As the lack of Celerion's chariot causes us to do more wilderness travel, we've been using the rules for jousting more often. I think these came from Chainmail or maybe Dragon - I have them in Il Male's single-volume compilation. And while I love the idea of fighting men being challenged to joust by castle occupants, the problem is that the jousting mini-game is a little opaque.
My proposal is: what if we made a pair of picture books, similar to the old Lost World fighting books, that encoded the choices each party makes in a joust? So we'd start on a page with the opponent's picture, and when we chose to aim our lance at the opponent's helm, the page would say "tell your enemy to turn to page X" so that they would see you changing your seat to attain that aim, and visa versa.
Questions:
- Does the jousting mini-game have a fixed win condition if the choices are known? In other words, I'm thinking it would be most fun if the book showed you one of the enemy's choices (lance aim or shield position) before you made the other choice, but would this let an experienced player choose an option that would always win or otherwise be unbalanced?
- Who'd like to contribute design or drawings to this project? If we get a modest prototype going, we could consider doing a small-scale Kickstarter to produce more - perhaps with other minigames that would benefit from a similar approach, like psionic and unarmed combat in AD&D.