I finished reading them last night. Thanks for sharing this information with me. Bob Blake's article was more about tournament scoring, adventure design and judging fairly. It was very good. The main problems are scoring and consistency. He recommends a combination of objectivity and subjectivity, looking at each adventure separately to devise a scoring system that takes into account its special goals. In the Fire Giant one, you would get points for killing giants in particular, and for the rooms you explored and the clues you found revealing who was really behind the attack. Consistency is a matter of briefing the judges well enough, to make sure every table has the same experience. It's difficult to judge the event, particularly the individual player awards, because there are myriad factors. Dr. Barwick does a great job explaining this, and recommends a checklist of dozens of criteria to answer about the players. I am working on the problem, and I've come up with a number of interesting ideas so far. For starters, I think it's possible after all to have a universal team scoring format, but without a complex formula. Every adventure shares a few things in common, no matter what the plot is. The first is time, which gives us our basic score. The way I understand the approach now is to give each adventure's goals an arbitrary number of points. The problem is the number of points in a tournament can't be compared to the number in another tournament like this. My solution is to use the # of minutes of actual play time (after preparation and a 10 min break), as a universal value for all tournaments in a league. The standard event is 4 hours, which I give 3 Hrs 20 Min, or 200 minutes total actual play time after a 30 min prep. time and a 10 min break at one point called by the DM. So 200 is the number we can base the awards around, so they are scaled comparable to other tournaments. The plot needs to score certain clear goals, where everyone can clearly see if they were achieved with a simple "Yes" or "No". These goals will add up to no more than 200 total where they are the only scoring system used.
I thought of a few concerns. First, if combat begins immediately, players will lose their characters too early. Each player would need some backup's, or some henchmen or forces to control. Second, I am trying to think of a scenario that would be Red Team vs. Blue team, but not be a big battle. I like a joint mission much better, and I think I would give it the name ALLIED GAME. Since the BATTLE ROYAL is what it is, only a scenario really designed for it should be used in an event billed that way.
