When running my players through Challenge of Chamions VI, I found a few problems (or perhaps I missed a few things...?)
Scenario 1, Snakes and Ladders: what exactly prevents the PCs from levitating to the ceiling and propelling themselves forward using the ceiling? Granted, the walls are too smooth to climb, but this is not "climbing" the ceiling... a very small amount of friction would be sufficient to cross the pit in this way. When the first PC has crossed the pit, he can just take off the boots and throw them back to the other PCs.
Scenario 2, Duck, Duck, Goose: a 5-pound bucket is the absolute maximum of a heavy load for a raven (tiny creature)... and it can still fly with that?
Scenario 3, Egg Toss: The description of "Daern's Instant Fortress" states that anyone "nearby" takes 10d10 damage from its expansion. How are the players to guess that "nearby" doesn't include "right above"? And even if they suspected this, the Instant Fortress grows from (basically) zero size to a height of 30 feet in just 6 seconds, that's a speed of 5 feet per second... a bit much for an egg, wouldn't you agree?
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.
Scenario 6, Horseshoes: The Horseshoes have no command word. So why doesn't the black horse start the scenario already levitating, thus giving away the magical nature of its horseshoes? Or, in other words, what exactly is supposed to trigger the levitation effect?
Scenario 9, Old Maid: A minor oversight in the description... the first paragraph includes the statement "... her hands are tied to two of the thick vertical bars...". The end of Marilyssas introduction however states, "With that, she puts the gag over her mouth...". Oops. I suppose the extra pair of arms drops to the ground right after putting the gag over her mouth. :-)
I suppose a bit more playtesting might be a good idea...? It was still a great adventure, but it could have been better. Particularly the scenarios 2 and 3 were made extremely difficult because of that... well... sloppiness.
Oh, one more thing - anyone interested in a German translation of Challenge VI? I have made a complete translation of all the introductory scenes for the ten scenarios, plus abridged translations of the solutions and notes. I'm willing to put those on my web pages - if someone from the Paizo staff grants the permission to do so... *hint* *hint*
jow - In response to your concerns:
Scenario 1: Nothing is preventing your PCs from crossing the pit in the fashion you described...or at least the first PC. Mess up in throwing the boots of levitation back to the other PCs across the 30-foot-long pit, though, and they probably won't be joining the first PC. :) Seriously, though, it's a valid (if potentially dangerous) approach to the scenario.
Scenario 2: Nowhere in the scenario does it say that the buckets weight 5 lbs. I think you were focusing too hard on the part where it says the ducks cannot "hitchhike" in the buckets (while the buckets are being magically manipulated via a mage hand spell by one of the PCs), because the weight of the duck and the weight of the bucket together exceeds the 5-lb. limit of the spell.
Scenario 3: The Daern's instant fortress was designed a little different from the norm specifically so as not to harm the contestants. (I did it this way thinking from the point of view of those who run the Adventurer's Guild, not wanting to harm - or kill - their potential or actual members.) However, I saw no need to point out the differences to the players ahead of time - they can use the item's description in the DMG as written. As for the acceleration of the roofline - well, if you're going to use real-world physics against me, I'm going to have to concede defeat. :) Honestly, I didn't worry about it - it's magic.
Scenario 4: On page 94 of the magazine, it specifically states: "The staff of divination is 7 feet long, with a forked tip." The information is provided to the DM so he can provide it to the players. It was not intended that the players should have to ask if this was the case.
Scenario 6: Horseshoes of a zephyr "allow" the horse to float above the ground, but the description in the DMG doesn't state that they always do so. Perhaps it's just the way we've always used them in my own experience, but we always just assumed that the power "kicked in" when necessary or when desired. I assume the horse is more "comfortable" touching the ground, but if ridden over a pool of lava, the horseshoes' power would kick in (either automatically or because the horse at that point was thinking to himself, "Uh, no thanks on the lava bath, pal"). Apparently my own assumptions about the horseshoes' powers are not universally embraced, and for that I apologize. I'll have to scour the magic item descriptions a bit closer in future to prevent such a recurrence.
Scenario 9: I...have no argument here at all. My goof.
In any case, I'm glad you got some enjoyment out of the adventure, and I'll try not to make the same mistakes next time.
Johnathan
Creative Director
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Oh, one more thing - anyone interested in a German translation of Challenge VI? I have made a complete translation of all the introductory scenes for the ten scenarios, plus abridged translations of the solutions and notes. I'm willing to put those on my web pages - if someone from the Paizo staff grants the permission to do so... *hint* *hint*
I'm afraid this wouldn't work out. Wizards of the Coast is actually the owner of the material, not Paizo. There's probably no problem with sharing the translations with friends, but actually putting a translation up online isn't something that WotC would approve, unfortunately.
First of all - thanks for your comments and clarifications.
Scenario 2: Nowhere in the scenario does it say that the buckets weight 5 lbs. I think you were focusing too hard on the part where it says the ducks cannot "hitchhike" in the buckets (...)
You're right, I was mistaken about the weight of the buckets being given as 5 pounds; on the other hand, I can't imagine those glass buckets being much lighter than that. A standard (European) 1 liter glass bottle weighs somewhere between 800g and 1000g (approx. 2 pounds), and a glass bucket big enough and strong enough to be used as a glass "shoe" will certainly be much heavier than such a bottle, wouldn't you agree?
Scenario 3: The Daern's instant fortress was designed a little different from the norm specifically so as not to harm the contestants. (...) However, I saw no need to point out the differences to the players ahead of time - they can use the item's description in the DMG as written.
This is where my group really messed it up - they read the description in the DMG quite thoroughly and decided that they couldn't use the Fortress to lift the egg. Which didn't surprise me at all, because I had just the same reaction when I saw Scenario 3 for the first time. I gave it to the group unchanged because I wanted to hear their opinion after playing it. As I wrote in my original message, nothing in the DMG suggests that the instant fortress will NOT do damage to things above it, and from a player's point of view it's an incredibly high risk to "just try it"... if you're wrong, you end up with one hell of a lot of scrambled egg (and zero points). They were not desperate enough to try, even when they were seriously low on time.
As for the acceleration of the roofline - well, if you're going to use real-world physics against me, I'm going to have to concede defeat. :) Honestly, I didn't worry about it - it's magic.
Yeah, well, that's a group specific problem... the group I'm playing with has a strong scientific background. There are two doctors (physics, computer sciences) and some other university degrees (computer sciences, maths, chemistry, economy). You wouldn't believe what I went through when I tried to run a Star Wars campain. :-)
Scenario 4: On page 94 of the magazine, it specifically states: "The staff of divination is 7 feet long, with a forked tip." The information is provided to the DM so he can provide it to the players. It was not intended that the players should have to ask if this was the case.
You're right. My mistake.
Scenario 6: Horseshoes of a zephyr "allow" the horse to float above the ground, but the description in the DMG doesn't state that they always do so. Perhaps it's just the way we've always used them in my own experience, but we always just assumed (...)
That's the problem with those assumptions. They're different for everyone. On a good day, the Dungeon editor(s) should have noticed this (that's what I tried to say when I suggested more playtesting).
Just for the record, we did have lots of fun playing the Challenge of Champions VI, and we're looking forward to all the future Challenges you will (hopefully) put together for us Dungeon readers. I particularly enjoyed seeing my players mess up Scenario 6 (Horseshoes)... because they ignored the first instruction. They even made a few smart-ass jokes about being bright and ignoring it. Doctors and diplomas, scientific background and all that, remember? Watching their faces when I pointed out instruction number 14 (after their time was up) - that was truly priceless. :-)
Heh heh heh...yeah, my two sons gave me grief over the Horseshoes scenario, too. They HATED it! Oddly enough, though, they managed to get to the point at the end of the instructions where they found out that all of their time up to that point had been wasted, and they still had time enough to recover and complete the scenario.
As for the Daern's instant fortress, one of the ways I come up with scenarios is to page through the magic items in the DMG and spells in the PH and come up with what I hope are cool and different ways to use them. I had been wanting to use the Daern's instant fortress for awhile now, and thought the Egg Toss would give me a good chance to do so. Apparently I should have polished that one up a bit more....
Oh well, I can only pledge to try to do better with Challenge of Champions VII. (I've already got a germ of an idea for a unifying theme for the scenarios in that one.) Of course, as the Challenge of Champions tend to be published every two years, I'm afraid you'll have a bit of time until the next one.
In the meantime, though, have you sent your players through "Gorgoldand's Gauntlet" yet? It was written for 1st-level PCs, but it's similar in nature to the Challenge of Champions series (although the puzzles aren't part of a contest; they're part of a sort of testing ground that was taken over by some nasty jermlaine). It was in Dragon Annual 5, and also appeared on the free CD-ROM that was given away with issues of the magazine some years back.
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...
The original manuscript didn't have wooden pegs - it had four shuriken, instead. The solution was to wedge the ring gate in place by sticking the shuriken into the fork of the wooden staff, holding it in place.
I'm not sure why the shuriken were replaced with wooden pegs. Perhaps the editors felt having the shuriken as starting equipment was too great an enticement to have the PCs throw them up at the tag in hopes of cutting it free...? (Naturally, this would also entail having to have the PCs dodge the shuriken on the way back down, what with gravity being a law and all.)
Johnathan
So far I am beginning to start the fourth scenario of the Challenges of Champions... of course its for a play by post game so I have to alter the 'time' limit idea, and I am sure that when I post the player handout that someone will read it all the way though within the time limit with no problem.
However a few gripes with Challenge 3 would be the caster level of Telekinesis not that it matter, but it says CL 5, which it has to be CL 9 to even be cast. (And it still doesn't lift the egg at CL 9).
My group used the floating disk to levitate the egg above the instant fortress (since the owner of the Fortress was the same as the owner of the ring). He attempted to keep the egg within arm reach however the fortress expanded around him, and the instant fortress/rooftop forced the disk upwards. Since I assumed that the disk was CL 5 as well (giving the spell a range of 35 ft), and the Fortress was only 30 ft tall, this put the disk 33 ft above the owner (so the disk didn't wink out!).
I had hinted that the fortress description had taken some liberities and one of the players instantly got what it was, however when I said I would say no more they overlooked the idea for other ones (like trying to take out the wall with the fortress as a seige engine! LOL).