March 16, 2007

Wurld Open Tournament


A few members of the HackMaster Association kicking around the idea of having a truly international tournament event. We have the Tournament of Champions (TOC) at Origins and the Wurld Championship (WC) at GenCon, but those events are primarily for Americans (heck I’d even go so far as to say for those Americans living in the eastern half of the country). The format that was decided upon was to have home groups sign up to play and run the tournament rounds in place of their normal home game. A group of writers/evaluators volunteered and went to work.


We had 22 teams sign up for the first round and every group GM was sent the adventure and a group of 6 pregens (pre-generated characters) for the players. The pregens consisted of (and I might get some details a bit wrong): a half-elf druid, an elven ranger, a dwarven fighter, an elven battlemage, a gnome thief, and a Halfling cleric. Each pregen had a few useful skills and some debilitating quirks and flaws. After each tournament round the GM had a report to fill out and submit to the judges, who had a pre-determined point system. Basically each teamed earned points for completing each encounter and good role-play and lost points for character deaths and bad role-play (like not playing out the quirks and flaws).

Eleven teams, including ours, advanced to the second round. From there five teams advanced to the third, or semi-final, round. We did pretty well in the second round so we get to advance again. The tournament rounds are released about a month apart and for the first two rounds Carolyn and I drove down to Salt Lake City where the rest of our team resides. Later this month a couple of players are coming up to Boise and those that cannot will gather and play at one player’s house. We’ll hook up using some chat software and a webcam.

Our group makeup for the first two rounds has been Joe playing the thief, Bethany the ranger, John the battlemage, Lars the cleric, Shad the fighter, and I played the druid. Carolyn was out GM.

While I can’t recall the specific strengths (skills & talents) of the other PCs, or even their quirks and flaws, I remember enough of the druid’s. The druid didn’t have much anything special except for Mobile Spellcasting, but the quirks were pretty devastating: Claustrophobia and Pack Rat.

More to follow……

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