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Iron DM 2009 - all matches
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<blockquote data-quote="phoamslinger" data-source="post: 4967429" data-attributes="member: 2342"><p>and the winner is…</p><p></p><p>different judges look at different things. my focus is almost always on the ingredients more than anything else. playability or usefulness is usually a wash and overall story or the feel of the scenario is extremely subjective, so I only count down on it if the story seems trite or contrived. hooks and formatting are always nice, but I’m not as picky about such things as some other judges have been. I figure that the DM will either steer his players into a setting or not. and someone who wants to win an Iron DM is going to put the best, most presentable face on his or her entry as they can. so you generally never get extra points out of these types of things with me and I tend to gloss over them.</p><p></p><p>it really does come down to the ingredients and more importantly, how those ingredients connect to the other ingredients. if you made a chart with ingredients 1-5 up the y axis and ingredients 6-2 along the x axis, there are 15 possible connections between 6 ingredients. which really means that there are thirty connections. maybe the river delta doesn’t have a connection to severed feet, but the severed foot stops flowing downstream when it gets to a river delta (a one way connection, so one of two possible). or maybe the bedridden troll ate the bard, making her monstrous and then the monstrous bard is what put the troll into the bed (going both directions, two out of two – much stronger!)</p><p></p><p>when I put the ingredients out there, several of them immediately jumped together pretty naturally: severed feet, brutal slayings, a monstrous bard, a troll (bedridden or not). so it was really the last two ingredients that I figured were going to be the make/break points. what would you do with the river delta, the ioun stone, and the bedridden nature of the troll. how would these be worked in and how strongly would each ingredient be connected to the other five?</p><p></p><p>individually (and taken out of order, because…)</p><p>the <strong>Monstrous Bard</strong>: Rechan had a halfling bard who, even before she became an undead, sought out and tormented the trolls who were providing a useful service for the community. so even though she later became a monster, she was not a good person to begin with. Atras has a half-orc who will eventually destroy a village, abuses and kills its inhabitants, turns their feet into bizarre undead monsters, and has a troll kept prisoner and tortured in his lair, just because. both bards are very bad people, but which one had to be a bard? Atras, your bard sang the people into dominion, but it could just as easily been a wizard, priest, warlock, sorcerer, or other class casting similar spells for similar effects. . bards aren’t just singers, although that’s how they are most typically played. Rechan’s bard used “scorching wit” and comedy to attack the troll brothers, which struck me as a very bard-like way to go about things. plus the “riddle contest” at the end was an excellent encounter, although I usually consider skill challenges to be “roll-playing”, which is not a compliment to the system. I would rather be stumping the players themselves and making them THINK. but Rechan’s bard <strong><em>as a bard</em></strong> was a much stronger entry.</p><p></p><p>the <strong>Bedridden Troll</strong>: I thought it was interesting that you both used acid as the reason the troll couldn’t get out of bed, either from an upset tummy or by being tied down and actively prevented from recovery. but troll regeneration is tough stuff, and Rechan’s troll’s case of stomach acid seemed a bit weak. and are we suggesting that a cleric who has risen to the rank of abbot doesn’t have the cure spells to fix a bad case of heartburn? per the story, Gruck ran away while Gabby was finishing off his brother, so she hasn’t used her “wit” on him yet. so he might have been a frightened troll, but not really enough to be confined to a bed. point to Atras.</p><p></p><p>I don’t want to repeat my last harsh criticism of a player’s entry, but unfortunately, those were the two strongest ingredients in Rechan’s entry. all of his other ingredients were either replaceable or not that impressive an interpretation. </p><p></p><p>the <strong>Severed Foot</strong> of the bard, why not replaceable with a hand or her head? and why was the foot missed from the troll buffet in the first place? NEVER toss an ingredient into the mix as a mcguffin, a generic THIING that drives the plot around it. you’re in effect making one of the ingredients generic and that will only hurt your entry. </p><p></p><p>with the <strong>Brutal Slayings</strong>, I asked my young son how to kill trolls and he said “burn ‘em”. I asked with what and he told me “fire or acid”. so any adventurer who’s ever killed a troll has probably seen a trollish acid or burn victim. the evidence of Rechan’s brutal slayings could be considered commonplace, not extreme. </p><p></p><p>the <strong>River Delta</strong> sort of works as a place where the foot might have slowly come to rest, but might not a pool or waterfall or just ‘down river’ worked as well? the delta as a tie-in for crocodiles which then tied the troll brothers “trolling” helped some, but now the crocodiles are starting to take over a strong place as a seventh ingredient (which they were not), especially with the fight with Toothy Jack. I would not have put crocodiles as an ingredient into a competition like this because it would have been too easy a tie in to the River Delta, but they play a big part in Rechan’s entry. logically, River Delta becomes swamp or marshland before entering the sea, so crocodiles were not a problem in and of themselves, but I would have put other swampy creatures in there to offset, will-o-wisps, giant leeches, quicksand, etc. as it was I felt “Crocodile” actually replacing “River Delta” in the overall context and after that River Delta became easily replaced. so I felt I had to give this one a no-pass.</p><p></p><p>and that brings us to the last, the <strong>Ioun Stone</strong>. I like thinking out of the box. when I originally printed the list, the magic item was a Ioun Stone of Steadfastness, but at the last minute I decided to make it a generic item, just to open up a little creativity. Rechan’s Stone of Ioun took that way, way too far. Ioun Stones are little gems that float around your head and give you some MINOR advantage. I was wondering what minor advantage the stones might give that would be story turning. in other words, without the Ioun Stones, the story would not have been the same (or it might not even have been possible). this was clearly the case when Atras used the Iouns to keep his troll barely alive and barely conscious. without the stones’ effects his bedridden troll might have died. I had a hard time understanding *why* his monstrous bard was using the magic to keep the troll alive until I remembered *he was a monstrous bard* and didn’t need a reason to torture a troll. so the Ioun Stone strengthened the Bedridden Troll, which emphasized the Monstrous nature of the Bard (nice connection string there!).</p><p></p><p>instead Rechan built an artifact around the idea of a Stone of Ioun to guide the players along. shaky, but not bad until I went and looked up Ioun:</p><p></p><p> Ioun is the god of knowledge, skill, and prophecy. Sages, seers, and tacticians revere her, as do all who live by their knowledge and mental power. Corellon is the patron of arcane magic, but Ioun is the patron of its study. Libraries and wizard academies are built in her name. Her commands are also teachings: Seek the perfection of your mind by bringing reason, perception, and emotion into balance with one another. Accumulate, preserve, and distribute knowledge in all forms. Pursue education, build libraries, and seek out lost and ancient lore. Be watchful at all times for the followers of Vecna, who seek to control knowledge and keep secrets. Oppose their schemes, unmask their secrets, and blind them with the light of truth and reason. </p><p></p><p>I found that online and it’s a direct quote out of the 4E PHB. I don’t have a problem with you guys writing 4E adventures and calling them that, I just don’t care to play them is all. Rechan proposed his adventure as non-edition specific, but when was Ioun deified? for certain in 4e, was there an earlier edition? I always figured he was another inventor/ mage like Tenser or Bigby. suffice it to say, trying to avoid the appearance of being a 4E adventure, and then finding a 4E deity implied did not add to Rechan’s entry. nor did it detract. it just annoyed.</p><p></p><p>If Rechan’s Stone of Ioun, a huge artifact of the deity had related somehow to “knowledge, skill, and prophecy” it might have worked. if Rechan had played directly of other parts of the in-book description it might have worked. but instead it was given divination and worse, because the abbot was able to read or communicate with it somehow (did it speak to him?) it became a deux ex machina device within the story, telling the players exactly what they needed to know and do to win the game (which then took me back to my theory that 4E leads to facile gaming – just my opinion and observation, but not something I care to argue here). I won’t quote Wikipedia on the idea of deux ex machina in literature, but it’s not complimentary. if the Abbot had come forth with a prophecy, or maybe directed the players to a library to research how to quell a restless ghost or something like that, it would have made it the Stone of Ioun. but now, it could just as easily been the Stone of Thor, the Stone of Bast, or the Stone of Yog-Sothoth and the players would not have known the difference (ok, maybe not that last one).</p><p></p><p>so Rechan had one strong ingredient, two sort of weak ones, and three that just didn’t impress at all. some other considerations. what did the River Delta have to do with the Brutal Slayings, or with the Monstrous Bard, or with the Stone of Ioun? other than sitting on it, how did the Bedridden Troll connect to the Stone? What was the link between the Stone and the Slayings? like I said earlier THIRTY possible connections criss-crossing over the space of an adventure (which is hard, but not impossible. thinking about it I came up with an idea for an adventure that cross connects every which way, using precisely these ingredients. if there’s curiosity, I’m tempted to write it up as an example.</p><p></p><p>regarding Atras’ ingredients, your <strong>Monstrous</strong> villain was definitely a bad, bad person, but beyond the domination song and his combat powers, he didn’t strike me as terribly <strong>Bard</strong>-like. the <strong>Brutal Slayings</strong>, might not have been all that brutal - clearly a high level NPC going up against a town of minions will have an easy time of it. but in the eyes of those minions, it would have been pretty horrific “one hit and he killed Charlie”, so I inferred that it would work, especially when the NPCs relayed the story back to the adventurers. I liked your usage of the <strong>Severed Foot</strong> as another monster type and even more, that at the end of the adventure after the party has been fighting monstrous feet all along, that the traps of the Bard would then remove THEIR feet, making everything quite personal, was an original idea. your <strong>River Delta</strong> as a river delta was a bit weak, but you put a Skill Challenge there. I started to see it as an analogy or metaphor, that as the river branched but eventually ended up in the ocean, so too might the adventure have branched to various encounters but still arrived eventually at the half-orc, based on how well they did their skill checks. I would have liked to have seen (or at least seen suggested) a few more alternate branching results beyond a simple pass/fail. so this ranked as not completely weak, but not as strong as it could have been. </p><p></p><p>why did you put the <strong>Troll</strong> there? if it was <em>Just Because</em>, then it was a weaker ingredient than I read it to be. but your usage of the <strong>Ioun Stones</strong> was perfect and justified my making that ingredient less confining: just enough to keep the troll alive and aware. just enough to give the Bard a slight edge, to grant him a minor combat ability, and let him be just a bit more survivable in the final fight. </p><p></p><p>your ingredients had a few better connections, but also no where near to thirty. how did the Stones relate to the Slayings, the Feet, or the Delta? how did the Delta relate to the Bedridden Troll or the Slayings? etc.</p><p></p><p><strong>Note: </strong></p><p>after you finish writing, if you have time, you should always go back and ask how did this relate to that? what’s the connection between these two? how do these two ingredients cling together? if I swapped another “x” in place of this ingredient, would it change the story or not? <u>and you should be doing it for the ingredients that don’t obviously flow together.</u> for example: a River Delta eventually flows into the sea. maybe sea pirates or a trading port that would have made it NECESSARY that the story took place on a River Delta. maybe upriver is roaring rapids which means the only place the story could take place HAD TO BE where the water slows down. maybe the Troll was a SCRAG and had to be near the ocean, therefore the setting had to be the river’s mouth. or something else. doing this kind of an analysis and then tweaking your submission will usually end up giving you a much tighter entry on the following rounds.</p><p></p><p></p><p>at this rate, based on my main criteria, Atras had it pretty solidly as a win (was that vague enough to keep you wondering?). but I also had some comments on and issues with the overall stories and the fact that Atras used 4E, whereas Rechan tried for a more generic feel (based on earlier comments I’ve made).</p><p></p><p></p><p>Rechan, I LIKE halflings a lot and it would be fun playing in your halfling community. there was a lot of personality in the names of the various NPCs and the crocodile bad guy at the end which I liked. but the rest of your story kind of fell flat. Gabby Talltale is a villain whose death was not unjustified, yet she comes back from the dead and now she’s putting her community at risk and is tormenting the trolls who as a judge, I do not see as being ‘evil’ creatures. yet the whole mission resolves around putting her foot into hallowed ground so that she can be “at peace”. what she deserves is not peace, but an exorcism to send her restless spirit to its just reward - sending her to the fiery realms below would have been a happier ending.</p><p></p><p>Atras, the map was a nice visual and helped visualize how the traps would work, but it was not really needed unless you just felt like adding it. some of your ingredients needed a bit more work, but I found your bard to be more Monstrous, and stopping him (instead of putting him to rest) to be a better story overall. plus you used the rest of your ingredients better. I was just kidding about the 4E thing. it’s really not that big a concern with me compared to the other parts of the competition.</p><p></p><p>so the 4E adventure, <em>The Brutal Bard of Trasa</em> wins! Atras advances to the next round.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="phoamslinger, post: 4967429, member: 2342"] and the winner is… different judges look at different things. my focus is almost always on the ingredients more than anything else. playability or usefulness is usually a wash and overall story or the feel of the scenario is extremely subjective, so I only count down on it if the story seems trite or contrived. hooks and formatting are always nice, but I’m not as picky about such things as some other judges have been. I figure that the DM will either steer his players into a setting or not. and someone who wants to win an Iron DM is going to put the best, most presentable face on his or her entry as they can. so you generally never get extra points out of these types of things with me and I tend to gloss over them. it really does come down to the ingredients and more importantly, how those ingredients connect to the other ingredients. if you made a chart with ingredients 1-5 up the y axis and ingredients 6-2 along the x axis, there are 15 possible connections between 6 ingredients. which really means that there are thirty connections. maybe the river delta doesn’t have a connection to severed feet, but the severed foot stops flowing downstream when it gets to a river delta (a one way connection, so one of two possible). or maybe the bedridden troll ate the bard, making her monstrous and then the monstrous bard is what put the troll into the bed (going both directions, two out of two – much stronger!) when I put the ingredients out there, several of them immediately jumped together pretty naturally: severed feet, brutal slayings, a monstrous bard, a troll (bedridden or not). so it was really the last two ingredients that I figured were going to be the make/break points. what would you do with the river delta, the ioun stone, and the bedridden nature of the troll. how would these be worked in and how strongly would each ingredient be connected to the other five? individually (and taken out of order, because…) the [B]Monstrous Bard[/B]: Rechan had a halfling bard who, even before she became an undead, sought out and tormented the trolls who were providing a useful service for the community. so even though she later became a monster, she was not a good person to begin with. Atras has a half-orc who will eventually destroy a village, abuses and kills its inhabitants, turns their feet into bizarre undead monsters, and has a troll kept prisoner and tortured in his lair, just because. both bards are very bad people, but which one had to be a bard? Atras, your bard sang the people into dominion, but it could just as easily been a wizard, priest, warlock, sorcerer, or other class casting similar spells for similar effects. . bards aren’t just singers, although that’s how they are most typically played. Rechan’s bard used “scorching wit” and comedy to attack the troll brothers, which struck me as a very bard-like way to go about things. plus the “riddle contest” at the end was an excellent encounter, although I usually consider skill challenges to be “roll-playing”, which is not a compliment to the system. I would rather be stumping the players themselves and making them THINK. but Rechan’s bard [b][i]as a bard[/i][/b] was a much stronger entry. the [B]Bedridden Troll[/B]: I thought it was interesting that you both used acid as the reason the troll couldn’t get out of bed, either from an upset tummy or by being tied down and actively prevented from recovery. but troll regeneration is tough stuff, and Rechan’s troll’s case of stomach acid seemed a bit weak. and are we suggesting that a cleric who has risen to the rank of abbot doesn’t have the cure spells to fix a bad case of heartburn? per the story, Gruck ran away while Gabby was finishing off his brother, so she hasn’t used her “wit” on him yet. so he might have been a frightened troll, but not really enough to be confined to a bed. point to Atras. I don’t want to repeat my last harsh criticism of a player’s entry, but unfortunately, those were the two strongest ingredients in Rechan’s entry. all of his other ingredients were either replaceable or not that impressive an interpretation. the [B]Severed Foot[/B] of the bard, why not replaceable with a hand or her head? and why was the foot missed from the troll buffet in the first place? NEVER toss an ingredient into the mix as a mcguffin, a generic THIING that drives the plot around it. you’re in effect making one of the ingredients generic and that will only hurt your entry. with the [B]Brutal Slayings[/B], I asked my young son how to kill trolls and he said “burn ‘em”. I asked with what and he told me “fire or acid”. so any adventurer who’s ever killed a troll has probably seen a trollish acid or burn victim. the evidence of Rechan’s brutal slayings could be considered commonplace, not extreme. the [B]River Delta[/B] sort of works as a place where the foot might have slowly come to rest, but might not a pool or waterfall or just ‘down river’ worked as well? the delta as a tie-in for crocodiles which then tied the troll brothers “trolling” helped some, but now the crocodiles are starting to take over a strong place as a seventh ingredient (which they were not), especially with the fight with Toothy Jack. I would not have put crocodiles as an ingredient into a competition like this because it would have been too easy a tie in to the River Delta, but they play a big part in Rechan’s entry. logically, River Delta becomes swamp or marshland before entering the sea, so crocodiles were not a problem in and of themselves, but I would have put other swampy creatures in there to offset, will-o-wisps, giant leeches, quicksand, etc. as it was I felt “Crocodile” actually replacing “River Delta” in the overall context and after that River Delta became easily replaced. so I felt I had to give this one a no-pass. and that brings us to the last, the [B]Ioun Stone[/B]. I like thinking out of the box. when I originally printed the list, the magic item was a Ioun Stone of Steadfastness, but at the last minute I decided to make it a generic item, just to open up a little creativity. Rechan’s Stone of Ioun took that way, way too far. Ioun Stones are little gems that float around your head and give you some MINOR advantage. I was wondering what minor advantage the stones might give that would be story turning. in other words, without the Ioun Stones, the story would not have been the same (or it might not even have been possible). this was clearly the case when Atras used the Iouns to keep his troll barely alive and barely conscious. without the stones’ effects his bedridden troll might have died. I had a hard time understanding *why* his monstrous bard was using the magic to keep the troll alive until I remembered *he was a monstrous bard* and didn’t need a reason to torture a troll. so the Ioun Stone strengthened the Bedridden Troll, which emphasized the Monstrous nature of the Bard (nice connection string there!). instead Rechan built an artifact around the idea of a Stone of Ioun to guide the players along. shaky, but not bad until I went and looked up Ioun: Ioun is the god of knowledge, skill, and prophecy. Sages, seers, and tacticians revere her, as do all who live by their knowledge and mental power. Corellon is the patron of arcane magic, but Ioun is the patron of its study. Libraries and wizard academies are built in her name. Her commands are also teachings: Seek the perfection of your mind by bringing reason, perception, and emotion into balance with one another. Accumulate, preserve, and distribute knowledge in all forms. Pursue education, build libraries, and seek out lost and ancient lore. Be watchful at all times for the followers of Vecna, who seek to control knowledge and keep secrets. Oppose their schemes, unmask their secrets, and blind them with the light of truth and reason. I found that online and it’s a direct quote out of the 4E PHB. I don’t have a problem with you guys writing 4E adventures and calling them that, I just don’t care to play them is all. Rechan proposed his adventure as non-edition specific, but when was Ioun deified? for certain in 4e, was there an earlier edition? I always figured he was another inventor/ mage like Tenser or Bigby. suffice it to say, trying to avoid the appearance of being a 4E adventure, and then finding a 4E deity implied did not add to Rechan’s entry. nor did it detract. it just annoyed. If Rechan’s Stone of Ioun, a huge artifact of the deity had related somehow to “knowledge, skill, and prophecy” it might have worked. if Rechan had played directly of other parts of the in-book description it might have worked. but instead it was given divination and worse, because the abbot was able to read or communicate with it somehow (did it speak to him?) it became a deux ex machina device within the story, telling the players exactly what they needed to know and do to win the game (which then took me back to my theory that 4E leads to facile gaming – just my opinion and observation, but not something I care to argue here). I won’t quote Wikipedia on the idea of deux ex machina in literature, but it’s not complimentary. if the Abbot had come forth with a prophecy, or maybe directed the players to a library to research how to quell a restless ghost or something like that, it would have made it the Stone of Ioun. but now, it could just as easily been the Stone of Thor, the Stone of Bast, or the Stone of Yog-Sothoth and the players would not have known the difference (ok, maybe not that last one). so Rechan had one strong ingredient, two sort of weak ones, and three that just didn’t impress at all. some other considerations. what did the River Delta have to do with the Brutal Slayings, or with the Monstrous Bard, or with the Stone of Ioun? other than sitting on it, how did the Bedridden Troll connect to the Stone? What was the link between the Stone and the Slayings? like I said earlier THIRTY possible connections criss-crossing over the space of an adventure (which is hard, but not impossible. thinking about it I came up with an idea for an adventure that cross connects every which way, using precisely these ingredients. if there’s curiosity, I’m tempted to write it up as an example. regarding Atras’ ingredients, your [B]Monstrous[/B] villain was definitely a bad, bad person, but beyond the domination song and his combat powers, he didn’t strike me as terribly [B]Bard[/B]-like. the [B]Brutal Slayings[/B], might not have been all that brutal - clearly a high level NPC going up against a town of minions will have an easy time of it. but in the eyes of those minions, it would have been pretty horrific “one hit and he killed Charlie”, so I inferred that it would work, especially when the NPCs relayed the story back to the adventurers. I liked your usage of the [B]Severed Foot[/B] as another monster type and even more, that at the end of the adventure after the party has been fighting monstrous feet all along, that the traps of the Bard would then remove THEIR feet, making everything quite personal, was an original idea. your [B]River Delta[/B] as a river delta was a bit weak, but you put a Skill Challenge there. I started to see it as an analogy or metaphor, that as the river branched but eventually ended up in the ocean, so too might the adventure have branched to various encounters but still arrived eventually at the half-orc, based on how well they did their skill checks. I would have liked to have seen (or at least seen suggested) a few more alternate branching results beyond a simple pass/fail. so this ranked as not completely weak, but not as strong as it could have been. why did you put the [B]Troll[/B] there? if it was [I]Just Because[/I], then it was a weaker ingredient than I read it to be. but your usage of the [B]Ioun Stones[/B] was perfect and justified my making that ingredient less confining: just enough to keep the troll alive and aware. just enough to give the Bard a slight edge, to grant him a minor combat ability, and let him be just a bit more survivable in the final fight. your ingredients had a few better connections, but also no where near to thirty. how did the Stones relate to the Slayings, the Feet, or the Delta? how did the Delta relate to the Bedridden Troll or the Slayings? etc. [B]Note: [/B] after you finish writing, if you have time, you should always go back and ask how did this relate to that? what’s the connection between these two? how do these two ingredients cling together? if I swapped another “x” in place of this ingredient, would it change the story or not? [u]and you should be doing it for the ingredients that don’t obviously flow together.[/u] for example: a River Delta eventually flows into the sea. maybe sea pirates or a trading port that would have made it NECESSARY that the story took place on a River Delta. maybe upriver is roaring rapids which means the only place the story could take place HAD TO BE where the water slows down. maybe the Troll was a SCRAG and had to be near the ocean, therefore the setting had to be the river’s mouth. or something else. doing this kind of an analysis and then tweaking your submission will usually end up giving you a much tighter entry on the following rounds. at this rate, based on my main criteria, Atras had it pretty solidly as a win (was that vague enough to keep you wondering?). but I also had some comments on and issues with the overall stories and the fact that Atras used 4E, whereas Rechan tried for a more generic feel (based on earlier comments I’ve made). Rechan, I LIKE halflings a lot and it would be fun playing in your halfling community. there was a lot of personality in the names of the various NPCs and the crocodile bad guy at the end which I liked. but the rest of your story kind of fell flat. Gabby Talltale is a villain whose death was not unjustified, yet she comes back from the dead and now she’s putting her community at risk and is tormenting the trolls who as a judge, I do not see as being ‘evil’ creatures. yet the whole mission resolves around putting her foot into hallowed ground so that she can be “at peace”. what she deserves is not peace, but an exorcism to send her restless spirit to its just reward - sending her to the fiery realms below would have been a happier ending. Atras, the map was a nice visual and helped visualize how the traps would work, but it was not really needed unless you just felt like adding it. some of your ingredients needed a bit more work, but I found your bard to be more Monstrous, and stopping him (instead of putting him to rest) to be a better story overall. plus you used the rest of your ingredients better. I was just kidding about the 4E thing. it’s really not that big a concern with me compared to the other parts of the competition. so the 4E adventure, [i]The Brutal Bard of Trasa[/i] wins! Atras advances to the next round. [/QUOTE]
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