Tournament of Heroes (A RP Tournament)

[Andromeda]

Well it is good to see that I have some people interested. The thread will be staying around at the top for a while to let it all soak in. As I had said, this is to give me a feel for what sort of respond I get. Now to address the questions.

Psiko: First question, the starting time for the tournament is undecided currently. I am going through the process of seeing the respond I get from the forum to plan accordingly. Also I need to work out the story, background and plot for the first tournament. I hopefully will make this first one as memoriable as possible and exciting.

Second question, no like any other tournament you will be not allowed to pick who you go up against. This is not completely cooperative, it is mainly competitive. The groups will be randomized, though if there are sides or warring countries, I will be taking that into consideration as well.

Zeke: As I said in the inital post, character profiles will not be request until the tournament's background, plot and the like has been sorted out. Because I will be treating this like any other RP in the fashion that I will be creating a world for you all to be participating in. As such, I will be making nations, kindgoms, races. I will provide you with enough foundation for you build from. Though creativity and independence to build on your own from what little you are given will be an important part of the tournament and whether you succeed or not.

I do want to emphasis that the quests do not require you to be successful for you to complete them. Your characters could fail in their assignments if the odds are too overwhelming. Victory or failure does not matter, it is the how you get there that is important and the manner in which you do it.

[Merlin]

The whole thing sounds rather vague and contradictory:

• Quests: Each team will have its own quest based off their characters? This makes no sense and is more work than it is worth. For starters, simply creating quests based off of sets of randomly-picked characters would become tedious rather quickly. Not only that, it adds a huge factor of error to the equation of winning. One can easily claim that the quest that they recieved was harder or poorly formed in comparison to that of the quests of other teams. If it is not the same quest for each team it is inherently flawed and unfair. You might be trying to make it more 'friendly' for each team perhaps, but in the end the possibility of inequality will override any benefit you attempted to achieve. It will turn into a competion of alleged favorites.
  
• Judging: One of the most obvious questions that is going to come up is how is this thing going to be judged? With each quest being different for each group, there is no set guideline on how it should be done. Is it based on post length, grammar, creativity(bias? ), originality(once again.. bias? ), etc?
  
• The end: I know this whole thing is based off a RPB Tourney, but does the end need to be an RPB Tourney? I mean really.. from the sounds of it, this is nothing more than a RPB Tourney wrapped up nicely with a RP exterior. In the end, your characters still have to duke it out for supremecy, which is not the core belief instilled in this forum.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, I just think these things need to be cleared up. Although I find the idea noble, I'm not particularly keen on it being based upon the RPB Tourney frameset.

[Andromeda]

Well I was waiting for your response Merlin. And first things I will start off with is that this is not a battle between others in the direct sense that RPB are. The battle is of writing skill and roleplaying skill, you are working in a semi-competitive/cooperative manner. Sounds strange, but the idea is that you have two people or more working to an end goal. From those the winner is decide not from who won, but who was the better RPer.

I was originally thinking about doing all the same quest, but I decided that if I had 8 groups of people all doing the same quest the only differences would be in how they achieved those goals. And while that is one part of it, it also tends to make people inclined to look over at their other groups. So I decide to eliminate that factor, everyone would have an unique quest.

As I said, victory is not what is important in the quest, you seemed to have read over that fact. The winner is not determined by who got to the end and won, but who wrote better than the other. Even in the RPB Tournaments it is not about who got more hits in or who was just about to win. It was who wrote better, the better writer wins, not the combat victor. The same applies to the RP Tournament, it is just going to be using the RP standards of writing and not the RPB standards.

Judging I omited from this thread since it was me testing the waters. I wanted to get the idea out there and the basics. When things get finalized, the judging part will be added. I will be milling it over with other people as well, so that the judging perimeters are as unbias and complete as possible.

And yes it is based off the RPB Tournament TOA. The idea was to create something that easier to manage and simpler, that was more open and did not rely on a team. I love RPing, and it is a team effort that creates the RP as a whole. But lets face it, people are not always so prompt or relible. So I wanted to create something that did not penalize severely for the lack of someone. If someone does not show up for the round, well the other people gets a default. Their team is not dragged down by say "life" or absent mindedness or whatever the case is. I wanted to try to make something that was a little more singular focused to allow for individuals to stand out and not be pulled down but accidents or misfortunes. I liked the TRPT and RPJam ideas, but I wanted something that was a little more accessible to people.

In some ways the tournament goes against the nature of what RPing is. It is not a competitive activity. It is a cooperative, everyone working together. So it is hard to figure out a way to a competitive RPing. The obvious way is teams. Aside from teams what does that leave you with? It leaves you a singular approach, which is obviously going look like a normal tournament, which is what ToA is. But it needs to be done with the RP flair. This my approach to what is a possible parellel to the ToA for RPers. That was my goal in mind, I am not going to deny it. I wanted a ToA for the RPers, it is simple as that. But it had to be done in a way that is suited towards RPs. So it is going to be a little wierd and strange, feeling that you are competing against and working together with your group because you know that one of you is going to move on and the other is not. The end in mind though is that you are working together to the end and the better writer wins. So you can still work together, but whoever writes their parts better is going to be the winner. It is simply judged Roleplaying when you get down to it.

My belief is that there is nothing original anymore and it is only how we do things different that makes us unique from the next person. So saying that it is similar to ToA, yes we are. But that is also like saying that everyone other tournament is like ToA. ToA is in no means original, it is the basic tournament, its been done before. How they make themselves different is through different settings and that is it through writing as opposed to real physical contest. The RP Tournament is like ToA, but it is different from ToA in many ways. The execution is going to be vastly different, it will be treated like another RP, so it will have a world, history, background. It will feel like a RP and not a RPB.

[Merlin]

I didn't overlook the point about 'completing the quest', it was simply irrelevant to what I was saying. The 'storyline' itself for each individual quest is inherently different from your description, which can lead to issues. If you recall the whole Pirate-Theme from my Tournament. The suggesters loved it while everyone else either refused to participate in the practice or struggled with it because it was not their style. That being said, if you create different quests that are different styles, it will cause problems and will technically not be fair.

The burden of ensuring that all quests are of equal difficulty and style will fall flatly in your lap, unless you opt to have help in the future. It shouldn't be as big of a concern since everyone is in the same world, from what I take, but it could still raise issues. Its not on whether they win or not, but whether the 'writing difficulty' of a given style is of equal weight. Kind of hard to explain. Its easy to throw in a quote like 'the best writer wins and they should be able to handle any style' but really, that's a cop-out. One person could get easier to write quests the whole tourney while someone else get hard ones. Who wins? The one with the easy to write ones. Perhaps I overthink things, but think about the following... ^_^

An example of various quests that would be of equal fairness and difficulty(generalized for simplicity sake):
Q1: Team must make their way through a dense forest, obtain a hidden treasure and fight the monster protecting it.
Q2: Team must traverse a desert and rescue a man who is being guarded by a monster.

They are different, but inherently the overall style is similar.

An example of various quests that are not of equal fairness and difficulty:
Q1: Team must make their way through a dense forest, obtain a hidden treasure and fight the monster protecting it.
Q2: Team must defend an outpost against an invading enemy regiment.

They are completely unrelated and the overall style is different.

But, I have a solution for this... create several quests for each tier of the tournament and allow the teams to pick which one they want to do. This way, if they suck at it, its their own damn fault.

EDIT: You really don't have to worry about teams trying to 'cheat' off other people if you think about it... if they are plagiarizing other teams, its pretty easy to tell. That's where the 'originality' factor comes in. If you can't come up with your own ideas besides looking at another team's posts, it will be obvious.

[Nehi]

I'd like to join this rp or tournament. Just tell me when we start.