Now that round one is over, I wanted to comment on a few common issues I noted.

The first issue was powergaming. Even though this is technically a quest based tournament, it is competitive and therefore powergaming rules are strictly enforced. Some teams engaged in forms of powergaming. Regardless of whether this was intentional, it still offered unfair story advantages over other teams. I went back and forth, but ultimately decided to take off points.

Team A used a ship that was not approved, when a member of the team had an approved ship. This allowed them to start on the water and engage the freighters at an unfair advantage to the others. Team B abused a character’s enhanced speed to advance the plot in terms of time. This allowed them to complete a more in depth story. This gave them a boon to interaction that other groups did not have.

As harmless as these actions seem, they gave your teams unfair advantages. For future rounds, please limit yourself to your “battle” abilities, or abilities that can only be used in competitive RP. These actions are essentially akin to finding a rail gun on the ground in the Citadel and using it against your opponent.

The second issue was NPCs. A wide variety of NPCs were introduced. This is not necessary a bad thing, but varying roles were given to these NPCs that detracted from the plot. Only Fordstein, used by both groups B and D, was used effectively in my opinion. The rest detracted from the story and confused writing. In the future, if NPCs are necessary, please develop them appropriately and use them only to advance the story.

That’s all I have. Please see individual judgments for more comments.

Here are the final scores:

Group A: 54/100
Group B: 61/100
Group C: 58/100
Group D: 63/100

Congratulations to Groups B and D for advancing. Thanks to everyone who participated.