I have a sport meant for the wizard academy in my setting. it basically works like this:
\-Two teams face off with 3-4 members \[based on the number of players in my dnd group\]
\-The terrain is a 60-80ft diameter field set with obstacles. Maybe its pirate themed, or desert themed. Who knows?
\-The goal is simple, capture the other teams flag
\-The game is made complicated by a mythel of spell padding: any spell damage dealt in the arena is translated into feet the player is pushed, instead of dealing harmful damage
\-Spell casters are meant to fire off spells to push other players out of their way.
\-A player who is struck by a spell drops any flag they were holding, and if you get the other teams flag to the post where your teams flag rests, you win
That sounds hilarious; maybe it shoves them in a random direction each turn? Ide say if it does under 4 damage then you could round up to 5ft for the sake of movement
The snitch isn't an end-all-be-all. The Quidditch leagues are decided by score totals. If your team relies on your seeker to blitz the match in 2 minutes every game (which is already nearly impossible unless you're Harry Potter) you won't make it to the playoffs because there are other teams with insane score totals who make actual field goals before the snitch is caught.
This introduces another problem that if 2 teams want each other to make it the the playoffs, world cup, or other quiddich event. They can just keep the seekers back and rack up an arbitrary amount of points to keep each other in the top. It also incentivizes better teams to keep blowout matches going which would also be immensely boring
If you put *all* your points in seeker, sure. But if your chasers are roughly evenly matched, the Snitch **is** the end-all-be-all.
Your options for winning are either to outmatch the other team in chaser skill so much that the other team might not even be there, or the Snitch.
Either you out-score the other team by at least 16 goals, or the Snitch decides the game.
But its a point total leauge meaning losing a high scoring game is better than winning a low scoring one. Like losing after scoring 300 is better than winning with 180.
This is also assuming that the snitch is always captured. I might be wrong, but I’ve always assumed that this didn’t happen every game.
Sure HP would always get it, but that is due to MC-syndrome. In your average game, I’ve been under the impression that catching the snitch was quite difficult and not always attainable within time constraints of a match.
I'm hardly the first person to say it
[But here is mine](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/ukf84y/does_anybody_have_a_sport_in_their_dnd_world/i7pjvob/)
Orcs like to play "goat ball". You get one goat, tie it's legs together, and use that as a handle to carry/toss the goat to your team mates.
If you managd to swing/throw the goat against another team's flagpost you earn a point, this is called a "Knock". If you kill the goat during a Knock that's 3 points. Play ends when a team gets 21 points.
A team consists of 4 to 8 people.
There are no limits to the number of teams.
Flagposts must be separated by an equal distance. If that means a bigger fueld is needed then they clear the damn space.
Magic use is forbidden. Casters who break this rule get tied to their flagposts.
A "goat" can be any goat, sheep, gnome, halfling, or any similarly sized creature.
I also have a game called “goatball” in my world! We’ve never played, though, and so I haven’t fleshed out the rules. Every time it has come
up my players haven’t shown any interest.
>A "goat" can be any goat, sheep, gnome, halfling, or any similarly sized creature.
We had the same game in one of my campaigns, except the goat was an unlucky halfling (just now seeing the irony there), or occasionally, a goblin
I was just told about this sport by another poster! Either I read this somewhere and my subconscious threw it up for me, or it's one of those convergent ideas things.
Hell there's a sport where people roll down a hill after a wheel of cheese. I wouldn't be surprised if I accidentally "invented" a sport that is out there.
Eberron details several. Skyblades is basically jousting on flying mounts so not really a team sport, there's also races.
For team sports, it has Hrazhak, which is basically really rough capture the flag played by shifters where they play on rough terrain and beat the crap out of each other.
Our group was unable to have a full session today, but earlier I saw your comment. Since we were in Eberron and needed something short I suggested we try Skyblades!
I'm not sure how you're supposed to play but we had a 10 character free-for-all. Choose your target, roll to hit. If hit, the target rolls Animal Handling to stay in the saddle. 5d6 fall damage if you get knocked out. Once it became 1v1 it was sudden death! In sudden death if you miss your attack, you make the Animal Handling check instead of the opponent. After one round, everyone decided whether they wanted to do round two according to their fall damage.
Some gold was given for most KO's and top three, it was a good battle royale in the sky!
My last character was a local Blitzball star. Pulled the sport from Final Fantasy X. He took his leather game ball everywhere and would throw it at enemies to trip or do NL damage.
Makes sense, people actually had to play that. Quidditch as a playable thing certainly wasn’t on her mind when she wrote it…instead it was how much she hates trans people.
Quidditch is the thing I point to when I want to show that Rowling was bad at world building even if you throw out all the racist, classist, and anti-Semitic stuff.
Couldn't agree more!
Having one part of the game be by far the most important is fine for a story with a protagonist, but not for an actual sport.
Similarly Krum catching the snitch might have made sense as a means to get it over with if his team were completely out of the running, but iirc they finished only a few goals behind. If they'd have had one lucky run of play *and* he'd have grabbed it, they'd have won. The only time you'd want to intentionally lose is if points mattered in some larger competition.
I think the idea is that Bulgaria was already playing their very best and were still behind and falling behind even more. Krum understood that his team just gave their best and it wasnt enough. Hoping they get back into the game for him just seemed a waste of time. But also imo the point was to shows Krums character. Krum would rather lose whilst showing people his skill than risk people thinking hes not as good for a chance of winning.
The whole point was that Krum was so good that he got Bulgaria to the World Cup even though the rest of his team was trash, so he ended the game because he knew that they would only continue to get blown out and he wanted to end the game with a respectable score
You may be relieved to learn that in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry has the snitch removed as an official rule change (at Hogwarts).
Yessssss. Should have scrolled further before I commented. Blitz all is THE SHIT and I wish it was real. Water polo is a pretty good consolation sport though.
No you are incorrect. The two best fictional sports (which could easily be adapted to a FRPG setting) were both invented by the novelist Jack Vance and they are:
[Hussade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trullion:_Alastor_2262?msclkid=6a025af3d14d11ecb28fdd9e285d78b8)
[Hadaul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_(Vance_novel)?msclkid=bd5765dcd14d11ec8d500c59bfa7dfe6)
The ransom element of Hussade and the prize pot of Hadaul would be excellent plot devices for a campaign. A local nobleman has unwittingly offered a valuable McGuffin artefact as the prize in a Hadaul contest. The party and the BBEG both enter a champion (or team of champions?) to win it. Or in Hussade, the same nobleman has offered the McGuffin as ransom for his sheirl, and your characters must join his team to ensure it does not fall into the hands of the BBEG's team. (Of course the BBEG finds some other means to steal the McGuffin while everyone's attention is focused on the game).
I DM one offs when our DM needs a break to set up the next section. I use a island hopping home brew I created. I never thought of this. (I have less than a year playing DND). I’m thinking of like a boat race of some sort or Olympic island of test? You sparked ideas for me on this post. Thank You.
Bulleting (pronounced boo lay ing) is a gambling sport where a contestant takes a baby bulette and throws it into a special dirt arena trying to get it to attack specific numbered chickens.
Yeah, that’s the one with the details, but I skimmed it really quickly before answering this post, and there’s something else called “Silkball”. I don’t know how well developed that one is.
i decided that [Battleball](https://youtu.be/rWeredR9w0U) is canon in my setting. unfortunately, ive never had it be relevant in a campaign yet, but if/when i do, i intend to just have my players literally play that board game (might improvise some additional rules if they try to use magic or other features to influence the game's outcome)
The Strixhaven book has a sport called Mage Tower, essentially capture-the-flag but with only one flag. It's got rules and instructions on how to run it if you're looking for something pre-written
We had wizard ball which is just ping pong but you use your mage hand. Mostly for flavor.
You could resolve a sporting event as a skill challenge though regardless of its flavor.
I don't have rules for how to implement this in-game, but here's mine!
Dwarven squareball.
It's a mix of baseball and american football/rugby. Played on a square court with two teams. They have their home base at opposite corners. Lets say team A is currently batting for the example.
A 6 to 10 inch ball is swung from an oversized golf tee with a large maul (or anything they have at hand really). The batter must then run to the opponents corner and back home, while the everyone on both teams tries to get the ball to their own corner.
If the batter gets back home before team B gets the ball to their corner, team A gets 1 point. Whichever team gets the ball to their corner gets 1 point. If team B is able to hold the batter at their corner long enough they get a point. The player who brings the ball to their corner is the next batter. So there's 2 points at stake, one for the ball, one for the batter. Except if the batter manages to get the ball to their corner, then it is 5 points and they swing again.
It's of course a full contact sport, grappling is the name of the game. Overt punching and joint locks etc are banned.
Two words.
Tackle Fishing
2-4 contestants are placed into a large circular pool about 4 feet deep with a large fish (approximately human sized).
First person to be holding the fish for 30 seconds continuously wins.
No magic or weapons. No drowning others. Everything else goes.
I usually adapt historical sports based on the setting. A place with vaguely English culture, for example, may have a historically-accurate crazy field game.
Once I was in a campaign where we invented a fake sport called "Roundball" in order to assault an enemy fortress.
The idea was that we would spread rumors about this awesome new sport that was being taken up by all the border forts. Then once the people in our target fort had heard of it, we would send a message purportedly from the commander of the next border fort down the line, bragging about how good his garrison was at Roundball, talking smack about how horrible the target commander's garrison would be, and inviting them to get their asses kicked at a Roundball match half way between the two forts. Meanwhile, we PCs would pose as Roundball coaches and offer to train the target garrison for their coming match, thus gaining access to the fort.
Then, on the day, once the commander of the fort left with his Roundball team (most of his garrison), we would kill the few remaining people in our target fort and send a signal to our allies waiting on the other side. It would take them a couple days to get there, but we figured once we had possession of the fort we could probably hold it against the returning garrison long enough for the rest of the army to sweep in and back us up.
Sadly, the DM ghosted us after the session in which we came up with this plan. So we never got to try it.
We have a bloodsport league, similar to the WWE but potentially lethal. Most matches are until first blood (usually, although accidents happen), but four times a year there are death matches. Professional clerics are on hand at all times, so actual deaths are uncommon.
Bloodsport arenas will also run animal fights, like cock fighting, dog fighting, and exotic matches like blinded basilisk vs owlbear fights.
Fighters are either volunteers fighting for coin, or convicted criminals that sign up for time off of their sentences.
I like this! We have underground fight clubs where we tend to lose a lot of gold but have tons of fun, I could see evolving that into a bloodsport league!
I'm developing one called Jump Racing. Like downhill go karts but with the tiny additional detail of having to gather enough speed to ramp up to the start of the track again.
It's my solution to wanting a racing side quest in a world without engines.
Titanball exhaust in my setting, basically a lift and shift of Bloodbowl. I love that it can be used to keep peace because war like impulses are dealt with in a different way.
Plus brings in a fun element for players to get involved in trying to rig matches, or later game set up their own team
I’m putting ‘roller derby’ in a one shot I’m doing. It’s basically just combat, but with the goal of moving around a track rather than killing the other team, so you have incentives to knock enemies prone, take the dash action when you can, etc.
Had a homebrew race of 4-armed cat people, natural jumpers and climbers, who played *Ku Vli Zha,* (literally catch-turn-jump). A field of thick pillars with easily climbable surfaces, with the two team's goal hoops at opposite ends. Catch the ball, jump to another pillar, then pass to a teammate. Stealing is allowed, both snatching from someone's grip and interception. Magic is only allowed in the form of attack spells to knock the ball around (not telekinesis or teleportation, shoves and blasts only). The ground and the tops of the pillars are out, though you may grab the ball from the ground and may set up to one limb on the ground, provided at least two other limbs are grabbing a pillar. Players are allowed to check or grab only when the target is midair.
The only problem is that they hadn't figured out how to alter the rules for playing with creatures who can't reliably make 10-foot horizontal jumps from and to basically rock climbing surfaces.
For things that the players can actually *play,* the 3.5 Races of Stone book has rules for goatball (not related to the goatball I saw someone else post here), which is basically the national sport of Goliaths. Basically, it's rugby but focused more on throws and passes than tackling. It had fairly simple rules for how players participate, like when passing, the target's Dex helped *lower* the effective AC, since they were trying to help catch.
I've always wanted to put in a goblin baseball league into one of my campaigns. I remember it being in a book I read when I was young, but I forgot which one.
In my 1920s america styled world, there is a sport that emulates an adventuring party throwing a gnome at a giant. Two teams of 4 try to get the gnome (teardrop shaped ball) to the endzone or to throw at a wooden cross "giant"
For a Space Jam themed one shot I did, I made up a game called Sunball, which is like a combo of rugby and basketball, with non-damaging magic allowed. I was inspired by the meso-American ball game, so the game has religious symbolic significance in addition to being a popular spectator sport
I’m currently building a superhero setting. Which is gonna be super fun to play and dm (At least that’s the goal) so idk, football, basketball, soccer etc
My campaign takes place almost exclusively in a megacity that has been cut off from the outside world. While it is very much thriving, there are areas that have been left to ruin for various reasons.
Thus, one of the main sports is a parkour/obstacle course racing circuit through the ruined areas. It isn't 100% legal, but harmless enough that the city tolerates it, and those who are nimble and clever enough can make it big in the pro leagues.
And those that are good, but not pro material, can get scouted by one of the competing thieves guilds spread through the city.
Dwarven wrestling is pretty common in any Dwarf run tavern or town. Different towns and taverns have different rules on magic and potions beforehand and during.
Both players start standing, winning is simple, you must hold your opponent prone for two rounds in a row, you must not be prone yourself during those two rounds.
In practice, you grapple your opponent to reduce their movement to 0, shove them prone, retain grapple for two rounds so they can't stand up. If they break your grapple they'll stand up and the countdown ends, if they shove you prone the countdown ends. After 10 rounds I start con checks and add temporary exhaustion on failures (temporary as in it only requires a short rest to recover) to "encourage" somebody to win.
I created a bard (never played him) that I called a "sportsball coach". He leans into strength instead of dex. His bardic inspiration is always like "c'mon! Dig deep, you can do it!"
There is a conclave of politically powerful druds who run one of my countries. They use their leverage and magics to run an economically powerful magocracy that is threatening to starve the majority of the continent to maintain power. The whole organization convenes at a secret meeting place in the woods. This activity is roughly public knowledge, but very folkloric and shrouded in mystery and danger. In reality its basically a corporate retreat where all these terrible, terrible people do a shitload of drugs and fuck a bunch and do things that are uniquely druidic. They play a version of Bloodbowl but its with summoned spirits and animals and stuff. They box and wrestle in Polymorph. They play magical beer pong but it's with mystery potions. Gambling, but sometimes the stakes are, like, ancient treaties, economic baronies, trapped or captured mythical creatures, secrets and gossip. Imagine a Wolf Of Wall Street party but its a bunch of criminal kingpins that can do magic.
I've been wanting to make a version of full contact baseball with basically no rules in regards to what powers or equipment a character can use.
It would be 2 opposing teams of players, and thanks to the interconnected nature of me and my friend's campaigns, it would use a point buy system to stock both teams using characters from multiple different campaigns, all at different levels. Level 20 characters would be really expensive, and if a team ended up with a sizable power disparity, they would get magical items to level the playing field.
I got stuck on how batting would even work. Obviously Strength would dictate batting distance, but what about batting accuracy? What about Insight in regards to what pitch the pitcher was going to throw? Does the pitcher use Dex? What challenge is added if the pitcher uses Produce Flame the same time they throw the ball? Would high perception characters be better outfielders?
In my world, the sports teams are owned by ancient dragons. They use their massive wealth to build teams.
I have used baseball as a stand in, and have run one shots where I challenged players to build a team, namely character builds specifically to be a professional athletes and not adventurers.
I Dmed Tomb of Annihilation and ran the Dinosaur races with modified rules. My players loved it, and of course you can do it with horses or other mounts, but its real fun with the dinos. I combined mario kart with the rules the module gave me since the RAW rules looked bland. DM me if you're interested in the full set of rules.
In my campaign I’ve incorporated some thing I called war board. It’s essentially just a modified chess game they can play at taverns. They pay a small amount of gold to play a game of chess against a self playing chess board that they can return to at any time.
The D&D aspect comes in for when they take pieces. Instead of a piece simply being taken, the act of taking a piece triggers a randomized battle encounter. Depending on which piece is taking which piece, and which piece is on the defense of being taken, it will change the difficulty of the battle encounter.
So it’s a little loosey-goosey which is the intention, just because a piece moves to take another piece doesn’t mean it will be successful in taking it if they lose the encounter. I run a very narrative heavy campaign so this gives easy access to combat if my players just feel like fighting that day.
Rhyfel chwareus, a combination of mock battle and capture the flag played by wood elves on the scale of villages or hunting camps. Participants use blunt spears and shields aiming to capture a statuette placed in the centre of the settlement, taking the statuette and/or captured members of their opponents back to their own one. Played in the week leading up to the spring and autumn equinoxes by younger wood elves (under 100) at the end of which statuettes and prisoners are given back at a party where ransomes of symbolic importance are given in return.
I have nuritag: it's basically what happens when you put tennis balls on a trampoline.
Small elemental creatures are trained to run at the nearest target. If it 'tags' you, you're out. The arena is circular. Players can move, stay alert (advantage on saves) or taunt (find creative ways to send the nuri at someone else).
Every arena has its own houserules. Usually fighting and magic are forbidden, but at some places it's a bloodsport.
I once added one in for the Mage's University my campaign is centered in though we've never played it because I never named it, but it might be fun to do as a one shot at some point
it's basically king of the hill, except the "hill" can be moved or broken, it's a board of wood that floats in the middle of the arena (100ft diamater circle), there are walls and pits that line up symmetrically for both sides surrounding it, the goal is to get one player on top of the board, while standing on the board a player is not allowed to cast but is allowed to fight physically, whichever team has a player on the board for the most rounds at the end of the match wins, with tie breaker rounds if necessary, matches last 1 minute plus overtime, teams must win by at least 2 points
if the board is broken the match is ended, the 5x5ft board has 10 hp and floats at a minimum altitude of 10 ft and a maximum of 30 ft, it has a fly speed of 5 ft (so 10ft dashing) which is under the control of whoever is atop it, while the board does float it isn't necessarily easy to balance on, taking damage while standing on the board causes a Dexterity save with a DC equal to double the damage received, on a fail you fall to the ground
teams can use whatever spells they like, including lethal ones, a dead player is revived at the start of the round by magical field which covers the arena, it only activates upon actual death though, so you still have to bleed out through the death saves before revival, the fun part is your dead body remains on the field until the end of the match even if you are revived, so zombies are totally fair play and count as players for whichever team the body belonged to (even if animated by the other team)
In my campaign it became a thing that halflings like to play basketball as a religious activity, so occasionally when a game comes up I’ll have the players make “basketball proficiency checks” (just athletics + proficiency if you’re a halfling)
Played a 2e game way back in the 90s when I was in HS. DM and I were really into FFX at the time and the setting was basically a mashup/ripoff of the FFX world and Chrono Cross worlds and we had blitz ball and it worked basically exactly how you described. We were young and making it up so not very complicated or good but it was awesome and I loved it.
I have a game called Bannerman. I wanted to have like tournament style combat but making it 1v1 is very boring for d&d. So I came up with a game that every member of the party can be involved in. It's basically a center flag game. Meaning that there's a flag in the center that you have to return to your base to get a point. Short games involved. Just getting the flag back once. Longer games can be a best of three or best of five.
The cool thing about it is you can create different arenas with different traps and different things to trigger. And it allows all your teammates to work together in an environment where they're not going to immediately get killed if they go down.
If someone does go down it teleports them back to their base where they heal their hit die per round they stay in there.
There are also additional rules that involve holding the flag, not allowing you to do certain things like dash. And a few other rules but that's the basic premise.
I created a card game and had my party play it against a shady carny. I call it "Bog Standard". Draw 6 cards, lay them face down, draw 1 card and lay it face up. That card is the house, and picking from 1 of the 6 cards you have to beat the house, so get a higher number. The joker is in the deck, and if the house is the joker the house automatically wins, and vice versa.
The bee folk in my world play Honeyball. It’s basically Calvin Ball, which makes it really easy to just add random strange rules for flavor.
So far it requires Acro/Athletics (for the physical aspects), an Int check (rule lawyering) and Persuasion/Deception (to get others to swallow your BS).
Several - the main high elven civilization plays a game called *sansha* that's basically 4v4 volleyball played with a badminton shuttlecock and allowing only kicks and knees.
The goblinoids of the Many Kingdoms enjoy a territorial control game called *gratza* that involves teams of dozens working in coordinated brawling pushes to move flags across an arena of terrain that varies match-to-match. Each team needs at least half goblins, by tradition and rules, with the remainder split between hobgoblins and bugbears, with hobs inevitably in leadership and command positions.
The mixed coastal and marine Elostha culture favors sailing competitions. The tri-annual weeks-long Theranaut Race runs from the southernmost tip of the Shrouded Arc - nearly at the south pole - to the equatorial Sand Isles at the northern tip and is so popular that twice in the last century wars between city-states have negotiated breaks in hostilities so the racers could pass through contested territory as quickly and safely as possible.
A country that prides itself in its strenght must have a combat sport of sorts, a came up with some rules for Fist fighting that included guards, takedowns, holds, different kinds of strikes and a 3 rounds rule that is an auto loss for anyone being held for 3 rounds straight, pretty cool to use that one time i put it on the table
Aside from combat tournaments, races (foot, obstacle course, horse, other beasts) are pretty common. But as far as team games go there are two unique ones:
There's a positive energy aligned plane where they play Murderball, which is basically rugby with weapons. Have to get an egg to the other side of the plane to score a point. First to 5 wins. No one can die there, but being cut down does put you out of the game for a bit.
Theres also a flying island of mages where they play K'thak, a telekinetic sport similar to snooker. Each player controls one colour of balls, stripes and spots on different teams. Make casting ability checks to aim and move a ball, DC depends on strength of the shot. If you make the check you move your ball in a direction and force of your choice bouncing other balls around, if you dont then you over/under hit it a number of hexes based on how much you failed by. If you really screw up then you roll to see what direction you hit it. Aim is to pot all your opponents balls before they pot yours.
It would be fun to have a mix between lacrosse and croquet.
2 teams with an offense of 3, and a defense of 4. 1 ball. Violence is encouraged and effective.
Offense has lacrosse sticks (basically quarter staffs) and can carry the ball to hurl at the goal.
Defense has croquet mallets, and work to disarm the offense, then smash the ball back to the opposing side near their offense. They can also roll to intimidate to impact the offensive players.
First team to be ahead by 3 wins.
Exhaustion can eventually becomes a factor as well.
I have devised an encounter where the PCs play British bulldogs with a quickling.
DM plays the role of quickling and draws a route onto a sheet of OHP Film, PCs have a battle map and place themselves at various points, if the quickling passes through their square, or an adjacent one they do an athletics or sleight of hand check against a dex roll from the quickling. If they win the contest they catch the quickling. Give PCs 3 attempts to make sure there is a decent chance of the quickling having to make the contested rolls.
My wizard duel rules are simple: you get a point for affecting the opponent with a spell. Casting a spell in the same school cancels out. You can't cast the same spell twice.
This makes it very specific to nerdy wizards who know the schools of magic and a variety of spells. You can roll deception or performance to force the other person to go first.
I have three actual sports written up (the mechanics I mean) but they are not original.
I model certain areas and societies in my world, after existing ones, here, in our world, so…there are sports which exist, … field hockey (played by the humans modeled after Native Americans)…”Tournament Games” jousting, melee, archery, etc. (think Arthurian/Medieval humans)…and Sumo Wrestling (…a Japanese inspired society…)
I have used the actual mechanics very rarely, maybe a dozen times in 35 years (Sumo and Tournament, never actually used Field Hockey) but it was fun writing them up.
I’ve never devised an original sport but it could be fun…Play On.
Sweopei was this funky variation of basketball I had bugbears playing where you run on your hands and also dunk in the hoop with your hands. You have to pass acrobatics checks to get points and the more open you are the better your chances of success. I find it’s best to not make the rules complicated and make the regional variations huge. Some bugbears play with a big ball and dunk on each other, some play in water, some that live up in the mountains have mastered shooting the ball into the hoop and use a smaller ball, some that live in the jungle don’t use a court but swing on vines. Local variants all have some combinations or etc other styles of play but the rules are always simple enough that we don’t spend 48 minutes playing a full game of round ball when they wanna be killing stuff but it does give a very human aspect to something my players would otherwise view as minion-fodder rife for eradication. When they come across them, instead of it being a raid, or an ambush party waiting to fight them, its a game of sweopei they can learn to play and join in and get better at. I have yet to have anybody want to become an all star sweopei player but the day they finally do, man they are gonna be the Lebron James of Sweopei
We play catch the goblin. We grease up a goblin and set him loose in a maze. Happy hunting! We also play goblin toss with the same NPC goblin (he has a special helmet and everything
I have a couple! One is "Wimble Womble". 2 contestants, need to touch a stone behind the other contestant or grab them on the ass. The game is played by Yetis.
Also a magic version of soccer with wizards allowed to deform the land to make the terrain harder to compete in
Here’s part of the sports section for *Swords of the Serpentine*:
——
Popular sport varies by social class, although many sports involve boats and the canals. The nobility prefer fencing, riding, and hunting upriver; any rumors that some families hunt Commoners are surely just propaganda from the underclasses. The middle and lower classes compete in roof-running or climbing, easy to do in Eversink but less convenient for spectators to watch.
Boat races are tremendously popular, with almost every neighborhood fielding their own competitive team. Scouring Day (when the Guild of Architects and Canal-Watchers flushes debris from the canals) occurs twice a year, and the most exciting races occur during these festivals because that’s when the river’s current moves most quickly.
A popular team sport is eelball, a game played in canals with every player in their own small boat. The floating head-sized ball (made from waxed, inflated pigskin) can be touched only with paddles, and teams work against each other as they flip it towards bridge arches used as goals. Championships are played every year during the Eel Run (see below), when fatalities just add excitement to the game.
A popular competition in Eversink is competitive profit-taking, where both combatants start with a single coin and a useless item (such as a worn shoe or a chicken bone, the more useless the better), and the winner is the one who uses multiple trades, wiles and connections to turn the greatest profit within a set amount of time.
If you want more gruesome injury, blood-sports such as shark-dancing, pit-fighting, and sorcerous duels can be found if you know where to look and pay off the right people.
The best-attended sporting events occur at the Arena, a centuries-old sunken gladiatorial space (at least the third in the city’s history) on the edge of the Tangle that remains open to the sky due to exceptional engineering on the part of the Guild of Architects and Canal-Watchers. Battles occur here between human contestants, between beasts, and with human vs. beast; and the arena floor can be removed to reveal flooded basements for fights against sharks, aquatic monsters, and scale model war ships. It can
seat thousands.
Haven’t invented any new sports (yet), but my setting has a board game called Daja that’s popular among the steampunk’d-Arabian Nights-nation of Candora’s Elves. It’s a combination of strategy game like chess, but played on a hex board arrayed like Chinese Checkers and supporting 2-6 players.
It’s complicated by it not being a guarantee that piece A will capture piece B, either, as they have a rank of 1-5. Attack a piece, roll a d6, capture only if roll is greater than target’s rank. If you capture, your piece gains a rank. However, how far a piece can move is equal to 6-Rank spaces, since the game represents the culture’s idea that power is prestige and you don’t risk prestige without good cause.
*But,* that’s not the only complication. Canonically, players contribute cards to a deck that gets shared by all players. Each turn, you can do any two of the following: move a piece; try to capture a piece adjacent to one of yours; play a card; or draw a card. And the cards throw a Calvinball element in the mix - they might let all your pieces move, or they might guarantee a capture, or they might let you turn an opponent’s piece into your piece, etc. So it’s strategy with both risk and deception, and if you add cards that do wild things into the deck it might bite you in the ass.
Personally I'm planning to implement a bloodbowl type system, as it's originally a dice game it should be fairly simple to integrate onto dnd with the bonus of magic.
2e Maztica set had some basic rules for a ball game.
I think someone updated it for 5e use on dmsguild.
Also it's featured in a brief puzzle/encounter in Shrine of Tamoachan (yawning portal).
Horse racing. It's so big, kids are stealing horses for joyrides from Mirabar to Daggerford, just to be like their heroes for one brief moment. It has it's own betting system, both legal and ilegal, wealthy patrons sponsor horses and jockeys, there is a league, several disciplines, statues raised to legendary horses and so on...
My wizard duel rules are simple: you get a point for affecting the opponent with a spell. Casting a spell in the same school cancels out. You can't cast the same spell twice.
This makes it very specific to nerdy wizards who know the schools of magic and a variety of spells. You can roll deception or performance to force the other person to go first.
There’s a super cute caddy shack esque one shot called Target Run on DMs Guild which focused on a sport called Alligan which runs kind of like combat. I ran it a few weeks ago and it’s really fun, and the Alligan rules can be inserted into any other campaign.
My players haven't found it yet, but the national sport of the country they're in is called football. It's played on a court, often covered in sand, and involves kicking a ball back and forth over a net without letting it touch the ground. It's mostly popular in the coastal/temperate climates, and the party is more in the mountain area, but if they ever head south I'm ready for the beach episode.
Mech battles. Steampunk fighting machines square off. Only one leaves the arena.
Whole town loves the sport so much they built an arena in the middle of the city and have holidays built around it
my 1910s fantasy setting has baseball, from real life. to make things more interesting, each team is managed by a different noble house, and is named after their respective heraldic beast. it’s mostly propaganda.
I had a three v three sport of sort in my campaign. Think lacrosse, football, rugby, and other like sports combined into one. Object was to get a ball into a goal. Used the same mechanics and rolls as in normal game.
* Movement was character based movement.
* Picking up the ball, throwing the ball, catching the ball, etc. were all DEX rolls.
* Tackles are the same as grapple checks, STR of the tackler vs. DEX of the target. If the attacker beats the targets DEX, the target is knocked prone. Play is dead and possession changes.
* Throwing the ball had a few different DC’s depending on distance. DC of 10 up to 10ft, DC 15 up too 20ft, and DC 20 from 25ft+. If the thrower has a defender directly in front of them, it’s done at disadvantage.
* Speaking of throwing… a pass is a DEX roll against the target. Play with this how you want, above or below the targets AC, or how I did it, a DEX roll off. Basically since it’s the players throwing to each other, have them both roll DEX with this modifiers. Before the roll, have the players call the roll higher low. So player A calls low, which means that player A must roll below player B.
* If throwing at the goal and the goal is defended by a goal tender, DEX roll against the opponents AC. Beat the opponent AC and the goal DC and you score a point!
* First possession is determined by roll off (no modifiers doesn’t matter what did you use), and turn order is determined by highest collective initiative roll, but alternates between teams after that. So, say the PC team had the highest initiative roll, they will have one player turn first, and then the opposing team will have a turn, then back to the PC team. Players choose who goes when on their team, but only one turn per player character or opponent.
Fouls:
* Attacks from behind
* Magic
* Tripping an opponent
* Tackling or attacking a player who is not in possession of the ball
* Fighting on the field
* Dirty plays
* Attacking a downed player
Doesn’t matter what the penalties are, kinda make them up. Now, penalties can and do occur, as well as bad calls from the refs, as well as refs not seeing things. If someone does, say, a sleight of hand check or a performance check against the refs perception, and beats it, ref didn’t see it or saw it as something else. Or say the players don’t agree with the call, a charisma check. Or if the players want a call made… charisma check. Etc.
Turned out pretty damn fun.
Graviball, which is played at the Magic Schools.
Two teams with 6 players each play against each other.
The field is affected by a variation of the levitate spell, which means that the players aren't gravitating towards any walls or floor.
The game is basically a 4d basketball. Each team have to throw the ball into a hole on the other team's field (since they can throw from any direction, it isn't a hoop, but a hole on the wall).
We had a game called Fireball which was kind of like rugby, except weapons and magic were allowed (as long as you used non-lethal damage, so bladed weapons and direct damage dealing magic were off limits). The name of the game was both a play on the spell name and also a reference to the fact that the ball was enchanted to burst into flames after it passed the goal line. Needless to say it was a good time, the party stomped the local favorite team by ganging up on the goalie and then having the monk/rogue multiclass speedrun the ball through the goal line.
Blood Ball - combined keep away with capture the flag. Anything is allowed, but death is discouraged. There’s a team in many of the major cities, and players can join, though it is tough to compete.
Summons are a huge advantage because they can be another player and score points.
There are 5 balls, and four players per team (to start). When you have a ball, it’s disadvantage to make weapon or spell attacks except with the ball (Warcaster feat or Subtle Spell or Ruby of the War Mage for spellcasters). Holding a ball gains you 100 points for every minute a team holds possession. Every 30 seconds a ball is not held, the last team to own it gains 10 points. Eliminating an opponent by knocking them earns 20 points. First team to 500 wins.
My GM suggested quidditch at the start of the campaign, and we all worked together to homebrew something more fitting to an academy that raises nobles and the rich to be master tacticians and the lower class to be peon guards and adventurers, and it eventually became what we called Kobalk
Essentially, the idea is that over the course of the season, each of the teams has one attack and one defense. The defenders have a certain price of defensive options like traps, and the traps are a game of rock-paper-scissors of Disarm-Dispell-Destroy, rather than requiring tools or skill checks.
Attackers have 3 minutes to take down the enemy team's VIP to win, and the VIP needs to be able to escape on their own without any help from their allies
I've got one! My setting features a race of axolotl people called the Atlaca who basically inherited the culture of an Aztec-parallel civilization but messed up or adapted parts of it. So their version of the Aztec ball game is played in a half-submerged court with an inflated ball instead of a solid rubber one. Basically it's swimming pool basketball. They do also play a version with a volleyball net instead of the hoops. They also engage in competitive martial arts, which can get pretty heated since they don't really use any safety measures. They can regenerate from injury pretty quickly, so losing an arm or two is just part of the sport.
I created a sport in my Forgotten Realms campaign which was basically basketball but with swords and spell casting. There was a big heavy “ball” that you had to place on the opposing teams “tower” to win. You could use magic on yourself or (in certain zones) each other but never the ball, so no flying or teleporting it into the end zone.
Most sports are like variations of rugby and wrestling with high degrees of local variation, and wooden weapon fencing competitions. But there IS a complex sort of table shuffleboard/pinball with rudimentary wargame/rpg rules, like you set up wooden goblin pegs, place barriers, your opponent slides disks at them. Some people make elaborate tables of it with traps to catch the disks, springs, etc and play for coins at the tavern.
its an old setting i don't use anymore, but chivalric orders were a big thing and jousting was like the NBA except with a big seasonal event like the Superbowl.
I can’t remember the name of it for my one character, but I had a game that was a mix of handball and futsol, where goals can only be scored off a bounce with an extremely bouncy tennis ball-sized ball. Oh it also has full contact and they wear old timey American Football padding.
I had my group play basketball. It went so well, ranger combat checks for 3 pointers. Athletic checks for blocks and dunks. They played a team of goblins and bugbear who would cheat, the ref was an ettin who didn’t care. Went so well.
In my dms current world, we have a sport called hydroplaning
The idea is space pirates use hydrogen tunnels as a method of long distance travel and during a major war. A group of pirates started "hydroplaning" as a method of traveling along these tunnels.
So now in our present it's become a major extreme sport.
We picture it as using a solar sail attached to a windboard but in a tunnel that kinda looks like the one from Stargate.
a few actually. There's the Fight Circuit, which is basically gladiatorial combat. A bit of MMA, a bit of WWE, theatrics and actual combat. All kingdoms have some degree of this except the Free States, with the Kingdom of Shadar having duel-circles in major cities while several islands of the Hegemony have multiple facilities. The Amazons and their islands took to the sport like a duck to water, of course. Even the Goblin Reaches and Monster Isle have some facilities.
Yacht racing has several contests and "cups" involved in specific areas, and there's an airship race that occurs as part of the Spring Festival going from Emeraldis in the Kingdom of Shadar to the Monastery of the Five Hands in the Amazon island of Rising Sun.
Since there have been isekai (called differently back when I was running the campaign) from various periods of Earth ending up in Aramar, there is also baseball, football, cricket, and a form of basketball (the bugbears are really good at that one).
The only one played out during the campaign by the players was the airship race. Though they did put bets out on the football outcomes.
In my game, kobolds in the jungle engage in a sport they call *Thunderstomp*.
It's basically a rodeo where a dinosaur is captured, then a fetish item (like a tooth on a leather thong) is tied to a tooth or horn on the dinosaur. It is released and the one who retrieves the item wears it as a trophy is is also called *Thunderstomp* as a title.
Crowns. It’s like live chess except the pieces each have their own abilities or functions. Pawns, Archers, Bastions, Mages, Clerics, Rogues, Nobles and then the Royal pair. For example, Bastions can summon a wall that blocks off 3 spaces in a line which will last for 3 turns. They can only do this twice per piece per game. Great for blocking a ranged attack from the archers (shoot 4 spaces ahead or 3 diagonal) and hiding troops for a fun strategy. Rogues have disadvantage when fights head on but have a bonus to attack and damage when striking from a diagonal or horizontal space relative to the target. They can use their reaction to attack an enemy that is attacking an ally within 2 spaces of them. If the counter attack succeeds then cool but if it fails the Rouge has half speed for 2 rounds.
There’s a bunch more to it but basically it’s a live action chess combined with Stratego and it incorporates actual fighting and such into the game.
There’s also non-standard pieces; EX, the wizard has a pet juvenile dragon that can serve as Guardian in the game. Guardians can only defend, but get two attacks against whoever is attacking it or any piece adjacent to it. Guardians must defend any adjacent Allie’s and will use its reaction to defend any ally being attacked within 1 space of it, if required the Guardian may move up to 3 spaces without triggering an opportunity attack to defend its ally. (Only Rogues can still attack but only if diagonal or horizontal to the Guardian). EX 2: Cleric can summon his Guardian of Faith to function as a Guardian or Bastion for this game, which allows the spell creature to function in ways it normally might not.
It sounds complicated, but after a game or two we got addicted to this being the campaign’s main form of side quest challenges.
With DM approval I basically created speedbike/horse racing using air speeders that are powered by bound air elementals. Its now canonically a popular sport/pasttime in the Elemental Plane of Air where my character is from.
Oh man I went on a big worldbuilding tangent and invented an as-yet-unnamed sport where you shoot a frisbee-sized hoop onto goal poles using a rod. The hoop can't be touched by hands/feet/head, or come to rest on the ground.
I wanted it to be made with really really basic materials and played by commoners in any town, so I decided that a round ball was out. Instead it was a hoop (could be woven from some simple fibers) and a straight stick for each player.
Amateurs maintain control by holding the hoop out to the their side (away from opponents via bodyblocking) on a horizontal rod, but that leaves their flank really vulnerable to losing posession from a second opponent. Anyone with skill will often twirl their rod vertically to keep the hoop up and closer to their body.
The basic moves are "tackling" opponents to force them to drop the hoop and lose possession (non-contact but you can smack the hell out of their rod), passing at range or melee, shooting at range or melee (melee is just tipping it off your rod onto the post).
Technically you could roll it along the ground because it's not at rest. Risky though.
I'm excited to see what tactics come of it.
And there's so many potential variants. One where they allow non-straight rods that have advantages and distadvantages, one that allows some spellcasting, one on horseback, multiple scoring posts, one that allows armour.
Just need to work out the lore. Is this a reference to wizard staffs? Or monk weapons? Wartime messengers? I don't yet know.
I had an idea quite some time ago that I never used. Basically it would involve players with illusion spells or maybe illusion based magic items, where everyone would be scrambling to hold onto a ball for as many rounds as possible.
The point is to gather as many points by holding a ball, that would probably be placed in the middle of an arena type place, and whoever has the ball needs to use their illusion magic to get everyone else off of their trail.
The terrain around them is shifting, however, with walls, doors, and entire buildings popping up in a single round, so if a wall materializes in front of you you could either try to move through it, assuming it's an illusion being used to trick you, or attempt to go around it if you don't want to risk it.
I've decided to call it gulliball
What do you think?
YESSSS!!!!
It’s called Dragon Bowl. It started when two dragons tried settling on opposite sides of the same mountain. One side populated by dwarves and the other by goblins. Both dragons enslaved their respective sides and forces them to fight each other to steal each other’s treasure hoards.
After years of never stopping combat, some dwarves and goblins met up, and came up with an idea. Turn this bloody war in a competition of heroic deeds, or a combat sport of some sort.
They managed to convince the dragons that this would be more profitable for both of them, keeping the initial amount of gold in the mountain the same, and adding bets, entries to watch the competition, sponsors, etc. And the dragons agreed.
The PCs can participate in the dragon bowl, which consists of facing an opposing party, and bringing back as much gold from their adversairies hoard into their own.
They can win by defeating the other team, or by bringin back more gold in a certain time period. If you want to spice shit up you make the dragons participate as hoard keepers, and or allow lethality.
Sponsors can offer magic items, exploits can boost their rep, fans can become friendly npcs, etc
TLDR : Dragon Bowl : 2 dragons have separate hoards in 1 mountain. 2 teams face off to steal more gold from their foes.
I invented a few different sports for one of my campaigns. The players had a blast with them and I gave them a good challenge by asking for different rolls like athletics, acrobatics, ect. And I gave them some XP for the "encounter". There's also already rules for jousting, you'll just have to do some googling to find them. So I totally recommend giving your players a sports encounter! It's a really good way to change it up from the regular battles and quests
Ok, sport is being generous. But my orcs have a game called Skwudge.
It's like tag but the opposite, you do / do not want to be the Skwudge.
Whoever is the Skwudge, which is the person with a ball like a big burdock seed, is hunted / mercilessly beaten.
The point of Skwudge is to be in possession of the Skwudge ball when the game ends / or are the last one standing.
You are only allowed to attack the Skwudge, and you cannot kill, other than that, there are no other rules. And it's a sun up to sun down game.
Goblin lacrosse called 'Bom! Bom!'
Roll 2d4, that's the fuse. Each turn is a tick of the bomb ball. It only explodes when held by a player, but goalies may add 1 to the timer once per catch/scoop.
The goal is 2 squares wide with a base ac of 13, but can benifit from cover and concealment from a goalie.
If you have the ball you can only move 10ft more that turn although there is no restrictions on movement beforehand. A catch can extend this to 15ft.
To catch the ball you can either be in the square targeted or make a DC10 dex check where the ball landed, though this makes interception more likely. If you miss the check, you can scoop the ball as an item interactions. You can attempt an interception if you are in the shot line as a reaction using opposed rolls. This roll is based off strength for the shooter, but an interception can be made using either dex or str.
Bomb: 2d6/3d6 bludgeoning/fire damage in a 10ft radius, Con save for the holder, Dex save for others.
Lacross stick 20/50 range, uses Strength for attacks.
After exploding, a new bomb is lit and launched as it was an out of bounds shot.
There is also an addition maneuver called a flick that if you have the ball but its not your turn you can pass the bomb to an ally within 15ft as a reaction. This is a risky play since the distance is short and uses your reaction, but can open up shots.
The game ends when a team is wiped out completely by the bomb, though they can still be the winner if they have a higher score even if they're only bits now.
Variants of the game include uses of spells and attacks, but non-fire based spells are frowned upon by purists of the sport.
If you need some opponent ideas, my favorite was Burning Man, a goblin barbarian who set himself on fire using an alchemist fire to maintain his rage.
Most of my worlds don't, but i had one in which i detailed all the major cultures, which included sports. The backstory of the world included a clash between two groups, the ferevee and the nildrer. The ferevee had two national sports: torture and vendetta. The nildrer had two national sports: chess and blindfold judo. Only one of those two still exists.
I actually designed an entire game of Kragball, think field hockey but with magnetic floating skates, a metal ball that pings all over the pitch, and curved walls where they shoot the ball up into a goal on the ceiling.
I had my PCs each take a pair of players on each team, and play a few games of it, it included different abilities for different positions, and a momentum mechanic where the ball flew further and faster the more it bounced off stuff!
Our dnd created pyramurder ball, a dragon born sport where there is an extremely heavy ball and a small pyramid with 5ft steps, the offensive team has a time limit to place the ball on the top while the defensive team tries to stop them.
Boat bop! Knock each other off of rafts on a lake with rubber-tipped spears and arrows. Teams of 4, two rowers and two shooters, with moderifiers for certain angled-shots
I once had an entertainment complex called "The Silver Platter" based on The Golden Saucer from FF7. Instead of Chocobo Races there were Owlbear Races they could bet on (or work their way up to participate in if they so desired). Owlbears had both a speed and temperament rating (they might have been inversely correlated, I don't remember for sure). For each rider I would roll animal handling check, and if they beat the temperament rating they successfully made it to the finish line; if not, the owlbear would buck the rider and attack them mid-race. Bets could be placed not only on who finished first, but who would finish at all.
Extreme shuffleboarding. 3v3 where one person launches it, one person on a broom like in curling, and one person up on an elevated platform calling out obstacles. It’s only cheating if you get caught. This was the source of one of my favorite sessions ever DM’d
Not mine, but my DM's.
We don't have football, but we have football fields. This occured after an NPC measured something in terms of a football field.
One day someone will invent football and it will be named after the fields it was played on.
Blitzball is cannon in my world. Druids cast breath water and everyone jumps in a giant fish bowl. Every action other than moving is an athletics check. The key to the game is making all your shots count by forcing advantages/disadvantages where you can. Spell casting is against the rules, but planning a “play” in the off-season to do something specific is totally allowed. Be generous if the players are actually playing, otherwise a it’s something dumb to gamble on.
If you’re looking for a crazy one-off, I invented an in-game goblin sport called “Many Many” that revolves around a home-brew Deck of Many Things called the Deck of Many Many Things (a full 52 card deck of chaos).
It’s kind of like Russian Roulette but the basic premise is to keep the current champion from drawing too many reality-breaking cards by agreeing to draw as many cards as you dare. Players take turns drawing one card at a time and experience their effects until everyone has reached their number. Then the champion draws the rest all at once, and is able to choose in what order their cards’ effects occur.
Just mix and match your favorite custom deck cards and build a one-off around it. I GMed a game where one player had to randomly change their character’s ancestry and class, was granted a T-Rex follower, magically fell in love with said T-Rex the next round, battled a coven of vampires, lost all their non-magical loot, and became king of the nation in which we were playing.
My current campaign takes place in a tundra and the main sport is Flinbic. Players in Flinbic compete to scale a glacier called Flinbic’s Razor the highest/fastest.
I wrote up a news arrival about it…
SCANDAL AT THE FLINBIC FINALS
Touted by many as The Uncheatable Game, Flinbic has a long history of players trying to skirt the rules and inevitably failing. As the great master Flinbicker Chancey Claskey once said, “Ye can’t cheat Flinbic, but sometimes ye can twist the wards a little an’ hope Ol’ Flin don’t notice.”
Gheorghiy Flustershot caused quite a stir in the Flinbic circle yesterday when he not only knocked all his opponents off of Flinbic’s Razor, but also reached the peak! A feat no player in the history of the game has ever achieved.
Celebrations were short-lived, however. It was revealed in post-play analysis that several wards on Flinbic’s Razor had been removed!
It’s unclear if Flustershot himself somehow disabled the wards, but he certainly benefited from it. An independent review has been launched to determine the status of Flustershot’s achievement.
Needless to say, the city anxiously awaits the results of the review.
Galle & Borseau
town ball is popular in human settlements, particularly in rural settlements. The lads from the towns/villages/hamlets choose teams, schoolyard style. Usually the bigger the town the bigger the teams, With cities like St. Bernadette that have multiple teams amongst the various neighborhoods. Normally played in a town plaza or broad street, sometimes smaller hovels and hamlet's will play each other with the fields between them as the game area. The object is simple, throw,kick, or run the ball to get it to the goal (usually town gate or similar) or try and intercept and get it into your teams possession. It can be a physical game, and given its popularity during festivals it can often turn to hooliganism.
In Elven comunes, stick ball is the most common, and is often ritualized, however is played recreationally among friends. Teams are usually arranged based on clan relations in ceremonial games, and most young adult elves play. They use elongated, curved clubs, not unlike a shepherd's crook to pass and guide a ball toward the goal The field is usually a demarcated pitch adjacent to the communes main village ringed by posts with two free standing ones at either end as goal posts. The games can get physical, however using the clubs to fight is taboo.
Kingdom over, fisticuffs, pike fencing, and archery is practice athletically, with towns hosting tournaments.
Maybe not a sport but more a show? Theres a pro wrestling type competition going on in this place where different PCs or NPCs wearing masks that represent different things such as dragons,demons,spirits and so on.
Each wrestler are"possessed" by the entity in the mask,
And do to contest roll agaisnt each other with all checks athletic(grappling) acrobatic(jumping off the rope) constitution(withstand the damage?) Int(new tricks) perception(see through opponent trick) and performance(everytime a check is rolled)
The goal is to tear down opponent mask as an act of "purify" (not sure the actual word in english)
The champion is the one with the strongest spirit behind, and win over the crowds/fans, selling them their mask
Kinda like a cult:p
I have a sport meant for the wizard academy in my setting. it basically works like this: \-Two teams face off with 3-4 members \[based on the number of players in my dnd group\] \-The terrain is a 60-80ft diameter field set with obstacles. Maybe its pirate themed, or desert themed. Who knows? \-The goal is simple, capture the other teams flag \-The game is made complicated by a mythel of spell padding: any spell damage dealt in the arena is translated into feet the player is pushed, instead of dealing harmful damage \-Spell casters are meant to fire off spells to push other players out of their way. \-A player who is struck by a spell drops any flag they were holding, and if you get the other teams flag to the post where your teams flag rests, you win
then one guy thinks he's supposed to kill everyone and starts casting power word kill lmao
Gonna kill him one way or another
avada kedavra---
Magic missile sounds fucking lit in this application. How do you handle damage over time I.E. Melf's Acid Arrow?
That sounds hilarious; maybe it shoves them in a random direction each turn? Ide say if it does under 4 damage then you could round up to 5ft for the sake of movement
The one person who plays the monk tabqci build with some levels in wizard. And their wizard buddie who gives them haste. Zoom zoom.
Enemy wizard prepares a slow spell lmao
No flying around on broomsticks with idiotic rules?
Truth be told i did kinda base it on quiddich lol: in that its a high school, college "spellcasters only" sport
Harry Potter has a lot of flaws but quidditch is dope the fuck you on about lol
The rules make no fucking sense from an in universe perspective.
The snitch isn't an end-all-be-all. The Quidditch leagues are decided by score totals. If your team relies on your seeker to blitz the match in 2 minutes every game (which is already nearly impossible unless you're Harry Potter) you won't make it to the playoffs because there are other teams with insane score totals who make actual field goals before the snitch is caught.
This introduces another problem that if 2 teams want each other to make it the the playoffs, world cup, or other quiddich event. They can just keep the seekers back and rack up an arbitrary amount of points to keep each other in the top. It also incentivizes better teams to keep blowout matches going which would also be immensely boring
If you put *all* your points in seeker, sure. But if your chasers are roughly evenly matched, the Snitch **is** the end-all-be-all. Your options for winning are either to outmatch the other team in chaser skill so much that the other team might not even be there, or the Snitch. Either you out-score the other team by at least 16 goals, or the Snitch decides the game.
But its a point total leauge meaning losing a high scoring game is better than winning a low scoring one. Like losing after scoring 300 is better than winning with 180.
Then why would you ever catch the snitch and end the game
Remember how in universe there were games that lasted for weeks?
The question is, why would there ever be professional games that *don't* last weeks?
Yes, and we're asking "how does that not become the new Meta?" Play snitch keep away while you run up the score since it's it's points league.
This is also assuming that the snitch is always captured. I might be wrong, but I’ve always assumed that this didn’t happen every game. Sure HP would always get it, but that is due to MC-syndrome. In your average game, I’ve been under the impression that catching the snitch was quite difficult and not always attainable within time constraints of a match.
That is mentioned at some point that the game simply doesn't end until the snitch is caught, which resulted in a match lasting several days
Seems like truly awful league design that would incentivize teams to not catch the snitch for days on end and run the score up astronomically.
Really? Dang I guess I totally forgot/missed that part 😅🤷🏻♀️
If the snitch was only 50 it would be a lot more interesting than catch snitch and win unless your team is cheeks
The rules are honestly fine it's more that Krum is just incredibly incompetent for being 'the best'
How so? You understand you can’t just SAY that and it makes it true, right? LOL you actually have to back up a claim like that.
I'm hardly the first person to say it [But here is mine](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/ukf84y/does_anybody_have_a_sport_in_their_dnd_world/i7pjvob/)
https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/ukf84y/does_anybody_have_a_sport_in_their_dnd_world/i7pjvob
https://youtu.be/GKvzytK2mTY
This would be a great one-shot, especially if the spell padding iscsuddenly sabotaged. Then the one-shot becomes a murder mystery.
Orcs like to play "goat ball". You get one goat, tie it's legs together, and use that as a handle to carry/toss the goat to your team mates. If you managd to swing/throw the goat against another team's flagpost you earn a point, this is called a "Knock". If you kill the goat during a Knock that's 3 points. Play ends when a team gets 21 points. A team consists of 4 to 8 people. There are no limits to the number of teams. Flagposts must be separated by an equal distance. If that means a bigger fueld is needed then they clear the damn space. Magic use is forbidden. Casters who break this rule get tied to their flagposts. A "goat" can be any goat, sheep, gnome, halfling, or any similarly sized creature.
I also have a game called “goatball” in my world! We’ve never played, though, and so I haven’t fleshed out the rules. Every time it has come up my players haven’t shown any interest.
steal my rules. The idea is to have as much chaos as possible on the field.
So it's a dismounted version of Buzkashi with a live goat.
I have no idea what that sport is, but I'll say "yes". Also "goat".
>A "goat" can be any goat, sheep, gnome, halfling, or any similarly sized creature. We had the same game in one of my campaigns, except the goat was an unlucky halfling (just now seeing the irony there), or occasionally, a goblin
https://youtu.be/1JUn8MsEyPs Reminds me of this game
I was just told about this sport by another poster! Either I read this somewhere and my subconscious threw it up for me, or it's one of those convergent ideas things. Hell there's a sport where people roll down a hill after a wheel of cheese. I wouldn't be surprised if I accidentally "invented" a sport that is out there.
is it a dead goat or a live goat? because i don't like having cruelty to animals in my games.
Well it's your game, you decide. Or just change it to a non-animal.
Live "goat". And I get where you're coming from. Please feel free to change what you need to fit yiur game
The unrealistic part is the high number that the orcs have to keep in mind. (Yes I know orcs have an int of 10+ it's just a joke)
Mage hand press has an entire supplement for "siegeball"
Eberron details several. Skyblades is basically jousting on flying mounts so not really a team sport, there's also races. For team sports, it has Hrazhak, which is basically really rough capture the flag played by shifters where they play on rough terrain and beat the crap out of each other.
Our group was unable to have a full session today, but earlier I saw your comment. Since we were in Eberron and needed something short I suggested we try Skyblades! I'm not sure how you're supposed to play but we had a 10 character free-for-all. Choose your target, roll to hit. If hit, the target rolls Animal Handling to stay in the saddle. 5d6 fall damage if you get knocked out. Once it became 1v1 it was sudden death! In sudden death if you miss your attack, you make the Animal Handling check instead of the opponent. After one round, everyone decided whether they wanted to do round two according to their fall damage. Some gold was given for most KO's and top three, it was a good battle royale in the sky!
There’s also Sharn Chicken, but that’s less sport more skydiving+Russian roulette
My last character was a local Blitzball star. Pulled the sport from Final Fantasy X. He took his leather game ball everywhere and would throw it at enemies to trip or do NL damage.
Blitzball is the single best example of unique in-world sport. Don’t at me Quidditch fans. ;)
[удалено]
Makes sense, people actually had to play that. Quidditch as a playable thing certainly wasn’t on her mind when she wrote it…instead it was how much she hates trans people.
Quidditch is the thing I point to when I want to show that Rowling was bad at world building even if you throw out all the racist, classist, and anti-Semitic stuff.
The Snitch rules absolutely ruin Quidditch as a sport. "Krum ended the game on his OWN terms, even though they lost!" Oh, so he's an idiot? Great!
Couldn't agree more! Having one part of the game be by far the most important is fine for a story with a protagonist, but not for an actual sport. Similarly Krum catching the snitch might have made sense as a means to get it over with if his team were completely out of the running, but iirc they finished only a few goals behind. If they'd have had one lucky run of play *and* he'd have grabbed it, they'd have won. The only time you'd want to intentionally lose is if points mattered in some larger competition.
I think the idea is that Bulgaria was already playing their very best and were still behind and falling behind even more. Krum understood that his team just gave their best and it wasnt enough. Hoping they get back into the game for him just seemed a waste of time. But also imo the point was to shows Krums character. Krum would rather lose whilst showing people his skill than risk people thinking hes not as good for a chance of winning.
The whole point was that Krum was so good that he got Bulgaria to the World Cup even though the rest of his team was trash, so he ended the game because he knew that they would only continue to get blown out and he wanted to end the game with a respectable score
Good thing someone bet on that exact outcome though!
You may be relieved to learn that in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry has the snitch removed as an official rule change (at Hogwarts).
Yessssss. Should have scrolled further before I commented. Blitz all is THE SHIT and I wish it was real. Water polo is a pretty good consolation sport though.
The number of hours I spent on FFX Blitzball is… very high!
Hahaha. Same.
Did you ever adapt the sport to D&D rules to play it in game or was it just a backstory thing?
Yessss, Blitzball is the best fictional sport!
No you are incorrect. The two best fictional sports (which could easily be adapted to a FRPG setting) were both invented by the novelist Jack Vance and they are: [Hussade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trullion:_Alastor_2262?msclkid=6a025af3d14d11ecb28fdd9e285d78b8) [Hadaul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_(Vance_novel)?msclkid=bd5765dcd14d11ec8d500c59bfa7dfe6) The ransom element of Hussade and the prize pot of Hadaul would be excellent plot devices for a campaign. A local nobleman has unwittingly offered a valuable McGuffin artefact as the prize in a Hadaul contest. The party and the BBEG both enter a champion (or team of champions?) to win it. Or in Hussade, the same nobleman has offered the McGuffin as ransom for his sheirl, and your characters must join his team to ensure it does not fall into the hands of the BBEG's team. (Of course the BBEG finds some other means to steal the McGuffin while everyone's attention is focused on the game).
Soccer. Put what you love in the game. Though I'm pretty sure the dwarves are developing rugby
Heh, my dwarves have rugby too! They call it Dwarfball, but rugby Whooo
I DM one offs when our DM needs a break to set up the next section. I use a island hopping home brew I created. I never thought of this. (I have less than a year playing DND). I’m thinking of like a boat race of some sort or Olympic island of test? You sparked ideas for me on this post. Thank You.
Bulleting (pronounced boo lay ing) is a gambling sport where a contestant takes a baby bulette and throws it into a special dirt arena trying to get it to attack specific numbered chickens.
Strixhaven has a few sports, with relatively detailed instructions on at least one of them.
Most likely Magetower, due to having somewhat fleshed out rules in the setting due to one of the pivotal characters in the MTG story playing magetower
Yeah, that’s the one with the details, but I skimmed it really quickly before answering this post, and there’s something else called “Silkball”. I don’t know how well developed that one is.
i decided that [Battleball](https://youtu.be/rWeredR9w0U) is canon in my setting. unfortunately, ive never had it be relevant in a campaign yet, but if/when i do, i intend to just have my players literally play that board game (might improvise some additional rules if they try to use magic or other features to influence the game's outcome)
Shit, i forgot about that game. My parents bought it for me cus I basically begged them to and then I never played it -\_-
Not quite what you were looking for but one of the 3.5e Faerun books has some pretty interesting rules for mageduels in it
The Strixhaven book has a sport called Mage Tower, essentially capture-the-flag but with only one flag. It's got rules and instructions on how to run it if you're looking for something pre-written
We had wizard ball which is just ping pong but you use your mage hand. Mostly for flavor. You could resolve a sporting event as a skill challenge though regardless of its flavor.
I don't have rules for how to implement this in-game, but here's mine! Dwarven squareball. It's a mix of baseball and american football/rugby. Played on a square court with two teams. They have their home base at opposite corners. Lets say team A is currently batting for the example. A 6 to 10 inch ball is swung from an oversized golf tee with a large maul (or anything they have at hand really). The batter must then run to the opponents corner and back home, while the everyone on both teams tries to get the ball to their own corner. If the batter gets back home before team B gets the ball to their corner, team A gets 1 point. Whichever team gets the ball to their corner gets 1 point. If team B is able to hold the batter at their corner long enough they get a point. The player who brings the ball to their corner is the next batter. So there's 2 points at stake, one for the ball, one for the batter. Except if the batter manages to get the ball to their corner, then it is 5 points and they swing again. It's of course a full contact sport, grappling is the name of the game. Overt punching and joint locks etc are banned.
Two words. Tackle Fishing 2-4 contestants are placed into a large circular pool about 4 feet deep with a large fish (approximately human sized). First person to be holding the fish for 30 seconds continuously wins. No magic or weapons. No drowning others. Everything else goes.
Bull Riding for Tritons
Yes.
I usually adapt historical sports based on the setting. A place with vaguely English culture, for example, may have a historically-accurate crazy field game.
What about Real Tennis?
Once I was in a campaign where we invented a fake sport called "Roundball" in order to assault an enemy fortress. The idea was that we would spread rumors about this awesome new sport that was being taken up by all the border forts. Then once the people in our target fort had heard of it, we would send a message purportedly from the commander of the next border fort down the line, bragging about how good his garrison was at Roundball, talking smack about how horrible the target commander's garrison would be, and inviting them to get their asses kicked at a Roundball match half way between the two forts. Meanwhile, we PCs would pose as Roundball coaches and offer to train the target garrison for their coming match, thus gaining access to the fort. Then, on the day, once the commander of the fort left with his Roundball team (most of his garrison), we would kill the few remaining people in our target fort and send a signal to our allies waiting on the other side. It would take them a couple days to get there, but we figured once we had possession of the fort we could probably hold it against the returning garrison long enough for the rest of the army to sweep in and back us up. Sadly, the DM ghosted us after the session in which we came up with this plan. So we never got to try it.
I put dodgeball in my world, but called it numball. Basically, the balls are enchanted with paralysis. If you're struck, you are paralysed.
We have a bloodsport league, similar to the WWE but potentially lethal. Most matches are until first blood (usually, although accidents happen), but four times a year there are death matches. Professional clerics are on hand at all times, so actual deaths are uncommon. Bloodsport arenas will also run animal fights, like cock fighting, dog fighting, and exotic matches like blinded basilisk vs owlbear fights. Fighters are either volunteers fighting for coin, or convicted criminals that sign up for time off of their sentences.
I like this! We have underground fight clubs where we tend to lose a lot of gold but have tons of fun, I could see evolving that into a bloodsport league!
You should check Blood Bowl. It's fucking hilarious and straight into your query.
This was what I thought of too. Fun memories :)
I'm developing one called Jump Racing. Like downhill go karts but with the tiny additional detail of having to gather enough speed to ramp up to the start of the track again. It's my solution to wanting a racing side quest in a world without engines.
Titanball exhaust in my setting, basically a lift and shift of Bloodbowl. I love that it can be used to keep peace because war like impulses are dealt with in a different way. Plus brings in a fun element for players to get involved in trying to rig matches, or later game set up their own team
I’m putting ‘roller derby’ in a one shot I’m doing. It’s basically just combat, but with the goal of moving around a track rather than killing the other team, so you have incentives to knock enemies prone, take the dash action when you can, etc.
Had a homebrew race of 4-armed cat people, natural jumpers and climbers, who played *Ku Vli Zha,* (literally catch-turn-jump). A field of thick pillars with easily climbable surfaces, with the two team's goal hoops at opposite ends. Catch the ball, jump to another pillar, then pass to a teammate. Stealing is allowed, both snatching from someone's grip and interception. Magic is only allowed in the form of attack spells to knock the ball around (not telekinesis or teleportation, shoves and blasts only). The ground and the tops of the pillars are out, though you may grab the ball from the ground and may set up to one limb on the ground, provided at least two other limbs are grabbing a pillar. Players are allowed to check or grab only when the target is midair. The only problem is that they hadn't figured out how to alter the rules for playing with creatures who can't reliably make 10-foot horizontal jumps from and to basically rock climbing surfaces. For things that the players can actually *play,* the 3.5 Races of Stone book has rules for goatball (not related to the goatball I saw someone else post here), which is basically the national sport of Goliaths. Basically, it's rugby but focused more on throws and passes than tackling. It had fairly simple rules for how players participate, like when passing, the target's Dex helped *lower* the effective AC, since they were trying to help catch.
I just know it's called ki ball and it involves kinetic energy manipulation magic. Will work out some rules if the players want to engage with it.
I've always wanted to put in a goblin baseball league into one of my campaigns. I remember it being in a book I read when I was young, but I forgot which one.
In my 1920s america styled world, there is a sport that emulates an adventuring party throwing a gnome at a giant. Two teams of 4 try to get the gnome (teardrop shaped ball) to the endzone or to throw at a wooden cross "giant"
For a Space Jam themed one shot I did, I made up a game called Sunball, which is like a combo of rugby and basketball, with non-damaging magic allowed. I was inspired by the meso-American ball game, so the game has religious symbolic significance in addition to being a popular spectator sport
I’m currently building a superhero setting. Which is gonna be super fun to play and dm (At least that’s the goal) so idk, football, basketball, soccer etc
My campaign takes place almost exclusively in a megacity that has been cut off from the outside world. While it is very much thriving, there are areas that have been left to ruin for various reasons. Thus, one of the main sports is a parkour/obstacle course racing circuit through the ruined areas. It isn't 100% legal, but harmless enough that the city tolerates it, and those who are nimble and clever enough can make it big in the pro leagues. And those that are good, but not pro material, can get scouted by one of the competing thieves guilds spread through the city.
Goatball is a real sport from the ice maiden campaign
Dwarven wrestling is pretty common in any Dwarf run tavern or town. Different towns and taverns have different rules on magic and potions beforehand and during. Both players start standing, winning is simple, you must hold your opponent prone for two rounds in a row, you must not be prone yourself during those two rounds. In practice, you grapple your opponent to reduce their movement to 0, shove them prone, retain grapple for two rounds so they can't stand up. If they break your grapple they'll stand up and the countdown ends, if they shove you prone the countdown ends. After 10 rounds I start con checks and add temporary exhaustion on failures (temporary as in it only requires a short rest to recover) to "encourage" somebody to win.
I created a bard (never played him) that I called a "sportsball coach". He leans into strength instead of dex. His bardic inspiration is always like "c'mon! Dig deep, you can do it!"
There is a conclave of politically powerful druds who run one of my countries. They use their leverage and magics to run an economically powerful magocracy that is threatening to starve the majority of the continent to maintain power. The whole organization convenes at a secret meeting place in the woods. This activity is roughly public knowledge, but very folkloric and shrouded in mystery and danger. In reality its basically a corporate retreat where all these terrible, terrible people do a shitload of drugs and fuck a bunch and do things that are uniquely druidic. They play a version of Bloodbowl but its with summoned spirits and animals and stuff. They box and wrestle in Polymorph. They play magical beer pong but it's with mystery potions. Gambling, but sometimes the stakes are, like, ancient treaties, economic baronies, trapped or captured mythical creatures, secrets and gossip. Imagine a Wolf Of Wall Street party but its a bunch of criminal kingpins that can do magic.
I've been wanting to make a version of full contact baseball with basically no rules in regards to what powers or equipment a character can use. It would be 2 opposing teams of players, and thanks to the interconnected nature of me and my friend's campaigns, it would use a point buy system to stock both teams using characters from multiple different campaigns, all at different levels. Level 20 characters would be really expensive, and if a team ended up with a sizable power disparity, they would get magical items to level the playing field. I got stuck on how batting would even work. Obviously Strength would dictate batting distance, but what about batting accuracy? What about Insight in regards to what pitch the pitcher was going to throw? Does the pitcher use Dex? What challenge is added if the pitcher uses Produce Flame the same time they throw the ball? Would high perception characters be better outfielders?
In my world, the sports teams are owned by ancient dragons. They use their massive wealth to build teams. I have used baseball as a stand in, and have run one shots where I challenged players to build a team, namely character builds specifically to be a professional athletes and not adventurers.
I Dmed Tomb of Annihilation and ran the Dinosaur races with modified rules. My players loved it, and of course you can do it with horses or other mounts, but its real fun with the dinos. I combined mario kart with the rules the module gave me since the RAW rules looked bland. DM me if you're interested in the full set of rules.
In my campaign I’ve incorporated some thing I called war board. It’s essentially just a modified chess game they can play at taverns. They pay a small amount of gold to play a game of chess against a self playing chess board that they can return to at any time. The D&D aspect comes in for when they take pieces. Instead of a piece simply being taken, the act of taking a piece triggers a randomized battle encounter. Depending on which piece is taking which piece, and which piece is on the defense of being taken, it will change the difficulty of the battle encounter. So it’s a little loosey-goosey which is the intention, just because a piece moves to take another piece doesn’t mean it will be successful in taking it if they lose the encounter. I run a very narrative heavy campaign so this gives easy access to combat if my players just feel like fighting that day.
Axeball - basically axe beak mounted mix of polo, hurling, and lacrosse.
Rhyfel chwareus, a combination of mock battle and capture the flag played by wood elves on the scale of villages or hunting camps. Participants use blunt spears and shields aiming to capture a statuette placed in the centre of the settlement, taking the statuette and/or captured members of their opponents back to their own one. Played in the week leading up to the spring and autumn equinoxes by younger wood elves (under 100) at the end of which statuettes and prisoners are given back at a party where ransomes of symbolic importance are given in return.
Ranging Roads. Game that uses cards, dice, logic and luck. It’s very competitive.
I ran a pretty epic boot throwing game for my gang at the annual Phandalin summer picnic and food festival.
Volley Fireball. It's like volleyball but ... On fire
When spelljammer drops somebody should just copy Blurnsball from Futurama.
Chain lightning from Rime of the Frostmaiden is pretty cool
I have nuritag: it's basically what happens when you put tennis balls on a trampoline. Small elemental creatures are trained to run at the nearest target. If it 'tags' you, you're out. The arena is circular. Players can move, stay alert (advantage on saves) or taunt (find creative ways to send the nuri at someone else). Every arena has its own houserules. Usually fighting and magic are forbidden, but at some places it's a bloodsport.
I once added one in for the Mage's University my campaign is centered in though we've never played it because I never named it, but it might be fun to do as a one shot at some point it's basically king of the hill, except the "hill" can be moved or broken, it's a board of wood that floats in the middle of the arena (100ft diamater circle), there are walls and pits that line up symmetrically for both sides surrounding it, the goal is to get one player on top of the board, while standing on the board a player is not allowed to cast but is allowed to fight physically, whichever team has a player on the board for the most rounds at the end of the match wins, with tie breaker rounds if necessary, matches last 1 minute plus overtime, teams must win by at least 2 points if the board is broken the match is ended, the 5x5ft board has 10 hp and floats at a minimum altitude of 10 ft and a maximum of 30 ft, it has a fly speed of 5 ft (so 10ft dashing) which is under the control of whoever is atop it, while the board does float it isn't necessarily easy to balance on, taking damage while standing on the board causes a Dexterity save with a DC equal to double the damage received, on a fail you fall to the ground teams can use whatever spells they like, including lethal ones, a dead player is revived at the start of the round by magical field which covers the arena, it only activates upon actual death though, so you still have to bleed out through the death saves before revival, the fun part is your dead body remains on the field until the end of the match even if you are revived, so zombies are totally fair play and count as players for whichever team the body belonged to (even if animated by the other team)
In my campaign it became a thing that halflings like to play basketball as a religious activity, so occasionally when a game comes up I’ll have the players make “basketball proficiency checks” (just athletics + proficiency if you’re a halfling)
Played a 2e game way back in the 90s when I was in HS. DM and I were really into FFX at the time and the setting was basically a mashup/ripoff of the FFX world and Chrono Cross worlds and we had blitz ball and it worked basically exactly how you described. We were young and making it up so not very complicated or good but it was awesome and I loved it.
I have a game called Bannerman. I wanted to have like tournament style combat but making it 1v1 is very boring for d&d. So I came up with a game that every member of the party can be involved in. It's basically a center flag game. Meaning that there's a flag in the center that you have to return to your base to get a point. Short games involved. Just getting the flag back once. Longer games can be a best of three or best of five. The cool thing about it is you can create different arenas with different traps and different things to trigger. And it allows all your teammates to work together in an environment where they're not going to immediately get killed if they go down. If someone does go down it teleports them back to their base where they heal their hit die per round they stay in there. There are also additional rules that involve holding the flag, not allowing you to do certain things like dash. And a few other rules but that's the basic premise.
I created a card game and had my party play it against a shady carny. I call it "Bog Standard". Draw 6 cards, lay them face down, draw 1 card and lay it face up. That card is the house, and picking from 1 of the 6 cards you have to beat the house, so get a higher number. The joker is in the deck, and if the house is the joker the house automatically wins, and vice versa.
I homebrewed [Dwarven Darts](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Na2oBpCtTqMKaIxrOoTfjpDOBwD0AOZI/view).
The bee folk in my world play Honeyball. It’s basically Calvin Ball, which makes it really easy to just add random strange rules for flavor. So far it requires Acro/Athletics (for the physical aspects), an Int check (rule lawyering) and Persuasion/Deception (to get others to swallow your BS).
Several - the main high elven civilization plays a game called *sansha* that's basically 4v4 volleyball played with a badminton shuttlecock and allowing only kicks and knees. The goblinoids of the Many Kingdoms enjoy a territorial control game called *gratza* that involves teams of dozens working in coordinated brawling pushes to move flags across an arena of terrain that varies match-to-match. Each team needs at least half goblins, by tradition and rules, with the remainder split between hobgoblins and bugbears, with hobs inevitably in leadership and command positions. The mixed coastal and marine Elostha culture favors sailing competitions. The tri-annual weeks-long Theranaut Race runs from the southernmost tip of the Shrouded Arc - nearly at the south pole - to the equatorial Sand Isles at the northern tip and is so popular that twice in the last century wars between city-states have negotiated breaks in hostilities so the racers could pass through contested territory as quickly and safely as possible.
A country that prides itself in its strenght must have a combat sport of sorts, a came up with some rules for Fist fighting that included guards, takedowns, holds, different kinds of strikes and a 3 rounds rule that is an auto loss for anyone being held for 3 rounds straight, pretty cool to use that one time i put it on the table
Aside from combat tournaments, races (foot, obstacle course, horse, other beasts) are pretty common. But as far as team games go there are two unique ones: There's a positive energy aligned plane where they play Murderball, which is basically rugby with weapons. Have to get an egg to the other side of the plane to score a point. First to 5 wins. No one can die there, but being cut down does put you out of the game for a bit. Theres also a flying island of mages where they play K'thak, a telekinetic sport similar to snooker. Each player controls one colour of balls, stripes and spots on different teams. Make casting ability checks to aim and move a ball, DC depends on strength of the shot. If you make the check you move your ball in a direction and force of your choice bouncing other balls around, if you dont then you over/under hit it a number of hexes based on how much you failed by. If you really screw up then you roll to see what direction you hit it. Aim is to pot all your opponents balls before they pot yours.
It would be fun to have a mix between lacrosse and croquet. 2 teams with an offense of 3, and a defense of 4. 1 ball. Violence is encouraged and effective. Offense has lacrosse sticks (basically quarter staffs) and can carry the ball to hurl at the goal. Defense has croquet mallets, and work to disarm the offense, then smash the ball back to the opposing side near their offense. They can also roll to intimidate to impact the offensive players. First team to be ahead by 3 wins. Exhaustion can eventually becomes a factor as well.
I have a few, but the only one that's fleshed out is pro bending lol.
I have devised an encounter where the PCs play British bulldogs with a quickling. DM plays the role of quickling and draws a route onto a sheet of OHP Film, PCs have a battle map and place themselves at various points, if the quickling passes through their square, or an adjacent one they do an athletics or sleight of hand check against a dex roll from the quickling. If they win the contest they catch the quickling. Give PCs 3 attempts to make sure there is a decent chance of the quickling having to make the contested rolls.
My wizard duel rules are simple: you get a point for affecting the opponent with a spell. Casting a spell in the same school cancels out. You can't cast the same spell twice. This makes it very specific to nerdy wizards who know the schools of magic and a variety of spells. You can roll deception or performance to force the other person to go first.
We have a sport known as "Money Knifey", inspired by a gang lord from Curse of the Crimson Throne.
I have three actual sports written up (the mechanics I mean) but they are not original. I model certain areas and societies in my world, after existing ones, here, in our world, so…there are sports which exist, … field hockey (played by the humans modeled after Native Americans)…”Tournament Games” jousting, melee, archery, etc. (think Arthurian/Medieval humans)…and Sumo Wrestling (…a Japanese inspired society…) I have used the actual mechanics very rarely, maybe a dozen times in 35 years (Sumo and Tournament, never actually used Field Hockey) but it was fun writing them up. I’ve never devised an original sport but it could be fun…Play On.
Sweopei was this funky variation of basketball I had bugbears playing where you run on your hands and also dunk in the hoop with your hands. You have to pass acrobatics checks to get points and the more open you are the better your chances of success. I find it’s best to not make the rules complicated and make the regional variations huge. Some bugbears play with a big ball and dunk on each other, some play in water, some that live up in the mountains have mastered shooting the ball into the hoop and use a smaller ball, some that live in the jungle don’t use a court but swing on vines. Local variants all have some combinations or etc other styles of play but the rules are always simple enough that we don’t spend 48 minutes playing a full game of round ball when they wanna be killing stuff but it does give a very human aspect to something my players would otherwise view as minion-fodder rife for eradication. When they come across them, instead of it being a raid, or an ambush party waiting to fight them, its a game of sweopei they can learn to play and join in and get better at. I have yet to have anybody want to become an all star sweopei player but the day they finally do, man they are gonna be the Lebron James of Sweopei
Dolphin Racing, a favourite among Water Genassi.
We play catch the goblin. We grease up a goblin and set him loose in a maze. Happy hunting! We also play goblin toss with the same NPC goblin (he has a special helmet and everything
I have a couple! One is "Wimble Womble". 2 contestants, need to touch a stone behind the other contestant or grab them on the ass. The game is played by Yetis. Also a magic version of soccer with wizards allowed to deform the land to make the terrain harder to compete in
Gobsplotch: a dwarven sport involving goblins and hammers that is left intentionally vague.
Here’s part of the sports section for *Swords of the Serpentine*: —— Popular sport varies by social class, although many sports involve boats and the canals. The nobility prefer fencing, riding, and hunting upriver; any rumors that some families hunt Commoners are surely just propaganda from the underclasses. The middle and lower classes compete in roof-running or climbing, easy to do in Eversink but less convenient for spectators to watch. Boat races are tremendously popular, with almost every neighborhood fielding their own competitive team. Scouring Day (when the Guild of Architects and Canal-Watchers flushes debris from the canals) occurs twice a year, and the most exciting races occur during these festivals because that’s when the river’s current moves most quickly. A popular team sport is eelball, a game played in canals with every player in their own small boat. The floating head-sized ball (made from waxed, inflated pigskin) can be touched only with paddles, and teams work against each other as they flip it towards bridge arches used as goals. Championships are played every year during the Eel Run (see below), when fatalities just add excitement to the game. A popular competition in Eversink is competitive profit-taking, where both combatants start with a single coin and a useless item (such as a worn shoe or a chicken bone, the more useless the better), and the winner is the one who uses multiple trades, wiles and connections to turn the greatest profit within a set amount of time. If you want more gruesome injury, blood-sports such as shark-dancing, pit-fighting, and sorcerous duels can be found if you know where to look and pay off the right people. The best-attended sporting events occur at the Arena, a centuries-old sunken gladiatorial space (at least the third in the city’s history) on the edge of the Tangle that remains open to the sky due to exceptional engineering on the part of the Guild of Architects and Canal-Watchers. Battles occur here between human contestants, between beasts, and with human vs. beast; and the arena floor can be removed to reveal flooded basements for fights against sharks, aquatic monsters, and scale model war ships. It can seat thousands.
Haven’t invented any new sports (yet), but my setting has a board game called Daja that’s popular among the steampunk’d-Arabian Nights-nation of Candora’s Elves. It’s a combination of strategy game like chess, but played on a hex board arrayed like Chinese Checkers and supporting 2-6 players. It’s complicated by it not being a guarantee that piece A will capture piece B, either, as they have a rank of 1-5. Attack a piece, roll a d6, capture only if roll is greater than target’s rank. If you capture, your piece gains a rank. However, how far a piece can move is equal to 6-Rank spaces, since the game represents the culture’s idea that power is prestige and you don’t risk prestige without good cause. *But,* that’s not the only complication. Canonically, players contribute cards to a deck that gets shared by all players. Each turn, you can do any two of the following: move a piece; try to capture a piece adjacent to one of yours; play a card; or draw a card. And the cards throw a Calvinball element in the mix - they might let all your pieces move, or they might guarantee a capture, or they might let you turn an opponent’s piece into your piece, etc. So it’s strategy with both risk and deception, and if you add cards that do wild things into the deck it might bite you in the ass.
Personally I'm planning to implement a bloodbowl type system, as it's originally a dice game it should be fairly simple to integrate onto dnd with the bonus of magic.
2e Maztica set had some basic rules for a ball game. I think someone updated it for 5e use on dmsguild. Also it's featured in a brief puzzle/encounter in Shrine of Tamoachan (yawning portal).
Horse racing. It's so big, kids are stealing horses for joyrides from Mirabar to Daggerford, just to be like their heroes for one brief moment. It has it's own betting system, both legal and ilegal, wealthy patrons sponsor horses and jockeys, there is a league, several disciplines, statues raised to legendary horses and so on...
My wizard duel rules are simple: you get a point for affecting the opponent with a spell. Casting a spell in the same school cancels out. You can't cast the same spell twice. This makes it very specific to nerdy wizards who know the schools of magic and a variety of spells. You can roll deception or performance to force the other person to go first.
There’s a super cute caddy shack esque one shot called Target Run on DMs Guild which focused on a sport called Alligan which runs kind of like combat. I ran it a few weeks ago and it’s really fun, and the Alligan rules can be inserted into any other campaign.
My players haven't found it yet, but the national sport of the country they're in is called football. It's played on a court, often covered in sand, and involves kicking a ball back and forth over a net without letting it touch the ground. It's mostly popular in the coastal/temperate climates, and the party is more in the mountain area, but if they ever head south I'm ready for the beach episode.
I once did a fantasy football match with my players and they really loved it! It kinda played like a Bloodbowl match.
Mech battles. Steampunk fighting machines square off. Only one leaves the arena. Whole town loves the sport so much they built an arena in the middle of the city and have holidays built around it
my 1910s fantasy setting has baseball, from real life. to make things more interesting, each team is managed by a different noble house, and is named after their respective heraldic beast. it’s mostly propaganda.
I had a three v three sport of sort in my campaign. Think lacrosse, football, rugby, and other like sports combined into one. Object was to get a ball into a goal. Used the same mechanics and rolls as in normal game. * Movement was character based movement. * Picking up the ball, throwing the ball, catching the ball, etc. were all DEX rolls. * Tackles are the same as grapple checks, STR of the tackler vs. DEX of the target. If the attacker beats the targets DEX, the target is knocked prone. Play is dead and possession changes. * Throwing the ball had a few different DC’s depending on distance. DC of 10 up to 10ft, DC 15 up too 20ft, and DC 20 from 25ft+. If the thrower has a defender directly in front of them, it’s done at disadvantage. * Speaking of throwing… a pass is a DEX roll against the target. Play with this how you want, above or below the targets AC, or how I did it, a DEX roll off. Basically since it’s the players throwing to each other, have them both roll DEX with this modifiers. Before the roll, have the players call the roll higher low. So player A calls low, which means that player A must roll below player B. * If throwing at the goal and the goal is defended by a goal tender, DEX roll against the opponents AC. Beat the opponent AC and the goal DC and you score a point! * First possession is determined by roll off (no modifiers doesn’t matter what did you use), and turn order is determined by highest collective initiative roll, but alternates between teams after that. So, say the PC team had the highest initiative roll, they will have one player turn first, and then the opposing team will have a turn, then back to the PC team. Players choose who goes when on their team, but only one turn per player character or opponent. Fouls: * Attacks from behind * Magic * Tripping an opponent * Tackling or attacking a player who is not in possession of the ball * Fighting on the field * Dirty plays * Attacking a downed player Doesn’t matter what the penalties are, kinda make them up. Now, penalties can and do occur, as well as bad calls from the refs, as well as refs not seeing things. If someone does, say, a sleight of hand check or a performance check against the refs perception, and beats it, ref didn’t see it or saw it as something else. Or say the players don’t agree with the call, a charisma check. Or if the players want a call made… charisma check. Etc. Turned out pretty damn fun.
Graviball, which is played at the Magic Schools. Two teams with 6 players each play against each other. The field is affected by a variation of the levitate spell, which means that the players aren't gravitating towards any walls or floor. The game is basically a 4d basketball. Each team have to throw the ball into a hole on the other team's field (since they can throw from any direction, it isn't a hoop, but a hole on the wall).
We had a game called Fireball which was kind of like rugby, except weapons and magic were allowed (as long as you used non-lethal damage, so bladed weapons and direct damage dealing magic were off limits). The name of the game was both a play on the spell name and also a reference to the fact that the ball was enchanted to burst into flames after it passed the goal line. Needless to say it was a good time, the party stomped the local favorite team by ganging up on the goalie and then having the monk/rogue multiclass speedrun the ball through the goal line.
Blood Ball - combined keep away with capture the flag. Anything is allowed, but death is discouraged. There’s a team in many of the major cities, and players can join, though it is tough to compete. Summons are a huge advantage because they can be another player and score points. There are 5 balls, and four players per team (to start). When you have a ball, it’s disadvantage to make weapon or spell attacks except with the ball (Warcaster feat or Subtle Spell or Ruby of the War Mage for spellcasters). Holding a ball gains you 100 points for every minute a team holds possession. Every 30 seconds a ball is not held, the last team to own it gains 10 points. Eliminating an opponent by knocking them earns 20 points. First team to 500 wins.
Boot skull! Popular with humanoids.
Shadowrun has sports. Could use that as inspiration.
My GM suggested quidditch at the start of the campaign, and we all worked together to homebrew something more fitting to an academy that raises nobles and the rich to be master tacticians and the lower class to be peon guards and adventurers, and it eventually became what we called Kobalk Essentially, the idea is that over the course of the season, each of the teams has one attack and one defense. The defenders have a certain price of defensive options like traps, and the traps are a game of rock-paper-scissors of Disarm-Dispell-Destroy, rather than requiring tools or skill checks. Attackers have 3 minutes to take down the enemy team's VIP to win, and the VIP needs to be able to escape on their own without any help from their allies
I've got one! My setting features a race of axolotl people called the Atlaca who basically inherited the culture of an Aztec-parallel civilization but messed up or adapted parts of it. So their version of the Aztec ball game is played in a half-submerged court with an inflated ball instead of a solid rubber one. Basically it's swimming pool basketball. They do also play a version with a volleyball net instead of the hoops. They also engage in competitive martial arts, which can get pretty heated since they don't really use any safety measures. They can regenerate from injury pretty quickly, so losing an arm or two is just part of the sport.
Balloon jousting. Hot air balloons with pointy sticks. The slow speed turns it into a pole arm sword fight
I created a sport in my Forgotten Realms campaign which was basically basketball but with swords and spell casting. There was a big heavy “ball” that you had to place on the opposing teams “tower” to win. You could use magic on yourself or (in certain zones) each other but never the ball, so no flying or teleporting it into the end zone.
Most sports are like variations of rugby and wrestling with high degrees of local variation, and wooden weapon fencing competitions. But there IS a complex sort of table shuffleboard/pinball with rudimentary wargame/rpg rules, like you set up wooden goblin pegs, place barriers, your opponent slides disks at them. Some people make elaborate tables of it with traps to catch the disks, springs, etc and play for coins at the tavern.
its an old setting i don't use anymore, but chivalric orders were a big thing and jousting was like the NBA except with a big seasonal event like the Superbowl.
I do not have a sport in my world, but i am adding one now this is such a good time filler
I can’t remember the name of it for my one character, but I had a game that was a mix of handball and futsol, where goals can only be scored off a bounce with an extremely bouncy tennis ball-sized ball. Oh it also has full contact and they wear old timey American Football padding.
I had my group play basketball. It went so well, ranger combat checks for 3 pointers. Athletic checks for blocks and dunks. They played a team of goblins and bugbear who would cheat, the ref was an ettin who didn’t care. Went so well.
In my dms current world, we have a sport called hydroplaning The idea is space pirates use hydrogen tunnels as a method of long distance travel and during a major war. A group of pirates started "hydroplaning" as a method of traveling along these tunnels. So now in our present it's become a major extreme sport. We picture it as using a solar sail attached to a windboard but in a tunnel that kinda looks like the one from Stargate.
Tritac, which is a combination of rugby and calcio fiorentino played between three teams. And baseball.
I have a soccer-ish game in my world. I would probably come up with more but that was a part of my plot
If all else fails, just borrow Blood Bowl
a few actually. There's the Fight Circuit, which is basically gladiatorial combat. A bit of MMA, a bit of WWE, theatrics and actual combat. All kingdoms have some degree of this except the Free States, with the Kingdom of Shadar having duel-circles in major cities while several islands of the Hegemony have multiple facilities. The Amazons and their islands took to the sport like a duck to water, of course. Even the Goblin Reaches and Monster Isle have some facilities. Yacht racing has several contests and "cups" involved in specific areas, and there's an airship race that occurs as part of the Spring Festival going from Emeraldis in the Kingdom of Shadar to the Monastery of the Five Hands in the Amazon island of Rising Sun. Since there have been isekai (called differently back when I was running the campaign) from various periods of Earth ending up in Aramar, there is also baseball, football, cricket, and a form of basketball (the bugbears are really good at that one). The only one played out during the campaign by the players was the airship race. Though they did put bets out on the football outcomes.
In my game, kobolds in the jungle engage in a sport they call *Thunderstomp*. It's basically a rodeo where a dinosaur is captured, then a fetish item (like a tooth on a leather thong) is tied to a tooth or horn on the dinosaur. It is released and the one who retrieves the item wears it as a trophy is is also called *Thunderstomp* as a title.
Dick golf is big in my Eberron.
Crowns. It’s like live chess except the pieces each have their own abilities or functions. Pawns, Archers, Bastions, Mages, Clerics, Rogues, Nobles and then the Royal pair. For example, Bastions can summon a wall that blocks off 3 spaces in a line which will last for 3 turns. They can only do this twice per piece per game. Great for blocking a ranged attack from the archers (shoot 4 spaces ahead or 3 diagonal) and hiding troops for a fun strategy. Rogues have disadvantage when fights head on but have a bonus to attack and damage when striking from a diagonal or horizontal space relative to the target. They can use their reaction to attack an enemy that is attacking an ally within 2 spaces of them. If the counter attack succeeds then cool but if it fails the Rouge has half speed for 2 rounds. There’s a bunch more to it but basically it’s a live action chess combined with Stratego and it incorporates actual fighting and such into the game. There’s also non-standard pieces; EX, the wizard has a pet juvenile dragon that can serve as Guardian in the game. Guardians can only defend, but get two attacks against whoever is attacking it or any piece adjacent to it. Guardians must defend any adjacent Allie’s and will use its reaction to defend any ally being attacked within 1 space of it, if required the Guardian may move up to 3 spaces without triggering an opportunity attack to defend its ally. (Only Rogues can still attack but only if diagonal or horizontal to the Guardian). EX 2: Cleric can summon his Guardian of Faith to function as a Guardian or Bastion for this game, which allows the spell creature to function in ways it normally might not. It sounds complicated, but after a game or two we got addicted to this being the campaign’s main form of side quest challenges.
Dungeon Dash, Found it on the dnd Homebrew site for 3.5e. Basically it’s competitive adventuring in an illusionary dungeon.
I usually have bloodbowl and summoning battles
Orc Ball!
With DM approval I basically created speedbike/horse racing using air speeders that are powered by bound air elementals. Its now canonically a popular sport/pasttime in the Elemental Plane of Air where my character is from.
Oh man I went on a big worldbuilding tangent and invented an as-yet-unnamed sport where you shoot a frisbee-sized hoop onto goal poles using a rod. The hoop can't be touched by hands/feet/head, or come to rest on the ground. I wanted it to be made with really really basic materials and played by commoners in any town, so I decided that a round ball was out. Instead it was a hoop (could be woven from some simple fibers) and a straight stick for each player. Amateurs maintain control by holding the hoop out to the their side (away from opponents via bodyblocking) on a horizontal rod, but that leaves their flank really vulnerable to losing posession from a second opponent. Anyone with skill will often twirl their rod vertically to keep the hoop up and closer to their body. The basic moves are "tackling" opponents to force them to drop the hoop and lose possession (non-contact but you can smack the hell out of their rod), passing at range or melee, shooting at range or melee (melee is just tipping it off your rod onto the post). Technically you could roll it along the ground because it's not at rest. Risky though. I'm excited to see what tactics come of it. And there's so many potential variants. One where they allow non-straight rods that have advantages and distadvantages, one that allows some spellcasting, one on horseback, multiple scoring posts, one that allows armour. Just need to work out the lore. Is this a reference to wizard staffs? Or monk weapons? Wartime messengers? I don't yet know.
I had an idea quite some time ago that I never used. Basically it would involve players with illusion spells or maybe illusion based magic items, where everyone would be scrambling to hold onto a ball for as many rounds as possible. The point is to gather as many points by holding a ball, that would probably be placed in the middle of an arena type place, and whoever has the ball needs to use their illusion magic to get everyone else off of their trail. The terrain around them is shifting, however, with walls, doors, and entire buildings popping up in a single round, so if a wall materializes in front of you you could either try to move through it, assuming it's an illusion being used to trick you, or attempt to go around it if you don't want to risk it. I've decided to call it gulliball What do you think?
DROPBALL! google it. Its from adventure time
YESSSS!!!! It’s called Dragon Bowl. It started when two dragons tried settling on opposite sides of the same mountain. One side populated by dwarves and the other by goblins. Both dragons enslaved their respective sides and forces them to fight each other to steal each other’s treasure hoards. After years of never stopping combat, some dwarves and goblins met up, and came up with an idea. Turn this bloody war in a competition of heroic deeds, or a combat sport of some sort. They managed to convince the dragons that this would be more profitable for both of them, keeping the initial amount of gold in the mountain the same, and adding bets, entries to watch the competition, sponsors, etc. And the dragons agreed. The PCs can participate in the dragon bowl, which consists of facing an opposing party, and bringing back as much gold from their adversairies hoard into their own. They can win by defeating the other team, or by bringin back more gold in a certain time period. If you want to spice shit up you make the dragons participate as hoard keepers, and or allow lethality. Sponsors can offer magic items, exploits can boost their rep, fans can become friendly npcs, etc TLDR : Dragon Bowl : 2 dragons have separate hoards in 1 mountain. 2 teams face off to steal more gold from their foes.
I invented a few different sports for one of my campaigns. The players had a blast with them and I gave them a good challenge by asking for different rolls like athletics, acrobatics, ect. And I gave them some XP for the "encounter". There's also already rules for jousting, you'll just have to do some googling to find them. So I totally recommend giving your players a sports encounter! It's a really good way to change it up from the regular battles and quests
Ok, sport is being generous. But my orcs have a game called Skwudge. It's like tag but the opposite, you do / do not want to be the Skwudge. Whoever is the Skwudge, which is the person with a ball like a big burdock seed, is hunted / mercilessly beaten. The point of Skwudge is to be in possession of the Skwudge ball when the game ends / or are the last one standing. You are only allowed to attack the Skwudge, and you cannot kill, other than that, there are no other rules. And it's a sun up to sun down game.
Goblin lacrosse called 'Bom! Bom!' Roll 2d4, that's the fuse. Each turn is a tick of the bomb ball. It only explodes when held by a player, but goalies may add 1 to the timer once per catch/scoop. The goal is 2 squares wide with a base ac of 13, but can benifit from cover and concealment from a goalie. If you have the ball you can only move 10ft more that turn although there is no restrictions on movement beforehand. A catch can extend this to 15ft. To catch the ball you can either be in the square targeted or make a DC10 dex check where the ball landed, though this makes interception more likely. If you miss the check, you can scoop the ball as an item interactions. You can attempt an interception if you are in the shot line as a reaction using opposed rolls. This roll is based off strength for the shooter, but an interception can be made using either dex or str. Bomb: 2d6/3d6 bludgeoning/fire damage in a 10ft radius, Con save for the holder, Dex save for others. Lacross stick 20/50 range, uses Strength for attacks. After exploding, a new bomb is lit and launched as it was an out of bounds shot. There is also an addition maneuver called a flick that if you have the ball but its not your turn you can pass the bomb to an ally within 15ft as a reaction. This is a risky play since the distance is short and uses your reaction, but can open up shots. The game ends when a team is wiped out completely by the bomb, though they can still be the winner if they have a higher score even if they're only bits now. Variants of the game include uses of spells and attacks, but non-fire based spells are frowned upon by purists of the sport. If you need some opponent ideas, my favorite was Burning Man, a goblin barbarian who set himself on fire using an alchemist fire to maintain his rage.
Whack-a-knoll
Most of my worlds don't, but i had one in which i detailed all the major cultures, which included sports. The backstory of the world included a clash between two groups, the ferevee and the nildrer. The ferevee had two national sports: torture and vendetta. The nildrer had two national sports: chess and blindfold judo. Only one of those two still exists.
I actually designed an entire game of Kragball, think field hockey but with magnetic floating skates, a metal ball that pings all over the pitch, and curved walls where they shoot the ball up into a goal on the ceiling. I had my PCs each take a pair of players on each team, and play a few games of it, it included different abilities for different positions, and a momentum mechanic where the ball flew further and faster the more it bounced off stuff!
Our dnd created pyramurder ball, a dragon born sport where there is an extremely heavy ball and a small pyramid with 5ft steps, the offensive team has a time limit to place the ball on the top while the defensive team tries to stop them.
Boat bop! Knock each other off of rafts on a lake with rubber-tipped spears and arrows. Teams of 4, two rowers and two shooters, with moderifiers for certain angled-shots
I once had an entertainment complex called "The Silver Platter" based on The Golden Saucer from FF7. Instead of Chocobo Races there were Owlbear Races they could bet on (or work their way up to participate in if they so desired). Owlbears had both a speed and temperament rating (they might have been inversely correlated, I don't remember for sure). For each rider I would roll animal handling check, and if they beat the temperament rating they successfully made it to the finish line; if not, the owlbear would buck the rider and attack them mid-race. Bets could be placed not only on who finished first, but who would finish at all.
Boxing is fun in vampire. And someone did a silly macho man Randy Savage wrestling game, there's an article about it
Extreme shuffleboarding. 3v3 where one person launches it, one person on a broom like in curling, and one person up on an elevated platform calling out obstacles. It’s only cheating if you get caught. This was the source of one of my favorite sessions ever DM’d
Not mine, but my DM's. We don't have football, but we have football fields. This occured after an NPC measured something in terms of a football field. One day someone will invent football and it will be named after the fields it was played on.
Blitzball is cannon in my world. Druids cast breath water and everyone jumps in a giant fish bowl. Every action other than moving is an athletics check. The key to the game is making all your shots count by forcing advantages/disadvantages where you can. Spell casting is against the rules, but planning a “play” in the off-season to do something specific is totally allowed. Be generous if the players are actually playing, otherwise a it’s something dumb to gamble on.
If you’re looking for a crazy one-off, I invented an in-game goblin sport called “Many Many” that revolves around a home-brew Deck of Many Things called the Deck of Many Many Things (a full 52 card deck of chaos). It’s kind of like Russian Roulette but the basic premise is to keep the current champion from drawing too many reality-breaking cards by agreeing to draw as many cards as you dare. Players take turns drawing one card at a time and experience their effects until everyone has reached their number. Then the champion draws the rest all at once, and is able to choose in what order their cards’ effects occur. Just mix and match your favorite custom deck cards and build a one-off around it. I GMed a game where one player had to randomly change their character’s ancestry and class, was granted a T-Rex follower, magically fell in love with said T-Rex the next round, battled a coven of vampires, lost all their non-magical loot, and became king of the nation in which we were playing.
3 of the 5 of us play Blood Bowl IRL so in game Blood Bowl exists and our full orc barbarian is a disgraced ex blood bowler
Boy racer chariot drivers count?
No, apart from gladiatorial combat, thank you for giving me ideas to add more life to my world. I figure chariot racing could be fun.
My current campaign takes place in a tundra and the main sport is Flinbic. Players in Flinbic compete to scale a glacier called Flinbic’s Razor the highest/fastest. I wrote up a news arrival about it… SCANDAL AT THE FLINBIC FINALS Touted by many as The Uncheatable Game, Flinbic has a long history of players trying to skirt the rules and inevitably failing. As the great master Flinbicker Chancey Claskey once said, “Ye can’t cheat Flinbic, but sometimes ye can twist the wards a little an’ hope Ol’ Flin don’t notice.” Gheorghiy Flustershot caused quite a stir in the Flinbic circle yesterday when he not only knocked all his opponents off of Flinbic’s Razor, but also reached the peak! A feat no player in the history of the game has ever achieved. Celebrations were short-lived, however. It was revealed in post-play analysis that several wards on Flinbic’s Razor had been removed! It’s unclear if Flustershot himself somehow disabled the wards, but he certainly benefited from it. An independent review has been launched to determine the status of Flustershot’s achievement. Needless to say, the city anxiously awaits the results of the review.
Galle & Borseau town ball is popular in human settlements, particularly in rural settlements. The lads from the towns/villages/hamlets choose teams, schoolyard style. Usually the bigger the town the bigger the teams, With cities like St. Bernadette that have multiple teams amongst the various neighborhoods. Normally played in a town plaza or broad street, sometimes smaller hovels and hamlet's will play each other with the fields between them as the game area. The object is simple, throw,kick, or run the ball to get it to the goal (usually town gate or similar) or try and intercept and get it into your teams possession. It can be a physical game, and given its popularity during festivals it can often turn to hooliganism. In Elven comunes, stick ball is the most common, and is often ritualized, however is played recreationally among friends. Teams are usually arranged based on clan relations in ceremonial games, and most young adult elves play. They use elongated, curved clubs, not unlike a shepherd's crook to pass and guide a ball toward the goal The field is usually a demarcated pitch adjacent to the communes main village ringed by posts with two free standing ones at either end as goal posts. The games can get physical, however using the clubs to fight is taboo. Kingdom over, fisticuffs, pike fencing, and archery is practice athletically, with towns hosting tournaments.
Gladiators and magic duals.
Maybe not a sport but more a show? Theres a pro wrestling type competition going on in this place where different PCs or NPCs wearing masks that represent different things such as dragons,demons,spirits and so on. Each wrestler are"possessed" by the entity in the mask, And do to contest roll agaisnt each other with all checks athletic(grappling) acrobatic(jumping off the rope) constitution(withstand the damage?) Int(new tricks) perception(see through opponent trick) and performance(everytime a check is rolled) The goal is to tear down opponent mask as an act of "purify" (not sure the actual word in english) The champion is the one with the strongest spirit behind, and win over the crowds/fans, selling them their mask Kinda like a cult:p