| Brandon Stenger |
For the most part I enjoyed the special this year. My group didn't make it to the second round, but having read this thread that may not have been a bad thing. The variety of challenges in the first part made it fun, and the timed element really did add a sense of urgency. That said, the table's fun ended towards the end of Friday evening when
the chase deck came out. I was playing in tier 3-4, and spent close to an hour on the first two cards of the chase. Only two members of my party were able to make any real headway, and the NPC kept on moving. As our GM explained to us, there was no end to the chase until you caught her or time ran out, so he kept flipping cards from the deck and she kept getting further away.
The first four cards for our chase were handwritten, maybe all of the tables had the same ones. After that though, they came off the top of the standard chase deck. Adding in a random element like that to a competitive situation just doesn't work. Also, the chase cards aren't scaled with level - what would have been trivial for a table of higher level PCs (a DC 25 Acrobatics check, for example) was literally impossible for characters untrained in Acrobatics, like my level 4 Sorcerer.
What ultimately ended up happening was the final encounter being fought by the two members of our party who rolled well enough to get through the chase, while the rest of us had our turns reduced to a single roll as we tried to move from chase card to chase card. After working together for hours as a team, two-thirds of the party completely missed the big final fight. Talk about a letdown.
I sincerely hope that the competitive aspect of the special is dropped. I thought the story for the scenario was extremely well-written and it definitely held my interest. As a cooperative game with everyone in the room working together it would have been awesome.