Well I guess it'd be a board or skirmish game... but is there any tRPG that does it alright? That's what 20th century D&D did at conventions where people were given challenge dungeons to earn magic weapons to use officially in any game.
Clarity of rules and GM'ing is ultra important so writing quality is ULTRA important to create an environment of fairness.
How do you account for 'out of the box' solutions like clearing the tomb of horrors by digging holes or rerouting rivers?
Dungeon Crawling as a competitive game
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OgreBattle
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Honestly for it to be fair you need no out of the box solutions and the same MC for all games. Ideally games that can be adjudicated by a computer.
Living Greyhawk sort of had tournament format where you compared your progress vs other tables but still wildly dependent upon what DM you got.
I’ve seen people run events at cons where the same DM keeps running people through a killer mod and people compete to get the farthest, but I never participated so don’t have details on exactly how they were designed. Ditto for the living dungeon or whatever at GenCon. People pay to LARP a dungeon and mostly pay to win by buying potions and such.
Living Greyhawk sort of had tournament format where you compared your progress vs other tables but still wildly dependent upon what DM you got.
I’ve seen people run events at cons where the same DM keeps running people through a killer mod and people compete to get the farthest, but I never participated so don’t have details on exactly how they were designed. Ditto for the living dungeon or whatever at GenCon. People pay to LARP a dungeon and mostly pay to win by buying potions and such.
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Yesterday's Hero
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What's stopping football players from forming a roman turtle and advancing slowly, protecting the ball?
In all seriousness, banning certain spells and putting the dungeon on a time limit might help with some of these kinds of issues. "You can reroute the river, but it takes six months even with the proper tools/help and Move earth and stone is banned from the tournament, so the team that got in and used regular strategies beat you to it by about 57 days."
To make these kinds of rulings you might need a panel of multiple DMs, too.
In all seriousness, banning certain spells and putting the dungeon on a time limit might help with some of these kinds of issues. "You can reroute the river, but it takes six months even with the proper tools/help and Move earth and stone is banned from the tournament, so the team that got in and used regular strategies beat you to it by about 57 days."
To make these kinds of rulings you might need a panel of multiple DMs, too.
Did you ever notice that, in action movies, the final confrontation between hero and villain is more often than not an unarmed melee fight? It's like these bad guys have "Regeneration 50/Unarmed strikes".
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Stahlseele
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Welp . . you could american gladiator the shit out of this.
2 entrances to the dungeon, mostly similarly constructed.
Target roughly in the middle of the dungeon.
On your marks. Get set. GO!
If you want it to be even more like american gladiators, make it an actual spectator blood sport in honour of some gods competing for something that a third entity has put into the dungeon. No actual godly interference allowed, just your chosen mortal chamoignons.
2 entrances to the dungeon, mostly similarly constructed.
Target roughly in the middle of the dungeon.
On your marks. Get set. GO!
If you want it to be even more like american gladiators, make it an actual spectator blood sport in honour of some gods competing for something that a third entity has put into the dungeon. No actual godly interference allowed, just your chosen mortal chamoignons.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
Not strictly competitive, but Gloomhaven introduced the idea of no shared looting (and looting only being possible before the scenario finishes), randomly drawn secret "battle goals" that require you to handicap yourself or perform suboptimal or simply strange actions in exchange for ticks that can be exchanged for character perks, and a secret "retirement goal" you're aiming towards to unlock stuff like new characters, that affects what scenarios you want to do, and makes you care what monsters you kill or what happens during dungeons, etc.
Board games are nice because 1) they don't require a GM, which eliminates a lot of ruling issues and 2) have a whitelist of options you do have, instead of a blacklist of what you can't do. That solves a lot of the "we didn't think of that" issues.
If you want "fair" with repeatable results, you want a board game like Dungeonquest or whatever.
If you want interesting solutions, you want a tabletop game.
If you want "fair" with repeatable results, you want a board game like Dungeonquest or whatever.
If you want interesting solutions, you want a tabletop game.