NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dave Turner" data-source="post: 1178516" data-attributes="member: 12329">Wulf writes:I guess that I take "cthulhuesque" to mean something a little less direct that what you had.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I appreciate what you tried to do with your entry.  You were outside the box and that's where Iron DM entries try to be.  I do wonder why you decided to rely so heavily on cliche, though?  Your broad meta-concept was already innovative enough within the context of the tournament: present a long-term adventure framework rather than an immediate adventure set in the short-term.  Saying that you wanted to make things easy for the DM by relying on cliches sounds a bit odd to me.  If someone published an adventure based on your idea, I don't think people would be lauding it for its reliance on cliche?  While the concept of the adventure is a good one, it's certainly not such a mind-bender that cliche is needed so that readers can figure out what's going on?  Maybe that's just my own facility with the concept you described, however.I wonder why you chose to describe your own instance of lifting with quotation marks and didn't do the same with mythago?  Both of you apparently did the same thing.  If mythago is to be believed, he did it unconsciously.  Using quotation marks the way you did is usually meant to signify that the word isn't being used in its regular sense.  If mythago did what he did unintentionally, then shouldn't his "lifting" be in quotes, since using the word in that way suggests an intentional use of the material?  Regardless of whether the source material is well-known or obscure, you both did the same thing in a sense.  It raises a red-flag in my eyes when you describe your version as a "paean to a classic" while mythago is somehow doing something reprehensible.Even if mythago did, in fact, use the novel as template for his entry, you did exactly the same thing for yours.  Trying to highlight and differentiate between what are ultimately cosmetic differences between both "paeans" seems a bit disingenuous.  Having said all that, I don't want you to get the impression that I'm somehow down on you or your entry.  Speaking from experience, I know the time pressure involved in the tournament.  Overall, I do believe that your use of ingredients, once the matter of both entries relying heavily on other material is balanced and disregarded, was better than mythago's.  My initial point was the seeming penalizing of mythago for his reliance on outside material which didn't seem to apply to your entry as well.Which brings me to Pie's response:I would suggest that your bias might have crept in here, which is somewhat inevitable in a tournament such as this with a single judge.  I imagine that you were more comfortable with the Cthulhu similarities because of your comfort with the source material.  I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I wonder if you would have reacted with calm if the Cthulhu story wasn't so well-known?  What if, like the other novel, the Cthulhu thing was as relativley obscure?  Would your reaction had been the same?This is impossible to answer in a way, but it highlights the problem that I see.  After all, we often criticize movies for being "a rip-off of X", where X is some extremely well-known movie (like: "Equilibirium is a total Matrix rip-off.").  In this case, Wulf's adventure simply referenced a very well-known story, while Mythago's didn't.  Does that mean that Wulf should somehow avoid the same criticism that Mythago does?  I don't think that just because you reference something well-loved that you are insulated from charges of "making a paean".  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />In the end, maybe this could inform any further judging by Pie?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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