. Thank you for responding. Yeah, I thought that in low levels it can be fun obviously. In teams can be fun (whatever it's monotype teams such as Fighters, Wizards LOL! and also mixed types of classes.)

[WhamBamSam]

It gives you basically the same advantages that a tournament arc would in an anime. It allows you to handwaive the plot a bit to get the encounters you want, and gives you excuses to do RP and show off with a BBEG before they're strong enough to fight them.

I would stick to team battles, since that's what D&D is built around, and I would actually bump it up to a mid-level range where you have a more interesting variety of options to throw at them and when they're feeling their oats a bit so the pomp and circumstance of the tournament feels like a bigger deal.

[Kelb_Panthera]

It can be. It's like any other narrative device, whether it works is in how you use it.

You'll want to do team bouts or battle royales for the most part so nobody at the table is left twiddling their thumbs through whole encounters. Nonlethal for the latter, of course.

There are two tricks to making a tournament arc work in any story but particulalry in an RPG:

Narrative weight:

While it's perfectly acceptable to have a tournament for the sake of a tournament or simply as part of a celebration, it feels much more satisfying and gives the PCs much more reason to worry about winning if there is some kind of prize at stake. Give them a difficult to acquire prize like an artifact or a plot of land else make winning or at least placing in the tournament a condition for progressing along the current plot-line (have a backup plan for in case they fail.)

Variety:

Just straight up fighting on an open field is -boring-. Put in various thematic matches, like partially flooding the arena for a naval engagemen or floating platforms (either on the water or in the air above it) that fighters are eliminated if they fall into the water, put mobile barriers on the field, perhaps have a capture the flag type of match where each team has a flag bearer and their goal is to take the other team(s) flag(s).


Then, of course, there's the major concern for these sorts of things: magic. Part of the purpose of a tournament is to entertain the onlookers. There are a myriad of magical effects that can frustrate both the view of the arena and the various bits and bobs that you put in as obstacles to make things more interesting. In another thread, someone was concerned about invisibility in a tournament setting. While I don't think that invisibility itself is necessarily an issue (there are a number of non-magical ways around it) a fog-cloud would definitely put a damper on things and you won't be terribly concerned about being knocked from a floating stone into the water below if you can fly indefinitely. Consider the rules for the tournament in general and for particular events with these things, particularly the ones your PCs are prone to using, in mind.