I will not be lending my critiques this time around, for a number of reasons, some of which hail back to RPGC #15. Call it a decision made in protest (though pointedly without malice; consider this an opinionated rant).

I do not feel the parameters of the contest are sufficiently permissive to make feedback necessary or helpful from me. A 7000 word ceiling cap for a co-authored piece, for those of you who do not frequently collaborate with other writers, is paltry. A written piece is always [i]exactly as long as it needs to be[/i], no more or less, and forcing writers to constrain themselves where a better story might otherwise be conceived is pointless as anything other than a challenge in and of itself for the sake of itself, invalidating the nominal pretense of the contest parameters in favor of an assignment of brevity. [i]There is no legitimate reason to impose any kind of wordcount limit except for that specific purpose.[/i] I include in that assessment the time and ability required of judges to evaluate submissions. If somebody submits an 800,000 megabrick, the judge should be up to the task of evaluating the whole story in a timely fashion - after all, the writer themselves was called to the task of creating aforementioned brick in a limited span of time.

Additionally, the arbitrary rule against gratuitous violence - which in and of itself does not violate Guild Rules - is just that. An arbitrary imposition of the judge upon the writer based on personal preference, which constrains writers in a similar fashion to a wordcount limit (the judge may impose such a rule freely, it is their contest, but that does not change that the rule is arbitrary). Ideally, the judge would not constrain the content of a story beyond the narrow tailoring of the challenge parameters themselves and what is forbidden by Guild Rules.

I may lend critique to submissions in future RPGCs even if these policies do not change, but for the moment I have no interest in evaluating the subjective merit of stories that have been unduly constrained by needless guidelines.