How to Fix the Ennie Awards

And the four secret DM styles

• Over on the channel I took a look at Crown of Salt, which took Silver for Long-Form Adventure at the Ennie Awards. A really beautiful books with some great ideas, although I think the adventure could be improved.

• While I was at GenCon I attended the Ennie Awards (watch it here) and captured Chris McDowall’s Mythic Basionland winning Silver for Product of the Year! Click here if you want to watch Baron De Ropp of Dungeon Masterpiece lose his mind. We were wearing knight masks to support Chris, along with the crew from The Arcane Library and Plus One Experience.

• Most recently, I make a theory video on the four Roll Windows that I talked about a few months ago in this very newsletter.

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I’ve been attending the Ennie Awards since 2019, and overall I think they’re a very good thing. It’s always great to shine a light on lesser-known products and that’s what the Ennies does (contra a lot of people online who think that it only promotes big publishers, or that you have to know someone to get in). I also think that Bridget does a fantastic job MCing the show.

That being said, I have some feedback on how both the ceremony and the awards themselves could be improved.

Time

The ceremony itself lasted for 3 hours this year, which is waaay too long. In contrast, take a look at the Dice Tower Awards, which are also held at GenCon and only take a little over an hour.

Shortening the length keeps people engaged and the excitement high. It also means that people have time to go out and celebrate afterwards. As things are now, if you go to the Ennies, that’s all you’ll be doing that night.

So how could you cut down on the time?

1. Create guidelines for how long acceptance speeches should last (maybe with a timer only the winner can see?) One minute per person, especially when multiple people on the team want to speak.

2. The fact that there are two awards (gold and silver) that are given out in each category is a huge part of why everything takes so long. Cutting the silver award would help, but the silver is great for getting more recognition to more games, so I would settle for keeping it but only allowing the gold winner to make a speech.

The Categories

Here’s the categories I would cut:

• Community Content. I don’t think it makes sense to have this as a separate category just because it was made for organized play. If it’s a good adventure, it should get nominated in that category.

• Best Free Game. Same reasons. Having a category for a price point doesn’t seem useful to me. It doesn’t tell me what makes the product stand out.

• Best Monster. This is a strange one, since the award never says which monster the product is nominated for! I would either cut it, or change the category to Best Bestiary.

• Best Supplement. Supplements are either adventures, extra rules, or settings, which are already existing categories. This is like having an Oscar for “Best Sequel”, it doesn’t tell you what the nominee excels at.

• Best Online Content. There’s too much packed into this category. I would break it into some new ones listed below.

• Perhaps most controversially, I would cut Product of the Year. It’s a confusing category, because the winner often doesn’t line up with the winners of other categories, so it’s hard to say what it really means. For example, this year Triangle Agency won Best Rules, Best Writing, and Best Game, which is an amazing sweep, but the Moria supplement for The One Ring won Product of the Year. In what way was it better than Triangle Agency? You can’t tell by looking at the awards, so it’s not useful info.

Here’s what I would add:

• Best Actual Play. This is a huge, very popular, emerging entertainment form and it deserves its own category. Any recording of RPG gameplay could be submitted, whether it’s audio or video, prerecorded or live.

• Best Podcast. For audio-only media that isn’t an actual play.

• Best Video Channel. For long and short form videos that aren’t actual plays.

• Best Blog. Blogs are the backbone of the RPG internet and deserve their own category.

Overall, the categories would be reduced by two, which would speed up the ceremony. Also, a huge number of people regularly consume actual plays, podcasts, videos, and blogs, which could help draw in more voters.

Submissions

Every Ennies judge I’ve talked to has the same story: there is just way too many books being submitted. It’s reached the point where there is no way a judge can reasonably read all of the submissions, so inevitably a lot of stuff is skimmed or skipped over.

I’m not sure what the best solution is here. Maybe restrict the number of books that a single publisher can submit? That way each publisher would only send in their best one or two books rather than their whole catalog. That might make things a bit more competitive for smaller publishers as well.

What changes would you make? Let me know below.