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IRON DM 2023 Tournament Thread
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<blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 9210197" data-attributes="member: 57112"><p>Here's the thing... you are! In fact such analyses were... I hesitate to say common in the past, but they were put out there, and while I can't speak for everyone, I always enjoyed reading them when they were put out there (and I enjoyed writing them as well!)</p><p></p><p>I wouldn't mind putting out some more detailed comments on the previous match, but for the moment I can make some general comments on my process, which is always evolving.</p><p></p><p>In general, I wait until both entries are posted before reading either, and I try to read both in a single sitting. This first read is very much a "does look like fun to run/play"; I try to keep the ingredients themselves out of my mind until the second read-through, where I write down a list of the ingredients and how each one is used in each entry. This is often one to three words at most, a name or a specific location of each adventure. Third pass I get down to the nitty gritty. In general, I use a scale of 0-2, in increments of .5, for no real reason. .5 is "did they even try to use the ingredient", and it goes up from there based on how well the ingredient is incorporated. Is it central, is it relevant. Can it be removed without changing the adventure? Can one of the elements of the ingredient be changed without changing the adventure? What if the ingredient were Captivating Cube? Would that change things significantly? There's a system to it but I won't pretend it's in any way objective, which is one of the reasons why I don't share out those numbers. The other reason it that, as I've mentioned in my past few judgments, the individual ingredient vs ingredient lineup doesn't tell the whole story. How well do the ingredients mesh together? Does the adventure feel cohesive, like a classic Iron Chef lineup, or does it feel like a stew with whatever ingredients we had lying around tossed into it? This, by the way, is at least for me the most important reason why word counts were instituted; over a long enough adventure, you can put a lot of space between ingredients. Shorter adventures, at least in theory, force you to cram those ingredients tighter and make them play together.</p><p></p><p>But from there, yeah, it's kind of a gut thing. The individual ingredients, how well they blend together, and how much I like the adventure in the first place, all factor in to the final judgment. </p><p></p><p>That said, the personal peccadillos of judges I think will always come into play. I've gotten docked in judgments before for assuming my adventures' players would have an altruistic motivation to get involved. I try to recognize my own where I can, but unconscious bias is a hell of a thing to combat. And those biases can definitely color what we determine on our own to be subjective quality. I'll say, as a player on my own, I'd much rather play "Tavern" than "Dungeon"; all I can do is <em>try </em>to put myself in the shoes of the kind of player I would imagine would love this genre of adventure. </p><p></p><p>I'll touch on the D&D supremacy thing in a longer post, but I'll say that I can't disagree, despite being personally responsible for two of those three non-D&D wins (in fact, I'm 2-1 in championship matches; but 0-1 when I explicitly used D&D).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Gradine, post: 9210197, member: 57112"] Here's the thing... you are! In fact such analyses were... I hesitate to say common in the past, but they were put out there, and while I can't speak for everyone, I always enjoyed reading them when they were put out there (and I enjoyed writing them as well!) I wouldn't mind putting out some more detailed comments on the previous match, but for the moment I can make some general comments on my process, which is always evolving. In general, I wait until both entries are posted before reading either, and I try to read both in a single sitting. This first read is very much a "does look like fun to run/play"; I try to keep the ingredients themselves out of my mind until the second read-through, where I write down a list of the ingredients and how each one is used in each entry. This is often one to three words at most, a name or a specific location of each adventure. Third pass I get down to the nitty gritty. In general, I use a scale of 0-2, in increments of .5, for no real reason. .5 is "did they even try to use the ingredient", and it goes up from there based on how well the ingredient is incorporated. Is it central, is it relevant. Can it be removed without changing the adventure? Can one of the elements of the ingredient be changed without changing the adventure? What if the ingredient were Captivating Cube? Would that change things significantly? There's a system to it but I won't pretend it's in any way objective, which is one of the reasons why I don't share out those numbers. The other reason it that, as I've mentioned in my past few judgments, the individual ingredient vs ingredient lineup doesn't tell the whole story. How well do the ingredients mesh together? Does the adventure feel cohesive, like a classic Iron Chef lineup, or does it feel like a stew with whatever ingredients we had lying around tossed into it? This, by the way, is at least for me the most important reason why word counts were instituted; over a long enough adventure, you can put a lot of space between ingredients. Shorter adventures, at least in theory, force you to cram those ingredients tighter and make them play together. But from there, yeah, it's kind of a gut thing. The individual ingredients, how well they blend together, and how much I like the adventure in the first place, all factor in to the final judgment. That said, the personal peccadillos of judges I think will always come into play. I've gotten docked in judgments before for assuming my adventures' players would have an altruistic motivation to get involved. I try to recognize my own where I can, but unconscious bias is a hell of a thing to combat. And those biases can definitely color what we determine on our own to be subjective quality. I'll say, as a player on my own, I'd much rather play "Tavern" than "Dungeon"; all I can do is [I]try [/I]to put myself in the shoes of the kind of player I would imagine would love this genre of adventure. I'll touch on the D&D supremacy thing in a longer post, but I'll say that I can't disagree, despite being personally responsible for two of those three non-D&D wins (in fact, I'm 2-1 in championship matches; but 0-1 when I explicitly used D&D). [/QUOTE]
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