Time For Another Round Of Iron Dm!!!

[Rune]

Re: Aw shucks

I do wish I'd had more time on my entry -- not that I think it would have made a difference in the competition, but there are a few undeveloped areas (now that I have a few nights sleep under my belt and can think clearly again).

When you get it finished, email me a copy.

Actually, this brings up an interesting question in my mind. Does anyone here plan to polish up and/or expand any of their entries later? I plan to do so with each of mine, but I'm not sure what I'll do with them...since my players have read them. Maybe I'll give them away if anyone actually wants to use them.

My last entry could easily have been ten (or more!) times its length.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Re: Aw shucks

And so right there on the crapper it came to me -- the only obvious choice was Ottar, the king's wizard, and the connection there would do a LOT for the story...

Yep, that's very clever. Mmm... it's like a soothing balm to my ego.

But, don't you just hate hindsight?

Anyway, rg, you may now put yourself in the same "always a bridesmaid" class as Wicht. Not too bad, though, there's quite a bit of prestige to being the fan-fave runner-up!

Nemmerle now has two champs and two runners-up and is well on his way to a fantastic "tournament of champions."

Wulf

 

[Rune]

Absolutely! That's exactly what I thought when I read it; I gave the edge to RG because Rune's was so ambitious it required ten times more exposition than he gave it! The outline of the adventure seemed terse because there's virtually an entire campaign setting contained within it!

I agree that more expostion would certainly not have hurt my last entry (except by keeping me from finishing it in time), but I wouldn't say that it required more exposition. Allow me to explain:

I have always been a fan of adventures that imply many details (especially flavorful details, as you can probably tell ) without actually tying the DM down to them. (And, here, I seem to be contradicting my postion from an earlier conversation I've had with mmadsen, on this thread, but bear with me.)

I feel it is far better for an adventure to inspire the DM to creatively embellish the setting. Detail is nice, but the DM's imagination is more important. That being the case, I tried to give enough solid detail only to run the adventure on and merely hint about how to fit it into the ongoing campaign in a lasting way.

I furthermore disagree that this would make a good campaign setting. It might for a short campaign, but it works much better as a significant location in a larger campaign.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

Re: Re: Aw shucks

Actually, this brings up an interesting question in my mind. Does anyone here plan to polish up and/or expand any of their entries later?

Given world enough and time, I think there are enough interesting ideas in the entries I wrote that they might be turned into pretty good adventures -- even the weakest, the first one, has some interesting challeneges in it (I still like the huge whale skeleton and the smaller shark skeletons (just jaws) for the party to deal with).

But do I have the time? With a day job, a summer teaching gig, a SO who needs attention every once in a while, and my own campaign to run, I don't know if I can make the time for a full write up anytime soon.

I have a couple of other adventures on the back burner I keep wanting to write up, too -- sections of what I've whipped up for my own campaign, a first level adventure and a mini-campaign of three. There's just too much to do.

But, then, I've been getting deeper and deeper into the D&D thing over the past 18 months -- returning to gaming after a LONG hiatus, and trying different things out. And I always seem to be slipping a little deeper into the game stuff, and letting other hobbies and passtimes fall by the wayside (I can't remember the last time I played a computer game was). So we'll see what I'm going in a month or so.

I will say one thing about coming back to the game now that I'm in my 30's -- I LOVE that I have enough money now to buy pretty much any book I want, even if I don't expect to EVER use it in my campaign. So now I have Oriental Adventures, Spycraft, Dragonstar, Call of Cthulu, and a bunch of other junk floating around.

-rg

 

[toberane]

Re: Re: Re: Aw shucks

I will say one thing about coming back to the game now that I'm in my 30's -- I LOVE that I have enough money now to buy pretty much any book I want, even if I don't expect to EVER use it in my campaign. So now I have Oriental Adventures, Spycraft, Dragonstar, Call of Cthulu, and a bunch of other junk floating around.

-rg

This is not universal. I'm in my thirties, and there are still a gawdawful number of D&D and d20 books I want to buy but don't have the money for. You must be independently wealthy.

Of course, I also have a wife, three kids, and an 18 year old neice living with me. Sometimes I wonder where the money goes. It seems every year, my wife and I make more money than we ever have before, but we seem to also be more broke than we ever were before.

BTW, I loved all the work you guys did in this game. Threads like this were what made me give up posting on this board in the first place--they take up entirely too much of my time! (Which is not a bad thing when you're at home, but at work, that's another story...)

 

[Radiating Gnome]

I feel it is far better for an adventure to inspire the DM to creatively embellish the setting. Detail is nice, but the DM's imagination is more important. That being the case, I tried to give enough solid detail only to run the adventure on and merely hint about how to fit it into the ongoing campaign in a lasting way.

I probably should have quoted a couple of other posts -- several posters have said that Rune's final entry was too broad, too ambitious, etc. But you've all read the thread, so I'll move on.

Rune shouldn't have to defend the style of his entry -- he won, and his entry deserved it, no question there -- but the finals did seem to stretch to the limit the range of possibilities for the competition, and in the end comparing the entries seems to be like comparing apples and oranges. It might help, in the future, to have much clearer guidelines. After all, what I knew about the competition and what was appropriate I learned as I played, and from reading the other posts.

It would help to have much clearer guidelines for entrants. Rune and I differed, in this case, in one very fundamental way -- he was writing the outline of an adventure -- a sort of recipe he could give to other DMs, while I focused much more closely on the details of the adventure, writing it as best I could to represend the way I would DM the set of encounters myself, rather than what someone else might do with the same core ideas. Should entrants be approaching this from the point of view of someone writing source material for other DMs or for their own game? Is this a competition for scenario writers or DMs?

Is one approach more appropriate than the other? Should it be clear in the competition whether entries should lay out encounters, interludes, full adventures, or campaign-length productions?

Should there be other guidelines as well? Should it be permissable to morph an ingredient into something that works a little better for your story? (As I did in the first round, morphing ghouls into Lacedons) Are there there guidelines about the use of different game worlds and settings? Could I, for example, have written a Call of Cthulu version of the last entry?

I'm not trying to say that if there had been strickter categories, the results would have been different. Far from it. But clearnly there were a variety of different expectation here, and it might help in the future if they were a bit more clearly laid out.

And, Nemmerle, I want to make sure you know I'm saying this all out of respect and appreciation -- I had a great time in the competition and the only results I've ever questioned were the ones where I won.

-rg

 

[Wicht]

No Rune should not have to defend his entry. We all accepted Nemm as judge and we knew going in the judging was more or less subjective.

Of course that means that individually some on us may find some scenarios more palatable than Nemmerle for our own style of gaming. But thats life.

And yes, Nemm this game is fun to play. Do it again soon!

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Hmmm... I was thinking along the same lines, rg, and then I just decided that the seemingly arbitrary nature of the Judge was one of the lynchpins of the whole Iron DM concept.

And I think that's kinda cool.

I guess given two entries of equal merit, nemm might lean one way or the other just on his personal preference for how they are structured, but I don't think that would persuade me to change my methods.


Wulf

 

[Vaxalon]

I am willing to do a round of Rune vs. Vaxalon for the title of “Iron DM of Enworld” – but it is really all I have time for what with so much I have to do these days. . .

I am ready, Nemmerle!

Vaxalon straightens out his silver lamé DM suit and prepares to go on stage to defend his title...

 

[el-remmen]

As for the format. . .

I really would rather not provide too much of a guideline because I don't want to limit or stifle anyone's creativity. . . And while sometimes the difference in scope of two entries can make them difficult to compare - in the end I try to measure them on their own merits and then decide which one I think worked better for what it was. . simple as that. . .

At least not once in this competition did I have to choose which entry sucked less as I had to do in the past on more than one occasion. . They were all excellent - and RG - under ordinary circumstances I think your final entry would have won the whole thing - but I think Rune's was just above and beyond the ordinary.


As for Vax vs. Rune. . I am ready for the next two hours or so - so let me know