IRON DM General Discussion

[Gradine]

Taking @el-remmen's suggestion into account, I've moved our more general discussion to a new thread.

My own purpose: building an interesting and exciting IRON DM spinoff for the summer. On the table right now are two main ideas. Perhaps I'll start a poll thread at some point to gauge general interest, but for now it seems like we can one of two directions:
*Game Design - Likely limited to D&D5e. Requires game mastery, balance. Potential to tie-in with ENWorld's Level Up? Creativity tested, but design skill is at the forefront.
*World Building - Ecology and storytelling over mechanics. System and genre neutral. Creativity spotlighted. Seems the more popular idea so far.

I'm of two minds myself; as IRON DM is typically not about game mechanics much at all, a world building competition would remain in line with that spirit, while a game design competition would set it apart from its older cousin.

Beyond that, we need to determine a structure (weekly challenges with a single elimination is the most common I've seen suggested so far), and, perhaps most importantly, a pithy name for our new spinoff

 

[el-remmen]

In terms of the spin-off format that was discussed in the other thread:

I think weekly is too much to ask of all the contestants and I think any multi-week seasonal structure should be built with everyone getting one "bye" they can use to skip any challenge after the first and before the semi-finals because life is life and stuff happens and would save the issue of rescheduling for up to 12 other people.

My other suggestion is to do some kind of week on / week off and give each challenge a week to give people time to work and judges time to judge.

Week One: First Challenge is announced
Week Two: Weak One challenge due.
Week Three: Week One winners announced, Second challenge announced

But the problem with that is, you'd have to drop two people each time to keep the whole thing from lasting a year!

 

[el-remmen]

oh and unrelated meta-idea based on archiving/reading through old IRON DM tournaments: A contest where the judgements are judged.

(Yes, there was a lot of grousing back in the day - more than any I've seen recently - and very often by a character or two in particular)

 

[Rune]

I have a third idea that could be good synergy with the IRON DM Tournament.

Judges present contestants (not necessarily just two) with one adventure pulled from the IRON DM archives, along with some parameters and expectations.

Contestants present notes for running said adventure within the given parameters and introducing the expectations. Part of this would be filling in the gaps, part smoothing over rough spots, part converting to whatever system (ideally, without emphasis on the mechanics – more like consideration for how spells work, or whatever).

Contestants would be graded across categories and final standings would be based on point-totals.

 

[el-remmen]

@Rune We can call it "STRIPE MINE DM"

 

[Wicht]

A Title/Concept I have been playing around with in my head: Iron DM Tactics

I also liked the idea of building different things along the course of the contest: a cursed item, an interesting locale, an interesting NPC, a recurring villain, a magic item, a monster, and then finally an actual adventure. Ingredients would be provided each round and maybe each round allow the contestants some sort of ability to add or take-away from the ingredients: maybe have a preset pool of ingredients and each round they have to use 1 assigned ingredient and a couple of their choice, but they can't reuse ingredients.

 

[el-remmen]

Wow. I just have to say that when Round two's first match's entries and judgement comes in before both contestants have submitted for Round One's last match it is really confusing to make sure it is all copied in the proper order!

 

[el-remmen]

A Title/Concept I have been playing around with in my head: Iron DM Tactics

I also liked the idea of building different things along the course of the contest: a cursed item, an interesting locale, an interesting NPC, a recurring villain, a magic item, a monster, and then finally an actual adventure. Ingredients would be provided each round and maybe each round allow the contestants some sort of ability to add or take-away from the ingredients: maybe have a preset pool of ingredients and each round they have to use 1 assigned ingredient and a couple of their choice, but they can't reuse ingredients.

I really like this idea. I think giving ingredients in each round to build a thing that will then become an ingredient in the final round would be a lot of fun. But forcing contestants to swap items once created would add a wrinkle. I must build the best thing possible to win this round but in the final round my opponent will have it to build an adventure to beat me!

 

[Rune]

Wow. I just have to say that when Round two's first match's entries and judgement comes in before both contestants have submitted for Round One's last match it is really confusing to make sure it is all copied in the proper order!

Yup. Those old threads are hard to sift through, sometimes.

 

[el-remmen]

So I figured I'd lay out what I am in the middle of doing for the IRON DM project and hope that some clarity can convince a handful of people to join the effort.

Currently there are 21 available tournaments/seasons of IRON DM to archive.

I am going through each thread (starting with the oldest) and simply copying and pasting the ingredients, entries and judgements into a google doc. I do a different google doc for each round and different sub-folder for each season.

When I paste them I paste w/o formatting and then I go back in and do stuff like put bullet or numbered lists, formatting the title and adding the author. Basically, make it legible enough to work with later more easily.

So for example the top of each round looks like this in my archiving:

Round One - Match Four: Rune vs. Griswold

Ingredients
Fine sand
Shadow Dragon/Dagon (latter is a typo corrected halfway through the match!)
A dead God
Unusual coins
Githzerai Monk
Maintaining balance

“The Fishy God” ([if the contestant included levels or setting anywhere in the body I indicate it here])
By Rune (posted 29 October 2002)

[followed by Rune's entry]

“Shadows of Insanity” (an adventure for higher level D&D characters - around 15th)
By Griswold (posted 29 October 2002)

[followed by Griswold's Entry]

Round One - Match Four: Judgement (by incognito) {posted 26 October 2002}

[followed by judgement]

My guess is once we are done doing this to all of them we can figure out the best way to post them (I don't mind taking point on that), but if someone else is willing to start the copy/paste/clean it'd be great. Right now I am trying to do one a day / four a week. If some one else joins the project they can start from the most recent and work backwards and if we get more than one person I will break them up and assign them

And heck, if you want to do just one, that is one less that will need to be done.. . .

Let me know and I'll add you to access to the Google drive and DM you about where to start.

(My hope is that eventually we can go back through and pick some of the best post-entry commentary to also archive, but that is less important right now and so onerous as to endanger getting the main project done - so one thing at a time).