The Jousting Competition

The most popular event in a tournament, the event which the tournament revolves around, is the jousting competition.

In this competition, all participating fighters announce themselves to the seneschal, knights' marshal, or other minor dignitary who does the actual work of running the tournament. There is no fee for admission, but each entrant must have his own mount, armor, and lances. It's best if he also has a squire, page or friend to wait by his lance-rack to hand him a new lance when one breaks.

In some societies, all entrants must be of the nobility, but that is necessarily left up to each DM.

The jousting competition is single elimination. The field of entrants is broken down into randomly-chosen pairs (sometimes the choosing is not so random, if the organizers want to pit especially interesting fighters against one another—or to rig the tournament results). Each pair makes a number of jousting passes until one is dismounted (or yields the field—i.e., surrenders in order to avoid further damage). If both combatants are dismounted in the same pass, they get up, remount, and start over.

The winner of the pair advances to the next round of matches; the loser is consoled.

When the number of entrants is an odd number, one fighter doesn't have an opponent. He gets to "fight the bye." An opponent is chosen for the jouster: Someone who lost in an earlier match, a warrior not entered in the competition, etc. Regardless of who wins the match, the jouster is advanced to the next round (and thus has a slight benefit over someone who didn't get to fight the bye); but he's just as tired and injured as any other fighter.

No fighter may fight the bye more than once in any tournament; the organizers re-arrange things if the same fighter ends up without an opponent in another match. By the last matches of the competition, the tournament numbers will have evened out and no more byes will be fought.

With each subsequent round, the number of entrants is halved, until at the end only two are left; the winner of that match is the winner of the tournament.

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