Origins Awards 2010 Nominations - Discuss!

[Crothian]

And Cro, I think the Central Ohio RPG community is pretty insular. Having lived in Central Ohio my whole life, I've only been part of one club, and that was in college.

OSU in the mid 90's when I went there had a pretty large gaming club. The old Union's basement is were we would meet and fill many of the rooms with mostly D&D. THough there were many scattered groups across campaus that were not a part of the club as well. They even ran a yearly convention though I stopped going over a decade ago and haven't heard much about either since. When we put together the first Ohio Gamedays and used the Union as our meeting place some of the guys on campus I knew said that the club was not friendly to them and had no interest in being part of our gameday.

I know at many of the local stores they have weekly games so one could consider those club like. Ohio has a rather large gaming club that is state wide that I know of but never been a part of. I've never been that interested in gaming clubs.

 

[nedjer]

I'd kind of hoped that the non-shows were down to a return to the days when RPG players thought a win mentality was only fit for beardy hexgamers.

 

[Erik Mona]

Jim Lowder's post is spot on from my perspective. I think he accurately outlined some of the major challenges faced by the show, and I think the point about a downward spiral is particularly apt.

One of the best things Origins has going for it, frankly, is that it is NOT Gen Con. It's no where near as crazy as Gen Con, and the smaller size means that you can pretty much find 92% of all attending professionals at the Big Bar on 2 every night. That's GREAT for networking, and heck, just for saying "hi" to old friends.

As fewer and fewer publishers attend, there's less and less reason for freelancers and other industry folk to attend. We're very deep into self-fulfilling prophesy territory here, and at some point the gravity well is going to be impossible to escape.

Proximity to Gen Con is a huge problem, and one that Origins has dealt with since as long as I've been going to the convention (about 15 years). I can understand why staying in the same locale has some long-term cost savings, but for the show to escape Gen Con's shadow, it really needs to get its butt to a different month. I know the idea is to keep it in the summer to make it easier for children to attend, but I don't see a whole lot of children around the show one way or the other, and the convention is held on a weekend anyway, so I think this is an overrated reason to keep the convention in July.

One of the problems with putting the con in July, and one of the reasons I have heard GAMA folks cite as a problem with the con, is that publishers do not plan specific product launches to coincide with the show the way almost everyone does for Gen Con. That's due to a few factors:

1) The con no longer attracts enough RPG customers to make monkeying with the schedule worthwhile.

2) Everyone is going to time their big releases for a month later anyway, because while there are many things Origins can do to avoid a death spiral, they ain't never going to be Gen Con. A publisher like Paizo can only schedule (and produce!) so many "major" product releases, and it just doesn't make sense to bunch them so closely together. For one, most RPG companies can't afford major product investments within a month of one another, and adding two cons worth of expenses to ship a booth and a staff across the country on basically the same budget month is a recipe for disaster.

I really, really, really wish that Origins would experiment with a different month and perhaps even a different venue. I was not a regular attendee when Origins used to be a moving convention, but I hope the GAMA board and leadership have very seriously considered trying that again, and I further hope that the reasons they have decided not to do so in the last 15 years involve more than simple inertia.

The Gen Con shadow is probably the single largest contributor to the lack of attendees at the show. Moving the convention to a different month (or perhaps even a different season) would be, in my opinion, the smartest possible major change they could make to jump-start the convention and return it to its former glory.

Otherwise, I think it's just going to keep shrinking.

--Erik Mona
Publisher
Paizo Publishing

 

[Crothian]

and the smaller size means that you can pretty much find 92% of all attending professionals at the Big Bar on 2 every night. That's GREAT for networking, and heck, just for saying "hi" to old friends.

I'm sad to say they are doing a good job of killing this. A couple nights last year and maybe the year before they had gamer karaoke there. I've never seen the place so empty.

 

[nedjer]

I'm sad to say they are doing a good job of killing this. A couple nights last year and maybe the year before they had gamer karaoke there. I've never seen the place so empty.

And did you then seek out the person responsible and put their head down the nearest toilet. If not, I'd have to say take responsibility!

 

[Jolly_Blackburn]

GAMA need to do the same thing with the awards--figure out what the goal should be and how to get there. They could make the awards better, but there are fundamental issues with the way GAMA is structured that make that very difficult to achieve.

One of the things that hurt the awards I think was the constant reworking of the rules and the categories in recent years.

Tweaking is fine IMO. The need for new categories is always going to come up.

But for awhile there it seemed like the awards were being re-written/overhauled every year.

One year KODT was eligible. Next year it wasn't. Then it was again.

It was hard to keep up.

The effort to exclude gamer comics because they were dominating the magazine category was understandable but I felt they went about the wrong way in handling it. They should have just barred comics period and kept the magazine category IMO instead of dropping it.

For an award to mean something I think the rules should be fairly consistent.

Having said that I have no real beef with the Awards. It's great to get one still. I'm happy for others who get the honor.

I'd just like to see them settle on a process and stick with it instead of changing it up every year.

 

[JLowder]

One of the things that hurt the awards I think was the constant reworking of the rules and the categories in recent years.

Agreed. And KotDT has been somewhat badly served by the frequent changes--is it fiction or is it non-fiction, or is it something else altogether? The awards would certainly benefit from a set of stable baseline definitions created to make it clear to publishers and even the jurors what is and is not eligible, and why. (eg. What qualifies something as a new edition?)

Cheers,
Jim

 

[Jolly_Blackburn]

Agreed. And KotDT has been somewhat badly served by the frequent changes--is it fiction or is it non-fiction, or is it something else altogether? The awards would certainly benefit from a set of stable baseline definitions created to make it clear to publishers and even the jurors what is and is not eligible, and why. (eg. What qualifies something as a new edition?)

Cheers,
Jim

True dat.

That being said we're not bitter about it.

We've always supported GAMA and the Origins Awards. I can't imagine sorting it all out year to year is easy and I'm glad I only have to show up.

We'll be there this year applauding the winners whoever they are.

 

[Tush Hog]

I would like to see A Song of Ice and Fire win. I love that system.

 

[MerricB]

To provide closure in this thread... (and information gleaned from Critical Hits):

Historical Miniatures Figure or Line of Figures
Wings of War Albatross D.III - winner!
15mm Parachute Rifle Company
15mm Ming Chinese
28mm British Napoleonic Infantry
28mm World War I: Great War in Africa

Historical Miniatures Game Rules Supplement
Flames of War: North Africa - winner!
Eternal Empire: The Ottomans at War
Battles of the Seven Years War: Austria vs. Prussia
Fields of Battle: Atacar es Vencer!
Commonwealth Skirmish Scenarios

Historical Miniatures Game Rules
Flames of War: Open Fire
Wings of War: World War II, Deluxe Edition - winner!
Napoleon’s Battles, 3rd Edition
“La Salle” Napoleonic Tactical Wargame Rules
Warlord Games Black Power Rulebook

Historical Board Game or Expansion
The Hell of Stalingrad
Richard III: War of the Roses
Conflict of Heroes: Storms of Steel - winner!
D-Day at Omaha Beach
Unhappy King Charles

Game-Related Book
BattleTech: 25 Years of Art and Fiction - winner!
The Best of All Flesh
Cthulhu 101
Deluge
Legend of the Five Rings: Death at Koten

Game Accessories
Arkham Horror Dice Set
d20Pro
Forsaken Lands Poster Map
Fortress of Redemption
Knights of the Dinner Table - winner!

Miniature Figures or Miniature Line
Duke Rathat, Dragon Lord
Kings of War: Elves
Marvel HeroClix: Hammer of Thor Expansion - winner!
Monsterpocalypse Series 4
Warhammer Armies: Skaven

Miniature Game Rules
BattleTech: Strategic Operations - winner!
HAVOC: Tactical Miniatures Warfare
Larger Than Life
Warhammer 40k: Planetstrike
Warhammer Prime Mk II

Roleplaying Game Supplement
Big Damn Heroes Handbook - winner!
The Day After Ragnarok
Seattle 2072
Warriors & Warlocks
Weird War II

Roleplaying Game
Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space
Eclipse Phase - winner!
FantasyCraft
A Song of Ice and Fire
Supernatural Roleplaying Game

Children’s, Family, or Party Game
Are You the Traitor? - winner!
Duck! Duck! SAFARI!
Pack and Stack
Ren Faire
Word on the Street

Traditional Card Game
The Isle of Dr. Necreaux
Martian Fluxx
Poo - winner!
The Stars are Right
Thunderstone

Board Game
Castle Panic
Endeavor
Small World
Space Hulk - winner!
Steam

Cheers!