# RPG A DAY 2025: Day 12 - Path tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2025 ![[RPG a Day 2025 (illo).png]] I think there's a style of storytelling, a formation of narrative, that very often gets overlooked because it's considered too lowbrow, even for the connoisseurs of genre fiction, to really study and accept that it might be something worth exploring. I'm referring to "tournament narratives." If you've ever been an aficionado of Hong Kong action movies of the 70s, or you have ever had a brief conversation with one, you know that half of them were set up along the lines of **Tournament of Death**.[^1]  Actually, I would like to specifically focus on tournaments which aren't to the death, even if sometimes they get that name. They live next door to the much less prosaic sports movie. What we're talking about is the kind of tournament where everything is resolved with a fight—generally something well choreographed and ultimately non-lethal. - Two protagonists meet and are sizing each other up? **There's going to be a kung fu fight.** - The enemies have a falling out with one another? **There's going to be a kung fu fight.** - Every other scene involves the protagonists working their way up some sort of organization, either a criminal organization where they are taking on first street-level hoods, then mid-level opponents, lieutenants, and finally the big bad guy? **They're going to kung fu fight.** - There is a literal arranged event in which people are chosen to fight one another to see who wins and it's only in the last couple of rounds where things could get absolutely lethal? **They're going to kung fu fight!**[^2] The underlying structure seems as though it should be extremely formulaic, and at a certain level, it is. But that's part of the joy of the tournament movie. You know what is going to happen, at least in broad swaths. You're going to have some protagonists, they're going to have some opposition, perhaps they even get beat a couple of times at the beginning to show that they are the underdogs. They do some training or learn some things, fight their way up, and eventually stand triumphant at the end of the battle, achieving the emotional stakes that have been on the line the whole time. That is what everybody showed up to see, and by God, did we get it. So why don't we have more games that are structured like this? ## Street Fighter ![[Street Fighter - The Storytelling Game (cover).jpg|200]] We don't talk about **Street Fighter** because—okay, let's talk about **[[Street Fighter - The Storytelling Game|Street Fighter]]**. The year was 1994, and one of the biggest role-playing game companies on the planet, arguably the most successful one at that point in time, was White Wolf. White Wolf was made up of what would currently be referred to as *"a bunch of jumped-up theater kids,"* who brought a fairly different sensibility to the hobby. Their games were edgy, dark, and about implicit themes of rape, violence, ecological damage, the suffering of death, and the joylessness of existence. The *World of Darkness* lived up to its name. The problem, insofar as there is one, was that they were geeks. They were geeks that were brought up at a certain time in our cultural history where the arcade was the place to hang out, spend time with your friends, and generally waste your money. The internet existed, but it wasn't really accessible yet, and the web was still a long way off. In the future, the arcade was where it was at, and the fighting game was the king of the mountain. Look, I'll just give you the short version. **Street Fighter** wasn't a very good product. It used the same mechanics as the rest of the World of Darkness but went balls deep into the gonzo ridiculousness of the setting. It makes a great setting book, but it is lousy mechanically for actually emulating the feel of the 90s fighting game genre. Its mechanics were really designed to do interpersonal stories of pain and horror, and that just doesn't work for a big green guy who can hunch over and fart out lightning. Basic tonal mismatch. But the concept was there. The idea of the tournament game as the framework for play existed, while White Wolf weren't the guys to bring it about. Joe Prince certainly was, and he did it with a little game called **Contenders**. ## Contenders ![[Contenders (cover).jpg|200]] I've written about **[[Contenders]]** before, and I'm sure I will continue to in the future. It's a very tight, very evocative GM-less game about boxers who, for one reason or another, are at the low point of their lives. Maybe they got caught throwing a match, or maybe somebody really wanted them to, and they didn't. Maybe they just are down on their luck, and they need that one big break. You know all the story setups because you've seen them, and you love them. **Contenders** is about fighting your way up and maybe reaching glory—and maybe not. Maybe you fall short. Maybe you betray the things that you loved most along the way. Maybe you hold on to them, even when it would be better to let them go. That's the game. It's inherently structured around working out what you do at every turn, but you are going to need to get into matches in order to work your way up. That is the core of the engine. Everything else exists to support that. If you're looking for the purest example of the tournament game as story framework abstraction in RPGs, it's right there. ## Eternal Contenders ![[Eternal Contenders (cover).jpg|200]] Joe wasn't content to leave things there, of course. Much like the protagonists of the game, he came back to it with something all new, under the hood. Well, perhaps not that new. **[[Eternal Contenders]]** (I know, not the most imaginative title) moves the action from Rocky Balboa's Philadelphia to a rundown, near-steampunk version of grim and gritty Western Europe. Again, the protagonists are down on their luck—impressively violent individuals in a violent culture. While not everything is settled with a duel, 80% of the things that you're going to run into are—and, again, not always to the death. Unlike **Contenders**, **Eternal Contenders** is structured more with an eye toward *almost* traditional RPG fantasy. It never really does it, but it's as though Prince is standing to the side and nodding slightly in acknowledgment. Fight your way to the top. Look after your personal concerns. Make hard, painful decisions along the way. At the bottom of it all, we're looking at the tournament plot again. ## Panic at the Dojo ![[Panic at the Dojo (cover).jpg|200]] Who's the latest fighter on the world stage? That would be **[[Panic at the Dojo]]**,[^3] which doesn't even make a pretension of being about anything other than the tournament motif, even when it's not about the tournament motif. I don't think I've ever seen a game lean as hard into being so inspired by the video games which birthed it, whether it be tournament fighters like **[Mortal Kombat](https://www.mortalkombat.com/en-us)** or beat-em-up side-scrollers like **[Final Fight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fight_(video_game))**. If you're looking for that game, this is that game. Here is a game that is *all about* the fighting mechanics. Remember how I was talking about the 70s and 80s tournament-style movies where characters meet each other, fight, have a disagreement, fight, agree with each other, then go off to fight some other guy, and then affirm their friendship by fighting? Here you go. It's almost as if someone asked one of my rhetorical design questions: *"What would happen if you replaced all of the mechanics in an RPG with combat mechanics and just didn't mention it, with the underlying assumption that you will use the fight mechanics to resolve every conflict?"* That's what it does. I'm not going to lie, I kind of like it. There's a certain purity of form, by focusing so entirely on doing one thing and doing it exhaustively well. ![[Panic at the Dojo - Basics of Play (illo spread).webp]] Also, that is some hardcore old-school layout. I hope that they make some changes there before the second edition is released, which should be very soon. ## On the Path Do you need to be playing one of the above games to really have a tournament-style experience? Absolutely not. You can do it with whatever your favorite game is. There is one necessary caveat: you need to be able to do something other than lethal damage. Most of your conflicts need to be non-lethal, with the opponent either being knocked out, tapping out, forfeiting, or perhaps the fight merely going to first blood. You need to be able to step away from a given fight with one party knowing that they've lost and one party knowing that they've won. Then the consequences get applied, because there always needs to be some stake for the conflict. Sure, there's always, "I want to move up in the tournament," but individual fights are never that simple. There's always something on the line. Are you trying to impress someone with your fighting prowess? Are you trying to secretly throw the match because someone has kidnapped your fiancé? Are you sending a message to the head of the tournament by beating one of his cronies so badly he may never walk again while staring intently into the chairman's eyes the whole time? There's always some sort of interesting stake on the table beyond the fight itself, which means that not killing your enemy is part and parcel of making the story work. That has to be expressed within the potential mechanics. What else do you need? Characters that care about things. I know I go on at great length about this all the time whenever I talk about character creation and character construction systems, but here we go again. Characters need motivations. Characters need things that they want but can't have. And they need to have something that they're doing, motivated by that lack. Put that together with a lightweight character generation system with some random elements so you can just put together an opponent quickly, one that has some elements that perhaps you didn't expect, and away you go. Have the characters get recruited. Take them to a secluded place. Set them against one another. Away you go. There's no reason that you have to limit the tournament format just to a modern setting, either. - Perhaps a series of complicated wizard's duels to decide who ascends to the chair of Archmagus, and the invitations are delivered by owls. - Maybe your fantasy world has a small kingdom which is really into gladiatorial combat, and all voting members of the polity have been gladiators. If you want to have a voice in the political system, you need to spend time in the pit. - If your setting is grounded in cassette futurism, nothing says dirty, grimy underbelly of the corporate world like a series of underground fights: man versus alien, man versus robot, robot versus alien.[^4] There's plenty of red meat there and a good reason to keep moving from planet to planet as you make your way through the circuit. While it's true that a lot of the RPG Illuminati look down on the lowly tournament format, I think it has plenty of material to work with, and it's a shame to leave something that good on the table. Whether it be the focus of your entire campaign or just the reason that your characters move from place to place, maybe you should consider a tournament. All the excitement of fights to the death, without all the death—except sometimes. [^1]: At least when they weren't about gangsters having really awesome gunfights. Look, there are some things that we really need to get back to. [^2]: Not going to lie, my favorite example of a movie of this form is probably not one that you've ever heard of, but instead is **Man of Tai Chi**, in which a Tai Chi practitioner is lured into a seedy combat tournament where he applies his increasingly corrupted style to fight his way up to the big guy in order to save his temple. Who's the big guy, you might ask? It's Keanu Reeves, doing a dual turn as the bad guy of the piece and the producer of the movie. It is fantastic.  [^3]: Which my system keeps working very hard to render as *Panic! at the Dojo*, like *Panic! at the Disco*, and it just makes me laugh every time. It's wrong, but it makes me laugh. [^4]: See: The *wonderful* episode of **[Love, Death and Robots](https://youtu.be/wUFwunMKa4E)**, S1E1, for a fine inspiration here.