Simple question: any experience corcening this?

How did you organize a Descent tournament?

Here's my idea...

I'm planning to create an exclusive Descent club in my zone, a place where parties of players can team-up against an "official" OL (a member of the crew), hiring him for a selected campaign.

In my plains, the house could offer many options to its customers, such as dedicated night sessions for each single group of players, with a personal OL throughout the entire campaign.

For every scenario in a quest that the party overcomes, it will receive 1 tournament point, regardless the other prizes normally present in the quest. At the end of each single campaign, the party will count how many tournament points it gained. A special chart would be published periodically, to report which party obtained the highest score.

At the end of the season (i.e. 6 months, less or more), we'll have the best party in the club.

This could be an idea for a kind of tournament in Descent, but, of course, it needs at least two parties (better if more), a place dedicated and a lot of people who heavily love the game!

What do you think?

Nice idea.

The only requirement is to have people who accept the luck factor and who know how to lose and win as gentlemen.

Over serious and competitive gamers could not adapt to the idea of a tournament where skill is not the only (or dare I say principal?) element that leads to victory.

But the idea of maintaining some emulation and competitivity between teams is nice.

BTW, you are a happy group of players to be enough to compete in a tournament format.

Over serious and competitive gamers could not adapt to the idea of a tournament where skill is not the only (or dare I say principal?) element that leads to victory.

I still believe that skill remains one of the most important factor to win in Descent. Naturally, it's not the only one, but it needs a lot of skill in order to choose among the plenty of options (as OL and as hero) you have when you travel throughout a classical campaign.

As customer, I'm pretty sure I'd accept to start a campaign if i'd know that my party would be the best among the other groups, at the end of the season. One reason more to win a campaign could be to enfatize the possibility to conquest special prizes, of course, something like particular gadgets (t-shirts, painted minions, cinema ticket, and so on...).

BTW, thanks a lot for your very important point of view!

I would OL in a heart beat for something like this ^.^!

Most of the people in this forum has always played Descent as OL, or mainly as OL. Only a few of those played Descent as hero actually played it ONLY as hero.

The original idea of a "Descent gaming club" is possible to realize only if, among 20 guys who want to play Descent, there are at least 15-16 "customers" aspiring heroes: the fact is that often it's very difficult to find guys just to create one party!

The club would recruit 2 or 3 official OLs, each of which would be assigned to different groups of heroes. The OL assigned, of course, will remain the same throughout an entire campaign.

BTW, that's only pure speculation...

Great idea i love doing both Ol and adventure. I taught my 5 friends last session and didnt even play just acted as a teacher. It was still fun though.

I'll be honest, I don't think Campaign Play would make a good tournament. If you're going to go with a Tournament format, I recommend sticking with Epic Play variants. Then instead of having each dedicated Overlord stick with a single hero group, assign each overlord a set of quests that they will know inside and out and how best to adapt to different parties. I'd go through and hand-pick quests which don't seem to clearly favor one side over the other. Then make sure that everyone has to play the same quest/overlord combos as everyone else.

Some example awards:

Win the quest: 10 points

For quests with 2 encounters, up to 5 points for the 1st encounter if they win. (Some quests may have different conditions, e.g. In a Fat Goblin, up to 5 points for the first encounter. 1 point per bundle saved, 1 extra point if they get all 4)

For larger quests with only 1 encounter (like interludes), maybe award 15 points for winning the quest.

For every 50 (or 100?) gold earned during the quest, 1 point.

If you want to add "progression" to the tournament, I'd say start the first few quests as Basic (Intro + 2 Act I), then move up to Advanced for a few quests (1 Act I, an Interlude, 1 Act II), then Epic for the last few (2 Act II, Finale). (Each Overlord would have 1 quest assigned to them at each level) But each individual quest is an isolated event.

If you really want to encourage more overall builds, you could restrict the upgrades from each section to build on the last one. So in transitioning from Advanced to Expert, they get 3 additional experience and an additional 100 gold instead of starting from scratch with 6 XP and 250 gold. (Note that this is NOT how these values are balanced, and may lean things in favor of the Overlords, unless you do the same to them, as they'll have had a chance to see each of the parties before moving on to the next level of play.)

Remember that in tournament play, you almost always want to eliminate as many variables as possible. If you want people to take your events seriously, you'll make a point of eliminating things that could lean in favor of a single group for the entire event (like getting stuck with a really nasty or really pushover overlord). I would probably also avoid the Conversion Kit and just stick with the base game and possibly even expansions (but I think you could probably save those for a second tournament).

Best of luck and let us know how it goes.

Griton, I appreciated so much your suggestion. BTW, I still love the Campaign modality of Descent, which can give always great fun, even in a tournament setting (IMO). Of course, the Descent "gaming club" I have in mind could offer also an "Epic Experience" of Descent, as you suggest: it would be depend on the customers...

As far as a gaming club is concerned, the campaign play would definitely be a lot of fun, and posting progress for each campaign that's going on would be great as well. I just wouldn't try to turn it into a tournament where the intent is to be competitive. A little competition in an event that is otherwise there for fun is absolutely great, but it is definitely different than making sure people have fun in an event that is intended to be competitive. (Note that when I say competitive in this sense, I'm referring to competition across "campaigns" with heroes competing against other heroes, not the Overlord-Hero competition) In the former, you're letting the game balance handle the Overlord-Hero competition, but trying to expand that into Inter-hero-party competition is almost impossible. In the latter, you want to make sure that everyone is on as equal footing as possible, otherwise people may get fed up with the swing effect and feel that progress is pointless, at which point they may stop having fun.

So here's my suggestion: Get the gaming club going and post campaign progress publicly, but don't worry about an officially competitive tournament until you know you've got the interest. I think at a minimum, you'll need at least 9 people: 3 overlords, 6 hero-players in teams of 2, each controlling 2 heroes. Ideally, you'll have 3 Overlords and 12 hero players. If you do get enough interest in an official tournament, you'll have plenty of players willing to help collaborate and organize and offer opinions on what THEY would find interesting.

Cheers!

So here's my suggestion: Get the gaming club going and post campaign progress publicly, but don't worry about an officially competitive tournament until you know you've got the interest. I think at a minimum, you'll need at least 9 people: 3 overlords, 6 hero-players in teams of 2, each controlling 2 heroes. Ideally, you'll have 3 Overlords and 12 hero players. If you do get enough interest in an official tournament, you'll have plenty of players willing to help collaborate and organize and offer opinions on what THEY would find interesting.

Cheers!

That's a great suggestion! I ,like the idea of "mini parties".Always, I figure them across a campaign-mode competition, not in single events (even if they actually could be more usefull for the purpose of a tournament)

Tnx a lot!

I really like the basic concept here. I believe it has great promise. A few things you need to think about as you advance this idea into reality.

1). How are you going to deal with the death of a player' s character.

2) will there be an opportunity to reset and add or change characters between sessions?

3). How will you handle the fact that some players may not make every session? Do you allow substitutes?

I really like the basic concept here. I believe it has great promise. A few things you need to think about as you advance this idea into reality.

1). How are you going to deal with the death of a player' s character.

2) will there be an opportunity to reset and add or change characters between sessions?

3). How will you handle the fact that some players may not make every session? Do you allow substitutes?

1) the hero's death works the same way as in a "normal" Descent campaign

2) No. My original idea was to handle the game game sessions of the Descent gaming club exactly like they were parts of a classic campaign. So the answer can only be "no"! Only in the case the party chooses to play a series of "single-quest night sessions", the players can change their characters between sessions, but this is not allowed throughout a campaign. Obviously, parties who play "the single quest night sessions modality" will have less possibilities to score a great amount of "tournament points" in the club chart than parties who play a whole campaign. For this reason, maybe makes more sense to have two diferent charts at the end of a "regular season"...

3)Substitutes are allowed. The concept is that every party "pays" a sort of registration fee when it enter the club, which allows that (two o more) players of that group may play several sessions in the club: it doesn't matter if the "party A" is formed by John, Nathan and Eleonor OR (for one night) by Andrew, Zak and Bob when they have to replace their three friends. It remains always "party A" for the pourpose of the Descent Gaming Club!

Of course, it always desirable that a party remained the same from the beginning to the end of a campaign