Tournament

I'm envisioning a competitive Sentinels of the Multiverse tournament, with meta aspects similar to the Sentinel Tactics tournaments:

• Head to head competition between two contestants, probably individuals, but I suppose it could be teams of people, too.
• Randomly choose two villains, two environments, and eight heroes. Each contestant will fight the same villain and environment, but which villain/environment pair will be used gets decided by choices made by the contestants. The eight heroes get picked, one at a time, by the two contestants. At least three heroes must be chosen by each contestant, but contestants can continue adding heroes as long as any remain, so the contestants don't have to end up with the same number of heroes.
• If one contestant wins their game and the other loses, it's obvious which contestant is the winner of the match, but since SotM is at its core a win or lose game, any method for breaking ties will fundamentally change how the game is played.
• So, make the tiebreaker something that is chosen by the contestants. Possible tiebreakers include: Number of rounds, number of turns, Total remaining HP, number of unincapacitated heroes. Those are off the top of my head. I suspect there are others that could be used.
• Perhaps if both contestants lose, the match would be repeated with a new set of villains, environments, and heroes.
• The coin flip winner can choose either to: A) Decide which villain and environment are used and pick a hero first, or B) Decide which tiebreaker to use and play second.
• I'm not sure if it's more interesting to randomly specify the hero and/or villain variants or make those choices the contestants make.

What do y'all think? 

If people are excited to try this, let me know. I think it would be fun to run a tournament and I think we can do it online.

Sounds fun!

I'm definetly interested if you can get enough people in the tournament.

Hope you all have fun. :-) 

I'm not interested for the same reason I'm not interested in the Spirit Island tournament: I don't have any interest in being competitive with my cooperative games. ;-) That's just me, though, and I have no interest in forcing that on anyone else! :-D 

The one piece that stands out to me as an issue of a tie breaker is HP left as having the Sentinels skews things.   

Yeah, remaining HP is problematic, not just for the Sentinels, but because some heroes use HP as a resource and low HP doesn't necessarily mean they're doing poorly (AZ for instance).  Number of turns would be my pick.  Not that I'd participate; I'm not big on competition either, and have scheduling constraints.

If one used 3 heroes and the other used 5, then the one who used 3 should probably win, eh? Less heroes is usually harder (with a few exceptions for villains, like the Dreamer)

For tiebreaker, how about total elapsed game time?  Favors quick choices over calculating out the optimal sequences.  It also balances out number of Heroes, as more Heroes will likely make the game take longer, but without directly favoring for lower numbers of Heroes.

Thanks for the ideas.

Did you all catch that choosing the tiebreaker to be used for a particular match becomes part of the strategy for the match? 

You could just have no tiebreaker, and each pair of players continues to play until one wins and the other loses. 1st repeat is on Advanced, 2nd is on Challenge, 3rd and further are on Ultimate =)

Some Ultimates could still go on for a long time before someone loses (and a few could take many tries until someone wins).  And if we're talking about a tournament, skill differentials narrow the longer it goes on--you could have a whole lot of games before one wins and one loses.

It's not like there's a TV timeslot it needs to fit in. I'm not suggesting they play the same game over and over - it's a new game setup each time. Lots of variability.

In fact you might want to have multiple games anyways. A best of 7 series is a better indicator of who's better than a single game.

I like the idea of doing best out of 5 or 7. I agree with it making it a little bit better of an indicator of who is better.

I guess it could be like chess: Twelve matches. One point for a victory. Half a point for a tie. If it ends at 6-6, keep going until there's a winner.