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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Conaill" data-source="post: 1723043" data-attributes="member: 1264">Wow, so many things to comment on. Let me just go through the thread and tackle them one by one:Protestations from the current judges notwithstanding, given the number of judges and number of categories, it's unlikely that all of the judges would be equally knowledgeable about all the categories. I'm not assigning any blame here, mind you! I think the current and past judges have done a wonderful job. It's just a fact of life that most people tend to be most interested in a smaller set of categories, and we shouldn't necessarily require people to be up on *all* of them, as a prerequisite to be a judge for the Ennies.Perhaps judges could indicate which categories they would like to judge. If you prefer well-rounded judges, you could require them to sign up for at least 5 categories (so you don't get an art judge who doesn't know squat about roleplaying, for example). It would make the judge selection process slightly more complicated, but as the Ennies' scope becomes larger, I think it's worth considering this. (Note that this can be an entirely *separate* issue from which community the judges should be drawn from. I do think we have enough in-house expertise to judge most of the categories.)Cartography, Interior Art, Cover Art, and Graphic Design & Layout? That's 4 out of the 11 awards devoted to "looks" over "content". I would greatly favor reducing the art&layout categories to two or three, and making room for one or two more "content" categories (d20/OGL vs non-d20/OGL for example, or fantasy vs sci-fi). Dextra's later list still has 4 out of 16... a much better proportion, but it doesn't exactly follow Psion's recommendation to remove one category for every one you add. If we do shrink it down from 16, one of those 4 should probably be the first one to go.Cartography and Cover Art are the two most obvious ones, because in most cases that boils down to ONE single piece of art. I'd much rather have an "artist of the year" or even an "artpiece of the year" award than an "artpiece of the year - cover art" and an "artpiece of the year - cartography" award...I think this is CRUCIAL, as long as the EN World is still very much d20/OGL dominated (and make no mistake about it, right now it *is*). Totally agree on both these points. Last time I gave a presentation to more than 10 people, I made sure I had a CD backup and one on a USB memory stick (plus I made sure I had a downloadable copy online as well). Never trust your computer to behave for any sort of presentation or demo.As for music, there's quite a few people putting out rpg related music or other audio. Doesn't matter if theyve been nominated for an Ennie or not. I'm sure if you contact the people putting out the RPG Sound Mixer or even Baldur's Gate, they'd be willing to provide background music in exchange for a little free publicity. And by all means, do put up that "GM Hold Music" during the intermission! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> I have to agree with Aaron here. Although it *seems* like the current voting procedure is more fair because it allows you to vote only on those products you are familiar with, it has some very serious drawbacks! It seems to me that this system was chosen on a somewhat ad-hoc basis, without much regard to current understanding of voting theory etc.In particular, allowing people to vote for only one single choice opens up some very serious imbalances, as Aaron pointed out. Secondly, allowing people to assign a 1-10 "weight" to each vote also makes it a lot more "abuseable". For example, if you really want one specific system to win, the best voting strategy is to vote "10" for that product, and "1" for all the others in the category. It is always in your best interest to vote for *all* the products, even if you are not familiar with them!Aaron mentioned some alternatives. At the very *least*, you should only count people that have voted for 2 or more choices in a category. Perhaps have people rank the products instead of assigning an unconstrained score (so if you only vote for 2 out of the 5 choices, ranking them 1 and 5 would have the same meaning as ranking them 1 and 2; and "ranking" only a single choice is meaningless). One-Person-One-Vote is ugly, and I'm not sure it would be better than the current scheme. Personally, I'd prefer approval voting (check off as many products as you want) over OPOV.</blockquote>

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