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One of the issues I see in both tournaments and narrative events are bad first round mismatches. With standard random pairings, you can easily wind up with good players paired up against and clobbering newer or weaker players. In most scoring schemes that's an unfair advantage, but it also creates a terrible initial experience for the new player (I'm assuming here that the latter is at least some consideration, it's not a purely competitive event---as most smaller events indeed are not).

In the NOVA Narrative this year and the LibertyHammer narrative event I'm trying to get off the ground, I'm thinking about applying a specific mechanism to mitigate that: Players fill out a quick questionnaire to check in, and organizers sum up the “Yes” responses and seed or constrain the first round pairings by sorting on those counts.

I would be curious to hear what people think about that approach, and other suggestions or past experiences. I have a much longer discussion about the problem and the proposed approach here:

http://www.rocketshipgames.com/blogs/tjkopena/2016/03/first-round-gaming-tournament-seeding/

Thx!

UPDATE: There is also a bit of a good discussion about this happening on Reddit.

I'm not sure how robust ITC's ranking system is, but using that might be a way to start for the bigger tournaments (especially since TOF kinda dropped off). That won't fix everything, but the mere "played in an ITC tournament" could help a bit.

To address the "fast/easy" concern in your attached post, you could use a few pretty simple functions in MS Excel to compare your roster with the list off Frontline's website, then sort and rank them for an initial swiss pairing.