Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 1719866" data-attributes="member: 1288">As a professional RPG writer, let me chime in on the notion of awards for specific contributors. (Best author, best artist, etc.)In brief, please God no!!!To put it bluntly, there is no possible way for such an award to be executed or judged fairly. The vast majority of books out there are collaborative efforts. Using myself as an example, I've been doing this work for almost four years now. In that time, I have had exactly three projects on which I was the sole author--and one of those was a novel.Look through a given WotC hardback, or Vampire: The Requiem, or the like. Multiple authors, with no indication of who wrote which sections. And even if the nominating companies were willing to send you the info on who wrote what, how are the fans--that is, the voters--going to know? And even if you told them, how many readers actually pay attention to which parts of the book were better written than others? Sure, if one section is notably good or notably bad, they might remember, but it doesn't happen often. This is especially true considering that part of the job of a developer is to make the entire book speak in one voice.Let's go further yet. The voters aren't going to have access to the pre-developed/edited manuscripts, so even if you're nominating based on those, they're voting on the published material--which once again includes possible rewrites by editors.And those are just the initial concerns. How many works do you judge by? What if an author is normally very solid, but has a bad book under his belt, and it's that book that draws the most attention for the year? What if the reverse is true? You simply cannot judge the quality of an author by a single work.It's simply something that I wouldn't want to see, because I don't think it's feasible to do fairly or accurately. And that's speaking as both a writer and a gamer. The Ennies Awards are for games and products; let's keep them about the products, please.</blockquote>

Verification