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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 8344362" data-attributes="member: 11760">For people who didn't make the top 10, which statistically is almost everyone, including me:I've won a lot of (non-gaming) awards. I've lost a lot of (non-gaming) awards. I've judged a lot of (non-gaming) awards.Keep the following in mind before you kill all your players in a death trap this weekend out of anger:1) We have no idea at this moment how many people entered. If there were only 400 people, which seems low to me, that's still only a 1:40 shot at getting in. You will roll a natural 20 twice as often as you would place in the top 10 in this contest.2) We don't really know the criteria the judges were using in the evaluation. There was some quirky stuff in their requests -- why did they want lore for a trap? -- and it may be that what they were looking for wasn't well-articulated in the guidelines, which definitely happens.3) We don't know how the judging went, but they likely had to look at a lot of entries relatively fast, especially since they've got multiple other products in the pipeline needing their attention. So judgements likely happened quickly. The difference between winning entries and non-winning entries in writing contests I've judged can come down to a single clunky phrase early on, because I've been sitting there looking at these damned things for six hours now, and I can't take any more badness, even if the rest of it might turn out to be amazing.4) We also don't know what didn't win. Maybe you had the best pendulum-based trap in the slush pile, but hundreds of other people submitted pendulum traps, too, and those ended up seeming boring and rote, just because there were so damned many of them, even if you had the best pendulum trap since Edgar Allen Poe.5) We also don't know the names of entrants 11-20. When in doubt, assume you were in there.I hope everyone who had their creative juices pumping because of this and were ready to crank out more stuff as finalists channels that energy into a productive end. Make this the best damned autumn of D&D ever with crazy new stuff. Publish something on DMs Guild for the first time ever. Post a bunch of great homebrew stuff on ENWorld.And win this whole damned thing next year.</blockquote>

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