About Original Character Tournaments

Original Character Tournaments (commonly shortened to OCTs) are art or writing competitions where participants compete by making a story with their own Original Character(s) and their opponent's Original Character(s). Main Page is a good place to direct yourself if you want to explore this wiki.

Detailed Summary
Original Character Tournaments, also shortened to OC Tournaments or, most commonly, OCTs, are competitions hosted online where participating artists and/or writers compete by making a story with their own Original Character(s) and their opponent's Original Character(s).

OCTs are run and organized by a Host, or hosts, usually artists or authors themselves, that come up with the premise, setting, rules, etc, and create the assets to promote it. Within the fictional setting of the Tournament, the Host may also be represented within the universe by an Original Character (OC) that itself runs the narrative of the tournament's fictional story.

A tournament will also have Judges, who's primary role is to review and judge the competitor's entries in order to determine winners. Judges may sometimes overlap with the role of host, may also involved in running aspects of the tournament's story, creating art and assets, and may also have an OC to represent them within OCT's fictional story as well.

The main participants of the tournaments are Competitors. These are the artist/writers that sign up to participate in the OCT by submitting entries of their OC's story, and how it progresses when matched up with other competitor's characters.

Most OCTs have an Audition Period, where the prospective competitors will submit their own Original Character(s) by creating a Reference Sheet, which provides information about the character, and an Audition Entry, which introduces the character's story and how they ended up in the tournament's setting.

Once accepted, Rounds begin. Each round of the tournament, competitors will be matched up with each other, and given an opponent character(s) they must implement in their story.

Tournament Formats may vary, but commonly accepted terms are Elimination Tournaments and Non-Elimination Tournaments.

Elimination Tournaments are normally a traditional tournament-bracket format, where each round will half the number of competitors by picking the best of each matchup. For example, a 5 round OCT would start with 32 competitors that will be halfed each round until 1 winner is left.

Non-Elimination Tournaments are a format which involves no forced elimination of the competitors. Competitors are eliminated if they fail to submit an entry or the criteria set out by judges. Typically a winner is decided via a point-based system.

Media Types
Most tournaments allow a certain type of media for entry. This includes:
 * Comics
 * Animation
 * Games
 * Visual Novels
 * Writing

The majority of tournaments require some form of visuals.

Types of Entry
An entry is a piece of media created by a participating artist depicting their OC's story throughout the tournament.

Competitor Entries - These are stories submitted for a tournament's rounds.

Spectator Entries - These are stories based on the Tournament's settings and characters. Both competitors and non-competitors can make these entries.

Related Art Contests
There are several art competitions which work in tandem with OCTs or provide OCT experiences through their own website.


 * Entervoid
 * Original Character Leagues
 * Oculama

Tournaments that occur within these sites do get listed in the Complete OCTs list.

Early OCTs
In early 2003, Entervoid was set up for comic artists to compete with others and draw their characters in stories or battles together. This is the earliest known precursor to OCTs. Entervoid can be seen as the first ever Original Character League due to its format.

OCTs in their current form have existed on DeviantArt since at least 2007. The first popular OC Tournament was Endzone OCT by Endling, which was made in celebration of Endling's DeviantArt reaching 2 million pagehits in June 2007. The idea of an OC Tournament likely came up due to Endling's history of running art tournaments on their DeviantArt and joining Rumble in the Summer OCT.


 * Endzone OCT was based on its creator's webcomic Everafter and ended up having 64 competitors.


 * Endzone had the concept of spectator entries.
 * Other tournaments like Redemption OCT, Steel Nation OCT, Rumble in the Summer OCT also appeared in early 2007.


 * Endzone finished its final round with Unknown-person and their character Climber as the winners.

OCTs continued to exist on DeviantArt, with Endzone popularising the concept. Before groups were introduced, artists used either their own personal accounts to run these tournaments or made seperate accounts to act as a central hub for all the tournament's information and images associated with it.

Original Character Leagues also started at this time, providing a similar but different concept, where competitors could pick who they want to fight without a fixed tournament bracket.

2010s
OCTs would continue into the 2010s, with tournaments using the group function to act as a hub for all entries to be gathered in. Software like DeviantArt's chatroom system and Skype would be used for communication. Groups like the OCTFollowers, OC-YellowPages and the-OCT-list formed in order to advertise upcoming tournaments.

In the late 2010s, making discords for OCTs became much more common.

After DeviantArt rolled out their "Deviantart Eclipse" update, many users left the site due to its more limited functionality. Pantheon OCT gave the option for competitors to submit "off-site", with entries being linked on the PantheonOffsite Deviantart account.

In 2015, Chop to the Top OCT was one of the first tournaments to use a Non-Elimination Format.

2020s
In 2020, Sukoshi Kaze on Twitter hosted The Tournament of Steel - a competition where users would vote on which OC they thought would win in a fight based on a list of their abilities and skills.

Sukoshi Kaze would run an OCT on Twitter later in the year, named The Tournament of Two Souls, introducing many new people to Original Character Tournaments.

In January 2021, War For Rayuba was hosted by ABBADON.


 * Based on his webcomic Kill 6 Billion Demons, the tournament had people create characters fight for two factions (the Pyre and the Bastion) to fight over the fate of the World Rayuba. The tournament had a map-based battle system and proved to be massively successful with 953 artists and writers contributing.


 * The Youtubers People Make Games competed in the competition and made a video in June 2021 documenting their time in War For Rayuba, introducing their audience to the concept of Original Character Tournaments and further boosting War For Rayuba's popularity.

Splinter City OCT also proved to be massively popular, getting 202 auditions applying for its 32 competitor roster.

In September 2021, the OCT Newscast was set up to document past and present OCTs.

In July 2022, Oculama's beta opened with its inaugural tournament beginning later that year.