Why aren't you voting?

[JoeGKushner]

Perhaps I should have said OGL/d20. Things that are not RAW D&D.

Not a problem.

For me, the RAW is a set of guidelines. I'm perfectly happy running my Shackled City campaign with all sorts of dials flipped up to action like the use of action points, the save vs. fortitue to avoid dying as opposed to -10 hit points ,reserve points to cover the fact that there's no cleric, etc...

On the other hand, I'm also not above using stuff like Grim Tales, etc... to craft a Warhammer style world where fighting is probably going to be inevitable at one point, but also painful.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Being a judge is a hard enough job without having to worry about looking over your shoulder for fear of offending a publisher.

I just want to quote this for emphasis, as I was verbally abused by an author because his book wasn't nominated. I was told point blank (with a lot of finger pointing in my face) that his book was the most important RPG book written in several years, and we were idiots not to nominate it. I don't want to have to walk around at GenCon and watch my email justifying my (and the other judges) votes.

 

[Dextra]

Increasing Transparency

I don't know if increasing transparency is such a big priority for me.

Ensuring the continuing viability of the Awards is.

Now if increasing transparency would really make a large difference to the number of publishers entering, or double the number of voter turnout, or make hundreds of more fans show up to the ceremony, then we shall be as clear as glass!

Until then, I'll protect the judges from those who would harass them, and I'll try and reduce their stress, not add to it.

 

[tetsujin28]

Voting for ENnies judges is going on right now in athread sticked to the top of General Discuission. But the voter turn out is pretty bad. So, why are you not voting?

'Cause I don't vote for any other online industry thing?

 

[Conaill]

A few questions for those people regularly doing reviews: Have you experienced this sort of behavior from publishers as well? Do you think it is a worse problem for the Ennies than for reviews? Should we move to anonymous reviews, to shield the reviewers from harassment?

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

A few questions for those people regularly doing reviews: Have you experienced this sort of behavior from publishers as well? Do you think it is a worse problem for the Ennies than for reviews? Should we move to anonymous reviews, to shield the reviewers from harassment?

I can't answer this from personal experience (due to my low review count), but I do know there have been reviewers who were accused of purposefully giving a publisher low scores. There are also a few cases where publishers have dropped reviewers from their distribution lists.

The relationship between the reviewer and publisher is quite a bit different than between judge and publisher. Staff reviewers receive many of their products from the publishers, and if the publisher did not know who was reviewing what, they wouldn't be able to get the products to review in the first place unless they buy them, which leads to a narrower selection of reviews.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

That's what I thought you might say. I definitely understand that you would want to shield the judges from any repercussions. But note that it's not really that much different from writing a review - that is a *lot* more public, and often a lot more specific. Having the Ennies judges be a "faceless entity" does run somewhat counter to the goal of increased transparency, no?

Here is another way to think of the judges voting. It's similar to the difference between reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews and watching the Acadamy Awards. You know what Roger thinks of a film when he reviews it, but you have no idea who the acadamy voters are or what they voted for. You could probably find a list (or partial list) of the acadamy, but unless they come out and say what film they voted for, you are not going to know who voted for what.

I'm not in any way trying to compare the ENnies to the Oscars, but there are parallels between the process, just on much different scales.

 

[Vocenoctum]

Seriously? WotC has chosen not to enter the ENies for the past few years.

I think this past year WotC decided not to enter, but the previous year (IIRC), they couldn't because of the OGL thing. Game products must be OGL/ have a certain bit of OGL material, or something. So, basically D&D doesn't count as a D20 Game. It's a catch 22, if WotC enters and wins, they'd not really get credit for the win. If they don't enter, they're considered not to be up to the challenge.

The only impact the ENnies could have on WotC is if they lost, and that'd just be bad press, so what's the point?

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

I think this past year WotC decided not to enter, but the previous year (IIRC), they couldn't because of the OGL thing.

Not true, they could have entered, but chose not to respond to us when we contacted them two years ago.

 

[Conaill]

Here is another way to think of the judges voting. It's similar to the difference between reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews and watching the Acadamy Awards. You know what Roger thinks of a film when he reviews it, but you have no idea who the acadamy voters are or what they voted for. You could probably find a list (or partial list) of the acadamy, but unless they come out and say what film they voted for, you are not going to know who voted for what.

I'm not in any way trying to compare the ENnies to the Oscars, but there are parallels between the process, just on much different scales.

I agree there are some very clear parallels - I just disagree with you on where those parallels lie.

At the Oscars, the voting is done by 6000+ members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is a very broad group of people with a direct interest in the movie industry. I think that group of people would be more analogous to the ENWorld (and now expanded beyond ENWorld) voting public. I don't really care to know how all those thousands of Academy members have voted on the past, nor do I care how all the hundreds (thousands?) of individual roleplaying fans have voted on the Ennie nominees.

To really have an analogous situation, you'd have to first select a group of judges, who then nominate a shortlist of movies to be voted on by the full membership. Now, if *that* body of judges that preselects the nominees were a "faceless entity", don't you think that would seriosuly undermine the integrity of the process? It might work fine if they're all movie critics with very public track records - i.e. ENWorld reviewers - but I'm not sure we would want to *require* all the judges to be ENWorld reviewers.

In the end, this is really an issue of representative "governmment". We want our congress members to *represent* our own preferences of how our society should be run, and therefore we demand insight in how they have voted in the past on issues of interest to us. Sure, if they also happen to be reporters, we could read their opinion pieces on individual issues. But I don't think we should require our politicians to also be prolific writers of opinion pieces, nor do I think we should ask the voters to read through all those opinion pieces. A concise statement of their previous voting record shoudl speak for itself, and would be sufficient in most cases...