h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think it is vital that we support sports that exercise that too often atrophied muscle between the ears. Chess is a one man sport, more for machines than living breathing beings. What better than the team sport of D&D to get the creative adreline flowing.

Ah yes but what eddition? How whould one win? and how whould one loose? I mean it whould have to be the DM's and diffrent players from diffrent countrys in a tournament and then how whould you decide the best DM and the best PC's? who wins the gold medel in other words?

You could do it. Have a single multilingual DM for the sake of consistency, and a odd-numbered panel of judges that could be called upon to make rulings in case of any confusion. Each team would include six players from a single country that would be given a group score.

The score would consist of Experience Points (XP) rewarded both for successful battles and for effective roleplaying. The game would be designed to include many situations where points might or might not be awarded. This would increase the likelihood of a clear winner.

If a tie occurred despite careful design and playtesting of the game by non-contestants before the actual event, the panel of judges would be called upon to make a partial decision on the creativity and effectiveness of the tied teams.

I would recommend using the most recent version of D&D, since the play books are currently in print and readily available. That would currently be version 3.0, though version 3.5 will be available shortly.

I wouldn't recommend making DMing an olympic sport. There are no clear standards for judging a DM's performance as listed in the D&D books.

Yes.. well 3.5 has some problems with it already even before looking at it, in terms of tournoment, 3 is pretty bad, 2 is worse and 1 is actuly pretty good. And well we could go into how 3 is really 4 but lets not.

Although I do agree that role-playing needs to get out of the closet a bit more. I'd go for something a bit more violent though - Werewolf perhaps.

Yes well tournoment rules need to be dictated, truely good roleplayers are not mathmaticains, who can make a 1st Lv Commoner able to beat a DC 26 Dragon. Not that Min/Max is particularly bad it is however a diffrent aspect of the game to what is "acting" your charicter, however the two should and genraly do go hand in hand. There has to be a reason why your a planetouched half clestail warewolf troll.