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Dagni
Sergeant
870 Posts
    
 | | 02/08/2006 5:34 AM |
| What are Vassal Tournaments?
Vassal Tournaments are free online D&D Minis tournaments for players of all skill levels. They offer the chance for any player to be able to compete in tournaments, regardless of whether or not his local area has DDM tournaments.
Players compete for glory, fun and someday soon even prizes! For those eager for a challenge, many of the best players in the world compete on Vassal. Compete in 200 pt Constructed, Epic, Sealed, or Draft tournaments!
Do I need anything to compete?
1. It is pretty much essential that you know how to play DDM before you can join the campaign. If you don't know how to play, buy yourself a starter set, read the rules, and find some friends to play with! If you don't have anyone to battle with locally...read on.
2. You will also need to install, and make yourself familiar with the VASSAL Game Engine - a sweet ass program that allows us to play DDM online. bshugg has written an excellent guide how to get this program up and running. Next thing you'll want to do is try to meet a few people online and play a couple test games. If you don't know how to play DDM yet you'll find, once you've logged in to VASSAL, plenty of players who would love to help out a new player.
The Rules
Standard rules for all Tournaments
1. All tournaments will be run in accordance with the rulebook, errata/FAQ, Guy's Clarifications, and the DCI tournament rules, with the exception of any changes detailed below.
2. All tournaments, unless otherwise stated, will be Assault format, 8 figure limit, on maps, and there will be no speed 2 rule. Every creature will be able to move at normal speed even if not under command.
3. Submitting a warband: as part of signing up for a Constructed tournament, or after receiving / drafting miniatures in a Limited format, each player will submit his warband by directly emailing me. Once everyone has submitted a warband, I will post all the warbands here on MaxMinis for discussion.
4. Logfiles. Logfiles are wonderful. A logfile is a recording of the entire game, even the chat log. It allows anyone to watch the game at his own speed, and whenever he wishes.
Every tournament game should be recorded to a logfile. The match pairings will always assign that responsibility to one of the players: 'Player 1'. To log a game go to File>Begin Logfile, and after the game go to File>End Logfile. Instructions on where and how to upload the logfile after the game will be given at a later date.
5. Scheduling a Match: (Just as with the Eternal Campaign) Each player must email his opponent as soon as possible after the schedule has been posted in order to schedule their match. Players must also post in the round's thread that he has sent his opponent an email, both so that his opponent can respond if he does not receive the email, and so the campaign administrator knows he is attempting to schedule a match. Once a time has been agreed upon one of the players must post the date and time of the match. If after two emails a player has not received a response from his opponent, the player should email the campaign administrator and inform him of the situation.
The assuption will be that everyone's here to compete. If scheduling problems occur, the goal will be to resolve each problem to everyone's satisfaction. If one erson can play, and the other cannot, the player that can play gets awarded the win. In that situation, the player that can't play has a responsibility to concede before it ever gets to the point of a judge being forced to award a win. If worst comes to worst, a double-loss would be given for an unplayed game, but I don't anticipate actually giving out double losses.
6. Tournaments will be untimed, unless otherwise stated. If both players agree, however, they can set a time limit on their game, to avoid a particularly long game that keeps the players from being able to finish the game that week. The time limit should never be less than 90 minutes, and preferably not less than 2 hours, however, as these matches are intended to be basically untimed. Games can be played over multiple days if that works out better for the players.
Sealed format
Each player will get 2 simulated boosters, and make a warband from the minis they received. These first Sealed tournaments will be Underdark boosters. There will be one twist on the normal Sealed format, at least in these first Sealed tourneys. Before every match, each player will get two new boosters, and start from scratch building a warband just from those boosters. In other words, each player gets a new Sealed pull before every game, the warbands don't carry over from game to game.
For the first tournaments, until I get things setup how I want, most likely I will simply directly email all the participants their random 2 sealed boosters. After everyone has submitted a warband, I will post everyone's pulls and warband choices on MaxMinis for discussion.
Draft format
Four player pods will take turns drafting miniatures one at a time from a pool of minis. The rules will be just as normal for D&D Minis Draft with one exception. For those unfamiliar with Drafting rules, they will be carefully explained beforehand.
The actual drafting will be done right here on the MaxMinis message boards! Hopefully, this will encourage a lot of post-draft discussion and online community involvement.
There's rather a long backstory for the one rules twist I'm adding. I'm going to mostly skip it however. Suffice to say that in talking with Ian Richards (head of Organized Play) after the Limited Championships, there was some concern expressed over the extent to which luck seemed to play a role in the drafting. After a few alternatives were discussed, Ian suggested that us SoCal players test out the following Drafting variation. We've only had the chance to do so once - and I thought it was a notable improvement - so I'm going to enlist all of you to help test this variation as well. Even if you think the variation is terrible, you should play it anyway, just so you can then email Ian Richards afterwards and tell him so.
Rather than each player opening one booster at a time, and having the four players draft those 8 minis before opening the next pack, this variation has each player open both his packs at once when it's his turn to open a pack, and draft from a pool of 16 minis before moving on to the next 2 packs. The same number of boosters are used (2 per person) so instead of 8 sets of 8 minis at a time, it's 4 sets of 16 minis at a time.
From the one time I've done it, I felt there was so much more depth to the choices that had to be made each time it was my turn to pick, and also a bit less variability in how much luck can play a role.
This sounds like fun! How do I sign up?!
Go here:
http://www.maxminis.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=15031
- Dagni | |
Proud member of the GRUUMSH fan club! | |
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