TaskMaster guidelines for a LC

Lucid Adventures
1

I recently discovered how a Lucid Challenge can be an awesome way of motivating both challengers and non-challenging spectators, plus bringing the participants to improve themselves in their dream abilities and confidence. So, I decided to gather the guidelines that accompanied me throughout the LC#23, so that new TMs will hopefully find some ways in them to make their LC better. :smile:
Of course, comments, corrections and suggestions are very welcome :colgate:

[color=darkblue]

  • Keep a list of the things you want to award, or the baselines you want to follow in any particular task, and keep the list by your side whenever you attempt to create any of this.[/color]

  • In your tasks, give players room for personalization and creativity.
    [color=darkblue]

  • Use modular tasks, as divided into parts. More than half the expected points for basic completion, 1/4 for the advanced stuff, and small ticks to cover the rest.[/color]

  • Always keep on the generic. NO “go to this precise place”, “ask this particular person” etc. Keep more generic, IE they could meet their version of a particular character, like the White Rabbit, so they can adapt the need to the dream taking place, and the personal goals each dreamer would want to accomplish on his own.

[color=darkblue] - Be flexible in the rules, inflexible in the applications. Plan ahead what could happen, and think of possible solutions.[/color]

  • Leave space for points adjustments. If someone deserve more then the points awarded, make sure they get more points. It’s great motivation for everyone.

[color=darkblue] - If some of your tasks require some particular/difficult skill, you can always take things in little steps and make an introductory task for that, like leaning to teleport in order to reach a certain distant place.[/color]

  • Be fair. Follow the patterns you have brought out before, and relate to the previously assigned points.
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  • Tickle the players’ imagination. Give crazy, nice, original examples, and be sure they’ll all do something different in their dream. That will also help them understand any difficult/complicated rule of a task :tongue:[/color]

  • Be available, at least the first days, to give answers, explanations, and be sure to cover all angles with thoughtful examples.

[color=darkblue] - A task must be some something YOU would find interesting to do. In fact, a Challenge a TM wouldn’t even want to participate in may need some more thought-out.[/color]

  • If you need any idea for the tasks you want to assign, you can read examples in the Quest suggestions, and in the favourite things to do, not to mention the to-do list.

[color=darkblue] - A good indicator is if the competitors are having fun. If they aren’t, try to spice up the tasks, but more importantly, start giving suggestions and encouragements in the topic, and commenting occasionally on their DJ’s. Keep their morale high, it is your responsibility for the time they are participating in the challenge.[/color]

  • You can adjust the required time you’ll spend with the organization by choosing how many players will participate. 10 is a minimum, 20 is feasible in a representative sample, 30 could become too much in any case.

[color=darkblue] - This sort of competition is not simply to have fun, they are here with you to learn. Make them do something that will teach them to hone their skills, make them practice on new things, or get them confident with their previously learned abilities. This can become a great source of motivation as well ^[1]

Following those guidelines, I hae come up with a refinement of the points system.

[color=red]What to accomplish:[/color]

  • Motivate people to have longer and longer LD’s, while avoiding better LD’ers getting too far in points.
  • Award chains and getting back lucidity, but not encourage them as to become a specific tatic in order to get more points.

[color=blue]What I came up with for the LC:[/color]

[color=red]Tasks:[/color]

  • I wanted to focus on lucidity (as in control), creativity as well as originality.
  • There would be good points for everyone, fat points for who can manage a little creativity and resourcefullness, and even more points (if little) for who wants to keep going.
  • Integrate the LC with a regular LD’ing session, leaving possibly ro

[color=blue]What I came up with for the LC:[/color]

[center]A for an example task, I will post #3 task from LC#23:[/center]

  1. /color ↩︎

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Hehe, good manual :tongue: but before you changed the rules of the LC the TMs used to post generic tasks so people could make their own version of it.

I must admit though that when you changed the scoring sustem and that I felt more motivated to actually get an LD :tongue:

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Oh, you’re right! The scoring system! :ack: I’ll update with that one too.

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Good idea, Ill post them in this post:

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From the Dutch forum there was a suggestions regarding the LD-points.

Some people never have LDs longer than x amount of minutes, and some people simply just have longer LDs in dreamtime. Next to that, people often find it hard to judge how long a dream is. To still make a distinction between long and short LDs a suggestion was made to differentiate between what is a short, medium, and long LD for the person participating. For one person, a half hour LD might be medium and for someone else it might be long. This may be better for the motivation…

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Guidelines! awesome :smile:

And Sandra’s post sounds like pretty cool idea to me. :wink:

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Mmm, I don’t really know.

The 4x compartments would be more than enough to be able to differentiate, especially when you primarly focus on remembering what you did during a LD, and you can approx. tell the duration of a dream by the number of things you did inside them.

Moreover, the point of this IMHO is not for people to say “ok, my average LD is x minutes, and I can’t do any better than y”, but rather, make them strive for (more and) longer and longer LD’s, whatever may their average be. With some effort, it’s always possible to better our personal records, and that’s what I had in mind when designing this system.

Plus, there’s no way I’d reward people diffferently for same results. If some did more, they get more points, if they did less, they get less. Myself, I’d get pissed if someone got more points than me for a dream that was shorter than mine, only because they had set their expectancy bar lower than mine.
The absolute scale is meant to put challengers in the viewpoint where they actually have to do more if they want more, not just set their expectancies low and get their points easily.
Plus this way they have an easier time getting inspired from the big scorers :wink:

This could seem a bit harsh for some, but I seemingly managed to even it out with the | [color=#e4ecee]invisible points thingie[/color] |, since that reinforced the concept that one’s points should only matter to him/her, and serve as a relative measure of how much (s)he’s putting effort/improving. Comparisons between dreamers only happen if someone wants, thus are not imposed.

And finally let’s remember, this is supposed primarly to be a challenge against yourself, not others :smile: Everyone has a different level of LD skills at any given time, and I can’t deny that, but a Challenge should be made to let them point to higher heights, regardless of what other dreamers in the Challenge are/do.

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ah yeah, I forgot about that way of thinking :tongue:

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Well actually I think rewarding for you long LDs subjectively would therefore be a better system, precisely because it is a challenge against yourself.

But I mean opinions can differ of course :content:

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Hm, I gotta agree with Sandra on this one actually. For me, a 5-8 minute LD is short, where I know a lot of others would consider that long. My 20-25 minute LD’s are medium too, and I know that certainly isn’t the case for a lot of people. There are people who wake up seconds after achieving lucidity and to get a LD several minutes long would be a good personal achievement for them. If the sake of the competition is to improve on your own skills first and foremost and not the competitive side of it, then this is probably the better way of doing it.

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Hmm, so if you go for Sandras rule youre gonna use this short/medium/long system instead of minutes?

I think its good to know, otherwise Im confused how the score is counted :confused:

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What I liked about the Lucidity Challenges was when they were 7 tasks and one LC took 2 weeks.

I liked the difference between the LC and the Quest, the quest was long and only one task while the LC was short and if you didn’t like the task, there soon would be a new one to take it’s place that you could try.

(That’s why I don’t like them when they take to long time, because then I manage to lose focus in them, since you have so much time for each task)

That didn’t mean I didn’t like your tasks TosxyChor, I liked the way you did the LC but the only complaint I have was that it took too long time.

Other might not think like that but to me LCs should be short.(7 tasks, 2 weeks)

13

Hmm, :ack: how could I forget this? I mentioned it that I as well hate that the tasks are long :cool: maybe if the TM for next challenge reduces the task time to 2 days but allows people to do previous tasks as well and get scored by it :tongue:

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@Sandra - Ha! :lol: Guess some took the gudelines more seriously than myself did. I was still basing myself on the hypotesis an absolute scale of ranking would be required, and as such I stalled on the “different person - same points” idea. But sure, this is a nice extention of the whole “competition with onself” idea, so why not develop it :content:

We could basically take the scaling system and adapt it to the average duration of the user, by making the average duration of their LD worth a fixed amount of points (20? 30?), and changing the rest of the time periods additively in the same way.

IE. (for average = 30 pts)
[color=darkblue]average LD is 1-4 mins[/color] → unchanged, meaning 15-60secs → 20pts, 1-4min → 30pts, 4-15min–> 40pts, 15min → 50pts, 1-4hrs → 60pts …
[color=darkblue]average is 15-60 min[/color] → now that time interval is worth 30 pts, so 4-15 min → 20 pts, 1hr-4hrs → 40 pts, 1-4mins → 10 pts etc. and accordingly, all LD points are effectively -20 than the other example.
Of course, this apart from the scores that go lower than 10 :tongue: we could keep 10 as a minimum for a LD score.

That, or a simplified score with 30 (20?) points for medium LD’s, 40 (30?) or more for those longer than a multiple of the average (4x seems too much at this point, maybe 3x or even 2x would fit), and 20 (10?) for LD’s shorther than a fraction of the average (again, either 1/3x or 1/2x)

@magnus - I get your point, but it mostly depends on the expectations of the TM. If (s)he had put a lot of effort in making the tasks, and wants most of them to be completed, then those will be further from each other; if instead those tasks are somewhat left to the likings of the challenger, and are simpler/with less requirements, then rapid-fire tasks becomes a more viable option. I don’t have a prcise opinion on this one, but I sure agree, now that I’ve tried 2, more than 30 days may be a bit too much for a Challenge :tongue: even if 2 days seem like an awfully small window to me for a task attempt. Perhaps the best option sits in the middle :smile: with 3 days for each.

Well, In recent LCs there indeed was the possibility of scoring points by completing previously assigned tasks; only, because 4 days was more than enough to complete one, I introduced the early/late bounus. But if we cut down the time intervals, we can remove the late malus and call it a day.

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I understand magnus’ point, and somewhat agree, but I did like the fact that one task that started on a monday, for example, would last until the weekend where chaces of LD’ing are greater. Maybe that’s just me though :tongue: Perhaps with shorter periods I’d apply more on weekdays? :eh:

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Well, I’ll definitely say after LC 25 that 2 and even 3 days didn’t seem long enough. I found myself giving extensions pretty often just to give even one person a chance to complete a task. Still, a week seems a bit extreme as well, and some tasks really didn’t need extra time. I suppose the TM will just need to use their best judgment from task to task.