Iron dm summer champion announced!

[cool hand luke]

Your self-depricating comments are unnecessary and unwarranted.

sorry, those comments just came to me, thought they were funny.

 

[WinnipegDragon]

sorry, those comments just came to me, thought they were funny.

No, no. No need to apologize! I just hate to see people get down on themselves, and I guess the sarcasm was hard to convey through the post.

My apologies if I offended!

 

[Rune]

Re: Re: The Judge's apology.

Thank you for the apology, Rune. I didn't feel like your analysis was unfair, but rather just sort of sad that a large amount of my effort just went to something that, in retrospect, was so obviously wrong. I felt embarassed that what to me, was clearly a result of interpreting the contest differently, instead came across as mass ineptitude on my scale.

I never interpreted your entry as inept. It was really quite good. On par with many winning entries in past tournaments, even. But it was far too ambitious for the length limit imposed upon it. That aside, I do appeciate brevity. The key is to be concise and still say what you need to say.

Let's also say, I appreciate your work as judge: being the organizer of a convention (no, no plug, I'm staying good ), I understand the huge amount of work (almost always unappreciated) that goes into organizing anything, let alone, organizing well. Thanks for doing this.

Thank you. In all honesty, I wanted to play this one

So, what I offer is not criticism, but rather advice for whoever runs Iron DM Fall 2003, which I will gladly participate in.

And I hope to see you in it!

I think a lot of what could be done to help this is to codify the rules more: rather than relying on people sifting past threads, just come up with a simple, concise, and clear set of rules, and issues like howandwhy99's "plagarism", and this, won't come up as often.

Here's where I disagree with you. It is true that such a codified ruleset would help make things easier, especially on the judge, but, in the end, I think it would strip the tournament of one of its most fun aspects: trying to second-guess the judge. In each of the tournaments that I played in, this was the most fun part. Only rarely do serious differences of interpretation rise up. In your case, you had to figure out whether I weighed strict adherance to guidelines more heavily than I weighed a superior entry. Perhaps my adherance to the no-editing clause threw you off. In the end, you took a gamble and lost, but it was not necessarily a foolish gamble. Just the wrong one.

The question to me is not one of: what's the reasonable interpretation of what was said at the front of this thread (which would be unproductive at this point), but rather, what's a more interesting tournament in the long run? Are the pressures of trying to tie together six disparate elements into a coherent abstract of an outline more interesting than trying to write what amounts to a module minus stat blocks?

I think the pressures of trying to second-guess the judge fill that niche, nicely. You had the misfortune of being in the first match, but then, so did Nemmerle. If he had insight into my method of thinking, it was only a slight advantage given him by paying attention to my posts elsewhere and, especially, in previous tournaments. But I linked to those tournaments in that same first post, so I'm not counting it as much of an advantage, if any.

Length: The level of detail is at your discretion, but we encourage entries to resemble anything between encounter outlines and full modules. Note that length or padding is not considered a virtue: whatever you can use best to clearly communicate your idea to the judge.

You know my thoughts on this, what are others?

Most entries have tended to average around 3-6 pages in word (single-spaced), as a rough guideline.

And I'll go ahead and say it. So far, all of the entries (except for anonystu's) have bordered on being too long. While, ultimately, the length of an entry is really a subjective measure of how well it flows and is paced, I do have a short attention span and I can be overwhelmed.

2) Systems: The dynamic here is that I clearly wanted to write a non-fantasy setting: while I can write and like playing fantasy, I wanted to earn those creativity points. This is why I tried to ascertain whether I could do this early. I was disappointed when my post was taken with a grain of salt because of using d20 modern: I didn't have the "room" to include d20 modern, and thought that both d20 modern was, while not common, certainly not uncommon.

In all honesty, I was delighted that you were going to use a different system. People have always shied away from it, but I think it was a good move. What was a bad move, however, was trying to do it in so few paragraphs. I want you to know that I judged the constistancy of your entry within itself. What I meant by saying that I would take it with a grain of salt is that I would have to keep in mind that I knew nothing about the campaign. I was specifically referring to what seemed like a hole in verisimilitude. In the end, it didn't count against you at all.

Next, there was the SRD to fall back on: if you had wanted to know what Department 7 was, google's first link, takes you straight to the SRD.

If only you had told me, that either: the burden of clarity rests on the author for including all non-X setting material, or had just told me you knew spycraft, I could have either included the setting material necessary, or just adapated it to spycraft (which is one of my favorite games, although as my exposition will talk about, the spycraft version of this that was conceived and dismissed, had a much different flavor to it).

The burden of clarity always rests upon the author. I can only assume so much, and the author should, likewise, only assume so much.

The trick is of course, what's the non-x in the previous statement? Is it non-srd? non-core rulebook? non-greyhawk? non-fantasy? non-high-magic-standard-high-fantasy?

You broke a boundary, today, and you should be commended for it. That's always tough. You may have lost this round, but one thing I can assure you of; you've changed the way the game will be played, henceforth. That's a damned big accomplishment.

Scheduling: A 8-player single elimination has 7 battles to it. While I understand the need for this to not drag on forever, especially for the one organizing, I think staggering the battles lets the spectating, the debating, the basking, take place better: I still haven't processed all the entries yet. A day a piece, with assumedly 3 days of "couldn't schedule anyone here", is only a 10-day affair for something that is a 3-month issue. This is of course, only determinable by your amount of free time, although I don't think it lengthens it much, just spreads it out, and I think it would be a bit more exciting.

You're right, but it's a delicate balance. I've seen (and been in) tournaments that dragged on for way too long and it ain't pretty. I can assure you, though, that the later rounds won't go so quickly.

I hope this has been helpful. Apology accepted, and I'm excited to read the rest of this. I also encourage any debate to make this and the next iron DM better.

Thank you for the insights. They are greatly appreciated.

 

[Rune]

I have to admit the bag of tricks stumped me. I had an idea but was forced to abandon it when I got home last night and checked the books. I was hoping one of the creatures from the bag would be aquatic, so that the harpy would have used it to help find the totem. The villagers would have found corpses of unusual animals floating nearby as she tossed the 'fuzzy balls' from the bag into the water one by one until an aquatic one appeared.

The two problems that killed this idea: No aquatic animals in a bag of tricks, and the drowned animals would have returned to the bag on death.

That killed my original idea, and I was sort of forced to 'tack-on' the bag elsewhere. I knew that, and the relatively closed conclusion were going to hurt me

Not to bum you out, but that's where creative interpretation comes in.

 

[Greybar]

One of the toughest things for me in these, and I think WinnipegDragon might agree, is getting stuck on your own ideas. I won't say too much on my own as an example in specific until the exposition stage. However, once I grab that first image from the ingredients I find it hard to toss the whole shebang and start over - even if that means that sixth ingredient gets a little stool by the corner of the submission.

John
p.s. oh, and I've gotta say - once again I stand in awe of Seasong's work.

 

[cool hand luke]

i've got a question, did you guys start with ANY preconcieved idea for the story line? I think that was my undoing. I decided I'm not creative enough to start from scratch, so I develloped a general setting that I was going to try to plop the ingredients in. Looking back, I think this was a bad move.

 

[el-remmen]

One of the toughest things for me in these, and I think WinnipegDragon might agree, is getting stuck on your own ideas. I won't say too much on my own as an example in specific until the exposition stage. However, once I grab that first image from the ingredients I find it hard to toss the whole shebang and start over - even if that means that sixth ingredient gets a little stool by the corner of the submission.

John
p.s. oh, and I've gotta say - once again I stand in awe of Seasong's work.

I thought right off of an aquatic mind-flayer - because I could not imagine even a claustrophobic one living on the surface of the world and under the sun.

Once I had that idea, and illithids being a big cthuloid - wrapping things up into a sacrifice (using the altar element) just seemed natural - it was the "crazed mentor" that gave me trouble.

I kept thinking it was "sunken ship", but when I saw it was "sinking ship" I made the spare boat be in disrepair, thus basiclaly guaranteeing that the PCs woould have to take over one of the other boats.

I really have no idea where the chest = mimic idea came from - it just popped into my head because I needed more possible combat encounters.

 

[WinnipegDragon]

Not to bum you out, but that's where creative interpretation comes in.

It can't help to bum me out a bit

I took it that adherence to the D20 core books was a necessity. Even something like how Wicenna managed to maintain a charm for a week crossed my mind, but if I had done a stat block or more history on her, I would have included a scroll of Geas or the like to account for her additional enchantment firepower. The bag of tricks, to my mind, didn't allow my original idea, and would have confused the players.

 

[WinnipegDragon]

One of the toughest things for me in these, and I think WinnipegDragon might agree, is getting stuck on your own ideas. I won't say too much on my own as an example in specific until the exposition stage. However, once I grab that first image from the ingredients I find it hard to toss the whole shebang and start over - even if that means that sixth ingredient gets a little stool by the corner of the submission.

John
p.s. oh, and I've gotta say - once again I stand in awe of Seasong's work.

i've got a question, did you guys start with ANY preconcieved idea for the story line? I think that was my undoing. I decided I'm not creative enough to start from scratch, so I develloped a general setting that I was going to try to plop the ingredients in. Looking back, I think this was a bad move.

I formulated relationships between objects, and then built the storyline. In this case it was Totem+Maze=Harpy's Goal. Bag of Tricks+Gynosphinx=Paranoid City.

After that it was just a point of relating the two together, in this case the proximity of the city and maze. The bag of tricks just didn't get used in my first inspiration, and had to be associated with something causing the city's paranoia. Random horrificc animal maulings sounded like it would do the trick, but I guess not.

 

[seasong]

I have to admit the bag of tricks stumped me.

I always fear the exposition part, because that's where I explain what a dumba** I am. The bag of tricks was the only good idea I had. If you look through the entry, you'll see that I fell back on my strengths (characterization and description) to cover the fact that I was essentially using clichés. Rune liked my description of a maze-like city, but even he commented that it was a cliché .

What really got me going in this round was the idea of having to chase a caffeinated weasel through ruinous buildings. Which was, I think, an incredibly great idea, one that's going into my DM's bag of tricks, if you'll pardon the expression.

That killed my original idea, and I was sort of forced to 'tack-on' the bag elsewhere. I knew that, and the relatively closed conclusion were going to hurt me

Well, I tacked on the totem, so I think we're even.