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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 3714891" data-attributes="member: 150">This was my second Gencon -- and my second year playing in the open.  Both times I've made it to the finals.  I really enjoy the open -- it's a very different feel for a D&D game, very challenging and deadly.  I'm sorry that you were disappointed with your experience with it this year.  While I can understand a certain level of frustration with the characters, since we all get the same characters, it doesn't really matter if we all have INT bonuses of +2 or +8 == what matters is what we do with what we're given.  And how we play together, how well we respond to difficult situations and, frankly, how long you can survive when the deck is very, very badly stacked against you.  By the same token, I don't think it much matters whether the PCs have leveled up in the second round.  They did gain a new level for the third round, but that made very little true difference -- every team gained those levels, got the new gear and abilities and spells, etc. Metagame awareness is, I think, an important factor in being successful.  One of the first things you need to identify is what sort of encounter you're facing -- is this a trap, a puzzle, a straight-up fight, or a gauntlet you need to run through.  Or something else entirely.  Learning to read the signs is key -- if it takes you three or four combat rounds to realize that you shouldn't be fighting the encounter to the bitter end, you're going to end up burning through resources you're going to need later.  In my limited experience, Judging does make a big difference, but I have yet to have a judge that I didn't think was trying to do a good job, and be as fair as possible.  There are going to be differences and challenges because we're all human, but they're doing everything they can.  But the bottom line of the Open experience is that the adventure is not really designed to make it possible for you to succeed -- which is very, very different from typical adventure design.  Open adventures are, necessarily, designed to make it nearly impossible to succeed.  Every decision needs to be potentially a TPK.  They're trying to winnow each heat down to a few teams, and have enough distinction between teams to make it easy to score teams -- and if success is even reasonably possible, it's going to be too hard to judge.  In the final round, the team that won (Aqua Team Hunger Force, the Dallas Cowboys of the D&D Open, having won now three years in a row.  Clearly it's time for those clowns to retire -- hear me, Jollydoc?  <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=";)" /> ) was the ONLY team (I think) that actually finished the entire adventure in the time alloted.  Some of us got close -- our group (3rd place) was one of (I think) 4 that made it to the final room, but when time ran out we were a few rounds away from finishing -- and that's assuming we could have survived -- and that is by no means something I can say with confidence was going to happen.  We were about as tapped out as we could be, had nothing left, and actually finishing that scene successfully would have been a major feat.  Anyway, I understand your frustration.  But I think you're not being entirely fair, complaining about the characters and the judges -- the characters are all the same for every party, so they're a non-issue, and blaming the judges for what amounts to the necessary style of the open is not really fair, either.  Last year, we made it to the finals and had an amazingly disappointing show in the finals.  In the first encounter area, we didn't move fast enough despite repeated descriptions of the complex shaking and rocks falling from the ceiling . . . . then, just as we were leaving the area, the ceiling collapsed, killing two characters -- our two fighter types.  There was no warning other than the description -- I had naturally assumed that there would be a round or two of taking damage from falling rocks before the whole thing fell in, but it all came down at once. One of the two fighter types that died was standing in the last square before the exit, waiting for the other fighter . . . and in a home game or more typical game, a GM might have offered a reflex save to dive out to safety when the ceiling came down, but there was no escape.  We managed to get three of the four characters to the final room by simply running through most of the other encounter areas . . . then the three that made it were quickly eaten by the aspect of tiamat at the end.  It was messy.  Anyway, it wasn't the judge's fault, or the fault of the adventure's writers, that we lost our two fighters that way.  It was a necessary part of the Open format.  It sucked, and it sure made for a long drive home, but that's just a lesson we had to learn about the open.  I hope you'll come back to play the open again next year - this year's experience will help you improve your showing next year.</blockquote>

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