Rock Band Tournament Guidelines
Brought to you by:
The League of Fandom and Gaming (LFG)
and Play On Con (POC)
Costume up your players, tease up your hair, and practice up on your rock skills! All convention attendees are encouraged to join in as we take the critically acclaimed video game and turn it into a full-scale battle of the bands.
The rules are simple. You get a band together and come play a song in the game--onstage in front of a live audience. We’ll have a panel of judges on hand scoring your band on three equally important factors: costumes, showmanship, and skill. There are no specific requirements on how to score well in these three areas, but here are some general tips.
Costumes: You’re playing rock stars. At a con. Show it, dude! Bring your Twisted Sister wig, your Def Leppard wife-beater, your Pat Benatar miniskirt--whatever ya got. As long as you make a fashion statement--even if that statement is just “everyone has an ‘I’m With Stupid’ shirt”--it will help your score. We’ve seen everything from leather-pantsed guitarists to King Koopa drummers in this category. Now show us what you’ve got.
Showmanship: Don’t just get up there and stand still like you’re at some spelling bee. This is a rock concert! Jump around, do some dancing, or whip out some stunts! Engage the audience, play blindfolded, bite the head off of a plastic bat....It doesn’t matter, as long as you melt the audience’s face. Even if your band can’t play a lick on the toy instruments, if you bring enough performance and attitude you can dominate this category.
Skill: The in-game score reflects how well you hit the notes and your difficulty level, so we’ll be using that to calculate your rank here. Your band can pick any level song and each player can pick any instrument difficulty, but you won’t score as highly if you go too easy. You may do the best 100% guitar solo of “Eye of the Tiger” that the Easy/Warmup set ever saw, but then another band might come along and school you by doing “Creep” on Medium! We recommend going hard enough to keep yourself busy, but easy enough that you can still rack up on Showmanship (above). It’s usually not good to play on Expert level, for example, if it means you’d have to stand still looking at the screen the whole time instead of dancing around. The bottom line, though, is that the harder you can play, the higher your Skill score will be.
Total Score: Each of the above three categories can score up to 30 points, for a total of 90. In addition, the host may award up to 10 bonus points if the song you play really works the room. So the maximum possible score is 100. Winning bands usually score somewhere between 75 and 85.
Audience Reaction: The judges have final say, but be assured they’ll be taking the audience’s happiness into account. Your energy and performance will excite audience members or bore them to death--it’s up to you! Oh, and your performance is subject to podcast and broadcast, so that audience could be bigger than you think.
Prizes: The winning band members will each receive a complimentary full weekend pass to Play On Con 2012, where we host an annual Rock Band Championship event (with winning players from tournaments just like this one that we’ve hosted all over the southeast in attendance)! These passes are normally around $50 each, so bring your A-game and get ready to Play On!
More Info: For a complete list of rules and available songs, please see Play On Con’s Rock Band Page. For any other questions or concerns on this event, just visit their Contact Page and write one of their Senior Directors an email!
