Hi all,

My question has to do especially with the challenges and the melee, but also the tournament as a whole. We have now done a few tournaments and they have not gone as... smoothly... as I (and the players) would have liked.

1. Challenges: How do you handle these?
- If the challenges are fought with rebatted weapons on foot until the other guy is knocked down, there is precious little risk involved. Even with a critical doing normal damage, the participants are unlikely to suffer more than a couple of points of damage. Is there any penalty for losing? If not, what is to keep a Glory-greedy PK from challenging as many as he wants (GM allows), gaining 5-10 glory for each win? In a Joust, this is limited by the elimination if he lost, but in challenges, couldn't he just challenge someone else?
- Potential solutions:
- a) Reduce the number of challenges one knight can participate in (like 3?).
- b) Introduce elimination rounds. If a knight loses, he can no longer challenge or be challenged, except for a real grievance (sharp weapons).
- c) Reduce the Glory more drastically, like 1 Glory per win.
- d) Limit the actual challenges offered to mainly sharp weapons.
( I think my personal favorite at the moment is b). Perhaps even introduce different 'leagues': Mounted, Two-handed, Weapon & Shield... In short, run a sort of 'joust' for melee weapons, too.)

2. Melee
- This has been very confused for us in the past. I guess I should come up with actual rules on how this thing works (the rules in the Grand Tourney of Logres in 3rd edition Spectre King are a good start), i.e. what exactly is rolled to capture an enemy knight, how are you captured yourself, how to rescue a friend, etc...
- One rule of thumb we have used during actual battles is that a critical roll (either battle or weapon) nets a captive. This makes getting captives pretty rare, though, although not impossibly so when using the weapon skill modifiers from the unit event tables (+10 gives very good odds and +5 is still pretty decent).
- Might require a successful Battle roll to be able to hasten the captive to the safe zone before his friends try to rescue him. I would not make this take the whole round, though, since the time is limited as it is.

3. The tournament as a whole
- How much time do you spend in tournaments? I know that our group might be atypical that we play several sessions for each in-game year. I can't imagine having time to run a tournament and an adventure during the same session, unless the two are the same thing.
- We tend to run the (Pentecost) tournament basically as: Hunting/Falconry - Feast Event - Joust - Feast Event - Melee - Feast Event - Challenges - Feast Event, where Feast Event is basically one Courtly skill they can attempt to roll, with a potential for a trait challenge as well.

1. Challenges: How do you handle these?

Basically, I don't handle them, I don't use them, unless if I run a tournament with the Quick tournament system i PGC. Why? It takes too much time, and don't really lead to anything interesting. You can play with them, throw in a hated enemy or disguised friend and so forth, but with the pressure to finish a year in one session I find that this part is the least interesting aspects of tournaments.


2. Melee

I either run them with the Quick tournament system, or a loose narrative system (i.e. I prepare a couple of interesting scenes and then throw them at my PKs). I did toy with the idea of running a Melee with BoB, but it takes to much time (see above).


3. The tournament as a whole

My solution: I either use the quick tournament system (most Pentecoast tourneys) or I dedicate the whole year to them. In the latter case, I stuff them with roleplaying scenes, mysteries, enemies, dramatic events, feasts, dances and a lot of other stuff. Thats all thats going to happen that year, so make it memorable and give the players many things to do and handle, on and off the jousting field.

For challenges with rebated weapons, I use "Fatigue Points" (FP).

Knights start a combat with FP equal to their regular HP. Hits from rebated weapons do damage to FP, not HP (unless a critical). Loss of FP has the same general effects as HP. That is, you can be knocked down, fall unconscious etc. However, FP are recovered at the rate of 1 FP per two hours.

Also, starting a new challenge with less than a 1 hour rest, results in -5 FP.

That way, a knight who has taken a good beating has to wait a day or two to recover.

NT