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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="grodog" data-source="post: 3032189" data-attributes="member: 1613">I think self-nomination is fine:  it's worked well to date, but requiring some seconds/thirds/whatevers from the community is a worthwhile idea.  Would seconds posted at other sites (rpg.net, The Forge, etc.) be valid seconds?I also like Umbran's idea of judges needing to rating a product so that folks have a sense of the judges' thinking prior to voting for her or him.  Perhaps having the judges provide an evaluation for one of the previous year's nominated-but-not-winning products would be worthwhile, or perhaps for an entire category of nominatees (all of the Best Adventure [or whatever] books).  That would give voters a sense of how the judges rate a range of products, and what matters to the judge (this judge is a nitpicker on editing, that one hates bad cartography, this one is very influenced by the artwork, this one loves gaming fiction, this one hates splatbooks, this one love WotC products, this one hates OGL books, etc., etc.).  On the whole judges conflicts of interest/appearances of conflicts of interest thing, I think I understand Mark's points about wanting to create an environment where the possible perception of a conflict of interest should be avoided, but, in general, I fall on the side of those who have argued that established reviewers (whether staff or not) are already well-qualified to render critcial evaluations of products.  Plus, if Umbran's above idea is adopted (to provide a primer on each judge's judgements, so to speak), then I would hope that the judge primer info may provide sufficient detail for the community, so that during voting, the community can weed out those who are deemed less-qualified (whether due to experience, possible conflicts of interest, lack of interest in their judging approach, etc.).  I think that's a good idea, and also think it may be worthwhile to consider carving out the OGL books vs. the d20 books vs. the non-OGL/non-d20 books, so that there's clearer distinction between them, especially with the increasing number of OGL-only books that are entering the market.  As others have commented, I think defining the categories more tightly would be good, so that campaign settings aren't in the adventures or the supplements categories, for example.  I'm don't think that limiting the number of categories that a book can compete in is a good idea:  if a book could viably fit into two categories, it's already at a disadvantage in both categories compared to books that focus on providing just one type of content (example:  a monster book with adventures in it, a la NG's Glades of Death).  If the catgories are defined more tightly, with language along the lines of "in order to be eligible in the [adventure/campaign setting/supplement/etc.] category, at least one third of the content in the book needs to clearly fit in the category" vs. "primary focus" as in the existing definitions, then I think that may help to unmuddy the waters a little.  I also like the suggestion that Glyfair made, that portions of books could be nominated (i.e., the adventure X in an anthology of adventures or in a campaign setting book, the short fiction Y that prefaces a rulebook, the chapter on new rules Z in a setting book, etc.).  The Origins Awards have done this for a number of years, FWIW.  This would be done at the publisher's discretion, of course, but it may be worthwhile to be able to recognize self-contained portions of products for their excellence, especially when some books/projects are written/designed by teams of writers (i.e., overall this book was average, but wow, the chapter on Crafting Artifacts was phenomenal).  I think this sounds fine in concept, but when you get into the lands of trinkets, how do you judge the quality of one mug with a logo on it versus another? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I made some comments above, but also think that the best web enhancement shouldn't be allowed to include best web site:  I think most folks think of WE's as single items that are freebies, generally tied to a product but sometimes a product in and of themselves; so why allow for the possibility of further category confusion by allowing a web site to also be considered a web enhancement?Semi-relatedly, how does the Grognard Award currently work, in terms of the judges selecting the winners, and are there any plans to open that category to general voting too?  If so, given the number of old school gamers on ENWorld (see Lanefan's poll thread @ <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=170490" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=170490</a>:  30%+ of ENWorlders began to game in or prior to 1980), and the general resurgence of old school gaming that's underway, have you considered expanding the Grognard Award into a small group of categories: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">best grognard publisher</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">best grognard web site</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">best grognard discussion forum/chat room/ICQ channel/etc.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">best grognard adventure module</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">best grognard campaign setting</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">best grognard maps</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">best grognard artwork</li> </ul>Many of these would obvoiusly overlap with the main awards categories, so I'm not sure how you'd juggle that, but I liked the idea of the 2006 Grognard Award, and think it would be cool to see this expand.</blockquote>

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