Award Shows are Good Actually

-

 


The Ennie awards have just been awarded for another years, and as is tradition, this means that there has been a load of chatter about award shows and their merits. This year saw a bumper crop of nominees, including several of my Blogger colleagues. Some of them even won! While I hesitate to claim total Blogging cultural victory, we're getting there.

The Ennies are of course not the only award concerned with TTRPGs - there are also the Diana Jones award, the Sprinties, the Rammies, The Awards,, the CRIT awards, the Bloggies, and the Lizzies (as well as various categories in other awards, like the Origins Awards and the Nebulas, and I am sure I am missing some).

Most award shows bill themselves as recognising and rewarding excellence in their field, which is a noble goal, but also almost entirely subjective. Excellence according to whom? In awards decided by a panel of judges, it will always be according to their opinions, with or without a judging rubric, and when you have the popular vote? That's almost always just a popularity contest. Ennie award for best game? That's going to be the nominee that most people like/have heard of and think sound cool. On a recent Between Two Cairns Patreon episode, the guys discussed the Ennies (which Yochai famously does not care much about, and what would make a for a good award procedure. Ironically, their conclusion, winners selected by a group of experts who could potentially be voted in as judges, is actually remarkably similar to the Ennie nomination procedure, if you just ignore the final step of public voting to select the gold and silver "winners".

However, there is another serious issue for any award that wants to cover the entirety of the tabletop space: there are way too many games to play all of them. For an award such as the Ennies, I expect that all entries will be skimmed, a subsection will be read, and a yet smaller subsection will be played. In any case, any award will show at least one of two things: excellence according to the judges, or relative size of fanbase that can be mobilized to vote. These things are not necessarily uninteresting, even if they are not some objective criterion of excellence. However, they are not what I like the most about awards, what I like is that they spark conversation.

If a favourite game is nominated, or wins, people will be excited to talk about it. An Ennies nominees slate is a great conversation starter, and a primer for some good works to take a look at, but what's almost even better is when people complain that their favourite is missing. As the list makers of Rock, Paper, Shotgun were wont to say: if you don't see your favourite game in our top 100 list, it's because it's at 101. I think that is key to enjoying awards, we should see then as conversation starters rather than The Final Word.

Was Triangle Agency the best RPG released in the eligibility period for the 2025 Ennies? I don't know, and frankly, I don't really care either. What I do care about is hearing your arguments for why something else should have one (or defending Triangle Agency's win). Awards are community events, and they are at their best when they get us talking about games (and not the award show's dodgy practices). Over at Taskerland, Moreau reviewed all the short-form adventures, and while I don't agree with all of their conclusions (there is nothing wrong with designing a product for a specific physical form factor, rather than for easy home printing), this is exactly the thing award shows can bring us. Conversation starters! Similarly, Moreau's conclusion has left me curious - indeed the short form adventure  is dominated by OSR-style modules, but I wonder, could this just be because the OSR is the scene most concerned with this type of content? If most short-form modules are for OSR games, it stands to reason that this would be reflected in the nominees. (This is the jumping-on point for anyone who knows of a great non-OSR module they felt was snubbed to blog about it. Keep the conversation going!)

There it is - I like awards! Not so much because of the awards themselves, but for the conversation that they spark, which I think can be hugely interesting, regardless of who wins or loses the actual trophy. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Toppling the pillars of the OSR: against lethality

-
Image
  One of the accepted wisdoms in the OSR (as codified in e.g. the Principia Apocrypha ), as well at the NSR (as defined by Yochai Gal or Pandatheist) is that lethality is good, and a core component of OSR/NSR play, because it means that player choice has real consequence. I do not entirely disagree with this, but I also do not entirely agree. My opinion aligns more with Pandatheist's follow-up post , arguing that "consequential" would be a better term. Perhaps my brain is poisoned with modern "trad" ideology, but when playing longer campaigns rather than one-shots, I find that the characters tend to evolve beyond vehicle's for the players' problem solving, developing interesting quirks and personalities that it would be a shame to lose because of an unlucky dice-roll (because that is one OSR tenet I do still believe in - the sanctity of the dice result). A dramatic death because of calculated risk gone wrong, or a heroic last stand against an ogre whil...
Read more

What is the Game, and What Makes a Good System?

-
Image
  In a confluence of events, I ran my first session of Mothership this week, after having played it most weeks for the last six months or so, coinciding with the Paul Beakley of Indie Game Reading Club posting his review of the game. I think it is a well articulated critique, echoing some points made in Dwiz' review over on Knight at the Opera (now sadly unavailable). However, as a self-professed "system-curious indie guy", I think Paul underestimates the value of a simple but effective chassis (or at least, he comes to the conclusion that it is not what he wants out of a game). The strength of the stress system is how simple it is to interact with - yes, the rules in the booklet may not be enough to fully drive play on their own, but perhaps that was never the intention? I would argue that the core rules of Mothership offer just half of the game, with the other half left open to be filled by modules or an enterprising game master: The quality of the rules should the...
Read more

Reality Check: Songbirds 3e

-
Image
  It is said that no plan survives contact with reality, and I find that the same is often true of RPG rulesets. Of course, one can make a concerted effort to follow the rules as written, but in many cases, you will end up with your own table's version of the game, having discarded some bits of rules that did not click with you, and added some house rules of your own. I have been running Songbirds 3e by snow roughly weekly for most of the year, and in this post, I will try to sum up my experiences with playing it, rather than just what's in the book. Songbirds is, in its bones, a very simple system, relying to a large extent on vibes as its selling point. Fortunately, the vibes are impeccable, and absolutely managed to sell me on the game. At its core are four attributes, each with its associated skills tracked with 5e style proficiency. Checks are standard d20+modifier vs DC rolls, though unlike 5e attributes only have a single value acting as their modifier. Combat is done ...
Read more