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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 9771068" data-attributes="member: 57112">Judgment for Round 1 Match 4: [USER=11760]@Whizbang Dustyboots[/USER] vs [USER=7054007]@AustinHolm[/USER] Rules and ReadabilityBoth Root of all Evil (hereafter referred to as "Root!") and Crashed in the Coin Tree (hereafter "Crashed") were turned in on time and under the 750 word count limit. Both entries remains unedited, and all other tournament rules appear to have been well followed. Full barks for both.Which brings us to readability. Both entries were well organized, but I will say I did find myself having the thought, after my initial read of the two entries, "If I see another explanation point again it will be too soon". Crashed would be considered a little too enthusiastic on its own, but it seems downright tame compared to Root!, which if it contains a single period, I cannot find it. The short, clipped writing style is what we've come to expect from these early round, 750-word entries; my eyes genuinely feel tired, though, after this read. I'm not sure if that's actually a fault of either entry or a me thing, but as a subjective thing it does detract, at least a little bit for me, from the readability especially of Root. This will likely have minimal, if any, impact on my judgment, however.Adventure Flow & PotentialThis is my subjective "what did I generally like/dislike about the adventures" section of the judgment.Root! is an exciting and complex race with so many moving pieces and potential complications and obstacles that it begs to be run. Every character or creature or faction involved is fun and intriguing. If anything I would dial back on the presence of traitors in both religious factions; I worry that it might create too many moving pieces and dilute from the role that each group is meant to play. Finally, as much as I complained about how physically sore reading this entry made me, I'm also an absolute sucker for a strong stylistic writing choice. So it balances out, mostly. This particular choice simply wasn't a hit for me.Crashed here presents its own intriguing and chaotic race, though I can't help but feel like it contains less of a sense of urgency, particularly since any direct competition for the final prize only truly serves as a direct issue to one of the three possible hooks. i recognize this is a personal bugaboo of mine; I would have preferred a single stronger hook, one that puts the players directly on the hunt for the False Negative. Other judges might more appreciate the option of hooks, however. In addition, while my personal knowledge of Troika! is a bit limited, I really do like how the setting here blends the strange and the mundane; with its down-to-earth political machinations and absurdity of the rest of the city and the dilemma. I care about the world of this adventure more than I do its counterpart in Root!This one is extremely close to me; with a stronger hook Crashed would probably be a better adventure to me; but as it is I lean slightly more in the direction of Root!This will likely be decided by the ingredients.The IngredientsThese are both extremely good Iron DM entries, so keep that in mind as I discuss some of the positives and negatives I see in these adventures.Coin TreeOne thing that is going to make judging these two entries extremely difficult is how similar they are in a lot of ways. It's going to be difficult talking about this ingredient, Existential Threat, and Upper Decks separately, because both entries are using these ingredients in a nearly identical weave, with the tree and the boat and consequences therein serving as the existential threat. I am inclined to lead towards Root! here, as the coin tree itself is what's at issue, whereas in Crashed the tree(s) are the result of a cursed idol that seems to otherwise have little bearing on the rest of the adventure. The tree in Roots! is thus more central, as a goal and not just an as an obstacle.Existential ThreatThere are a few things that begin to stand out as red flags as a season Iron DM judge, and few stand out as much as naming something in the adventure after the name of an ingredient, which meant that the ship named "Existential Threat" in Crashed stood out as a red flag. Root! again centers its existential threat as front and center and driving the adventure, asking the tough, existential questions like "What would a society money is free and thus meaningless actually look like?" and "Why are economists always just the worst?" (I feel like those questions should be interrobangs, honestly <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> ). And if Crashed had left its "Existential Threat" as just the name of its ship, Root! would have run away with this ingredient.However, Crashed doesn't stop there, layering multiple existential threats (What happens if the cursed idol grows things more out of control than it already has? What happens if the Autaurch can actually be brought low? How do the players react to facing off against themselves? And what does accidentally creating a second Troika mean?) upon each other in a way that makes the adventure more terrifying the more than you dig into it. This is a really great ingredient usage for Root!, but it's used even better here in Crashed.Upper DecksThe Upper Decks of both ships serve as the primary location of both adventures. It's a good solid usage and I really do not see too much to separate one from the other. If anything, there's more going on in the Upper Decks of Roots! which is enough to give Root! here a slight advantage.Week of the MonsterThis one was a tough one. I feel like on the surface for both entries this is a fair use, but it also fails on several levels in both adventures. In Root! we have the weekly match for the ship's first mate, with the "monstrous" Brahm cheating and therefore winning every week. This means that we're no longer talking about a single week (Brahm seems to have been in control for quite some time), and other than calling out his personality as "monstrous" we don't really get any kind of sense of what makes him a Monster at all rather than just a bad dude and a Mr. Hyde reference. It makes for a neat bit of backstory but with the time pressure and all of the other obstacles and competition I'm not sure how relevant this whole Jekyll/Hyde thing is going to be for the players, ultimately. Meanwhile, Crashed gives us a festival named "Week of the Monster" and makes such festival a source of some fun and interesting complications while we make our to the actual point of the adventure, but we never really get a sense of why this ingredient is necessary in this adventure. Sure, the added obstacles help add time pressure to the players, which isn't bad at all, but I feel like I could remove this festival and replace it with any number of similar sets of encounters without really changing the nature of the event.I think this one is a tie.False NegativeOnce again, Crashed came in with an important piece of the adventure named after an ingredient. The reason we call this out as a red flag is because, often, the name is utterly meaningless and only there to satisfy the ingredient usage. And by about 90% of the way through the adventure, that's what I was thinking it was, beyond the clever bit of wordplay with a photography negative. But then, Crashed turns this around by the end, giving us a photograph that creates false copies (false in the sense that they are photographic copies but also in the sense that they cannot speak the truth). What creates the copies? The rupture and exposure to light. It is a False Negative in so many different ways, I would almost have hoped that the entry doesn't outright name it as such. It's not needed.On the other hand we have the opposite end, a use so subtle that I missed it entirely in my first two readings. What I think is the intended use of the ingredient in Root! is the Oracle Flowers, or at least their cheap knock-off versions showing false visions of the future based on the viewers' wishes... but this seems to be more of a case of a False Positive instead of a False Negative. Presumably nobody wants to see negative things happen to them in the future. Tying two ingredients together is usually a really good thing to do (as both adventures have done with their first three ingredients), but I can't help but think even I'm missing something very obvious or that this is an incorrect usage of the ingredient.Crashed takes this one.Mysterious FlowersWe have the Oracle Flowers of Root! and the Metallic Flowers of Crashed. In both adventures they are tied to the nature of the tree, though in the former they are present in the garden alongside the tree and in the latter they are a consequence of the tree (though no less arbitrary, ultimately). They both present as obstacles and as a temptation. I think, that by both tying the Metal Flowers to the Coin Tree and providing an actual trade-off making the temptation potentially worthwhile instead of just a trap, creating an interesting decision point for the players, that Crashed handles this one a little bit better.In ConclusionThis has been one of the most difficult matches to judge I've had in a long time. We have two genuinely very strong entries that have done some really cool things with some fairly difficult ingredients. We end with up with two adventures with a lot of similarities, especially superficially. This one has come down to the details. And while I think one entry is, on the whole, stronger and more cohesive in general in the details of the adventure overall, the other entry is stronger when we dig into the details of how the ingredients have been used. And, when in doubt, I have to err on the side of the ingredients.[SPOILER="The Judgment"]This is a really tough one, because the more that I try to compare the two adventures the more I come away more impressed with Root! than with Crashed. But this says more about Root! than it does about Crashed, which is genuinely also a very good, very exciting adventure. Were the ingredients closer, this would be enough to make a difference. However, as far as I can see Crashed in the Coin Tree has the edge on ingredients, and thus I declare it the winner of this match.[USER=11760]@Whizbang Dustyboots[/USER], you are not only the returning Iron DM champion but also a damn good adventuer writer and designer in your own right. Against a lesser entry this one easily had what it takes to reach the next round. My inability to grok what you were trying to do with False Negative might have even been enough to swing the tide the other way. But you were up against a genuinely impressive and strong entry that weaved its ingredients together in a way that I've rarely seen before. You will undoubtedly be back here and in the mix again, I am confident.As it is though, congratulations are in order to [USER=7054007]@AustinHolm[/USER], who has advanced to the second round![/SPOILER]Bring on Round 2!</blockquote>

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