Hi all again.

I just have a few questions, a few arising from reading other threads and a few of my own.

With jousting Tourneys, what is the actualy objective as I have read several different rules.

First is that the idea is to unhorse your opponent, each rider gets three lances to do so, failure leads to Melee on foot til one yields.

Or the other was the first to break three lances on ones opponent is the winner lest they unhorse their opponent in which case that is an instant win.

Now with winning ones opponent's horse and armour, I see how that could work if you unhorse them on rule set #2 as it is not a sure thing where as with rule set #1 it seems it would happen more often than not. This doesnt it right with me as how many knights would have the means to replace lost horses and armour? Surely Household knights would be in a bit of trouble.

On that, one would assume that such a ransom/forfit would be honourable, but what of battlefield looting
Is it okay to collect items from the dead on the battlefield? Only if you killed them perosnally?
and I am not talking about the mass scale looting DnD style where the players try to sell the 99 axes they looted after the last battle with the Saxons, but say a trophey Ax from a Saxon or a 'spare' sword
I could picture Footman looting boots etc off the dead after the battle, but not knights unless it was some one they perosnally Killed like what one sees in the Iliad.

And This would be different from the distrubution by share of any caputres goods in the bagage train that seems to go on by the victors.

Finally (sorry) in this thread http://nocturnal-media.com/forum/index.php?topic=1455.0
There was talk of new knights vs RTKs inspired by amor

Why would somone consciously or subconsiously be enflamed by passon for ones amor to show ones proweess in the joust when facing someone who would appear not your match in the first place. Facing another knight or renoun I would understand the idea of needing to go above and beyond but against a young knight, what would the idea there be.

(by the by I thing inspired Knights causing grevious wounds in touney very fitting as they would probably forget it is a game being cuaght up in the monment)

It probably would have been better to split the battlefield looting off this thread, since it is more of a separate thing from the Jousting. In fact, let me do that for you...

As for the Jousting questions, this is how we do it in our campaign:

1. The knight who unhorses his opponent, or who is the first to break three lances, wins. (So your second option. We rule that the tournament lances break on a successful hit, so it is the best out of five or if the other is unhorsed.)

2. We have not so far used wagering the horse and/or armor, although there has been jousting for service/compensation. Young knight errants, who cannot afford to risk their horse and armor, challenge passersby to joust for £1 or (if the young knight loses) one month's knight service. But since we are moving to the tournament period, this wagering might start to pick up, and in that case I would definitely use your criteria of the knight needing to be unhorsed before he loses his equipment. This makes it a bit less risky, and might tempt more people. However, like mentioned in the rulebooks, once the wagering starts to become mandatory, the poor/household knights drop out. Unless they have a spare set of armor from somewhere and/or if they are really really good at jousting (i.e. professional jousters). The Tournament then becomes more of a sort for the rich knights who can afford to replace their lost equipment or who have the wealth to 'ransom' their gear back from the winner.

The second issue you had was with my post about the tournament injuries being a bit too commonplace for our tastes, especially with facing more talented knights. The RTK with Amor was used to illustrate a point, but it also depends how you see the passion being used. If the Lady puts a task of winning the joust on her Knight, would the knight's Amor be valid for all the Jousts? Earlier, I thought this to be the case, and it would fit the idea of the Amorous Knight just sweeping the field clean. "This inspiration lasts for the length of the task at hand, but never for more than one full day." On the other hand, in the new battle rules (BoB?), a Passion is only valid for one encounter/battle round, if I have understood correctly (alas, I still don't own the book), which would hint that the Passion would be more appropriately each individual joust, in which case fumbles might become quite common if the Knight rolls for every joust.

In any case, the point of that particular thread was:
1. We thought tournament injuries were too common, especially when jousting against more talented opponents, who didn't have a good reason to maim you. (Granted, situation was made worse by our houseruled increase of +1d6 to lance damage.)
2. The culprit was identified to be the critical hits causing full damage, and the frequency of that being increased dramatically with skill (especially if impassioned).
3. The solution was to switch it around, make it the defender's fumble rather than the attacker's critical, which caused the full damage. An accident, if you will. This decoupled the frequency of injury from high skill. (And thanks to our houserule about fumbles, even high skill knights occasionally screw up.)
4. Young knights can still get injured. Don't forget (I did!) that the jousting lances still do half damage on a normal hit. Which might not sound much, but once you get to destriers (8d6), a young knight with reinforced chain and who fails the lance roll can take a pretty solid hit on a good damage roll.
5. This solution works for us. It might not work for you. If you are happy with the things as is, good for you! (Again, I note the caveat that we did increase the lance damage, although since we are still using chargers (6d6+1d6), I would have expected to run into this problem once Andalusians and destriers become more common.)

Thanks for splitting the threads

And thanks for the insights on how you run your touneys, with the ideas of individual knights setting the wager like service.
Gives me some more items of how to run the tourneys when we get there
And to clarify yes, I was thinking passions wouldnt apply to the whole tourney based on the for one battle round rule of BoB, I figured the time between the jousts there would be a lull.