So in the campaign I am running at the moment (D&D 3.5) the players will soon find out about a duel tournament where teams can sign up and battle each other for glory and .... you guessed it; gold. I have no idea if the players will bite on the advertisement, but the idea is that this tournament/event is hosted continually and they might want to try it out sometime.
I want the fights to be dangerous and a serious threat to one or more members of the party, but failure should be less than a 50/50 chance. More like 30/70 or 40/60 (The participants are allowed to yield and a fight is won when either a team forfeits, are knocked unconscious or are killed). It is not underground and participants sign treaties accepting that no one but themselves can be held responsible for any deaths in the arena.
My players aren’t super optimizers but they are all fairly good at selecting decent options for their characters. They usually fight monsters 2 CR above the suggested CR (in DMG). The party consist of:
Goliath (LA bought off) barbarian with ranger and warblade levels. He is dual wielding shields and bash with these.
Goliath (LA bought off) Warblade, focusing on charging maneuvers.
Poison dusk lizardfolk (with LA bought off), focusing on archery.
And finally a illumian barbarian/battle sorcerer, who wants to enter reworked rage mage
http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=10640.0 with a nerfed Feral-template. LA1 bought off as well.
As you can see they have very little magic. The only spell the barb/sorc is casting is shield before entering rage.
I was thinking about making the enemy teams consisting of characters level 80% of the average level of the PCs (and adjusting this depending on how powerful the team composition and character choices I make for each team), giving the PCs the best odds, while still making the encounters lethal. Thus if the PC decides to enter the tournament they would fight enemies of primarily 4th level. Is this a good idea? If not, what could I do instead?
There will be three different arenas which is selected at random for each fight.
I would like some team and arena ideas. I want the areanas to be very different from eachother. Different underlay, different obstacles and such, and I want the teams to be very diverse as well: different amount of magic-usage, some focusing on dealing damage at range, some only in mellee. Some dealing damage via sneak attack and stealth and some by raw force straight-in-your-face style. You get the gist.
If you got any cool ideas then feel free to post them!
