Monster-Brewing Contest - Preliminary Discussion Thread

[ezkajii]

So, I know that I personally would be very interested in a (series of) contest(s) where a theme is given and the community homebrews monsters, in the same vein as the base class, prestige class, you-make-the-spell, and recently the ancillary content contests. I'm wondering two things:

1. Is there interest for something like this in the community?
2. What format would be best? So far the options look like Rate the Post Before You (used in the you make the spell threads, both for D&D and MTG), Community Vote (as in the base contest threads), or Panel of Judges (which I thought I remembered seeing somewhere on this forum but can only remember right now appearing in the Iron Chef challenges). If anyone has an idea for a different format, as well, please share it!

Personally I'm leaning toward a Community Vote contest, but obviously we need a certain number of participants to make it viable. So what do y'all think?

[Jormengand]

Monsters tend to be too complex for challenge format and too simple for a big community vote for each format - you could use the winner of old chooses winner of new format of the original MTG and Hearthstone YMTCs?

[Zaydos]

I'd go with community vote. The you make the card challenge isn't really a contest as much as a game. The panel of judges (used in the MUHA) just never went well. And when you have one judge it just becomes appealing to them instead of making the best thing you can. There used to be monster challenges, but they died out a long time ago as far as I'm aware (I think the person running it just stopped), but you could check how they did it.

[ezkajii]

I'd go with community vote. The you make the card challenge isn't really a contest as much as a game. The panel of judges (used in the MUHA) just never went well. And when you have one judge it just becomes appealing to them instead of making the best thing you can. There used to be monster challenges, but they died out a long time ago as far as I'm aware (I think the person running it just stopped), but you could check how they did it.

Do you happen to have any links to the old ones? I just ran a search for everything older than 6 months in the homebrew section with either 'monster' or 'creature' in the title, and found nothing, and I can't think of what or where else it would be. Though I did turn up a result from someone else basically asking my same question a while back, and the response was that several people had tried to revive it but it never lasted - so that's discouraging.

[Zaydos]

Do you happen to have any links to the old ones? I just ran a search for everything older than 6 months in the homebrew section with either 'monster' or 'creature' in the title, and found nothing, and I can't think of what or where else it would be. Though I did turn up a result from someone else basically asking my same question a while back, and the response was that several people had tried to revive it but it never lasted - so that's discouraging.

Searching gave me this.

Edit: More useful link (Chat thread).

It looks like the later attempts failed when either no one knew about it, ever actually started/ended the contest (which is what's been happening to the PrC contests), or made a theme that didn't get people making things. So I'd say give an extra length to make things in your first contest, a broad theme that hopefully will encourage participation, and remember to end the contest on the date instead of a few weeks later (unless people are clamoring for more time).