Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 1182497" data-attributes="member: 259">Judgment, Nem vs. Rune: Another case in which the contestants excelled in different areas. Organization: I've left this category out for a few rounds because it hasn't been significant, but I'm bringing it back in, because both entries were remarkably organized. I say "remarkably," not "well." My remarks follow.  Rune's was organized in an unusual fashion, almost a lyrical fashion, with the two concurrent perspectives on the adventure, a set of paragraphs for each ingredient, plus a final set for the denouement. Very readable, very easy to follow; although it wouldn't be of especial assistance to the DM running the adventure, it made for a cool entry format. Nem, on the other hand, desperately needs an editor. His second sentence -  - nearly gave me a migraine. I feared I was going to throw up my hands halfway through the entry and give up on reading it. Were I tutoring Nem, I'd forbid him to use hyphens, the word "however," and nested parentheses (my god, nested parentheses?) until he was free of their addiction. This entry was the sloppiest-organized of any entry yet, and was positively painful to read for that reason. Characters: Fortunately for Nem, he makes a comeback here. We've got the solitary, mercenary dwarf; the canny hobgoblin barbarian; the evil hobgoblin heretic; the bitter relapsed manslut; and the bizarre frost-wyrm as characters. None of them were especially memorable, no Stan the Fans in the bunch, but they were all plausible, and all had the potential for good roleplay. Rune's characters - excuse me, character - fell flat in comparison. I'm not sure whether we're talking Jim Jones or Barry White, a French Situationist or a pop star. In my mind, I've settled on playing him like my childhood companion Brian Dingledine, all sneers and erudition and punk attitude and sex appeal and manipulation, but I could really use some better characterization - and more characters. Scenes: Both, of course, turn the spiral staircase and the frost worm into cool scenes. Nem has got more cool scenes, though: from watching the hobgoblins stack corpses, to running across the ice field, to fighting up the hillside, to dealing with the mad sorcerer inside the hill, and even to confronting a dwarf inside his modest cabin. Rune's scenes were pretty much what was suggested immediately by the ingredients, and not much more (the fight vs. the frost wyrm with the army's participation, however, was pretty cool). Mood: Rune's was definitely moody, almost allegorical in tone. It suffered, unfortunately, from the absence of sympathetic characters: I'm afraid a lot of players would throw up their hands in disgust and leave the two sides to wallow in their own pettiness. The allegorical tone that worked so well in Rune's last entry fell flat in this one. Nem's has a more standard mood on its surface, but the difficult questions of loyalty (is the queen betraying the king? Is Lothario betraying the queen? Is the hobgoblin betraying his people? Is cooperating with the hobgoblin betraying the PCs' people? Will the hobgoblin betray them?) add a whole bunch of moral quandary goodness. I approve. I picked this set of ingredients to be difficult. Specifically, mountain cabin conflicts with spiral staircase, and heat lightning conflicts with frost wyrm. The contestants dealt with these contradictions in various ways. Spiral Staircase: Both entries had fights on spiral staircases, of course, with different mechanics for resolving falls. Nem's staircase was spiral only technically - nobody would normally call a stairway wending around a hill a spiral staircase. Though further from the ingredient, however, it was more plausible to me: Rune's staircase built of frost wyrm bones raises the question of why his heretic thought frostwyrms were difficult to kill. He'd killed enough to make this stairway, but figured one frostwyrm would annihilate an army? It seemed a poor choice of construction material for the lothario for an ambiguous political statement. Mountain Cabin: Rune resolved the conflict between cabin and staircase by having the latter be a secret escape from the former. It works pretty well, assuming PCs get to this scene; I imagine the lothario sort of like a supervillain or a Batman at this point, leading the PCs to his Batcave. Nem resolved the contradiction by having them as completely separate scenes in his 11-page opus. Because slightly more action happens in Nem's cabin (Rune's is little more than a foyer for the batcave beneath, where the real fun begins), Nem's use is stronger. Frost Wyrm: I think Rune is using his worm to symbolize chaos, the id, base lust, that sort of thing. Yes? Thus the city of chastity is built on killing the id, and the manslut leads the chaste back to the id, and so forth. And that works pretty well, I think, although Wulf is probably tearing his hair out on reading this. The lothario's use of frost-wyrm corpse in his house doesn't quite work for me: if the chaste kill the worm to symbolize the triumph of order, why does the slut kill the worm? Nem's Rez-Naci (misspelled once, amusingly, as Rez-Nazi - I picture a dour man with long braids shouting, "No fry bread for you!") as a mythical beast-god is a cool creation Heat Lightning: Okay, you both pretty much lamed out on this one, the second of the contradictions in ingredients. Rune's heat lightning as a symbol of the god's pleasure or displeasure felt really tacked on - was this a natural or a supernatural phenomenon? No fair not to tell the DM, as the DM is going to be the one answering the druid player's questions or the questions of the cleric who casts divination. Still and all, it was better than Nem's: heat lightning used twice as someone's name is even more annoying than using it once as someone's name, especially when we're talking Icy-Hot Lightning. Whereas Rune's actual heat lightning wasn't well integrated into his adventure, though, at least Nem's absurd interpretation of the ingredient was an integral part of the story. Oy. I wash my hands of this mess. Lothario: I wondered whether Nem would've renamed his characters if he'd had more time (Ursula, the queen from Atuan? Was that just pandering to another Le Guin fan? And Prince Lothario?) At first, I was expecting to ding him for this ingredient: a lothario who quits sleeping around before the adventure begins is a poor ingredient use. But then we find the secret letters, and find out that old habits die hard. Cool! As I mentioned before, Rune's allegorical lothario didn't feel fully fleshed out to me; while he did fit the ingredient's criterion, I didn't see him as a person. Heresy: Both of you used this ingredient well, and indeed it was central to Rune's adventure. I was left wondering in Nem's adventure what the hobgoblin Icy-Hot was planning on doing about the PCs once they killed off his rival; it becomes clear at the end that Icy-Hot is no heretic himself, and is happy betraying the PCs by killing them, so that difficulty is resolved. Overall, Rune had a neatly packaged little fairy-tale of an adventure, with a few big flaws - namely, that I can't imagine most PCs getting drawn into a power struggle between such flagrant jerks as the city and the lothario. His structure was neat, but the adventure itself wasn't up to his previous standard. Nem's adventure was sloppy as hell, difficult to read in places and with one silly ingredient usage - but past those problems, it was a great, multilayered adventure with all kinds of possibilities and a few very memorable scenes. Round goes to Nem. Congratulations! Daniel</blockquote>

Verification