Sports and D&D are not something that one would automatically link together. At least I don’t see it. Most of my gaming friends over the years are people who either were not good at sports or just didn’t like them. But not all sports involve a ball and scoring points.
If you look at it more along the lines of athletic competitions, you can get a lot of sporting events in your fantasy game. Throwing axes, spears, or archery can earn fame or even coins. Gladiatorial combat would always draw a crowd and it need not always be a fatal bout. You can also look at westerns and all the cowboy activities. Roping, wrangling, and riding can all be fun things to add to your game. All of these can be easily done with skill checks and/or skill challenges. Athletics, Acrobatics, Animal handling, nature, and survival work well for the rodeo-type activities.
If you look to stories, you hear of wild boar hunts, if you jump it up into fantasy, it can be reimagined into something like an owlbear, a bulette, a displacer beast, or anything else that fits the theme, and the area hosting the hunt. It even has the ability to be a ritualistic hunt of a scared creature where you are looking to be the first to get your ring on its horn or take a feather from its plumage. Again I always look for ways to have non-combat options. But if you want it to be combat, be as brutal as you like.
When Dave brought up the topic of sports. I wanted to add something new and ridiculous. I recently purchased the WizKids mini: The Tarrasque, and how ridiculous would it be to have to climb on the tarrasque and survive while trying to pull off some kind of scale? Attack rolls, skill checks, and saving throws could all be built into scaling the massive creature, staying on while it tries to either remove or eat you, and then cutting off a horn or scale.
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March 19, 2023 at 11:32 am