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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deuce Traveler" data-source="post: 6918430" data-attributes="member: 34958">I'm just going to post some brief comments anyway and lwaxy will just have to skip this part below until he gets a chance to post his judgement:--------------------------------------------------------------Ingredients, ingredients, ingredients.  Imagination, fun, and cohesiveness are all vital to a good submission, but ingredients are where all judges are going to focus.  I always go into drafting a submission by picking one or two ingredients to focus upon and trying to find ways to incorporate the rest in a cohesive way.  If I have an ingredient that doesn't seem to fit, I will try to rethink of how the ingredient can be interpreted.  If that doesn't work, I might rewrite the entire initial outline.  When the outline is done, I start thinking of how integral each ingredient is to the submission, and whether removing an ingredient would cause the submission to have fall completely apart or be greatly diminished.  Basically, is each ingredient vital.  It's only when the outline is completed in this way that I start writing.  I do have a tendency to write longer passages then I need, and have limited combat encounters in my submissions.  Rune, who I am going up against next, likes to use bullet statements with crisp and simple phrases at times to save room.  As long as this is not misused, I find this a pretty good practice as he uses up less words in some areas, so he can put more adventure in others.So some quick thoughts about my previous entry.  A couple of the judges noted that they were not fans of the Underdark and the drow, and that my entry was not as imaginative as my opponent, and I completely agree.  I grew up with BECMI and Mystara, and am unfamiliar with how the drow work past what I have heard from Drizz't fans and what I learned playing Baldur's Gate on the PC.  Hence some of my errors.  However, I was focused more on trying to make a cohesive and interdependent list of ingredients in Get Ye to the Underdark, and the Lazy Eye appeared to be an ingredient that would be tough to make integral in an entry... unless it was a main character.  Hence making him into a beholder that hated expending effort in moving around or casting multiple teleport spells when one would do.  That done, I remembered male drow had few rights, so I made the next character the Heir of Nothing and the fourth male in a minor noble family.  Now, if I had known that males in drow society have no rights, I would have actually made him female, which would have made the ingredient better, and made for two female lovers.  The silk wallpaper screamed spiderweb covered walls to me, so I threw in some driders setting up a wall trap and now was firmly set in making the Underdark an important element.  The star-crossed book became something vital to two lovers since star-crossed seemed like a Romeo and Juliet reference to me, hence the second drow character.The gutted machine was always going to be a teleport device, but at first I had it being something that keyed itself to the users and teleported them to a set location.  When the drow gutted it, it keyed to them and kept teleporting the drow's forces and the beholder's forces somewhere random.  They would briefly skirmish, then separate for a time before being randomly teleported again.  This would have made for a more imaginative and epic entry as the heroes would have to find a means to anticipate the next jump in order to stop the chaos these two were causing along the surface, but I wasn't able to incorporate things like the silk wallpaper easily if I went that route, so unfortunately I had to go with a straighter piece for the benefit of ingredient cohesion.  Again, ingredients also need to trump any good idea faeries that come up.  Except in the final round or rounds, where you better show up with your A game in everything.  Hence why you are given more time to write.Glue is sticky, so the useless glue was connected to the drider webbing.  It was useless because something strong kept getting loose.  That something strong ended up being the beholder's vehicle, a headless hunter becoming a headless iron golem.  I stole the iron golem idea wholesale from an official 2nd edition kill-all-players adventure module where the beholders traveled in such suits and attacked the party both physically and with their rays in the same rounds.  Nasty stuff.  That adventure module was designed to kill off entire parties in imaginative ways.My main point is this.  You might have the greatest idea for an adventure ever, but if you can't make the ingredients work with it, you are going to lose.  I had tons of great adventure ideas in my head prior to ingredients being posted, and every time I tried to shoe horn the ingredients to go with my great adventure idea I lost.  Every time.  So keep those ideas by writing them down somewhere so you don't lose them, but make the ingredients the priority.</blockquote>

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