Challenge of Champions V (Dungeon #108) GRRRR!!!!!

[Psychic Warrior]

Last night the group I play in finished the Challenge of Champions V from Dungeon 108. I have played and/or ran most of this series and always thought the senarios were fair and in keeping with the fantasy theme. Not so number 5 however.

The final puzzle has the party with 11 discs numbered 0 to 9 with an extra '1'. Our challenge is to place the discs in the correct order to open the door leading out of the room. The door is guarded by the spirit of Sheela the She-Goblin, a vain creature whose name you have to speak as you place the last discs. There are 3 rows of indendations to place the discs in 4 slots on the top row, 3 slots on the middle row and 4 slots again on the bottom row. We aren't given any more information about how to arrange the discs and are told failure results in 'death' (disqualification from the round). After 10 frustrating minutes (we are onyl allowed 15) and 2 out of 4 people eliminated we decide to concede (the last 2 players had nothing left ot go on - the 2 'dead' players agreed to concede just to get on with it). The answer?

Spoiler

You had to arrange the numbers to represent letters and spell out She-Goblin (yes with a hyphen and the last slot was 'wasted' and represented nothing). In essence 'elite' speak used by MMORPG players (of which none of us are).

We were f**king pissed.

What would your reaction have been?

 

[Crothian]

Ya, that is pretty dumb. I would have been just like whatever and moved on, but my excitemtn for the rest of the adventure woulkd have been killed.

 

[Psion]

What would your reaction have been?

Similar.

I have difficulty accepting word puzzles that only work in English.

That would have been absolutely beyond the pale. Not only language dependant, but anachronistic subculture dependant? That is the worst SoD-shatterer of all time.

 

[Richards]

You weren't the only one upset with that. I was myself, and I wrote the thing!

Spoiler

As far as "leet-speak" goes, that wasn't the intention. I'm not at all "leet," and the puzzle wasn't built around the "leet-speak" that some people use on the Internet. I just had noticed how some of the numbers could be made to look like letters, and devised a way to draw each of the numbers 0-9 so that they could each represent a different letter of the alphabet. Since "Challenge of Champions" adventures always have 10 scenarios, I jiggered the numbers 1-10 and tried to come up with a ten- or eleven-letter word that could be formed from those "letters." Having come up with "SHE-GOBLIN," I was all set.

When I sent in the adventure, I had drawn up the "number disks" in the specific font that best worked so the numbers could be used as letters. Imagine my disappointment when I saw that the artist had completely disregarded my inputs and came up with a font style of his own to use! My "1" was just a rectangle, with no serifs, so it could represent a hyphen when turned sideways; the "1" he came up with looks like a sideways "1" when turned sideways. My original "4" had only vertical and horizontal lines, so the "spokes" both pointed staright up (and more importantly, so that it would look like an "h" when turned upside-down), but the artist's "4" came to a point, so when you turn it upside-down it looks like an upside-down "4," not an "h." As far as I'm concerned, the artist made that scenario completely unsolvable.

(Oh, and Crothian - that was the 10th and final scenario, so there was nowhere to "move on" to from there but the final scoring.)

I'm sorry you didn't like the concept of the 10th scenario, but I thought it was a neat way to tie the ten scenarios together. Many "Challenge of Champions" adventures have a unifying theme for the scenarios; in fact, I usually don't even start writing up the other 9 until I know the basis of the 10th scenario. (But sometimes there is no "point" to the tenth scenario - if there's always a gimmick, then you'd know to always pay special attention to the 10th scenario.)

Hopefully, you'll like "Challenge of Champions VI" - which I'm working on now - a bit better. I promise you that the concept I used in the scenario that bothered you won't be used at all.

Johnathan

 

[Crothian]

That makes more sense then, if the numbers were supposed to look like the lettes in some reagrds, it is a shame that the art got messed up like that.

 

[Richards]

Since I was typing up my first response when Psion posted, I'll address his concerns here:

As far as the English-language puzzles, when I first started writing "Challenge of Champions" adventures, I honestly didn't even take that into consideration. Over time (as people started mentioning it on messageboards, and after I myself finally took the plunge into the Internet - I didn't even own a computer when I wrote the first two; I typed them up at work after hours!), I first realized that there were people all over the world using these, and many of them weren't native English speakers!

However, there's only so much I can do about that. Naturally, not using English-based word puzzles would put a bit of a damper on the creativity process - there's so many cool concepts that involve word play! I thought about not involving English in any of the scenarios, but to tell the truth, some of my favorite specific scenarios involve word play, and I feel the adventures as a whole would suffer if the scenarios were limited to the "use this pile of equipment to get from point A to point B" ones.

That said, I'll see what I can do to limit the language-dependent scenarios in future adventures. No promises, though: if I come up with a cool language-dependent puzzle, I'll probably want to use it.

Johnathan

 

[Richards]

By the way, the number disks weren't the only errors that crept into "Challenge of Champions V" via the artwork. Paizo did up a free download that corrected most of the problems (all but the number disks from scenario #10 - those are still messed up). I recommend using it when you want to run the adventure (and redesigning the number disks yourself, once you know the "trick" to them, you can probably come up with a set of disks similar to the ones I originally submitted). Here's the link:

http://paizo.com/dungeon/news/v5748eaic9jsf

Johnathan

 

[Psychic Warrior]

You weren't the only one upset with that. I was myself, and I wrote the thing!

Spoiler

As far as "leet-speak" goes, that wasn't the intention. I'm not at all "leet," and the puzzle wasn't built around the "leet-speak" that some people use on the Internet. I just had noticed how some of the numbers could be made to look like letters, and devised a way to draw each of the numbers 0-9 so that they could each represent a different letter of the alphabet. Since "Challenge of Champions" adventures always have 10 scenarios, I jiggered the numbers 1-10 and tried to come up with a ten- or eleven-letter word that could be formed from those "letters." Having come up with "SHE-GOBLIN," I was all set.

When I sent in the adventure, I had drawn up the "number disks" in the specific font that best worked so the numbers could be used as letters. Imagine my disappointment when I saw that the artist had completely disregarded my inputs and came up with a font style of his own to use! My "1" was just a rectangle, with no serifs, so it could represent a hyphen when turned sideways; the "1" he came up with looks like a sideways "1" when turned sideways. My original "4" had only vertical and horizontal lines, so the "spokes" both pointed staright up (and more importantly, so that it would look like an "h" when turned upside-down), but the artist's "4" came to a point, so when you turn it upside-down it looks like an upside-down "4," not an "h." As far as I'm concerned, the artist made that scenario completely unsolvable.

(Oh, and Crothian - that was the 10th and final scenario, so there was nowhere to "move on" to from there but the final scoring.)

I'm sorry you didn't like the concept of the 10th scenario, but I thought it was a neat way to tie the ten scenarios together. Many "Challenge of Champions" adventures have a unifying theme for the scenarios; in fact, I usually don't even start writing up the other 9 until I know the basis of the 10th scenario. (But sometimes there is no "point" to the tenth scenario - if there's always a gimmick, then you'd know to always pay special attention to the 10th scenario.)

Hopefully, you'll like "Challenge of Champions VI" - which I'm working on now - a bit better. I promise you that the concept I used in the scenario that bothered you won't be used at all.

Johnathan

Wow! Thanks so much for showing up here Johnathan! Just so you know I do really like the Challenge of Champions series and am glad you are making another one. The senario you describe above and how it was changed must have been very irritating for you. It is too bad that

Spoiler

the artist didn't leave well alone and go with how you designed the numbers in the first place, it would have made the challenge still hard as you had to guess the word but not impossibly so, at least there would have been some clue due to the strangness of the number designs

.

Looking forward to the next installment of CoC and I am very glad you took the time to explain this - thank you!

 

[blargney the second]

I love ENWorld.

Thanks for explaining what happened there! I'd been wondering about that myself. Incidentally, I recently used parts of CoC 4 in our Eberron game. I ran four of the puzzles along with an archery contest (animated targets are fun!) and a bloodless grand melee to make an overarching tournament. The players had a blast with it!

-blarg

 

[Richards]

You know, over the years, I've heard a lot of stories about people using bits and pieces of various "Challenge of Champions" scenarios in their "standard" adventures (usually the puzzles themselves, and the "figure out the command word to this magic item" ones seem to be the most popular in that regard). It certainly wasn't something I had envisioned, but I think it's pretty cool.

And in the spirit of "behind the scenes explanations" that makes EN World such a cool place to visit, here's a bit of "Challenge of Champions" trivia: In the first Challenge, if you look at the final scores of the competing teams, you'll note that one of the lower-ranking teams was called "Bisquayne's Army." In the second Challenge, I had a team called "Bisquayne's New Army," which again didn't score very high. "Challenge of Champions III" was to have had a team called "Bisquayne's Final Army," but Chris Perkins didn't understand the reference and reverted it to "Bisquayne's Army," setting back my long-running joke by two years. In any case, they did poorly that year as well, and in the fourth Challenge, they did just as bad as "Bisquayne's Final Army." I finally got to finish my punchline in "Challenge of Champions V," when the team that came in absolute last place was "Bisquayne's Final Army And This Time I Really Mean It."

I'm thinking that the winner of "Challenge of Champions VI" - barring the PCs beating their score, naturally - will be "The Army Without Bisquayne," proving once and for all just who was holding back those various teams.

Johnathan