Tournaments in Medieval TTRPGs
If someone who is passingly interested in medieval European history were asked to name ten things that they associated with the period, they would probably start by saying the obvious - castles, knights, plague, crusades. But it wouldn’t be long, I suspect, before they hit upon the word ‘jousting’. I’m told that among English Heritage’s most popular events that they run at their historic properties are the recreations of medieval tournaments. These iconic events loom large in the imagination of even the most casual students of the era. They are some of the most dramtic set pieces in films - from the at once realistic and absurd in Jabberwocky to the far too clean and pretty vision of A Knight’s Tale. Yet tournaments seem to merit very little attention in quasi-medieval RPG settings that are themselves central to a hobby so much of which is derived from a certain vision of the Middle Ages. Why is this? And is there anything we can do to bring these events into games?
To begin with a very brief overview, the European tournament or hastilude (‘spear game’) went through a number of changes in its long history from the first plausible examples in the mid-11th century until its final descent into self-parody and pantomime in the 1600s. For brevity and simplicity, I will confine the discussion to England, France and the Low Countries and readers should be aware that Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe - while broadly following similar trends - diverged in some matters of detail. Germany, for example, developed a tradition of fighting with wooden cudgels that was more or less unique to that region. ‘Tournament’ is a catch-all term for any organised display of martial prowess whether mounted or on foot. However, strictly, the tourney was (or became) distinct from the joust. The former was generally fought on foot and between teams with a variety of weapons - spears, swords and axes were common - blunted and rebated or not as the terms of the event mandated. These trials of arms between infantry continued throughout the Middle Ages and it was not uncommon for a late medieval tournament to feature the same participants engaging in both jousts and tourneys as part of the same overall event. But it was in the later 13th century that ‘the joust’ as a competition between two mounted men began to emerge as a separate entity. At Chauvency in France in 1285 we have one of the first accounts of an affair that was begun by two days of jousts between French and German knights and which were explicitly differentiated from the rest of the week’s tourneys.
The second basic division that emerged was between a ‘tournament of war’ and a ‘tournament of peace’. The former - a outrance - was, essentially, a ‘to the death’ encounter employing the arms and armour of real combat with few if any procedures to prevent the serious injury and death of the participants. The melee was the term applied to these sometimes large and often chaotic events that could be fought between infantry or mounted competitors. The rules, such as they were, closely mirrored those of actual warfare in that one could yield and the losers became the winner’s hostages and had to be ransomed - usually by handing over their (very expensive) horses, arms and armour. In fact, until their gradual disappearance in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, the tournament a outrance was sometimes barely distinguishable from a small-scale battle. In the wars between the English and the Scots and the French in the first half of the 14th century there emerged the notion of the ‘border feat of arms’ in which elements of the two warring sides agreed to meet at a specific time and place to fight an ‘organised’ engagement. At Berwick in 1341 20 English knights challenged 20 Scots to a joust a outrance at which three men were killed and several more injured. Afterwards, the heralds presented prizes to those on both sides who were judged to have fought well.
The ‘tournament of peace’ - a plaisance - is really what concerns us here. Exactly why this ‘gentrified’ version of warfare as sport became dominant is not entirely clear. It was probably a combination of diminishing royal and noble tolerance for lethal but licit violence and an increasingly rigid notion of knighthood and gentility that defined who was eligible to take part and, therefore, who was at risk of death and injury. In England, from the late 12th century, kings began to issue decrees that determined the rules that must be followed in a licensed engagement. Richard I’s 1194 rules laid out five approved places for tourneying, required entrants to pay fees and established a panel of noble judges. Edward I’s Statuta Armorum of 1292 insisted on the use of blunted weapons and placed strict requirements of good conduct on squires and others attending in order to reduce the risk of hot tempers leading to bloodshed. Throughout Europe there was, during the later 13th century, a trend towards these less brutal tournaments, with increased mention of specially designed and made armour and weapons, the formalising of the arena of combat and the presence of judges to decide the victor.
A major issue with running jousts in most RPGs is that the event that is being emulated seems to sit at odds with the mechanics of most games. This is, I think, for two reasons. First, many games strive to make combat an attritional process by design, structuring the chances to hit and damage of both PCs and opponents so that a fight almost always takes multiple rounds of action to resolve. This is not a foolish or unworthy goal per sé. After all, early RPGs inherited their ideas about what a fight should look like from the great action and adventure films of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Think of the duel between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone at the conclusion of the 1938 Robin Hood and the through-line that runs from that all the way to the lighsaber duels in Star Wars. Second, TTRPGs overwhelming assume that combat is necessarily a lethal exercise.
Why does this matter in the context of trying to run a joust in a quasi-medieval RPG setting? A joust was an event between two armoured and mounted contestants using the couched spear or lance in an attempt to strike his opponent. Each match consisted of sometimes 25 or more ‘courses’ (though usually between two and eight). This series of highly kinetic blows made at the charge does not appear at first blush to sit comfortably with the common mechanics and assumptions about combat being a process of dramatic attrition. In every iteration of core D&D, for example, a joust would boil down to a series of rolls to hit and damage - maybe even a long and boring sequence of them if the combatants are evenly matched. This rather prosaic exercise hardly seems in keeping with the commonly assumed flavour of the event, when two highly skilled men, riding horses at the gallop and wearing armour that cost many times the average annual wage, garbed in outlandish coats of arms and often sporting elaborate armour and horse trappings, thundered down on each other in a determined effort to kill or severely wound the opponent in a single moment of explosive action. This is all true up to a point, but only if we labour under a misapprehension about what jousts had become in Europe by the 15th century.
By c.1400 the joust was well on the way to becoming a carefully managed sport, where the primary aim was the provision of spectacle and not the injuring or maiming of one’s opponent. Armour and weapons had been devised specifically to facilitate this development. I have mentioned elsewhere the accounts for Edward I’s tournament in 1278 for which silver gilt swords made of parchment and whalebone were created at considerable expense. In the 1330s Edward III’s wardrobe accounts begin to contain frequent references to specialist tournament armour such as the maindefer (literally ‘hand of iron’), which appears to have been a molded gauntlet shaped purely to grasp a lance and ineffective for any other task. The later ‘frog’s mouth’ helmet, with its extremely narrow field of vision, was useless in actual warfare. However, its design ensured that the wearer was extremely unlikely to be injured in a joust. The narrowness and angle of the visor slit was such that, at the moment of impact, the natural backward tip of the head ensured the face was competely obscured. The lance itself was blunted by adding a crown-shaped tip (the coronel) that greatly diffused the force of impact and, indeed, produced a much greater chance of the two lances meeting ‘tip to tip’, which was considered a highly desirable outcome. Later, mechanical shields were manufactured that were designed to spring apart with pleasingly dramatic effect when struck.
The conduct of jousts also became hedged around with often elaborate rules on how they were scored when the objective was not to kill the opponent but to put on a good show. I take as my exemplar of such rules those drawn up in May 1466 by John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester and Edward IV’s Constable of England, perhaps with a view to governing the encounter between Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales, and Antoine Count de la Roche, the Bastard of Burgundy, that took place at Smithfield in June the following year. The full text can be found below, but I present here a simplification of it.
Highest award: Unhorsing an opponent or bringing down both horse and rider.
Second award: Shattering two lances in a blow coronel to coronel (i.e. tip to tip)
Third award: Striking the opponent’s visor three times.
Fourth award: Breaking the most lances (see below).
To calculate the number of broken lances -
Breaking a lance when striking the opponent anywhere between his saddle and the base of the helmet = plus one lance.
Breaking a lance from the tip downward = plus two lances.
Breaking a lance and disarming the opponent = plus three lances.
Breaking a lance as the result of a tip to tip strike = plus three lances.
Breaking a lance on the opponent’s saddle = minus one lance.
Hitting the tilt (the rail between the participants) once = minus two lances.
Striking the tilt twice = minus three lances.
If a lance breaks within a foot of the tip, it shall count as a good attaint (hit) if applicable, but will not count for the purpose of assessing broken lances.
A competitor shall be disqualified at once if they -
Strike the opponent’s horse.
Strike an opponent when his back is turned or he is disarmed.
Hit the tilt three times.
Remove his own helmet twice before the courses are complete, unless the removal is caused by the unruliness of his own mount.
It should be apparent from these rules that it is a relatively straightforward matter to construct a ‘mini-game’ which could employ the basics of conventional round-based combat to serve the requirement of simulating jousts a plaisance. If reduced to tabular form, it could look something like this.
It presumes that each participant makes a single, simultaneous, roll to hit for each course. I have kept the underpinning mechanic of ‘crits’, ‘hits’, ‘misses’ and ‘fumbles’ simple to assist with the process of abstraction. Most systems feature notions of ‘quality of hits’ or ‘degrees of success’ that can be adapted to this structure. Note that this ‘mini-game’ does not concern itself with damage. This is because many systems - by virtue of their attritional combat design - will generate levels of damage that have no real impact over a limited number of rounds - particularly if one allows that the tournament lance is coronelled and does much less damage than a war lance. Where a system mandates that damage suffered impacts the probability of hits by imposing combat modifiers, this can be implemented without difficulty. Note that Worcester’s rules and this mechanic do not concern themselves with the number of valid strikes (or attaints) at all. They are interested only in the spectacle. It is for this reason that the hierarchy of winning conditions moves from unhorsing the opponent to shattering two lances in a tip to tip exchange to three strikes on the visor and then to the number of broken lances.
The format and nature of the joust was such that, even after it reached the height of its refinement and artificiality in the later 15th and 16th centuries, a prince of Europe could be killed by a combination of the unlucky trajectory of the stray fragment of a broken lance and an ill-fitting helmet. In 1559 Henry II of France died of a wound to the temple inflicted at a joust by Gabriel Montgomery, captain of the king's personal Scottish Guard. If GMs wish to add this element of extreme risk to the conduct of a joust, they can allow that a critical hit by one party matched by a fumble by the other has some non-zero chance of the fumbling participant being killed outright.
The tourney a plaisance - the (usually) non-lethal combat on foot using agreed weapons such as spears, swords and axes - can be simply modelled without too much mechanical tinkering. Tournament weapons that are rebated or made from lighter materials are easy enough to incorporate with damage reduction. GMs will instead need to give more consideration to how the game mechanics interact with the rules of the engagement as determined by the story. In Worcester’s 1466 rules, for example, tourney participants were disqualified if they tried to use a weapon that had not been previously inspected and approved by the judges (presumably to ensure it was appropriately blunted). To be disarmed was also cause for immediate disqualification, which in turn necessitated a ban on any gauntlet or other device that ‘locked’ a weapon into the combatant’s hand. To leave the fenced tourney ground enclosure without good cause or to rest against the barrier that divided the two sides in some contests was also grounds for exclusion (and this during events that could last for hours). Any blow ‘below the belt’ or that passed below any barrier that separated the combatants also led to the immediate forfeiture of the competition. In other examples of tourney rules it is stated that there was to be a certain number of blows or strikes with the agreed weapons. This was probably enforced by heralds or other judges who would determine what was a ‘good blow’ and end the contest after the agreed limit had been reached. Anyone who continued to engage after a competition had been declared over would also be disqualified. As a matter of honour it was imperative that all combatants were armed and armoured in exactly the same way and any attempt to evade this requirement was also punishable by disqualification if discovered.
Thus far the discussion has been concerned with how to incorporate tournaments into RPGs from the perspective of martial characters. This is reaonable, but it fails to deal with another issue of why these occasions are absent from many games; the problem of what non-fighters are supposed to do at an event that is so focussed on military prowess. But here too we are fortunate that the tournament as it had developed by the 15th century provides us with a number of examples that we can steal from. Taken together, these various aspects of tournaments and the contexts in which they were held offer GMs and players a number of opportunities to engage with these events beyond martial activity. As with the real-life examples described below, a tournament can become a sometimes unreal, whimsical, playful, luxurious backdrop to other stories that can involve a very wide array of characters.
The first thing to note is the degree to which, relatively early in their history, tournaments came to be framed not just as two men (or teams of men) fighting in a field, but as elaborate stages on which sometimes intricate plays were enacted. The evergreen medieval tropes of Arthurian and other chivalric literature were certainly present as early as 1223, when a tournament at Cyprus featured the participants in Arthurian costume. At Le Hem in France in 1278 Jeanne de Longueval, sister of the event’s sponsor, appeared as Guinevere; the Count of Artois played Yvain (accompanied by a real lion as depicted in Chretien de Troyes’ version of the Arthurian legend). A caustic Sir Kay was played by a jester who provided a ribald running commentary to the tale that underpinned the occasion - the rescue of four damsels from their captivity by the Knight of the White Tower. By the mid-14th century almost everywhere that had a tradition of the hastilude had begun to hold events that featured ‘the round table’ and the conceit of Arthurian bands of knightly brothers in arms in some context or other. Everyone in attendance had a role to play in these complex dramas that featured tableaux, pageants, processions, feasts and live theatre as well as the tournament proper.
The apotheosis of this combination of display of martial prowess and chivalric symbolism was found in the great tournaments held by the dukes and senior nobles of Burgundy and France in the 15th century known as the ‘passage of arms’ (pas d’armes). These events were structured as ‘challenges’ whereby one party offered (sometimes backed by a solemn vow) to take on all comers in the lists purely for the glory and renown that would accrue. From many possible examples, I will detail the pas d’armes arranged by Jacques de Lalaing, Knight of the Golden Fleece and chamberlain of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, at Chalon sur Saône in 1449. The affair was known as the Pas de la Fontaine de Pleurs - or The Fountain of Tears.
A pavilion was erected in a meadow outside Chalon at which was stationed a herald and a - probably carved or otherwise modelled - virgin accompanied by a unicorn. With the aid of an ingenious system of pipes, the virgin ‘wept’ constantly (hence the name of event), her tears running down over three shields mounted on the flanks of the unicorn. Those who would challenge de Lalaing had to approach and touch one of the shields to indicate the nature of their challenge. Touching the white shield indicated a tourney with 25 blows of the axe; the purple shield a similar tourney with swords, and touching the black shield resulted in a 25-course joust. The herald recorded their choice and issued them a day to return to fight the following month. There were, of course, forfeits and prizes. If one lost the tourney with axes, the knight had to wear a golden shackle around his wrist for a year or until such time as he could find the maiden who had been given the key to whom he had to give the bracelet upon his release. If defeated with the sword, the loser had to present a ruby to the most beautiful lady in the land and, if losing at the joust, he had to send a lance to the lord of the winner. Winners were awarded a golden replica of the weapon with which they had been victorious. The pavilion remained standing for almost a year from November 1449 and, in that time, de Lalaing fought seven men. At the concluding feast, the weeping virgin and The Lady of the Fountain appeared and theatrically released de Lalaing from their service before the prizes were distributed. In a dark foreshadowing of the future of European warfare, Jacques de Lalaing was killed at the siege of Poucques in July 1453 when half his head was sheared off by a cannonball, becoming one of the first members of the European nobility to be slain by gunfire.
This trend for tournaments to become part of intricate and carefully managed narratives was facilitated by the changes in the context in which the events were held such that they became spectacles. Throughout Europe tournaments became quasi-public events sponsored by the crown or some other great nobleman. As such, they became only one element of a much wider form of political and social theatre held to celebrate coronations, betrothals, births, military victory, the agreement of alliances or the conclusion of a treaty. Perhaps the most famous example of this was The Field of the Cloth of Gold held in June 1520 as part of an attempted diplomatic rapprochement between Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England. The scale of this event was vast. Henry VIII’s quarters consisted of a specially built ‘palace’ measuring 10,000 square metres with a ground floor of brick and, above that, ten metre high upper storeys made of timber and canvas. Red wine really did flow from two fountains and Henry’s entourage alone consumed more than 2,000 sheep during the occasion. Tournaments therefore acquired utility as diplomatic stages as much as - if not more than - military proving grounds. But in the context of this discussion what matters is that, alongside the jousts and the tourneys, there are ample opportunities for other characters to occupy themselves among the feasts and religious ceremonies, the diplomatic discussions and the pageantry. Amid the bustle of the hundreds of servants and cooks and pages and esquires and heralds and armourers and grooms and minstrels and jugglers and clowns and ambassadors and spies and cutpurses almost any PC could find some useful or interesting diversion.
A Word About Women
Medieval Europe had a… complicated relationship with women. From christianity the culture and society absorbed the notion that women could be at once the perfidious instruments of calamity and - to quote Ubertino of Cassale on the Virgin Mary - ‘the noblest vehicle of Grace’. Although the story is immensely complex, I am persuaded by the broad hypothesis that the chivalric attitude to women was greatly influenced by the deep and widespread European devotion to and veneration of the Virgin. To the extent that this produced grotesquely cartoonish notions of femininity and erased the individuality of women, it is clearly to be deprecated. I am not here going to enter into the fraught discussion of where the line should be drawn between medieval verisimilitude and modern sensibilities at the table: groups will make their own decisions on these matters.
However, it is true that, in some senses, the role of women in chivalric culture was greatly elevated. In the course of this post, a number of instances of this phenomenon have been noticed in passing. Ladies had an active role in the Arthurian and other literary pageants - see for example, the presence of the Lady de Longuevale at Le Hem and the centrality of the virgin and The Lady of the Fountain at de Lalaing’s pas d’armes. These instances could be multiplied many times over. Nor were women reduced solely to attractive ornamentation. Knights really did compete in the lists bearing favours of women such as items of clothing, jewellry or other tokens, and fought for their chosen patron. Worcester’s 1466 tournament rules make it explicit that, notwithstanding the detailed procedures for judging the competition, they ‘[reserve] always to the queen and to the ladies present the attribution and gift of the prize after the manner and form accustomed’. Indeed, the probable origin of these rules was an incident at which the ladies of Edward IV’s court shackled Lord Scales with a golden belt that they would only release him from after he had fought the Bastard of Burgundy. For all of the caveats that should be borne in mind, it would be a poor version of a chivalric world that did not pay some attention to these contemporary ideas about the status and influence of women.
The ordinance, statutes and rules made by John, lord Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, Constable of England, by the king’s commandment at Windsor 29th day of May in the sixth year of the reign of Edward IV, and commanded to be observed or kept in all manner of jousts of peace royal within this realm of England. Reserving always to the queen and to the ladies present the attribution and gift of the prize after the manner and form accustomed, to be attributed for their demerits according to the articles ensuing.
How many ways the prize is won.
1. First, Who so breaketh most spears as they ought to be broken, shall have the prize.
2. Item, Who so hitteth three times, in the sight of the helm, shall have the prize.
3. Item, Who so meeteth two times, coronel to coronel, shall have the prize.
4. Item, Who so beareth a man down with stroke of a spear, shall have the prize.
How many ways the prize shall be lost.
1. First, Who so striketh a horse shall have no prize.
2. Item, Who so striketh a man, his back turned, or disgarnished of his spear, shall have no prize.
3. Item, Who so hitteth the toyle (or tilt) three times shall have no prize.
4.Item, Who so unhelmeth himself two times shall have no prize, unless his horse do fail him.
How broken spears shall be allowed.
1. First, Who so breaketh a spear, between the saddle and the charnell of the helm, shall be allowed for one.
2. Item, Who so breaketh a spear, from the coronel upwards, shall be allowed for two.
3. Item, Who so breaketh a spear, so as he strike his adversary down, or put him out of his saddle,or disarmeth him in such wise as he may not run the next course after, or breaketh his spear coronel to coronel, shall be allowed three spears.
How spears shall be disallowed.
1. First, Who so breaketh on the saddle shall be disallowed for one spear-breaking.
2. Item, Who so hitteth the toyle once, shall be disallowed for two.
3. Item, Who so hitteth the toyle twice, shall, for the second time, be abated three.
4.Item, Who so breaketh a spear, within a foot to the coronel, shall be adjudged as no spear broken, but a fair attaint.
For the prize to be given, and who shall be preferred.
1. First, Who so beareth a man down out of the saddle, or putteth him to the earth, horse and man, shall have the prize before him that striketh coronel to coronel two times.
2. Item, He that striketh coronel to coronel two times, shall have the prize before him that striketh the sight three times.
3. Item, He that striketh the sight three times, shall have the prize before him that breaketh most spears.
Item, if there be any man that fortuneth in this wise, which shall be deemed to have abided longest in the field helmed, and to have run the fairest course, and to have given the greatest strokes, and to have holpen himself best with his spear, he shall have the prize.
At Tourney.
Two blows at the passage and ten at the joining, more or less as they make it. All gripes, shocks, and foul play forbidden.
How prizes at Tourney, and Barriers, are to be lost.
He that giveth a stroke with a pike from the girdle downward or under the barrier, shall win no prize.
He that shall have a close gauntlet, or any thing to fasten his sword to his hand, shall have no prize.
He whose sword falleth out of his hand, shall win no prize.
He that stayeth his hand in fight on the barriers, shall win no prize.
He whosoever shall fight, and doth not show his sword to the Judges before, shall win no prize.
Yet it is to be understood, that all challengers may win all these Prizes against the defendants.
The maintainers may take aide or assistance of the noble men, of such as they shall like best.
What a fantastic breakdown, and hilarious to read the weekend after visiting New York Ren Faire. I wonder two thing:
1. Is a system of randomization an attributes the best way to work this out in TTRPGs? Sure, it's the way things are usually done -- you have a certain ability score, you roll a check, you reference a result. But I wonder if there is some other way to simulate the moment, like some sort of bluffing game, or a game like blackjack or something?
2. Cliche question: How do you feel about the way Pendragon deals with this?
Really great article! The mechanics of a joust are amazing.