What is an Original Character Tournament?: How To Participate In or Host One!

What is an Original Character Tournament?

Original character tournaments can carry many, many different forms, but they all share one element: competition through showcasing OCs, their abilities, and the talents of their creators. Original character tournaments can sometimes be collaborative storytelling or art fights, with the only limitation being the imagination of the creators organizing the tournament.

A tournament is likely to have a theme and a format. In many cases, tournaments play out in the form of comics, especially when combat may be involved between OCs. The theme in the prior example is combat whereas the format is comics. This is only one common form of OCT, and you are not limited to it.

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Many OC tournaments are narrative exercises and may have some overarching storytelling. Imagine a tournament arc of your favorite Shonen manga, but with the process being collaborative storytelling by the event organizers and the participating creators. 

In whatever case, OCTs can be a fantastic way to explore character through art, writing, and roleplay. You only need to prepare your characters, understand the rules and expectations of the tournament, and be ready to showcase your and your character’s abilities. Understanding your character’s archetype or traits can be useful, but you can also use these tournaments to help develop the characters.

What Kinds of Tournaments Are There?

Tournaments spring out of a community organically after a lot of brainstorming. Usually, artists of a certain style or genre focus will end up talking out a potential tournament and putting something together. We’ll cover how to establish an OC tournament later on. In the meantime, just how flexible is this whole OCT thing, anyway? Incredibly so, the only limitation is the organizer's imagination, time, and the participation of creators.

Example OCTs

Here are some examples to give a little sense of the variety of tournaments. These examples are nearly all hosted on DeviantArt, where many OCTs have happened over the past twenty years.

• Walking City OCT
• Trinity Tourney OCT
• Splinter City OCT
• Race of Aleria
• Endzone OCT
• Chop To The Top

Unfortunately, given the nature of the internet and the loss of archives, OCTs with recorded histories are becoming harder and harder to track down. Many websites and communities disappear, forums shut down, and hashtags get purged. We’ll talk about that more when discussing how to organize one of these tournaments, but it was worth mentioning because most examples of OC tournaments on DeviantArt are more likely to exist, even if they have been inactive for a decade or more.

Beyond these varying examples, let’s think about the OCT idea in a broader sense. If you want a more thorough history, consider reviewing the Orginal Character Tournament Wiki as they have a wonderful archive of tournament examples.

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Original Character Tournament Themes

Generally, the most significant part of putting together a tournament is having a theme, something like a fighting tournament or zombie slaying. There kind of needs to be a reason to get said characters together. We’re using the qualifier “kind of” here, however, because sometimes the theme is just barely there just to allow characters to interact. The added flavor of a narrative or theme serves as a broader element to assemble the cast.

But, themes can be a source of fun and push participants. For example, how might a cooking competition between OCs play out? Here is a hypothetical scenario: participating characters write a recipe and community votes decide the winning recipe. The fun is in how the recipe reflects the characters, their tastes, and even the format. For example, maybe the recipe is handwritten in character with notes and illustrations of the cooking. Or maybe it is the recipe in the form of a cooking tutorial. In any case, the challenge of cooking as a theme can make for an interesting twist to an OCT; how does the character come through with that theme? How might the theme help to showcase character traits?

Character Tournament Themes

We wouldn’t want to leave you without some options, so here are some potential themes for character tournaments you can use to roll out a tournament of your own with some talented creators.

• Water balloon and squirt gun battle
• The most over-the-top game of Freeze Tag ever
• Any team or competition sport
• Treasure hunt across an amalgamated world
• Who can smash the most evil robot invaders?

As long as you can introduce a competitive angle, a tournament can be arranged around it. It becomes an issue of how the OCs (and their creators) tackle the theme in question.

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How to Start an Original Character Tournament

Starting an OCT is surprisingly easy and the largest investment you need to make is time. Original character tournaments are also generally platform agnostic, meaning they can be established in most communities easily. However, CharacterHub has some fantastic tools and features that make it particularly easy and fun to set up a tournament, so we’re going to focus on how to do so on CharacterHub. Just follow this simple guide and you can roll out a character tournament or art fight of your own design with the CharacterHub community.

1. Gather Interest

Can you launch a character tournament without any participants committed to it right away and have it be a success? Potentially yes, but this is also unlikely. It is easier to bring in participants when participants are already present. So your first goal should be to recruit like-minded creators from specific communities, design niches, or friends to have an initial roster. It’ll make it easier to recruit more participants when the tournament is finally announced. It could be a great opportunity to pit dragon OCs against one another.

You can easily create an initial space for possible participants to gather and discuss the tournament idea through social spaces on CharacterHub. As the project organizer you can also use your social posts for announcements to keep everyone following in the loop. Don’t forget a hashtag either, and encourage a hashtag to keep tournament posts organized.

2. Determine Your Theme

Next is to determine your theme. More than likely there is a theme in mind while you are in that initial step of gathering interest, but in any case, this is something to lock down early. A theme will pull in people with a specific interest in this theme and will also help people understand the overall vibe of the tournament you are trying to create.

If your theme covers a specific kind of OC, such as kinsonas, or webcomic characters, for example, you’ll be able to figure out the most essential elements by exploring those kinds of OCs on CharacterHub. Look at the common elements of the community in posts and character profiles.

Of course, if you are developing a tournament on CharacterHub at this point you probably have a community of specific kinds of characters in mind and you are probably already part of that community. So, with that, you know what the expectations are and can work toward them.

3. Develop the Rules

Probably the most important step, and perhaps the least entertaining one, is figuring out the rules and format of the tournament. There is a lot to consider here and this needs to be figured out before you roll out an announcement and try to recruit participants in the OCT.

For example, what is the tournament structure? Obviously, this may need to change based on the number of participants. What doesn’t change is that tournament structures set the method by which participants are matched up and how eliminations are handled. That seems pretty essential to have figured out, right?

With that in mind, you then need to figure out how winners are determined and eliminations are handled. What system is in place? Will your character tournament have a single judge or a judging panel? Who is on the panel? Or, perhaps you want community votes to determine the winner of a round. What system is in place for counting the votes? What is the window of time valid votes are counted? Using CharacterHub’s social spaces to allow potential participants and volunteers to weigh in would be a great idea.

Of course, that also means you’ll need to figure out the format of the tournament submissions. Will it be comics or animation? How might the tournament handle people who prefer to write short fiction? These are hugely important considerations in the success of an OCT.

It can be a lot of work to do alone, so depending on the size of the tournament, you may need to recruit volunteers to help with some elements. This is why some of the best tournaments come from passionate, existing communities creating rounded characters; after all, the chances of people being paid for their time to help run an original character tournament are pretty low. You’ll be able to find existing communities of specific kinds of original characters on CharacterHub through social spaces and hashtags, which will be a great way to possibly find help running the tournament.

4. Archive the Tournament

Nothing is more disheartening than to participate in an OCT to only see all traces of it have been scrubbed from the internet. It’s a lot of hard work to just vanish, and losing a record of these communities can be quite sad. That is why part of organizing a character tournament or art fight should be an act of active preservation. In that regard, there are a couple of things to consider.

The first is having a hashtag that everyone can use on their posts and character profiles. It makes it easier to find participants and posts to archive in the future. A good hashtag appearing across multiple OCs and community posts is also good for drumming up interest. As for the hashtag, that will probably involve some name or acronym of the tournament, and maybe the year, especially if the aim is to make the tournament a somewhat regular thing.

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Second, as the tournament season progresses, encourage participants to save everything. There are plenty of methods of archiving material. Obviously, as the person arranging the tournament, it would be expected that you’d create an archive of your own. However, with multiple participants and observers saving copies, it becomes much easier to preserve records over time. Free public wikis, such as the OCT Wiki, or free wiki hosting websites, are great options for recording the overall tournament.

5. Have Fun

Whether you are running the show or even a participant, the final step is to roll with the character tournament and have fun. It’s a great opportunity to play original characters off of one another and develop new skills. After all, why launch a fun tournament if you’re not actually looking to have fun?

Prepare Your Fighter on CharacterHub

With all of this in mind, the time is right to start creating the latest original character tournament on CharacterHub. On CharacterHub you have the tools from social posts to top-tier character profile makers to help your tournaments impress the community..Take the time to prepare your character for the fun by creating a polished model sheet and be ready to embrace the chaos of competition; but most of all, enjoy the chance at making new friends and a whole new community.

And if you’re not quite ready for a character tournament or art fight, consider joining all the other wonderful events that pop up weekly on CharacterHub which can include everything from official events to raffles by creators all over the website. You can explore everything from writing prompts to OC creation challenges to daily art and character polls. 

Or, if you want to make your own challenges and invite others, consider some of our previous suggestions on the blog. Get the hang of that and before you know it you’ll have the network and experience to run a tournament on CharacterHub.