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Message: <blockquote data-quote="phoamslinger" data-source="post: 6534186" data-attributes="member: 2342">in the final round, a matchup between Wicht's Easy Come (EC), vs MortalPlague's Beneath Ratter's Dell (BRD), here comes my thoughts on the matter......before I jump in with the judgement stuff... when there is an ingredient with two or more words to it, I parse both words and ask myself, did it have to be this word used in the ingredient?  for example, with the Athletic Airships, did the ingredient have to be an "airship" to make the story work and then did it have to be "athletic"?  Gradine's Airship competition worked well with the ingredient with a floating city made possible by the discovery of the airships, and then an old school competition of the ships being propelled by muscle and sweat to make them go.  that's one of the things that I look for when I'm judging a match.  several times during this Iron DM, the topic of McGuffins has come up, where one or both parts of an ingredient could be swapped out with almost anything else and it would not have had a major impact on the overall scenario.  the best ingredient usage is when, if the ingredient is not precisely as named, the entire adventure fails.  a long time back there was an ingredient of "brass buttons", which popped off his waistcoat when the NPC escaped through a narrow crevice.  if not for that detail, the true culprit would not have been identifiable.  that's the sort of solid usage I like to see and read about.Evil Wizard - in EC we had Archaxk, a wannabe lich whose lair becomes the locale of the adventure while in BRD we had Mendor, the revenge driven animator of the inanimate.  both wizards were evil (one a lich and the other a fratricide) and but did both need to be a wizard?  In BRD Mendor is using Animate Object, or some variation of same, which strikes me as a very wizardly way to build an army.  but in EC, Archaxk could have been an evil priest going the lich route or some other spellcasting class, and would it have impacted the story at all?  not so much.  so I thought MortalPlague did a better job with this one.btw, this particular list of ingredients was all mine, and the challenge was to see what people would come up with that wasn't (help wanted sign in the tavern, enter low level dungeon and recover magic sword from evil wizard with angry ogre guard.  reward is pile of treasure.) with the Low Level Dungeon - I wanted to see what people would do given a set of blatantly obvious ingredients.  EC had the lair and vault of the evil wizard beneath his tower, while BRD had a network of caves beneath a ruin.  in both cases, a lair close to the surface with relatively low level challenges, intended for a low level group of adventurers.  neither entry really broke the mold on this one, but both were still valid uses.  a classic usage of "dungeon" is prison.  low and level could have referred to a ceiling height and an absence of stairs?  a halfling prison in a single story building?  just some different ways to approach it.with the Angry Ogre, why was he ANGRY?  Mal the Mauler hasn't been paid.  Gorthog is being Dominated by a sword.  both are very angry.  but why are they Ogres (and not Trolls, Orcs, or something else?)  both adventures have a "negotiate or face a tough fight" situation with the ogre, appropriate for the adventurer level in a way that a troll would not have been, while an Orc just wouldn't have been as intimidating.  both valid uses again....another thing that I like to look for is out of the box thinking.  with the Pile of Treasure, both entries came up with something different that you wouldn't normally find in an average game.  in EC, this is the wizard's hoard that is so large it cannot be easily moved and, once it's found, it becomes the focus for the party trying to stay in control of a situation filled with complications.  in BRD, the pile of treasure becomes a major encounter of its own, with its own motivations and reactions to the actions of the party.  in EC, the Help Wanted Sign pulls complications into the tale as various monsters come looking for job auditions.  nice in a sort of reverse situation where the party becomes the hirer instead of the hired.  the device to get rid of the door guard on the tower wasn't as strong, since it's mostly a plan by an NPC to dupe the players who have no understanding of what or why it's happening.  (I was reminded of the paragraph in the 5th ed DMG about "false action" which this barely avoids.) but in BRD, the animated bricks being used as a help wanted sign / adventure hook mechanism, I thought was really out of the box. show me an adventuring party that's going to ignore a hopping brick as an adventure hook...  Magic Sword... interesting that both used an intelligent weapon to interact with the party as an NPC...as I've said before, the ingredients by themselves aren't the only criteria I try to look at.  in this case, the judgment came down to [sblock]the last thing that I try to look for, and in some ways, what I believe to be the most important aspect of an Iron DM:  How do the items interconnect with each other?in Easy Come, the wizard doesn't really interact with the party at all, except as an add on at the end when he wakes up.  it's Archaxk's dungeon, and his pile of treasure, but the ogre and the sword both felt like, "ok here's the adventure. and oh, there's an ogre there too.  and oh, there's a sword there too.  both Mal the Mauler and Varlion the Balancer felt like add ons without really having a relationship with any of the other ingredients.  the Help Wanted Sign, while used well to bring complications into the dungeon later on, the whole sub plot with the pit fiend seemed too much like a gimme, where the DM just hands the solution to the players without them needing to sweat a bit first.  a challenge where the pit fiend wants the deal, but can't directly explain what how or why to the players would have been a lot more interesting to read (and to play).so really, only the dungeon and the treasure tied together that well, with the wizard and the sign coming in peripherally at best.in Beneath Ratter's Dell, the ogre and the sword are in contention against each other.  the wizard and the pile of treasure, the ogre and the sword all have motivations and different reasons to oppose the PCs.  the wizard created the sword, the animated help wanted signs, the pile of treasure.  the ogre wants the treasure.  the wizard wants it all.  the dungeon, while not really all that big is the site of everything going on. while I was reading BRD, it seemed like there was a whole cat's cradle of connections.  because of that and because of doing a bit better on a couple of the individual ingredients by themselves, I'm going to call this one in MortalPlague's favor.congrats and good luck with the other two judges.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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