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Message: <blockquote data-quote="phoamslinger" data-source="post: 6505533" data-attributes="member: 2342">sorry this took so long.  I've had a lot of stuff going on in RL, and I wanted to make sure that I had the time to do justice to, what I expected to be, a couple of off the wall, but solid, entries.I realize that the standard fare for judging is to break things down, item by item and look at pros and cons of each along the way.  we have MortalPlague with his Strawman, (SM) and Iron Sky with Agents of the Aberrancy, (AA).the ingredients were;Knight in Shrinking ArmorDesperate BluffCentaur PoliticsUnderground RailroadJuvenile DiscipleAbomination from the Farm Realm[sblock]keep in mind that all judgements are subjective any way you want to slice it.  both entries used a seriously tough set of ingredients, and used all six of them in a cohesive fashion.  Shrinking Armor, yes.  Knights, yes.  Centaurs, yes.  Politics, yes. Desperate Bluff, yes (and I wondered if anyone would pull a "cliffs of insanity" play on words, so I liked O' Nine Tails).  and all the rest of them.  MortalPlague's abomination seemed weak at first, until I began to consider how it was represented as the the bogeyman of the adventure.  so good enough within its scope.  good solid IRON DM fare from both contestants.but there was something in one of the entries that really stood out that needed to be addressed...[sblock]Iron Sky, Rune was concerned when I gave you guys extra time, but back in the day when I was competing, I would spend 3-4 hours typing, maybe an hour editing and enough time for one or two last read throughs before hitting -Reply-.  so, I figured that giving some extra time would make for a tighter, better edited adventure.  not 13 pages.Agents of the Aberrancy is AMAZING STUFF.  I will be saving it to my harddrive and will pull it out someday as a massively cool mini-campaign or as a full blown campaign all on it's own.  I suspect that a lot of folks following this contest or reading through it someday in the future will be doing the same. but if you go back to the first posting of this thread, where are laid out The Rules, the second sentence reads "Each match will consist of two contestants given a single set of six ingredients with which to construct a brief adventure in any game system or genre."  ...if I give the win to Iron Sky, there would be a sense from any future contests I judged in that more is better (and more and more).  it took me a solid hour to read through Agents, because I didn't want to accidentally miss or gloss over a detail that might be crucial to some later plot development.  if I had to take two hours to read two entries, well, best to put the brakes to that right now.  while I could deal with it and might even like it to the extent of getting more detailed entries from participants, it would probably generate some unhappiness from any other judges who caught the overflow.  so best to just not go there...in addition, the whole point of an Iron DM is to come up with a concise adventure.  I've lost competitions before where I threw the kitchen sink at the judge and the ruling went against me.  given enough time, enough text, enough campaign length, bringing six random, contrary, ingredients together becomes easier and easier.  but doing it in the space of a single adventure or a single encounter, well that's a pretty good trick.  a trick that MortalPlague was able to carry through with.  Strawman is a little rough around the edges, but it used all six ingredients well.  all else being equal, a strong negative vs a strong positive means that[/sblock] [MENTION=62721]MortalPlague[/MENTION] takes this round.  congrats.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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