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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 3715820" data-attributes="member: 150">Like I said, I don't want to go nuts defending the Open format or the specific adventure.  And I know that the first rounds are different for each heat (at least I think they are) so later groups don't get the benefit of other's experience.  So there may have been differences in some of our experiences.  I also wish the judging could be more consistent, but those are all volunteers, and I don't think it's truly possible to do much more than they do to regulate the volunteer GMs.  We found it very important, for example, to be able to immediately defend our understanding of the game rules for things like adjudicating cover and line of effect.  So we had a list of important page numbers ready, and tried to have book references appropriate to our actions on hand when we took actions.  It would be great if that were no necessary, if everyone had the same understanding and interpretation of the rules, but in practice it's just not possible with a group of volunteers.  And, you're dead right, climbing down a ladder with an army of gnolls behind you in a regular D&D game would be suicide. But, by that point in the open, we had been through several rooms where the winning strategy was to get out, not to fight to the bitter end -- actually, the number of encounters where we needed to actually stand and fight were the vast minority of the encounters we had in the open -- and even those were encounters where doing something correctly before or during the encounter would mitigate the force opposing us.  For me, it was easy to accept that the trap door was the target of the encounter in the context of the others we had faced. I didn't think too hard about how suicidal that might be in a regular game.  Erith and MMu, I'm sorry that you didn't enjoy the Open experience -- it's certainly not typical D&D, and it's not for everyone.  I find it enjoyable, though -- I like the tension, and the challenge of the nearly impossible encounters, and the puzzle that each new encounter presents.  We made some pretty big mistakes, ourselves, going through, and were lucky to be able to recover from them before they turned into character deaths.  For us the challenge of doing well in the open starts with getting the characters and doing what we could to work with what we were given.  The first thing to do is to examine the magic items the party has and redistribute them to whomever you think will best be able to use them effectively. That depends a lot on the item and how you want to play the characters, and tactics that you sort out ahead of time.  Here's a glaring example: Soris, the duskblade in the open, was given a wand of magic missiles, but magic missile is not on the duskblade spell list, so Soris actually can't use it.  You might argue that the organizers putting the party together did a bad job making those characters, and the wand is a mistake.  In my opinion, though, the open starts when you download the characters and start to figure out how to work with the material you've been given, not when you sit down at the table -- and moving equipment around is a big part of that prep.  Again, that's not traditional D&D.  In a real campaign, the players all gather up their own equipment and the only reason Soris would have that wand is to sell it.  Is that a flaw in the open format then, since it's not like "traditional" D&D?  I don't think so.  For me, that's a way for the organizers to give every team the same raw materials but create new differentiation among the teams based on which teams make the best use of that equipment -- those that figure out that there may be better ways to use what they've been given.  In our experience, it was important to our success that we had given the one potion of fly to the character we had given it to, and not another -- it was very small decisions that made big differences down the line.  Anyway, again, I'm sorry you didn't have a good time.  And I don't think anything you're saying is really wrong . . . but I still enjoy the format, the challenge, and the adrenaline rush of the Open, and I'm going to keep doing it. -rg</blockquote>

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