Iron Chef E6 Appetizer Edition, Round XLI

[loky1109]

In the absence of any disputes, does anyone have any feedback? I'm worried about how jaded I'm getting - wondering if I should take a break from judging for a while. I'd hate it if anyone was going "oh no, not another Miniman judgement".

I like your judgement. Plus, I anyway had no options to improve my place and understood it from the beginning. But, I still have one objection.
-0.25 for +2 int item.
I just mentioned I want it, I didn't rely on it, didn't include it in any calculations.

[AsuraKyoko]

In the absence of any disputes, does anyone have any feedback? I'm worried about how jaded I'm getting - wondering if I should take a break from judging for a while. I'd hate it if anyone was going "oh no, not another Miniman judgement".

I thought that some of the penalties were a bit on the harsh side, but nothing that specifically stood out. It was also a bit of a surprise that Necropolitan was worth a big Elegance penalty, since in the past I've not seen it be a penalty there in general.

(The reason why I went with Necropolitan over Tomb-Tainted Soul is that I wanted to have the negative energy healing as soon as possible without delaying Black Lore of Moil. Also, it allowed me to neglect Con for some points in other stats.)

The other main thing related to penalties that I thought were harsh was the crafting penalty.

Spoiler: Quote

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Another round, another paragraph about magic item crafting penalties. The contest rules aren't clear on how xp works, and whether you can afford to lose some. If each character gets enough xp to level to E10, the moment you craft something, you've lost access to your final feat. There's also potentially an issue with gold, too. My general rule when judging is to allow mundane items and ignore any magic items, since most builds don't assume they have access and we want a level playing field. There's obviously a big difference between "my character can craft these items" and "my character wants to buy these items", but I still feel weird about assuming you can fund your crafting, but others can't buy magic items. Normally, this would be a bigger penalty, since you're so reliant on crafting (it basically is your build), but you've obviously reduced your costs a long way, and that does count for you here. It just doesn't remove the penalty completely.

The big difference here is that giving a penalty for assuming that a certain magic item is available is pretty reasonable, since not all games will have all items available to buy, but all games are going to give out experience, so someone crafting something is fair. The character has already spent build resources on ensuring that they can get the items that they need, so penalizing them for something that they have already paid for (since they can't use those feats or whatever on other, non crafting things) seems rather excessive to me. It makes taking any crafting feat at all an immediate, direct penalty to your score, and I don't think that's really fair at all.



Regarding the Touchstone site, the intention was to qualify via Touchstone key, for which I think it is a reasonable assumption that he would be able to acquire it, given the lore snippet that I, er, well, failed to complete... I mentioned it in what I did include, but I wanted to touch on it a bit more, so I'll summarize it now:

Basically, the Sandman would spend most of his time in the areas around the Shrine at Kahar, where he would guide and protect pilgrims to the shrine during the night (his ability to glow would certainly help with this), and then hunt down and punish transgressors during the day (setting up a contrast between dark and light, using each one at the opposite time). He wasn't a follower of the god that the shrine is to (whose name I can't remember at the moment) because he didn't really believe in her enough to be a cleric of her, but he supported her cause, and took exception to those who exploited the faithful. Because he spent so much time around the site, he would have ample opportunity to acquire a touchstone key for it.

His domains are Sand and Travel, because they fit the ideals he supports: Travel, because while he generally stuck around an area, he still wanders about a wide range around it, never keeping to one place, and he supports travelers in that area, and Sand because of, well, much of the rest of his everything. He is chaotic neutral because he generally does Good deeds but uses Evil methods to do so (namely, Black Sand).

He has a theme of dichotomy in general: he does good things with evil methods, he uses light at night and darkness during the day, he stays in one general area but constantly travels in it, he's undead but he channels positive energy, he uses sand and dryness but guards an oasis, etc.

Had I had the time and the focus, I would have liked to include this all in the main entry, but I ran out, and I couldn't find a good way of presenting it in-character, or at least in a concise manner. At least I was able to present it after the fact, because it was fun to think about, and it came together so nicely in the end; all the pieces just fell into place, and most of the build was using a single book (Sandstorm).

[AsuraKyoko]

Ain’t no one feeling that way. Gratitude is primary.

Agreed, we're always grateful to the judges!

[Inevitability]

The only part of judging that I feel weird about is the minor penalty for failing to mention the Stench of the Dead thing; I feel like 'at some point I fought a necromancer' would've been awkward to have to insert in what's otherwise a short piece of fiction. Other than that, no objections against this style at all.

[MinimanMidget]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone. I'll try to be a little less harsh in future rounds.

I like your judgement. Plus, I anyway had no options to improve my place and understood it from the beginning. But, I still have one objection.
-0.25 for +2 int item.
I just mentioned I want it, I didn't rely on it, didn't include it in any calculations.

That's totally fair. I guess I saw the "it's easy for me to get this" and felt the need to correct it. And when you're judging, if you write something, you feel the need to put a number next to it. But yeah, this shouldn't have been a penalty.

[QUOTE=AsuraKyoko;25685888]The other main thing related to penalties that I thought were harsh was the crafting penalty.

I generally agree with you that this wouldn't be a problem in a real game. That said, I'm going to narrow your quote down to the important bit:

The contest rules aren't clear on how xp works, and whether you can afford to lose some.

I penalise for any experience loss. I penalise for crafting, I penalise for Necropolitan , I even penalise when people talk about which familiar they're going to use and then which Improved Familiar they're going to use. If the contest rules are ever amended to provide an xp budget (or similar), I'll stop doing this, but as is, I don't see any way around it.

I do feel the need to point out, even in a real game, having every member of the party be at a different xp total does complicate things, and I have played with DMs who discourage it.

Qualifying for Black Lore of Moil via an SLA is a little dodgy, but relying on a higher-order power from a touchstone site is worse, since it requires you to go to a specific place that may not even exist in any given campaign. I'm just relieved you at least picked a site which is doable in E6 and by your character. (-0.5)

This is two penalties in one, because I absolutely would have penalised qualifying for Black Lore of Moil via an SLA even if Touchstone wasn't involved. And I did read up on the Shrine, and noted that it's very reasonable for the Sandman - when this has come up before someone was relying on the higher-order power of the Catalogues of Enlightenment, which is very unreasonable in E6, and my memory was that they got a bigger penalty. Rereading past judgements, I've given a -0.5 and a -0.25 for that, so apparently I haven't been as consistent as I'd like.

The only part of judging that I feel weird about is the minor penalty for failing to mention the Stench of the Dead thing; I feel like 'at some point I fought a necromancer' would've been awkward to have to insert in what's otherwise a short piece of fiction. Other than that, no objections against this style at all.

Yeah, it's a lot more awkward to force things into the intro style fluff than the backstory style. I probably wouldn't have penalised for this if you'd mentioned it at all, even if it was only in your level writeup. I just didn't like ignoring it completely.

[daremetoidareyo]

Is this thread nearly done?

[loky1109]

Is it the end of this competition?

[MinimanMidget]

We've slipped to page 3! Are we waiting on anything?

[Venger]

Sorry for the delay, everyone. I've experienced a one-time upheaval in off-forum matters which shouldn't happen again. The important part: new round's up I hope everyone enjoys it.

[MinimanMidget]

Sorry for the delay, everyone. I've experienced a one-time upheaval in off-forum matters which shouldn't happen again. The important part: new round's up I hope everyone enjoys it.

Sorry to hear that (and to have pressured you). I hope everything's okay. Thanks for chairing!

[Venger]

Everything's fine, no need to worry. Hope you enjoy the new round.