Anyways, this was totally inspired by an event that BRM set up over on BG a couple years back where the local powers that be threw a festival, and as part of said festival, a tournament of games and other activities were held.
Now my suggestion is that we try to do these kinds of events on a more regular basis, with perhaps rotating them across servers. Of course it would not be the same festival or tournament, but made to be a local affair. For example on BG, its something thrown by the dukes, over on MS it's a day here people celebrate the bounty of the sea, etc etc. Perhaps these could be done every 6 months or so, or whatever is doable by whoever plans them and sets it up. As some have pointed out, BG might be a good place to start this off, but I really think it could work anywhere.
In my opinion, these kinds of events would serve to attract people to the server, get people to interact with each other who normally wouldn't do so, and obviously provide many a plot hook. Prizes and awards also would be a part of this, some of this could be a combination of npc and pc's sponsoring various prizes and monetary awards.
Right off the bat, a number of contests should be quite easy to set up, among them are sword fighting contests(or maces, halberds, whatever), team vs team melee, archery, various throwing contests, wrestling and various minor games of skill, such as eating or drinking contests. In many of these contests, there would be tiered rankings, as well as allowing players to move on to face increasingly difficult challengers as they go, also this would allow for example 1st, 2nd and 3rd place finishers. In my opinion, these kinds of contests would be done without magic and there would be wizards and priests about to check that competitors are not "cheating." Now this doesn't mean there would be no magic in these tournaments, in fact there should be some contests of magic, but i'm not sure how those would be judged, or how winners would be determined.
A little more difficult to handle but still doable are contests where player skill in RP and the PC's stats diverge quite a bit. A good example being competitions amongst bards, poets, musicians and the like. Contests like these could result in two bards, one being a level 1 lowbie...but is played by someone who writes for a living and has no issue throwing out masterpieces at a moments notice, while the other person might be level 8, and have 20 ranks in perform but who generally has gotten by through emoting "sings really good" while rolling said +20 to perform. As was discussed in chat, there are ways to handle these, through a mixture of use of stats and subjective measure, perhaps by allocating bonuses and penalties to the competitors. But if anyone has any good ideas on this, it will only help i'm sure.
The last thing to consider(outside of anything i'm missing) are the technical aspects of getting this going. As we've been seeing of late, its not difficult to see 20 or so people playing across the servers, so I think there wouldn't be too much of an issue getting player participation, but there will be need for help running the event. One option thats quite doable is to allow PC's to help coordinate and judge various events (outside of ones they're participating in) and secondly, allow DM's from other servers to temporarily DM on whatever server's running the event. I figure that for 20 people, 3-4 DMs minimum, and a few PC's helping in leadership positions as judges and sponsors could help things go relatively smoothly.
So what do you folks think? Can this be done? If you have any comments or suggestions as to how this could work....please do share
