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I think that "what" is the second question to answer. The first question has already been answered.


Richards wrote:
Challenge 1 - Well, I suppose that depends upon the level of the creator of the boots of levitation - they should, after all, support 100 lbs/caster level, according to the levitation spell description.

The DMG puts the caster level for the boots at 3rd, which implies a weight limit of 300lbs. At the start of the competition I indicated that the fighter weighed 200 and everyone else weighed around 150, not thinking that I'd suddenly made the published solution non-viable.

Richards wrote:
Challenge 4 - Technically, your team's solution wouldn't have worked: the scenario specifies that "both the 'Y' end of the staff of divination and the blade end of the ranseur are too wide to fit through a ring gate." But hey, as long as you all had fun with the scenario, the solution really isn't all that important. Apparently the proctors in your campaign used a slightly narrower ranseur than their counterparts did in other campaigns - no big deal.

Dang--I totally missed that! I'll keep that in mind if I run the contest again.

Richards wrote:
Challenge 9 - Cool story, and had it worked out, that would have been a perfectly valid way of getting the "old maid" at least onto the platform. How were they planning on getting her out of the cage, though?

Interesting question. I kept reminding them that there was a living woman tied to the inside of the cage. They still had this idea where they were going to tilt the top of the cage down into the acid to melt off the padlocks. Very linear thinking; if the old maid wasn't gagged I think she would have had some choice words for the party. :-)

Thanks for the responses!

Grmbrand


[Warning: Contains Spoilers]

This is mostly for the article author's benefit, but if you are thinking of running this module, you may like to know how it plays out "in the field" as well.

I set up a competition between two teams of four players. Each of team of was handed an identical set of 10th level PCs. The PCs were a fighter, rogue, cleric and wizard, all human, all built on the default array (15,14,13,12,10,8). As a temptation to cheat, I chose prepared spells for the cleric and wizard.

Note #1: If you decide to hand out stat blocks instead of full character sheets: generate and include exact character height and weight because some of the challenges will require this information.

Because I was pitting the teams against each other, I did not give players the opportunity to try to sneak items into the competition. I figured the spell lists were enough. The characters had no items.

Logistically, here's how I managed the competition: Each team had its own GM. Each of us ran our respective teams through the first five challenges, then took a break and synced up to run the second five. I thought about running each challenge simultaneously, but figured it would make things move too slowly.

Note #2: If you are running a multi-team competition, record the amount of time each team takes to complete each challenge. If teams end up tying on points, you can use each team's overall time to solve the puzzles as a tie breaker.

Note #3: To expedite the transition from one challenge to the next, I cooked up top-down views of each map prior to the contest and printed them on regular paper. The scale of each map was internally consistent though some had to be printed smaller than 1" = 5'.

Challenge 1 - The physicist in the team I was running observed that the Boots of Levitation would not actually be able to support the wearer and a ladder-crosser at the point where the crosser was immediately next to the boot wearer (i.e., where the ladder assemblies weren't actually bearing any of the ladder crosser's weight). They used the rogue's dex to throw the boots back across the pit each time.

Challenge 2 - Solved as written, took my team about 12 minutes.

Challenge 3 - As others have stated in the boards, the fact that the egg will survive the expansion of the instant fortress if it is directly atop it was non-intuitive. Five minutes into the challenge, the teams' wizards each got a Knowledge (Arcana) check to get a hunch about the properties of the tower. Still took almost the full 15 minutes to solve.

Challenge 4 - My team understood the idea of wedging the ring gate into the crook of the staff of divination, but not the idea of tying he staff and ranseur together. They stood on PC atop another holding up the staff, used the rope to tie one ring gate pointing upwards from the staff, and shoved the ranseur through the other ring gate to attempt to cut the cord holding the tag. I gave them a 50% chance to slice the tag instead of the cord, but they lucked out.

Challenge 5 - One of the players had the "chest over the construct's head" idea within the first minute. Puzzle was solved fairly quickly.

Challenge 6 - Both teams ainstakingly followed the instructions and swore at their respective GMs when they got to step 14. Still they both completed the task in time.

Challenge 7 - After the challenge, both teams voted this the hardest challenge. This was the first challenge that neither team got a perfect score on. Each team only got 10 out of 40 points.

Challenge 8 - No animal lovers in these two teams--both teams dumped the fish out of the tanks. After everyone in my team had eaten the brown fish, I let them wait it out for a few minutes to see if they would start second-quessing themselves. The player running the fighter started to wonder if the challenge's proctor meant that they should eat the paint. He succeeded in his post-paint-eating Fort save to avoid getting sick.

Challenge 9 - Surprisingly, this was the challenge that decided the contest. The other team solved the challenge more or less as written. My team tried a different tactic. They had the fighter jump across the two pools of acid and stand behind the hanging cage. Using the spears, two other PCs popped the chain off of the hook that was holding it. the fither attempted to grab the cage and swing it onto the platform he was on. I figured the cage probably weighed about 200 pounds and set the Strength DC to swing it over at 10. He rolled a 4. Cage goes into the acid, end of challenge.

Challenge 10 - Both teams solved as written, in about 12 minutes.

So, that was our competition. Everyone really enjoyed it--they want me to do set up and run other Challenge of Champions modules the same way. I spent about 15 hours doing the prep for this one, though, so I think it'll be a few months :-)

Anyhow, thanks for a very cool module!


jow wrote:
Scenario 4, Tag: Just a minor problem here, the DMG says a Staff of Divination "often" has a forked tip... so the players must think to ask the DM what shape this particular Staff has.

The thing I didn't get about this was how the four wooden pegs could be used to fix the ring gate in place. I believe the idea was to wedge them in between the ring and the staff, but this just struck me as a really unstable way to do it...