Story Time: My 1st Two Tournament Experiences

Yesterday I was doing something kind of monotonous and painful.....assembled (mostly) a big piece of Ikea furniture. Had Spotify blasting in the background and some song lyrics lamenting being dealt a "bad hand", and I honestly thought....., "Do people even think about the times they unfairly have an advantage?"

Well, obviously I do, or I probably wouldn't be typing about it here. What immediately came to mind were my 1st two RPG tournaments. While I am quick to talk about tournaments here 'cause it's an easy topic for me since I played in, and then ran, quite a few for HackMaster at Origins & GenCon. Pretty sure that I've referenced my earliest tournament experiences before, but I haven't flat-out told the whole story/stories.

My very 1st tournament experience was definitely a "bad hand" and the second was an "unfair advantage". Both of these were at a smaller local con overseas. The organizer was able to bill the AD&D Tournament as the "National Tournament" because there wasn't one otherwise. Winner got a free trip to GenCon Europe. No pressure.....actually I'm in it for the fun, so no....no actual pressure.

It's 1995 and I've made it to the final round at the "American" table.....there was another table for the host country so games could be run in native languages. I don't remember if we can choose our pre-gens or if they were randomly assigned, but I got a single-sided PC sheet that had the party Magic User. On the flip side of the PC sheet was a fricken wall of text. One paragraph of your PC's basic history and then a series of short paragraphs telling the player how their PC gets along with the other PCs. For the most part nothing too remarkable....until you got to the fighter, Solamnus. I can't recall my PC's name, but I sure remember this guy!

My PC did not like the Fighter, thinking he was an idiot and his stupidity is going to get me killed. There was some bad blood there, but it really looked like it my PC's fault 'cause it seemed to me that he was a bit full of himself and more than a bit dickish to the fighter, even if it didn't say that straight-up. The text was a first-person account and the "fact" that the fighter didn't care for being turned (intentionally, mind you) into a chicken was somehow not the MU's fault....yeah ok I think I have a feel for this PC.

In-character, and only in-character, I talked down to the fighter, nick-naming him "Salami" 'cause it was more succinct than "meat head". As a player I did mention to the other fighter's player that there was clearly some issues between our PCs and to please not take it personally. I assume he had bothered to read the backstory......especially since he didn't have to start looking up spells and whatnot before we started.....

.....yeah, clearly I assumed wrong. The player was a little antagonistic, but it didn't seem OOC in the moment.

The party did manage to work well-enough together, but leading into the final encounter it was obvious we were getting into, at best, a stalemate, and at worse possibly even a TPK. Now was my opportunity to shine and through a good combination of spells I was able to advance our party to the final encounter and subsequently managed to obtain the McGuffin while the party was otherwise bogged downed with the BBG. This enabled our table to win the tournament!

We had to pick a MVP from our table to win the trip and while I am biased (duh) I think it should have been me because I was playing my PC well, and managed to do some creative work that caused us to win. Problem was that Solamnus' player, and the player's wife (who was also in the game) really didn't like my PC making fun of that PC. Both players took it personally and to this day I don't think they actually read the PC backgrounds. Instead they both voted for the Bard's player, who did some cheap theatrics at the table......really?

Clearly I was a bit upset, but really it was just some added BS that feed into post-game and post-convention let-down. I really didn't know that was a thing for me yet. The player who went to GenCon Europe had a great time and she actually started playing and I was able to take part in her game a couple of times.

The next year (1996) though, that was a bit of a shit-show, but grossly unfair.....in my favor. Again I'm at the final table and this adventure revolves around finding a Holy Avenger for a Paladin....that I was lucky enough to draw. Really? The entire adventure revolves around one/my PC getting the best bad-ass weapon possible for him, which we managed to do. The final BBG is tough, but against a Holy Avenger....not that tough. Guess who won the tournament? The obvious answer isn't "me", but "Whoever managed to play the Paladin", which was me, but if a monkey capable of rolling dice was at the table with that PC (be nice Erik!) had the Paladin, then that monkey would be going to 1997 GenCon Europe! At least this monkey got a trophy!*

I didn't do too poorly at GenCon Europe. I didn't win, but I did place in the top half of my table...which came in second. This means I was in the top 10 if that's brag-worthy. That convention was in England during the weekend that Princess Diana died. That was an....... interesting experience, but not one for here. It was the second time I met Ken Whitman (1st being the earlier convention), but again not a (interesting enough) experience for here, unless you're a fan of the card game Groo: The game.

With these two initial tournament experiences it isn't surprising that it took me almost another decade to sling dice in an organized play event again......

*There was no trophy for winning the tournament. The prize was the trip, so I had a cup made as a trophy.  I just wanted something physical I could display, and possibly use at the table. Not the best pic as this was for something else....

My Thoughts on a Point About the Recent Candlekeep Mysteries Brouhaha

 

Something you Tavern readers might not realize is that I don't always drink the Tavern's Kool-Aid.....as in I don't read every post here and listen to every podcast or watch every YouTube video. I like Erik personally and enjoy the OSR, and I suspect that most people here are closer to my POV and less overactive Tavern fanboy.

I mention this because recently there has been some drama over WotC editors......editing a writer's submission to meet the needs of the desired publication. Erik posted about it at the Tavern, and I'll state my opinion....he didn't really hit on the important points of the problem very well. (Note: I pre-wrote this post days ago......)

BUT, to be fair, I thought he did a much better job on the YouTube video, and for you non-Kool-Aid drinkers, that would rather listen than read....go check it out.

Now I'm not going to insult you by going over everything I just suggested you watch, but I have a couple of main take-aways from everything I've seen and some of it is from personal experience, which I'll get into in a bit:

1. When you get hired to write something, there are established parameters that you need to conform to. Some are kind of understood, like "submit in English please" and others need to be (and usually are) spelled out, like "submit 5,000 words in this format". If you've been hired to submit a short adventure, regardless of word count, submit a short adventure! Regardless of word count, an adventure that is "a showcase to the deeper lore and history of the FR." kind of stretches the boundary for a short-story. Bringing back and or fundamentally changing a couple races......again stretches the boundary for a short story/adventure.
2. Most every writer has some big idea or a series of ideas.....I assume it's part of the creative process, but a successful writer, in addition to conforming to their client's desires (as expressed in written and unwritten standards mentioned above) does a good job of differentiating between what is and isn't important for the submission. Not the story, the submission. The piece of work that has to be edited and published to meet the needs of the publication itself.

Point #1 is a bit common sense and easy to argue/debate. If a writer is contracted for 5,000 words on an adventure to be written in English for D&D 5th edition and they submit 7,000 words for a French version of 1st Edition AD&D, the publication will just reject it outright and refuse to pay. No brainer there.

Point #2, and this is what I'm seeing in all this drama, is when a writer doesn't do a good job of meeting the needs of the project or audience. Usually this is when they meet the technical aspects of the contract and either ignore the unwritten aspects or disregard the needs of the publication or end-user.

Back when I was in charge of organizing the GenCon and Origins Tournament Adventures for the HackMaster Association/KenzerCo, I ran into Point/Issue #2 more times than I'd have preferred. I'm 110% certain that my early drafts my own writing attempts were guilty of this as well, but I'm sure I've gotten at least somewhat better due to dealing with other writers.......have I gotten good enough, not my place to say.

I will say that as an adventure editor, the whole idea of a writer trying to explain their big "backstory" and/or NPC "motivation", pretty much pisses me off*. I don't want to have to sift through pages of details of shit that is pretty much never going to come into play, or matter, at the game table.....and that is as an editor. As a GM I don't have the time or inclination to read three paragraphs of details, buried in four pages of text, on why one NPC feels a certain way about another NPC.

Show, don't tell.

If you need one NPC to be a dick in an adventure, simply give the GM that direction instead of having to make a reader....or end user, glean that information from a large body of text. If it is something the PCs won't see, it can probably be excluded altogether. Motivations and backstories are internal adventure points, not external, or party-facing. If you don't consolidate and/or dumb-down this unnecessary information, your editor will do it for you....

.....and he/she will hate your for it, and you'll probably hate them for it as well. Current case in point.

HackMaster Tournament adventures, back in the day, had a pretty standard format in that there were a specific number of encounters and there was a general rule as to the numbers and types of encounters. You wrote to a specific level range and while you could tweak things a little bit.....you want to swap out a trap encounter for another combat encounter, go for it.....but expect there to be more editing issues. Unless you inserted combat stat blocks in the body of the text, something I did (in addition to them in the end as a battle-sheet) a tournament adventure ran six pages or so (it's been a decade so my numbers are fuzzy).

I had an author submit twelve pages of content. It took me so long to edit that it would have been easier to just re-write it myself and use the basic idea for each encounter, but no I did the editing back-and-forth with the author. Now I was also the Head GM and as such I have to make sure that all my table GMs have what they need, when they need it, to run a table smoothly as all the tables play concurrently. Depending on the complexity of the adventure this might mean I give the GMs the adventure the week before. Usually a day's advance notice is sufficient because I'd take the time to prep maps and other game-aids when I could. I'd been known to provide battle-matt overlays and even monster tokens, broken out by encounter, so GMs could focus on running the game and not looking for minis or drawing maps.

Anyway this author was going so far as to try and provide me updates to the adventure the morning of the tournament, making sure he was clear enough on some NPCs motivation. It was all too much, and when asked for an evaluation of his adventure I gave some bluntly honest feedback.

If you are able to do so, I encourage you to look at the adventure T1 The Village of Hommlet. I'd argue that there's a lot of game play to be had, multiple game sessions' worth for certain. My PDF copy is 25 pages, counting the covers. The "Backstory" for the entire adventure is roughly a page and half, spread between the intro and some more on the ruins of the moathouse. Even that is a bit of  stretch because there is a generous three pretty much "read to the players" paragraphs and extra notes to the GM that are a mix of "backstory/motivation" and actual notes (like how some buildings aren't numbered). Everything else is condensed to a simple statement where needed.  

For example, entry 25 states that the herdsman "and the Druid of the Grove are friends". As a GM, that's all I need. I don't need to know that the herdsman's prized ewe that won a blue ribbon at the last Spring-Fair came down with hoof and mouth and the Druid spent two days on round-the-clock care, bringing her back to a state of excellent health such that the herdsman was able to sell her twin lambs later that spring for a record price, allowing him to afford his middle- daughter's dowry so she could marry up in social standing. The herdsman now considers the Druid of the Grove a friend and ally and makes a small offering every week.

Yes, I have been given this level of ridiculousness before.....I wish I had saved the files, but at pennies per MB of storage, it wasn't worth the hard-drive space.

Lastly, nobody values your story more than you do. This is a given and just suck it up! If someone values it enough to pay you five cents a word, then make sure they feel they got five cents a word value! Just because you think you are worth ten cents a word, or than your extra 1,000 words are worthwhile....well they just aren't. Deal with it...preferably in some self-evaluation and not on Twitter/Social Media.

*This is why I'm not a fan of overly detailed drivel, er backstory and motivation. My frustration at having to deal with pages of ultimately useless information and distillation of days worth of my wasted time spilled out into a truthful, but clearly negative review of this author's work. Now I definitely know better now how to appropriate review or critique a body of work.....I'd argue I knew then and refused reason, I created an enemy that day. I'd argue long-term wise this guy got his revenge and then some.

Not Erik Storytime: The Time I Won a Four Hour Tournament in Under Ten Minutes

So far here at the Tavern I've talked a LOT about tournaments, mostly because I have a lot of experience with them. Playing, writing, organizing, etc. One of the things I liked about tournaments, especially HackMaster tournaments, is that they were both competitive and cooperative. You really have to cooperate with your teammates and your party is competing against the parties at the other tables. If it was a single round adventure even better because there really weren't any losers. You got to play and have fun. If you were playing one of your home PCs and he/she/it died, that kind of sucked, but that's a good thing, right?

Seriously, and I don't know why more people don't instinctively get this, but you should get a little upset if your PC dies and that is a good thing because that means you cared and were invested. Nothing ventured, nothing gained......

...anyway I'm at this low-level, pretty sure it was a 1st level only, tournament game running my Double-Specialist Invoker. I'm not going to go all fanboy nerd and talk about my awesome PC because those details don't matter to this story and I'm not really that kind of loser trying to bore a captive audience with a PC stor.....oh shit, I guess I am that kind of loser. Screw it...in for a penny....

...ok, back to the tournament. This was actually the second tournament for this PC, I just hadn't played this guy in a single home game yet so he was just shy of the experience required for second level. For the most part my PC was on the same level as the others that were rolled up just prior to the adventure.....well technically we were on the same level, but my guy had that other adventure under his belt.

The GM starts reading us the set-up into flavor text for the adventure and I start to get a bit worried because I'm sure I've heard this before.....I think I've played this adventure before so I can't play it again per the normal tournament rules. I inform the GM and luckily he tells me it's ok because this is actually a new adventure based on an older one and after the initial flavor text it's all going to change. Sure enough the next paragraph is new and the setup for this adventure is that a local farmer hasn't been heard from in days and we're sent, by the local Sheriff, to specifically find the farmer and protect his property (It was assumed he and his farm were in danger).

The party makes its way to the farm a bit out of town and find the farmer in his home pretty much scared shitless. Evidently some "monster" got into his barn earlier in the week and he just boarded everything up and hid out in the house. He hasn't gone out to check on all his animals in the barn in three or four days......he agrees to come outside to the barn and I ask the fighters to remove the bar as I toss in a small fireball.

Of course the farmer just loses his shit because we're going to set fire to his barn and all his precious animals. Seriously?! You haven't feed any animals in days and shut them up with an unknown monster? Yeah, the animals are effing toast already dude, quite your bitchin.

But the barn!............Oh for fuck's sake!

I ask the farmer how much the animals are worth. As he hems and haws I up the question to the barn, and then just how much for the whole damned farm? The GM, assuming that all the players are running fresh PCs on their 1st adventure, spits out a figure from the farmer of 600 Gold Pieces , which should be more than what the entire party can scrap together.....

"SOLD! Do you want that in gems or gold coins?" Unlike the other PCs I have loot from the 1st tournament, in the form of coins and 100gp pearls.....

The party escorts the farmer back to the town to be dropped of with the Sheriff. My PC hands over a small pouch of pearls. We're not even 10' into this four hour tournament and I get an inordinate amount of pleasure in informing the GM that we just won the tournament: all objectives met, no PC deaths, three hours and fifty minutes early......the task at hand was to find the farmer and save/secure his property. His property was safely in not only his hands, but the hands of the Sheriff.

Now if the rest of the party wants to come back to my farm and help me with a little pest problem.......

....and that is the story how my 1st level DS Invoker won a tournament in less that 10' by buying the farm.

A One-Sided Discussion Regarding Tournaments (pt2)

So if you read my post yesterday you'd probably think that I really don't like tournaments, and really, that wasn't quite my point. What I largely don't like is how most tournaments are run. To me the amount of work involved on the organization side really wasn't worth what the hosting company gets out of it.

Really it's a basic risk/reward ratio. Sure the company (in my case KenzerCo) really didn't have much skin in the game since the real costs (time, money, and more time.....) were borne by volunteers, but if players/fans go to a convention and have a bad experience, or observe problems, then they might not be so apt to keep on playing. Some players I couldn't care less about (like we had one group of players come in second, bitch and moan insanely on the company forum boards, and made a big deal about never coming back......with the huge amount of crunchy record keeping the game had it was clear these guys hadn't interacted with the company, or other fans, in years so their absence would be felt just as much as their participation was!), BUT......games need new players and generally need to keep old players. The hardcore fans will generally ride the waves.

When I came on to the tournament scene I inherited the situation as-is and nothing was really going to change except the continued requests for power creep to take care of what others thought were "problem groups or players". One of my buddies ran a real one-trick pony Magic User, a Double-Specialist Divinator. If you needed to figure out who, what why.....he was your guy. If you ran a tournament where the objective was only to figure out who killed somebody, this PC would have it figured out before most of the table were able to pick up their dice. Trying to write an entire adventure to thwart this guys was recockulus, but an expectation. The thing is, the guy was literally a one-trick pony. He wasn't going to contribute jack-squat to combat...and the game was called HackMaster for pete's sake!

Anyway I dealt the hand I was given and did the best to my level of ability, which wasn't more than the status quo.....until the new edition of the game was coming out. The KenzerCo D-Team still wanted some type of competitive tournament, but the writing on the wall was that the old way really wasn't going to work.

So here I am having the opportunity to create some real change when it came to HackMaster (well, at least HackMaster Basic.....the beginning of 5th Edition HackMaster). I came up with a short list of requirements for "my" tournament:

• The tournament had to be competitive....for those that wanted to compete.
• Players had to be able to drop-in/drop-out of the tournament rounds should they choose
• Scoring had to be "fair"
• After-tournament drama needed to be minimized/no longer an issue

What I envisioned, and was able to execute, was a three round tournament  that accomplished all these things, well as much as possible.

The very first thing I did was layout the general format of three rounds, but instead of an elimination tournament, each round was different. Round one was what we called a traditional Roll-n-Run where players had 30' to create a character from scratch (This version of HackMaster was still kind of crunchy and 30' could be a challenge). Want to play, but really don't want to learn to roll up (or bother with) a character? No problem, here's a huge stack of 1st level pregens....take your pick. Round two was a pre-gen only game where the pregens were actually leveled-up versions of those 1st level pre-gens from the previous round, making it easier for new players that had also played earlier. Round three was a home-PC "only" round where you could play with the same PC you have hopefully been playing with for some time, as it was a higher-level game. No PC, again no problem....here's those same pre-gens leveled up some more.

That took care of my 1st requirement, and pretty much the second requirement as well. Play one round, play all three rounds if you want. Now there was technically still a potential issue with new, inexperienced players wanting to sit down and play the higher-level Home PC game, and they were welcome to do so. One way around keeping this from being an issue was to have that round listed as only for experienced players. The other way was by having a GM ready to run a group of inexperienced players as their own group. If they had shown up to the previous two rounds, then they wouldn't have needed there own group. That 1st year we did have an entire table of newbs, but they just wanted pre-gens and didn't care for the tournament, which was fine, they still got to check out the game and leave happy.

Now for scoring fair........that took me a while to get my head around. Previous scoring was how well the group did and the best table appointing a Most Valuable Player (MVP) who would be the winner. Heck some groups had decided who their MVP would be before they started play, should they win, so the wealth of Serialed Number Items would be spread out in the group. My initial thoughts were to break scoring into three broad parts, and try to minimize some of the potential cheats/tweaks/undue influence from people trying to work the system. The three broad scoring areas were 1) progress as a table (how the group did), 2) how the players thought the other players did, and 3) how the GM thought the players did. Now #2 & #3 had a LOT of potential for abuse, but I was abe to come up with some tweaks:

• Scoring as a group was easy.....how far along did the group progress, factored in by how many players/PCs there were. A table of 8 players could undoubtedly get farther than a group of 6 players (we did our best to have equal table sizes). That wasn't much of a change from the old HackMaster tournaments, although we did reduce the number of encounters so that every group should have a chance at finishing the adventure, where that wasn't necessarily a thing before.
• In order to reduce playing favorites to an extent instead of having a MVP vote or even a simple rating system (which I'd seen before as well), players had to rank the rest of the table. If there were 8 players, then you stacked and racked the other players from best being #1 to relative worst being #7. You did not rank yourself. This was a bit of a pain, record keeping, but I made a quick Excel sheet before hand that factored in table size so the resulting score could be compared across all players and tables.
• For the GM scoring players at their table that ended up being a lot easier as expected because HackMaster revealed the solution. In the HackMaster Basic book (which is free btw) there are two ratings for the GM to apply to a player's role-playing and have to do with the award of Honor, something I'll not get into. The first rating is for the player's ability to adhere to the PC's race and class. Playing a Violent Priest of the Caregiver (a Pacifist Deity).....yeah, that's going to cost you. The other rating is for adhering to the character's Quirks, Flaws, & Honor. Together it's basically "Did you play the character on your sheet, or just do whatever sounded good at the time?" Granted that is an over simplification, but easy-peasy for a HackMaster GM.

Scoring basically was just adding up the player's score from every round they participated in. Person with the highest score wins. The 1st time I did this nobody was surprised at who won, probably because everyone was involved in the process......

Now a smart reader will notice I hadn't touched the last requirement, which was basically to try and nip potential problems in the bud so we didn't have the traditional post-tournament whining. This was actually easy, but also probably a bit overkill since at this point the vast majority of players were either not interested in the tournament as a competition or not the bitch & moan type......but since we didn't have a problem in this area that's just speculation. What I basically did was simply publish the tournament rules. The rules had a clear-cut defined resolution process for IF a problem occurred and made it clear that issues would be taken care of at tournament and only at the tournament. The rules were posted and each table was given a copy, along with a simple read & sign for all players to acknowledge that they not only understood the rules, but agreed to abide by them.

I really wish I still had these assorted documents so I could share them for the maybe one reader who might be someday considering a tournament. Was this setup perfect? I'm certain it wasn't, but did it accomplish my goals and facilitate players being able to game as much as they wanted during the games we had running at the convention? Yes, yes it did.

Really, the posts for these last two days aren't a gripe about tournaments and definitely not me patting myself on the back for running a successful tournament. Personally I'd love to see more tournaments at conventions. I think most gamers are competitive at heart, even if they are real role-players and just want to have fun. A tournament can put a little bit of different pressure on not only individual players, but on a table as a group and that pressure can change things up a little bit. Depending on the adventure the outside pressure of a tournament might actually heighten some in-game pressures, like if the adventure needs to finished within a specified amount of in-game time.....

Besides, if you have some cool company swag to award to a player, do you simply want a MVP or maybe make the player work for it? I'm kidding......or am I?

Truth though, if I managed to give one person an idea they can use....worth it. 

A One-Sided Discussion Regarding Tournaments (pt1)

If you haven't figured out already I like(d) HackMaster and I've spent a LOT of effort on the game and it's publisher Kenzer & Company. I've done a few things for KenzerCo and one of them was working as their "Tournament Manager". I really don't recall the official title, but I've never been one for titles, unless having one makes it easier to get something done.

Basically I helped set up organized play at the two big cons of Origins (my favorite) and GenCon. Solicited authors, arranged for play-testing, wrangled GMs, and usually had to run a table to three myself. It was a fun, terrible, costly job that went largely unappreciated. Something about spending my vacation time, and a lot of money, attending a convention to work for free took its toll. I considered it a good year if I got to play one game a year at a con.

Yeah.....

My history with tournaments goes way back to 2nd Edition AD&D when I was stationed in Germany. In 1995 and 1996 I got to take place in what was billed as the "National AD&D Tournament". I should have won the tourney in 1995 and I was given the tournament in 1996.....both of these are my opinions (duh) and you can skip this story text easily enough:

In 1995 I made it to the final table of the tournament and I got to play a Magic User, which is probably my preferred class. I can say without a shred of doubt that the only reason my party completed the task at hand was a lot of creative spell-casting, but the winner....determined by MVP vote, went to the elf that had some cheap table theatrics. It didn't help that I really pissed off a husband and wife pair that was at the table. The thing is that along with the randomly assigned PCs, each player got a one paragraph statement of how the felt about each other character at the table. My MU didn't like the fighter Solamnus (or something like that) and was 110% confident the idiot would get him killed someday. The husband was playing who I affectionately called "Salami" pretty much throughout the game.....and I know I threw in "meat-head" once or twice. The player and his wife, took it seriously.....seriously?

The next year at the final table I ended up playing the Paladin....in an adventure revolving around the Paladin questing for his Holy Sword. Again....seriously? The entire adventure revolved around my character......MVP was already titled in my favor before even picking up the dice.

Anyway IF your convention had a tournament in the 90's odds are it was a relatively simple affair. Depending on the number of initial players and the pre-determined number of rounds, you advance enough players to make the needed number of tables and end with one table. Usually advancement is determined by the players, often by a simple MVP vote. This methodology is simple, but easily skewed by the players.

There were earlier tournaments, that I did not take place in, that advanced parties through the tournament rounds and the determining factor of which tables/parties advanced was based on a oint system where if the party took action A they got X points and if they did B they made...or possibly lost, Y points. Party deaths may or may not be a factor in awarding points, but in almost all cases, advancing further netted more points. A badly designed adventure could reward parties that simply pushed harder and not smarter.

When HackMaster was getting off the ground, and really all the way through to the end, they had tournaments. HackMaster was already pretty crunchy and there were a lot of records to keep. Part of the serious parody had to do with being a "Certified" or "Leveled" Game Master. There was an actual test to take (and pass) to be considered a bonafide GM. If you wanted to increase your GM level one thing you had to do was run so many local tournaments. This might be fine if you lived in an urban area, but I can tell you that even in the City of Boise City (literally it's legal name) you could get folks to maybe play, but to get enough folks to meet the two table sized requirement......major PITA. I tried running games, er....tournaments at conventions, at game stores.....we had good games, but not enough to qualify as a tournament.

So tournaments could kind of suck at the local level.......and on the national level I come to find out.

This über-crunchy game with the insane amounts of record keeping did have one potentially cool side-benefit: you could play your home character at a convention tournament. At the two big cons we'd have the "Tournament of Champions" or the "Wurld Championship". Groups would bring their home PCs to the convention and strive to win. Depending on the tournament the winning table and/or winning table MVP would win a "Serial Numbered Item", basically a tracked super special magic item. The idea was great and a lot of people enjoyed themselves, but these HackMaster tournaments had a lot of problems as well:

• If you didn't play as a group, especially a well-rounded group used to working together, you were at a SEVERE disadvantage
• These well-rounded, experienced groups added a steady power-creep and absurd over-reaction in needing to create deadly adventures
• To this day if I hear someone tell me I need to write to counter one specific player's PC or to "hit them sideways" to mess with a certain party, Imma gonna hit that bastard sideways.....with a shovel....which I will use to bury them in the nearest patch of dirt...dead or alive.
• Nothing like travelling cross country to attend a tournament, having to block out HUGE chunks of convention time only to be knocked out of the tournament in the 1st round.
• The competitive nature of these tournaments.......I'm just going to say it....lead to cheaters with PCs that were just jacked. I swear players would find a pushover GM and go fucking nuts. Sorry, but when every one of your PCs has 98% or 99% of potential hit points at 7th level (a statistical anomaly with one PC, but an entire group of PCs? Also, even with the best magic gear in the game, your 6th level non-specialist Magic User isn't casting 37 spells a day.
• Every year, or at least every year I wasn't in charge ('cause I got the head's up) inevitably there would be some problems, some sour grapes, and weeks or months of bitching/griping/moaning how one group was robbed. Of course there weren't issues at the damn convention where they could be addressed, but once groups got home after the con.

Now add in these inherent problems into the joy that is trying to get volunteers on board months before the convention, getting folks to put in 10's to 100's of hours into tournament prep.......it really sounds like tournaments aren't worth it.....

.....and you might be right.

When HackMaster 4th Edition was going away and the new edition was coming in, it was clear the crunchy days and over-the-top competitive tournaments needed to go as well. Tomorrow in pt 2 I'll lay out what I did to change tournaments and maybe it'll inspire someone to run/organize a convention tournament series.