The Joust and Tourneys

Starting a new game soon based around a group of desperate characters come together at a knightly tourney, and thought I’d put together some rules for jousting. I remember years back there were some pretty decent rules on the BWG wiki, but I’ve been unable to find them or that wiki. So, what’s here was inspired by what I remembered.

If you could take a look and offer feedback, that would be greatly appreciated. I haven’t posted or played in awhile.

The Joust
Running ‘the tilt’ as it is sometimes called would consist of a linked Riding test, into a Lance test.

The Riding test would face standard obstacles per the rules on pg 533.

The Lance test would then work similarly to Bloody Versus, where the player splits their Lance dice into two pools - one for attack, and one defense.

Obstacles to hit again are standard per the Bloody Versus rules on pg 426.

Breaking Lances and Scoring Points
The character scores points in the tilt by either breaking their lance, or unseating their opponent. 1 point is awarded for a broken lance, 3 points are rewarded for unseating a rider.

Im using the standard mounted combat rules from pg 534 with this modification:

After a successful Lance hit roll a die of fate. On a 1 your lance breaks. Additional successes may be spent to increase the die of fate.

  • One extra success increases the chance to 2-in-6
  • Doubling the obstacle increases the chance to 3-in-6
  • Tripling the obstacle increases the chance to 4-in-6.

They run the tilt 3 times. First character to 3 points, or with the most points after 3 tilts advances to the next round.

Are these ok? Thanks for any feedback.

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We did a little bit of jousting in a game I ran a while back.

I think we did it as a straight vs test, Lance vs Lance, winner won the contest.

We gave an advantage die to jouster with the better Ride skill (I think the linked test is kind of superfluous, honestly. You could get another die for the better horse. I think we also gave advantage for higher Reflexes and maybe Power, too. If you lost, you had to make the Unhorse Him! test as normal because jousting could be dangerous business.

On a tie, you were each assumed to have broken your lances at about the same time all three times. Then, you might: Accept the tie. Or make a vs Conspicuous test to be deemed the better jouster by the judge/crowd. Or break the tie in a contest of other knightly arms. Or run another tilt, this time as a Vs Test using Riding or maybe Agility or Power.

We also assumed that tourney lances are meant to break, and so are less dangerous – we didn’t account for actual injury caused by the lances (though a means of doing so could be cool, I think).

I would probably try to avoid making a series of tests out of this, but that’s just me.

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