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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tenelo" data-source="post: 85798" data-attributes="member: 3099">Some musings on the rulesWhen I vote, I'm with Mistwell on my first concern being with whether the entry followed the rules. There weren't very many rules, nor were they particularly difficult to follow. Writing to a word or page limit is always a challenge, but I thought that was part of the point in this case.It may be harsh, but if I'd been administering the contest, I'd have disqualified entries that didn't meet the guidelines. I'd have posted them separately so the authors could receive feedback, but only allowed voting on ones that followed the rules. Obviously it would be a judgement call on the part of the administrator as to what degree of latitude was allowed for things like resizing margins, etc. but blatant errors such as more than 1 page for encounter, NPC or location aren't within the rules and should be disqualified.The above is my opinion - it is not intended as criticism of the way the contest is being run, or of the people running it.What I do hope people take into account in their voting is the independant reuseability of encounter, location and NPC, and the ease of dropping any or all of them into any campaign. I tried not to use/reference anything that was not in the core 3 books, unless the new rule/monster/item was explicitly explained in the text of the NPC/location/encounter. Personally, my current campaign doesn't use psionics, so as an example any encounter that used psionics would be more difficult for me to use, unless options for converting it to a non-psionic encounter were presented. Equally, links between location and NPC make them more difficult to reuse separately, something I have seen in the majority of the entries I have read.I'm guilty of that one myself, but more through lack of space than intent. I hope the links are tenuous enough to be easily ignored, but it's one of the things I'd fix if I were revising my entry. I'd wanted to present two paragraphs on my NPC, one general (background, motivation etc) and one more specific to use in the encounter. As it was, space limitations meant I had to make it one longer paragraph. I've been more impressed overall by the ideas in the contest than the execution, and there are plenty I'd consider using, but I wouldn't vote for them if I didn't feel they'd met the challenge and stayed within the rules.My two coppers, YMMV.</blockquote>

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