ToC Rules and Regulations

ToC Rules and Regulations

Tournament Format

The Tournament of Champions is a two-person team tournament following a variation of the traditional ladder format. The teams will be broken up into sub-brackets of eight teams, and will then be paired off against opponents from their sub-bracket. Battle threads will last for three weeks. After that, the round ends for that bracket and posting ceases. Battles from that bracket will then be judged. The winning teams move ahead and are paired off again until only one team remains from each bracket. At that point, the brackets are merged and the semi-finals begin.

All characters are assumed to be revived and healed to their original, pre-battle state after each round.

Arenas

Arenas will be assigned to each pair of battling teams every round. These will not be detailed descriptions, but rather one or two-line prompts. An example would be, “Your battlefield is a hellish wasteland of ash and bone. Fire rains from the sky.” Another example: “You will do battle upon the rooftops of an abandoned city in the dead of night.” It is up to the players to interpret the prompts in detail.

These arena prompts will be drawn from four different pools and assigned at random to each battle. Each pool represents a different category of setting, and are as follows:

Wilderness: Whether raging rivers, mighty mountain ranges, or frightening forests, Wilderness arenas follow the theme of the great outdoors!

Fantasy: Fantasy arenas include aspects clearly supernatural in nature that greatly influence the battle, such as animated trees, raining fire, and other clearly magical elements. It is, however, still fairly androgynous and can easily fit with teams ranging from primitive to futuristic in orientation.

*Medieval: The prompts drawn from this pool contain clearly primitive aspects, such as castle ramparts, Viking-style longboats, or crowded village marketplaces.

*Modern-Future: Battlefields contained here include elements technological in nature or undeniably modern or futuristic settings (though the line is typically drawn at moderate degrees of Post-Modern). You could be fighting on the rooftops of a massive metropolitan city, on a steel bridge crowded with cars, in a futuristic robotics factory, or in an orbital station or a flying fortress.

* To prevent players from feeling stylistically constrained or limited in the creation of their characters, every team is allowed to request that they not be assigned either Medieval or Modern-Future arena prompts for their battles (though only one or the other). Please include this request in your team registration and qualifier trial thread.


Deciding the Winners

IC victory does not influence whether a team wins and advances or not. All players receive a score each round derived from the ToC Rubric. The team with the highest total score wins the round and moves on. All judge rulings are final.

Note: All threads must reach at least 12 posts to qualify for a judgment. Those that do not will be declared incomplete and the team with the most total posts will win by default. Attempting to abuse the default system by, for example, delaying for a week and then posting at the last second will result in disqualification. This will be at moderator discretion.

Fate Slots

Over the course of the ToC, empty spots will appear in the brackets. Some are intentional. Others likely will not be as, given the potential size of this tournament, there is a distinct possibility that a couple teams will drop out entirely in between rounds or that an entire battle or two might fail to even start. This could then result in empty slots in the brackets. Since a primary mission of the ToC is for all participants to battle every round that they remain in the tournament, we will initiate the Fate System to fill these empty spots. Fate slots, when they become available, are handed out to the team(s) with the most 'Fate Points' at that time. Teams earn points when they win battles in the ToC (one point per player multiplied by the round number), if Judges award them to teams for exceptional battles, and players can earn them by winning certain contests in the Side Events forum.

Registration Restrictions

Each player may only enter one character and may only be a member of one team. Judges may not participate, but other staff members managing the tournament remain eligible.