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Message: <blockquote data-quote="incognito" data-source="post: 674261" data-attributes="member: 7008">Round 1, set 4Mythago’s critique:Mythago lays out his adventure in a style that is known to me as “story telling” – and like a story taking place – the action is directed and flows along of it’s own accord; the wheels are in motion, rather than having points of interest, or planned combats for the PCs.  This is not a good or a bad thing, it must be called out because conventional critiques would write this off as railroading, which is not the case.An initial weakness in this scenario, is asking a set of players to give up their gear to go on this adventure – since “story telling” style tends to abandon most plot hooks, it is very difficult to persuade me that adventurers would want to part with their beloved equipment – heck, many say 3E is BASED off equipment!His island school of monks is an interesting setting & believable – incorporating the ingredients university and athletic teams which forms the core of this adventure. – the fact that it is on a tropical isle comes into play later, with an NPC dryad. A few ingredients used not as well here. Witch and a correct paranoia. – the base set up is brilliant.  Mahogany dryads look like dark elves, and  dark elves = bad, so the monks kill them!  Grrrreat! But calling a tree the WITCH tree for “reasons that the monks no longer recall” is not consistent, as is the dryad having powerful magic “gifts” for the PCs.  What’s with the items loosing power if they move more than 300’ from the tree?  The island may be small, but 300’ means those items are near useless! Also, There need to be **some** detail about the dryad interacting with the PCs, because if she sees a bunch of Monks coming, of course she is going to hide – she’s paranoid, remember!? Also, I imagine the PCs, not eager to blow their cover, would NOT go out and about exploring the island, and so would miss the dryad encounter all together. The contests are neat, and fun, and left for the DM to detail, which I am fine with.  The last day of the contest though, leaves me with a bit of a “what just happened?” feeling.  At the beginning of the story, we are told the PCs are seeking a powerful and important minor artifact.  I assume this is the gauntlets?!?  And I guess because they are shiny, the monks notice them – buy why would that make them realize they were dealing with imposters, except as a plot device to finish the adventure?  An excellent story telling style adventure, but one that needs a lot of fine tuning.  Give me a ROCK SOLID reason for giving up my gear, more motivations for exploring the island, a better plan for interaction with the dryad, including reasons why she would have a horde of pricy magic items (belt alone is worth $36,000 gp),  the gauntlets of swimming and climbing need to be identified as the artifact (if, in fact, they are – this is not totally clear to me) – and woven in the story better, and the monks need reasons to ‘wake up” after seeing he party with the gauntlets that maintain verisimilitude.exposition time!</blockquote>

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