The things that are usually fun and bring people are net tosses and Corgul/Charybdis. other than those, I like a good old fashioned story night at the Tavern.
Agree with Vicrim. These two events draw a sizable crowd as they offer a reward that is tough to come by and does not require the host to provide a drop. Fun to pack a boat full or the docks and get the salty air.
I've run events for my guild on pac it's where my second and third accounts come from it was more fun than rewards some naked fel dungeon crawling some pirating etc
Hey, fun topic. What I think draws folks in to player-run events (aside from some sort of large gold or item reward) is objectivity in who wins. When you're running events for a large group of people, the risk is always a perception around favoritism and cheating.
"Of course they won, they are in their guild!"
So the in-game mechanics which deliver clear, objective winners are better for some players events, especially the ones that offer desirable rewards.
Here's some examples of events I've seen or ran that felt successful:
Archery Contests
Archery buttes are cheap to get and can be placed in homes and found in the world. Determine a set number of shots and see who scores the highest. The trick here, however, is accounting for some quirks in the game design. Skilled archers will always beat out non-skilled archers, so you may want to do high skill and low skill bouts. Non-skilled human archers will always beat out non-skilled elves and gargoyles because of JOAT, so you may want to do a bout that is "lowest score" wins vs highest. Because players can all see who has the highest or lowest number, there is never confusion or accusations.
Rune Scavenger Hunts
This kind of an event favors the more patient player, but I've had a lot of engagement with it back when I still played Chesapeake. You determine a list of locations and mark them in your book, and then give those locations to your participants in the form of a list of clues. They go out and try and mark as many as correct as possible. When I did this, I would take the names of the people who got a book of correct entries and put their names into a RNG website. From there I let the RNG decide who wins the actual prize and provide proof. You could do this in-game, too, with the cup and dice if you're trying to keep everything within the system.
Map Making
Another form of the rune scavenger hunt is a map making contest. Same basic rules apply, except instead of marking a rune to a location players need to use the cartography skill and blank deeds to make a physical map in-game.
Bulletin Board Entries
The only system in-game which timestamps player written text is the bulletin board, which I've used for contest entries to determine who entered first. As the homeowner you CAN delete comments, of course, so it is on the event coordinator's honor not to. But, again, players can see when others have submitted providing a bit of objectivity.
Huntmaster's Champion
I haven't run this one personally but on Chesapeake a player runs a very successful contest where they give out a certain animal type and whomever returns a Huntmaster's Deed with the highest weight in stones wins. Again, it's a very objective system as they can prove who won simply by locking down the deeds.
Systems like bulletin boards, editable/leafable player-written books, mailboxes, dice and cups, ankh/serpent coins, buttes/dagger boards, etc are all fun ways to provide engagement and objectivity to events. There's probably more of these kinds of systems already in the game that I'm forgetting, but I'd call these critical roleplay mechanics. Mechanics which let us create our own content are always better than time-based, seasonal offerings.
A regatta.The EM's on Lake Superior, quite some years ago, did a great boat race. You have to show up at various checkpoints to receive a book with a code or some such thing, I forget. Something someone can do easy enough.
However they did something so that people couldnt just drydock their ship and recall. I forget. Locked an item on the deck of the ship or something. Off the top of my head I'm not sure how to prevent cheating as just a player. The old way would have just been to provide all the ships, but no keys. Alas, the silly 1 ship rule ruined that.
I enjoyed - and appreciated - the Bunny Bash you all did on Baja at the start of the last Easter Egg event. You guys gave away thorns to everyone that showed up and we all had a great time bashing 3-4 bunnies at a time! I was able to get a "nest egg" of eggs for my character there.
The one that I had the most interest in was basically Moonglow hijacking pirate ships for a couple weeks. The person who turned in the most cargo (not points, just the actual cargo though I think we had like three categories I would have to check) won x gold pieces. I had crates in my mailboxes every single day of the competition.
