[Editor's note: Originally published in The View From Valehaven, 2nd Ed, Vol. 2,
Issue 9 - September 2005]
Tried and True Tourney Tips #1
Start Together, End Together
By Steve Johnson (Sir Duncan of Rhiassa)
One of the things I will tell a prospective tournament
holder is that they need to have the players start together and end together. You might think
that's easy, because you have a reading of the rules and an awards ceremony, so most everyone will be together at the beginning and end of
the event, right?
While that’s true,
it's also missing the point.
You want your
event to be entertaining and fun for everyone in attendance. Your standard
tourney event will go from the Reading of the Rules right into tourney signups
and the start of individual tourneys, and will often end with the end of the
last individual tourney and then the awards ceremony. This kind of approach
works fine for a laid back, hang-out-with-your-buddies style of tourney event,
but those events are rarely the ones that get remembered for years and years
and that are in the running for Best Tourneys awards at year's end.
Some players will
want to hit the tourneys that are run first, and will be good enough to last
deep into the later rounds of the last few tourneys of the day, but many
players will take home the memory of sitting around with nothing to do for the
first hour or more and possibly the last hour or more of the event. Instead of
having lots of players sitting around waiting for their name to be called, I
learned early on that starting your tourneys with an exciting, high-energy
activity that gets everyone's blood pumping is a great way to set the tone for
the rest of the day. You probably want that first activity to be optional, so
latecomers aren't screwed and players that are still setting up tents or
checking in don’t get stressed out, but I would definitely try to get as many
people involved as possible.
As for the end of
the event, you will have lots of players who will walk away feeling like they
could have left several hours before the end of the awards ceremony if you
don't actively try to engage all of your players. Those who didn‘t win awards
and who didn‘t participate in or do well in the final tourneys of the afternoon
may wish they had hit the road, especially if they have a long drive ahead of
them. Giving people a reason to stay for the last group tourney or war maneuver
may result in more people being at the awards ceremony and event wrap-up.
Over the years,
throwing Tourneys of Chiron, Feast of Min and the Queen of Hearts events, I've tried to tackle this issue in a lot of
different ways. Most of the time my efforts seemed to work and some of the
excuses for having everyone participate were really popular and have been used
again both at my events and by others.
One of the
earliest instances of trying to get players to start together was at one of the
first Tournaments of Chiron back at
UMass Amherst in 1993 or 1994. I wanted to start with a Grand Melee.
Rather than have
one Grand Melee that would last just a few minutes followed by the usual
business of sitting around waiting to be called for your tourney, I figured we
would have the winner have to win two Grand Melees. To make it harder, we
marked everyone who had won one and made them start in the middle. The marshals
then called attention to the "winners" and we did our best to make
sure that players were aware of who they should be gunning for if they wanted
to have a chance at winning. I called it a “Grand Melee from Hell" and
it's been seen now and then in the Realms ever since.
At the Tournaments of Rhiassa, held by my
squire, Cedric of Rhiassa, I helped him develop a set of tourneys that would
keep players engaged from the Reading of the Rules right up to the Awards
Ceremony. I think we started
with the GMFH and we ended with something I heard about from the SCA called the
Warlords Tourney. The Warlords Tourney is simple. Everyone on site lines up and
the line is doubled back on itself so that every player is faced with an
opponent. Those pairs all fight, and the loser of each fight becomes the
follower of the person that beat them. The teams of two you just formed now
have to fight each other, with the losing pair of each fight becoming the
follower of the leader of the winning team. Your teams of two become teams of
four, then teams of eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. The winning Warlord
is the person who was on the winning side of every single round of the tourney.
Pretty much anyone can win, and you get a lot of interesting groups and teams.
For our Warlords
Tourney, we tried to make the levels interesting. The one on one fights and the
pairs were straightforward, but for the eight and sixteen player teams we had
bridges and capture the flag. I don't recall how many rounds we went or exactly
what we did for each level, but the result was pretty good. Players enjoyed
rallying around someone different, and fun was had by all. The chaotic nature
of the genesis of the teams left players less invested in winning and more
invested in having fun because they lost the clique-based competitiveness that
comes with so many group tourneys.
I could actually
imagine having Queen of Hearts run a
Warlords Tourney where teams would fight each other in the early rounds and by
the later rounds be hopelessly mixed together. The winning warlord would win
the War Maneuver for their team. It might not be feasible because some players
would throw fights if their teammate was the opposing warlord in the tourney,
but it's worth thinking about. It would be a good thing to give players the
chance to break down the barriers that develop between the teams during Queen
of Hearts, that’s for sure.
In the early days
of Queen of Hearts we went to great lengths to provide fun and interesting War
Maneuvers for everyone to participate in at the start of the event. We always
made them optional, as players tend to straggle in and need to set up their
tents and check in their magic, but it was important to us to provide the
opportunity for them to do something as soon as the rules were read and the
teams were introduced.
Our early attempts
were called "Quests," and the most memorable was the Maiden Quest. As
soon as the rules were read, we told the teams’ seneschals that a maiden had
been abducted by a local troll and needed to be rescued. The team that brought
her back would win. The excitement generated by dozens of young adventurers tearing
off to get their equipment and start searching the woods was always a great way
to energize the event site, and you generally always knew when the event had
started because chaos erupted and people were running everywhere. For the
Maiden Quest we had a woman guarded by a troll deep in the woods. However,
halfway down to the woods, on the other side of a field, we planted a guy with
long hair wearing a dress and standing with his back to the path the players
would be walking on. One team actually tore across the field, turned the false
“Maiden" around to discover a dude with a beard, and brought him back to
the marshals anyways.
Over the years we
also had “Fetch” war maneuvers where the team that brought a specific item back
to the marshals would win. For Queen of
Hearts X we had the players fetch the flagpole for the castle. Fortunately,
they managed to suppress the urge to use it as a weapon.
Ending together at
Queen of Hearts is something we
figured out early and have been doing it the same way since the very first
year. We run a Team Grand Melee, so that everyone is on the field at once. If
we have enough time and interest from players, we run it until a team wins
twice consecutively, but with less than four teams, I've always felt it was a
little lacking. After TGM, we run “Queen's War", which is a tourney
designed to encourage everyone to enjoy both as participants and as an
audience. All of the teams gather around and send players into the middle to
fight. Winners can add an extra player to their line of players that are still
“active” and when only one team is left, it‘s over. The amount of cheering,
wise-cracking and audience participation I’ve seen at Queen's War is something
I'd never seen before in the Realms, and is something I will sorely miss. It‘s
a huge part of what makes Queen of Hearts
a special, if not magical experience, and is the best example I can think of
for a way to “end together" at a tourney event.
If you are
thinking of planning a tourney event, think about the experience of your
players first. You can’t cater to them all, but if you want to throw a good one
you have to try.
What better way to
do that than to start together and end together?
It sure beats
starting alone and ending alone.
