ENnies 2019 voting is now open + ENnies Dream Date auction on eBay!

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zweihander

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This is your friendly neighborhood Zweihander, reminding you that the 2019 ENnies voting booth is now open!

I didn't submit this year, but am a strong supporter of the ENnie Awards. Anyone who tells you they don't matter is ignorant of how it can propel your game towards a whole new audience. Getting noticed when D&D and Pathfinder are dominating the conversation is tough, but the ENnies contribute in concrete ways that both recognize the hard work designers and teams put in, while raising awareness about RPGs to larger, industry-wide audiences. Zweihander Grim & Perilous RPG is not the only Cinderella story to be found, either – there are a multitude of RPGs that have won ENnies that have lead to new work, new connections, larger distributions, more sales and ultimately, recognition for the hard work people put in to making RPGs a reality.

While imperfect, the ENnies remain THE standard for Gen Con RPG awards ceremonies and is the only democratically-driven awards out there. No secret committees picking their favorites. No grognards sitting in a back room deciding who wins. It's all up to you, the fans.

Votes matter. Your opinion matters. And there's a ton of amazing indie RPGs and OSR tabletop role-playing games in the running made by a diverse pool of talent - both new and old - that needs our support.

Please begin by voting here: http://www.ennie-awards.com/vote/2019/

You can also follow this handy, dandy guide I've created to share out with your m8s that you voted on social media:
 
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I don’t even own Kult or have much interest in it, but I would vote for it based on what I’ve read at the Pub.
 
I looked through all the categories and honestly I've only read like one game out of all of them. (Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd Edition). I think this is kind of the problem with any awards like this. Very few people have read all the games to really vote with any kind of accuracy.

I mean, I guess I could vote on the cover art award, as that at least I can actually judge accurately to my tastes.
 
I looked through all the categories and honestly I've only read like one game out of all of them. (Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd Edition). I think this is kind of the problem with any awards like this. Very few people have read all the games to really vote with any kind of accuracy.

I mean, I guess I could vote on the cover art award, as that at least I can actually judge accurately to my tastes.

What did you think of Legacy?

I was pretty disappointed in Dream Askew/Dream Apart. I felt the original Dream Askew was a fine mini-storygame and was really looking forward to Dream Apart as a Jewish fantasy game.

A Jewish fantasy game is oddly something I’ve long thought someone should do. My forum name is the taken from the wizard character from Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician which is about a young woman and a Jewish magician and his conflict with a rabbi in a Hungarian village before the disaster of WWII. Ever since reading that very good book I wondered about an rpg version of Jewish magic.

But I found that the revised Dream Askew suffered from the storygame danger of too amorphous a ruleset that left the game feeling vague and directionless. Dream Apart being essentially written as an expansion of DA ended up with the same flaws. And I like a good storygame. Bummer.
 
Legacy is interesting if you don't mind the zoomed out abstract faction part of the game. I did really like the idea of generations and playing new characters each generation from your faction. I'd definitely play or run it if I had the right group. Any more detailed than that and I'd probably need to refresh myself on the rules. I read it originally not long after it came back and I've read a lot of games since then (though apparently none from this year :tongue:)
 
Legacy is interesting if you don't mind the zoomed out abstract faction part of the game. I did really like the idea of generations and playing new characters each generation from your faction. I'd definitely play or run it if I had the right group. Any more detailed than that and I'd probably need to refresh myself on the rules. I read it originally not long after it came back and I've read a lot of games since then (though apparently none from this year :tongue:)

I’ve heard the revised edition really improves on the ruleset and fleshes out options so I was interested in checking it out.
 
Legacy is a really daring and interesting design. One of my big regrets over the past few years has been my inability to carve out time to play it.

I also regret not getting time to play Invisible Sun yet. These two games got a lot of love on my ballot nonetheless.

Shameless Self-Plug: The Alexandrian is nominated for Best Online Content. If my little blog has ever proven useful or insightful to you, please consider ranking me somewhere on your list.

Thanks for sending up the flare, Daniel.
 
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What did you think of Legacy?

I really enjoyed Legacy. It allowed the group to world build pretty effortless through playing in a pretty traditional way, and the results were generally pretty cool.

I agree with EmperorNorton though it really requires the right group. Every player needs to take ownership of their faction and be prepared to not just to sit back and be a player.
 
The vote for cover art was hard one. I didn't even play Coriolis yeat, but damn, Emissary Lost cover art is just too good.
Deciding between, Emissary Lost, Kult and Terror in Australis was hard.
 
Legacy is a really daring and interesting design. One of my big regrets over the past few years has been my inability to carve out time to play it.

I also regret not getting time to play Invisible Sun yet. These two games got a lot of love on my ballot nonetheless.

Shameless Self-Plug: The Alexandrian is nominated for Best Online Content. If my little blog has ever proven useful or insightful to you, please consider ranking me somewhere on your list.

Thanks for sending up the flare, Daniel.
I voted for you before even seeing this post. Do I get a virtual cookie, or something:grin:?
 
I looked through all the categories and honestly I've only read like one game out of all of them.
I think this is true for a lot of people; I have only read a handful of the products listed this year.

The Alexandrian is nominated for Best Online Content. If my little blog has ever proven useful or insightful to you, please consider ranking me somewhere on your list.
It has and I will.
 
I always wonder about the voting process they have in the ENNies as anybody can vote for the nominees, regardless of whether they have any experience of them, and who gets to choose the nominees in the first place?

Anyway Kult get's my vote for anything, and I've found a few other things that I liked during the last year which voted for. Not entirely surprisingly, after doing some hachet job articles over the last year about it on the ENWorld site, V5 gets no nominations - despite winning the Origins award.
 
I always wonder about the voting process they have in the ENNies as anybody can vote for the nominees, regardless of whether they have any experience of them, and who gets to choose the nominees in the first place?

Anyway Kult get's my vote for anything, and I've found a few other things that I liked during the last year which voted for. Not entirely surprisingly, after doing some hachet job articles over the last year about it on the ENWorld site, V5 gets no nominations - despite winning the Origins award.

Publishers have to submit products for nomination. If they didn’t, then there’s no way it could get nominated.

That’s how it works: the judges, who are picked on the ballot by voters the year before, get submissions from willing publishers, then narrow it down to the selections that appear on the ballot.
 
Not entirely surprisingly, after doing some hachet job articles over the last year about it on the ENWorld site, V5 gets no nominations - despite winning the Origins award.

Quel surprise!
 
Publishers have to submit products for nomination. If they didn’t, then there’s no way it could get nominated.

That’s how it works: the judges, who are picked on the ballot by voters the year before, get submissions from willing publishers, then narrow it down to the selections that appear on the ballot.
I think there is a fair amount of swinginess in this process.

Which RPG award is picked by a secret committee?
The Diana Jones award is, quite literally.
 
Which RPG award is picked by a secret committee?

There are four major awards in the industry. Three of them operate by secret committee:

1. Diana Jones Award
2. Indie Groundbreakers
3. Origin Awards (there are on-site voting for popularity, but the main awards that matter are judged in secret)

ENnies remain the premier awards ceremony for Gen Con. They are also the only democratically-driven RPG award, as judges are publicly voted for the year prior, then the judges narrow down the titles and finally, the general public votes on what they like the most.
 
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Ratings for hundreds of RPG products I mostly don't know or care about... sweet.
 
Honestly, I get people's annoyance with "secret committee" awards, but I'll be honest, popularity contests aren't exactly better. At least with a committee, the people have likely at least read all the entries. And you can learn what a committee likes you can guess whether that award will be useful for helping you decide on a game.

On the other hand, popularity contests are just that. Whatever game has rabid enough fans to vote for it in troves.
 
I know that in the past, a large group of people used to (usually sarcastically) downplay the RPGnet darlings every year.
 
Honestly, I get people's annoyance with "secret committee" awards, but I'll be honest, popularity contests aren't exactly better. At least with a committee, the people have likely at least read all the entries. And you can learn what a committee likes you can guess whether that award will be useful for helping you decide on a game.

On the other hand, popularity contests are just that. Whatever game has rabid enough fans to vote for it in troves.
"The greatest fallacy of democracy is that everyone's opinion is worth the same."

Robert A. Heinlein
 
Honestly, I get people's annoyance with "secret committee" awards, but I'll be honest, popularity contests aren't exactly better. At least with a committee, the people have likely at least read all the entries. And you can learn what a committee likes you can guess whether that award will be useful for helping you decide on a game.

On the other hand, popularity contests are just that. Whatever game has rabid enough fans to vote for it in troves.
Yes. involvement of judges makes it more likely that I will actually learn about a new game. Popularity contest awards tend to bring attention to games that everyone already knows about.

The Ennies actually seem to be somewhere in between. They aren't that democratic as the judges' provide voters with narrow selection of five nominations in each category meant that there were only a few categories where I was able to cast a vote for the product that I wanted. Five products in each category hardly seems enough to choose between for the current RPG scene if they want to sell it as the people's choice.
 
I always thought the Origin Awards were the cream of the crop for awards in the RPG hobby because of their long history and the list of impressive winners going back throughout the years, especially the first twenty years.
 
I remember when they tried to set up the UK version of the US Rock & Roll Hall of Fame about 20 years ago. They had the worst possible combination of committee and popular voting. Essentially, they selected five acts in committee, and then ran a series of TV shows for each decade from the 1950s onwards (1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s) with a selection of ten acts for the public to vote for. They then collated the results:

Pre-selected: Elvis, The Beatles, Bob Marley, Madonna, U2.
Voted (per decade): Cliff Richard, The Rolling Stones, Queen, Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams (!).

You'll note this was presented in a final show as being the best ten rock acts of the 20th Century! Think about that for a minute, when you are flicking through your music collection….

Some bands, like The Who or The Police weren't even mentioned in the shows they ran. They tried to catch up with some sheepishly late awards - including for The Who - in the following years, but the event only ran for a couple more years before they gave up. It was all a bit embarrassing.

I agree that it's sometimes hard to get award nomination processes done well - both voting and committee selection have problems. However, the proof is usually in the pudding. I do find the ENWorld non-selection of V5 a bit incongruous with their winning of the Origins awards (including the popular fan-based award), and I could also cite some other game products that look a bit conspicuous by their absence. Including this site, for example...
 
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I remember when they tried to set up the UK version of the US Rock & Roll Hall of Fame about 20 years ago. They had the worst possible combination of comittee and popular voting. Essentially, they selected five acts in committee, and then ran a series of TV shows for each decade from the 1950s onwards (1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s) with a selection of ten acts for the public to vote for. They then collated the results:

Pre-selected: Elvis, The Beatles, Bob Marley, Madonna, U2.
Voted (per decade): Cliff Richard, The Rolling Stones, Queen, Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams (!).

You'll note this was presented in a final show as being the best 10 acts of the 20th Century!

Some bands, like The Who or The Police weren't even mentioned in the shows they ran. They tried to catch up with some sheepishly late awards - including The Who - in the following years, but the event only ran for a couple more years before they gave up. It was all a bit embarrassing.

Also the rather classic issue of confusing rock n roll and pop music. Just because rock n roll was pop music for many decades doesn’t mean all pop music is rock n roll or all rock n roll is pop music.
 
Also the rather classic issue of confusing rock n roll and pop music. Just because rock n roll was pop music for many decades doesn’t mean all pop music is rock n roll or all rock n roll is pop music.
Well that's a difficult issue to determine sometimes - but either way, the final list they came up with was….frustratingly bad.
 
I remember when they tried to set up the UK version of the US Rock & Roll Hall of Fame about 20 years ago. They had the worst possible combination of committee and popular voting. Essentially, they selected five acts in committee, and then ran a series of TV shows for each decade from the 1950s onwards (1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s) with a selection of ten acts for the public to vote for. They then collated the results:

Pre-selected: Elvis, The Beatles, Bob Marley, Madonna, U2.
Voted (per decade): Cliff Richard, The Rolling Stones, Queen, Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams (!).

You'll note this was presented in a final show as being the best ten rock acts of the 20th Century! Think about that for a minute, when you are flicking through your music collection….

 
Sometimes, people get hung up on genres - some argue that The Beatles weren't a rock band for example, but I think a lot of their music was more 'rock' than some other rock bands that nobody questions. I think the rock music genre is pretty broad, although it's what I would suggest is most archetypally represented by Led Zeppelin….

Actually, could do another thread for the best rock acts of each decade somewhere else on this site.
 
Sometimes, people get hung up on genres - some argue that The Beatles weren't a rock band for example, but I think a lot of their music was more 'rock' than some other rock bands that nobody questions. I think the rock music genre is pretty broad, although it's what I would suggest is most archetypally represented by Led Zeppelin….

Actually, could do another thread for the best rock acts of each decade somewhere else on this site.

I have a pretty broad defintion too but I don't think it is a synonym for pop music either. Pop music existed long before rock n roll and will exist long after it.
 
Anyone wanna be my date to the ENnie Awards ceremony at GenCon 2019?

ENnies Dream Date is an auction to sit with Grim & Perilous Studios at the awards ceremony + get some #ZweihanderRPG books. 100% of proceeds go towards sponsoring the ENnies ceremony. Here's the prize pack:
  • Zweihänder Grim & Perilous RPG: Revised Core Rulebook (pdf and print),
  • Main Gauche: Grim & Perilous Supplement (pdf and print),
  • Character Folio (pdf and print),
  • GM screen (pdf and print),
  • Monster Cards (pdf+print),
  • Injury & Mishap Cards (pdf and print),
  • One voucher of Zweihander Player’s Handbook (pdf and print) as it releases in December.
  • Drinks at the ENnies (must be 21 or older).
Wanna sit with me? I need two dates! Bid below, and please help spread the word!

Dream Date #1: http://bit.ly/dreamdate1
Dream Date #2: http://bit.ly/dreamdate2

10867

Publishers participating this year include:
  • Andrew McMeel Universal
  • Grim & Perilous Studios
  • Cubicle 7
  • Chaosium
  • Pelgrane Press
  • Alligator Alley Entertainment
  • Magpie Games
  • Peterson Games
  • ENnies Judges

Learn more: http://www.ennie-awards.com/blog/sit-with-your-favorite-creators-at-the-2019-ennies-as-a-dream-date/
 
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