"Guess the scene!"


The idea is based on a nice drawing of Sir Carnifex.

The "Guess the scene!" series will last for 9+1 weeks. There will be one picture in each of the 9 weeks, showing a scene from an Infinity Engine game (usually from the Baldur's Gate series I suppose). There will be a few questions stated about the picture, with a total score of 6p (which means perfect answers to all questions). Bonus points can be given for very outstanding answers, but the total score (after bonus points) may not exceed the allowed maximum (6p). The last, 10th week is an exception, as there will be no guessing: instead, the picture will show some new situation, and a simple (and probably BG2) mod -- inspired by or related to the picture -- will have to be created.

The winner of the week will be the person who gets the highest score. The winner of the contest will be the person with the highest total score (score of week1 + week2 + ... + week10), but we will also announce a winner who won the most weekly contests (as he or she may be different from the person with the highest total score). Depending on the number of participants, we might announce more winners at the end of the contest series. The prizes will be BWL forum portraits from our Gallery and custom subtitles. The main winner (the person with the highest total score) will get the Gold Cross of Modding, but this has another prerequisite: he or she must have a valid submission (a working mod) for the 10th week contest, with at least 50% score. If no such partipicant exists, the Gold Cross of Modding won't be awarded to anyone.

I'm the organizer of the "Guess the scene" contest, but the judge won't be necessarily myself. The picture might be created by a different person each week (but this isn't necessary). Each week, the picture and the associated questions will be posted by the picture's creator in this topic (please do not post replies in that topic, only the person who publishes the drawings can add new content there; please use the present topic for discussion).

How to enter: you automatically enter the contest by sending a submission (please see below).

How to submit: Submissions are nothing else than answers to the questions of that week. Submissions should be sent in the form of a forum Private Message (PM) both to the person who posted the picture & questions and to me (Baronius). If the submission is only sent to the picture creator (judge) or only to me, it won't be accepted. (Hint: you can use the field "Carbon copy to other members" in the private message sending form to add additional recipients.) One participant can only send one submission, and within one day, he or she can send another submission to replace the first one. If there is a replacement, the first submission will be ignored, and the replacement will be judged. Replacements sent after one day will be ignored. Submissions sent after the deadline will not be judged.

Remember, it's "Guess the scene", so don't hesitate to guess! There are no minus points!


Any questions are welcome!

Baronius I noticed you mentioned at SP that the first week's scene was from BG 1... have you actually mentioned that on this site too? I looked but could not find it. In the interest of fairness it may be a good idea to do so.

EDIT: Although, it is fairly obvious from looking at it...

As long as it's been advertised on SP, how about doing so at GameBanshee and Ironworks Gaming?

Raven: you are right, I should have been more careful. I forgot that here we didn't mention it at all, and I think the origin of the drawings shouldn't be revealed anywhere in the future (to make the contest harder, as it's not really a difficult one anyway).

Carnifex: feel free to do so. I often visit Sorcerer's Place, but not the other sites.

Awesome idea, I'm in!

We've received 4 submissions so far, they were quite good.

that's a great idea.. i'm inn

(my 1 post here)

We're up to six entries now.

And a reminder... There are only three days to go, so spend a couple minutes and submit your calculated guesses (or well-researched answers ) soon!!!

Well, I suppose I should confess that I too, toke part on the contest.

I like this idea too! I have sent my answers.

See you guys around!

We've received 8 submissions so far.

The contest of this week ends on 6th July 2008 24:00 GMT, which is tomorrow (from Europe, at least). So, not much time left! However, you can enter the contest at any time (any week), it doesn't matter if you haven't submitted anything previously. Of course, submissions can only apply to the active week's picture, not to earlier pictures (or to any future pictures -- if you are a Diviner or you know a Diviner, it won't help: the contest is fair to all classes).

Announcement of the results: we will post information about it later.

I sent my submission at the moment that my browser crashed (a few moments ago).
I'm wondering whether it arrived because it's not in my sent folder and I wouldn't want to send it double.

PS: Nice idea fora contest.

Sure, it arrived. I should have publicly mentioned earlier that I always send a confirmation PM to all those who correctly send their submission (or replacement submission) to Sir Carnifex and myself. (Of course, if a participant just sends it to one place and forgets to send it to Sir Carnifex or myself, we will also try to contact him/her to ask for correction; no one will be silently disqualified).

By the way, if the same happens with someone else (i.e. the participant doesn't know if the submission has been successfully sent or not), the participant should feel free to send it again (and again, if needed), provided it contains exactly the same answers (and preferably a note that the previous PM might have not arrived).

Thank you.

Next time I'll make certain to tick the "save message to sent folder". I guess I forgot...

The results of the first week will be announced real-time on the chat server of the Black Wyrm's Lair on 7th July 2008, 20:00 (8:00 PM) GMT (you can see this page for GMT and difference with your timezone). You can use a chat client (such as mIRC) to join, or if you don't have such a program, feel free to use BlackWyrm's JavaChat. If you aren't registered on our IRC, don't type any password (registration isn't required, it's just for regular users or anyone who would like to protect his or her nickname). Answer "Yes" to any security questions (such as "Trust content from this source?"), the program uses the Applet technology, which is secure and cannot harm your computer. If you aren't using our JavaChat, you will need the server's address: irc.blackwyrmlair.net, port 6667.

Of course, the results will be available on the forum as well, they will be posted about a day later (8th July).

The picture for the next week of the contest should become available on 9th July 2008.

Results are now available on the forum as well!

Please check the relevant topic. As usual, please use this one for discussion (for example, about contest questions and answers).

Cool, second place by a bonus point. I didn't expect that. Was my answer really so much more detailed?
As for the 4th question... Now that it's mentioned, I do see the guardhouse is missing, and the lack of shadows, but eh... Better luck next time.

Needless to say that such not too easy questions will occur in the next weeks as well (otherwise everyone could get maximum score).

Your answer to Q2 mentioned "reading the documents", which is apparently a minor detail, however, Chapter 3 is triggered by opening the chest (and taking those documents). So this was a "modder" answer, hence the bonus point.

Nice.. i didn't expect to be so high

shadows.. pfff....

D'oh... it was Nimbul after all.

I must note that Nimbul spawns in front of the Inn, rather than on the bridge, so that is another flaw in the picture.

That was exactly my reasoning for answering the person with Bardolan, who does approach from the bridge. I guess that as a result of that decision I got the next few questions wrong as well, because I thought the appearance of Bardolan was wrong.

I did notice that some houses were missing, but from perspective I found it reasonable to assume that those fell away to the left of the other houses. I guess I didn't think through there... the guard house should indeed be visible. I also didn't think about the shades in the picture.... next time I'll be a lot more thorough before answering.

Spawns, but he doesn't have to stay there. The pictures aren't exact replicas of the game scenes, so it's not really a flaw in this respect.

However, the problem with Bardolan is that he is an Amnish soldier (with the typical helmet, armour and weapons), so he doesn't nearly resemble to the guy on the picture. In your place, this would have been enough for me to prefer Nimbul to Bardolan.

Let's not forget though that this was just the first week, and many more will come, so those who didn't get too high score will also have plenty of possibilities

Ah, right. Lucky strike.



Yeh, to me he looked like Nimbul, so I answered that. I figured he could walk to the bridge if he wanted to.

A-a-a-a-a! I thought I would get a +0.000005 for speeed!
Gimmi, Gimmi !!!

Your replacement submission (where you mentioned Nimbul correctly) arrived after Moongaze, but since this was the first week, we can make an exception: choose, do you want to lose 1 point (= Nimbul) and get +0.000005, or is the current setup acceptable?

Actually, it isn't a bad idea to give +0.5 point to the person who first submits answers. This would mean a little advantage for those with good memory of the game's events and details, because everyone can visit the area in the game (provided he/she recognized it) or "scan" the game with Near Infinity or some other tool, but the search takes time, while writing from memory is quick. Of course, this might result in many submitted entries at the very beginning (everyone would want the bonus score), due to the fact that sending a replacement submission is allowed for one day. So after sending the "quick-submission", participants would more thoroughly check whether the answers they've sent are correct, and if it's worth it, they send the corrections as a replacement submission. I don't see anything wrong with this: the one day limit of sending the replacement submission is present, so it wouldn't ruin the contest in my opinion. (A replacement submission would negate the possible bonus +0.5 point of the first submission, of course.)

What do you think, Sir Carnifex?

then you should add the exact time of the next picture, not only a day...

As I told Baronius, the first time I met Nimbul, he met me almost at the top of the bridge. I think I just stopped when I saw him and let him walk up to me. So, yes, he can move.


I'm not in favor of it since:

1. It could possibly put someone's score above six.

2. Those who are in or around my time zone are much more likely to get first shot at it.

3. You nixed my idea of bonus points the one time I mentioned it...

Not if you get up at night to post the picture, so European participants can find it because it's morning here. (Actually, participants in your timezone would also be sleeping, so it would make the contest unfair after all )

We could set the 6 points as an upper limit that can't be exceeded, but let's drop the whole idea.

By the way: new picture should arrive soon! More precisely, as soon as Sir Carnifex is online again So stay tuned and keep checking the Pictures topic!

You could set up a PM bot to avoid the hassle (or an ad-hoc simplicistic PHP page): you contact the bot once for the picture, and then you contact the bot again with the answer, and the person with the smallest delta wins the point. Of course, JC refused this very idea for IM, on the basis that, uh, allowing people from Asia to take part in is less important than the feeling that 1/1,000,000,000 of the global Earth population is competing with you RIGHT NOW.

Eh... Sounds kind of complicated for a simple contest!

And back to topic, the new Guess the Scene drawing is now in, so feel free to start discussing it.

Answers send.
Edit; Baronius, thanks for the confirmation reply.

Well, I guess I'm out.
At present, I have no idea.

I thought they were close replicas, since you need to spot what's wrong with the picture. If too much artistic freedom is added, it may result in several possibilities that were not necessarily the intended. I was totally off on my guesses though .

I'm not certain whether I got this week's picture correct, but there's a lot more info added to my submission than the first time.

After a good long thought, I think I have figured it out after all.
Submission sent!

Submission sent... it was easy but i made a mistake (didn't read closely) and had to make a correction to one of the questions, remeber to answer after you had your morning coffe

hope i won't get any minus points for that

I agree. Sir Carnifex is trying to do his best for the drawing and questions. The contest is new, so we also learn several things while organizing it. When allocating points, we also consider the relative correctness of answers (so those who gave better answers get more points, other gets less -- but not necessarily zero -- points). Of course, one could say that it's unfair, because those who are lucky (made the good guess from the possible choices) will get the most points. Since the contest is about "guessing", it also has to do with luck anyway.

Fortunately, if practically no one answers a question, no one will get the points so it won't make any difference in the results. Furthermore, no minus points are given for anything. For questions that don't require a unique answer, you can list more things. For example, this is the case with the "what's wrong" question, but e.g. not with the question of "who is it" (where a multiple answer such as "It is either Nimbul or Bardolan" means 0 score) and the question "does the viewer intend to complete the quest?" also doesn't allow multiple answers (that is, answers in the form "IF-THEN, IF-THEN" are not good, conditional statements aren't encouraged).


Didn't you read the rules? A replacement reply reduces your maximum score to 50%. Actually, no, it doesn't I was kidding. The rules clearly say the each participant is allowed to send a replacement submission in 24 hours from the time the first submission was sent.


You're welcome. I'll send a confirmation to everyone who submits an entry; if I don't do so in a reasonable time, contact me. I advise everyone to tick the checkbox "Add a copy of this message to my sent items" folder, and if unsure whether it has been correctly sent, just check the Sent Items folder.

I found that a very tricky question to answer. It asks about the intention of a player, which is different for everyone. Some will complete the quest in a certain way, others in other ways (perhaps even ignoring it altogether). Or was this not what Sir Carnifex meant? I sure read it as such.

This is the question (so we can see what we're speaking about):


As you've written, the protagonist's decisions can be different for everyone during each game, but the contest would make little sense if it asked for detailed quest descriptions, or would allow more correct but completely different answers. So the only possible conclusion is that the picture reveals it. (In other words, Sir Carnifex, when saying "viewer", refers to the protagonist who actually experiences the scene on the picture. I admit "viewer" might refer to everyone who views the picture, but this interpretation has two problems. First of all, as written above, the contest would make little sense in that case. The second counter-argument is that Sir Carnifex has written "protagonist" in brackets. I believe that we -- picture viewers -- aren't protagonists, just players who control the protagonist. )

Generally, if you believe that a question is ambigious, i.e. its meaning is not clear or it seems to have more correct answers, try to focus on the picture. The picture is meant to clear up any ambiguity. It's also needless to say that each (directly visible or indirectly deducible) detail might be important.

Eh, how confusing... hang on...

It's also important to note that when you see some odd or apparently incorrect element on the picture, there are two possibilities:

• Your guess is entirely wrong, and the picture element is OK.
• Your guess is OK, and the picture element is wrong (and as such, perhaps an answer to the "what is wrong" question)

One could say that this is unfair, because there is no way to decide which of the two is the case. Let's use our common sense. When you find suspiciously too many flaws in the picture, it has a good chance that your guess is wrong. This is why it's so important to examine each element and detail on the picture, and possibly deduce some indirect information from it as well. The picture tries to present typical features of the scene, and it's unlikely that more typical features are incorrect.

Regarding the possibility of multiple or conditional answers, I would like to emphasize another thing (at the risk of stating the obvious). When there is a yes/no question (e.g. anything that starts with "Does", "Do", "Will" etc. and ends in a question mark), we always expect a yes/no answer (with an explanation). Any such answer is worth more points than a multiple or conditional answer.

Regarding question #4.

I put protagonist in there because, in this particular picture, the view is supposed to be that of the protagonist. Answers for #4 are supposed to be based on what you can see in the picture. Some of you have been answering it like a trivia that does not require a picture. Since the questions seems to have been misunderstood by some, those who did misunderstand them should be able to correct answers to just #4 based on the clarification I posted here. Best wait for confirmation by Baronius on this one since I won't be around for the end result.

It's still a tricky question, though.

Yes, please, those who haven't used their replacement possibility yet should provide an unambigious answer to #4 (of course, the replacement submission allows any other corrections as well without any penalty points). It seems I will be the judge, because Sir Carnifex will be on vacation (everyone can decide whether this is good or bad Sir Carnifex made the questions and answers, but I will have to give 0 scores so I will be hated I guess). The replacement submission is a good possibility: for example, we also received a completely wrong guess to the scene itself, so I advise everyone (or those who feel it might be their entry) to read the first paragraph of my previous post again.

...this is far more complicated than any contest should be.
May I should just quit participating, lest I make an even bigger fool out of myself.

Feel free to express your doubts if that helps you to get rid of the excitement caused by the contest's difficulty Although the decision is up to every participant (and it can be changed in each week), someone with one of the best results of Week 1 shouldn't be considering to quit, in my opinion.

There is always a choice when organizing a contest. One could say that it's all about fun, so let's make easy questions. But wouldn't it be boring if all questions could be answered in a minute and everyone got 6/6 (or 5/6) points all the time? It wouldn't be exciting in my opinion, because everyone would know for 100% that their answers are correct. No surprise, no fun.

Yeah, I know. I'm not asking to lower the difficulty. It's just a little frustrating when you don't know the answer and a question confuses you, making you answer from a very different perspective (game, modding, for example) while you're indeed in second place and trying to keep it or improving it. Of course there's no real serious consequence for losing, nor is it bad if I do end up losing (which will happen anyway, is my guess), but it remains a contest. I don't know about the rest of you, but I play to win.

How many pictures are going to follow after this second one, anyway? I mean, we could be doing this until Christmas 2010 if we wanted to.

Everything is described in the initial post of this topic.


And unless you quit or another mod developer enters meanwhile, you probably will. I haven't seen any modder among the participants so far, and the task associated with the 10th picture will be BG2 mod creation (for 6 points too).

It's a contest, so anything can happen. I think the best is when you find the balance between the excitement to win and the easy-going approach. The latter one allows you to enjoy the contest even if you don't get high score, while the first one (if kept on moderate level) may cause beneficial stress and helps you to investigate each question in details. That is, I would want to win but also wouldn't be too disappointed if I couldn't win.

And of course, the real reason for these contests is so the evil organizers can laugh at those who get wrong answers to ridiculously difficult questions!

Actually not. But as the "artist" of these, ALL of these questions seem extraordinarily easy to me because I already know the answers. That makes it a bit more difficult in deciding how hard it is for someone who has to make a guess. Baronius is my only "Beta Guesser", so I just have to go by what he says.

That all makes sense.
And... the final picture will require modding?
Oh dear..

I plead innocence! That wasn't my idea.

me to

Gold Cross of Modding isn't given for free. Yes, it will require making a quest mod of approximately half the size of Improved Anvil. There will be one month to finish and submit the mod.

Joking apart, it will be just something simple... we don't know the details yet, but I would like it to offer much space for creativity & freedom, without requiring too many mod development skills from the participant.