Posts Tagged ‘dfrpg awards’

The thing about being on the West Coast and not waking up at the crack of dawn is that you don’t have to wait long to find out certain news, including the ENnie Awards nominations. The Dresden Files RPG has been nominated in six categories, and Happy Birthday, Robot! in four. Friends of the Hat have some nods as well. All in all, a good spread.

Fred points out ours on his blog. In short: DFRPG’s up for Best Game, Best New Game, Best Production Values, Best Rules, Best Writing, and Product of the Year. That HBR is also in Best Game, Best New Game, Best Production Values, and Product of the Year is pretty cool as well.

Some personal call outs

A fist bump to Posthuman Studios for Eclipse Phase Gamemaster Pack (Best Aid/Accessory), Continuity (Best Electronic Book[1]) & Gatecrashing (Best Production Values[2] & Best Supplement). If you’re in the Bay Area, Endgame Oakland will be doing an Eclipse Phase day sometime in August. Follow them for news.

Steve Kenson‘s books have got quite a nice spread, between DC Adventures Hero’s Handbook (Best Art, Interior; Product of the Year), Mutants and Masterminds (Best Art, Cover; Best Game; Best Rules) & Icons (Best Game, Best New Game, Best Rules). Props to him, and to Green Ronin & Adamant Entertainment.

Cubicle 7‘s got a Fate game up for Best Game & Best Rules: Legends of Anglerre.

My good friend Jennifer Brozek was one of the writers on Shanghai Vampocalypse, for Best Electronic Book.

Graham Walmsley‘s A Taste For Murder is a delightful parlor game. I look forward to finally trying it, and happy to see it get a nod.

It’s no secret that I love the guys at Gameplaywright. I’m beyond happy to see The Bones get nominated. And Hamlet’s Hit Points as well. The books they forge are nothing short of mindshakingly awesome.

There are quite a few of Fate & Fate-inspired/influenced games on the board. That’s pretty exciting. It’s certainly not the reason we do this, but it’s fun to dress up and celebrate for a night with others who aren’t doing this for the awards, or for the money[3], but because we just fucking love doing this thing.

And while I don’t want to go into depth about who didn’t make it and all that, I will say that I’m bummed not to see Smallville or Leverage up on the board. Both are outstanding games that really turned around the perception of the Cortex system.[4]

Speaking of dressing up, want a dream date?

Going to Gen Con? Have a date for the ENnie Awards? Do you want one?

This year, the highest bidder will meet Ryan Macklin and a motley crew of whoever else from Evil Hat can make it to Gen Con, potentially including Clark and Amanda Valentine and Leonard Balsera and sit with them during the 2011 ENnie Awards ceremony taking place at Gen Con on Friday, August 5th, at 6:30pm in the 500 Ballroom.

You will also receive all the PDFs in the Evil Hat catalog.

We’re up for bid on eBay right now. And at the time of this posting, we’re apparently valued at $100. I should warn you that it’s looking unlikely that Lenny will be able to join us, so if you’d be bidding primarily for his smiling face, you’ll be disappointed. But I can do a good impression of him (and he can me), so maybe if we get to $200, I’ll pretend to be him all night.

Which means more rum than my liver is used to.

- Ryan

[1] If they weren’t up for Best Electronic Book, my mind would boggle. They’re leading edge on that begoodness.

[2] Adam Fucking Jury, baby

[3] That there’s money means we can, but the skillsets publishers and folks gain in this industry can get you better money elsewhere.

[4] Which, in my not so humble opinion, is why Cam Banks’ efforts deserve such nominations.

I’m going to be more rambly and self-indulgent today, with a touch of sentiment, because I want to talk about Dresden’s Origins Awards. Or, rather, I want to vocally process said awards.

If you’ve been following the RPG sphere, you’ve heard by now that the Dresden Files RPG won the Origins Award for Best RPG and Our World won for Best RPG Supplement. (Probably heard on Twitter or from the fine folks at Critical Hits.) I mentioned the nomination earlier, and feeling like we’re in respectable company.

You might want to read Rob Donoghue talk about it first, since he was there and all.

I couldn’t go to Origins this year — the “cash delta” (the cost of going plus the cost of not making any money on days I have to take off since I’m a freelancer) was too high. I pondered making it work, by taking just one day off, flying in Friday early to arrive in the afternoon (it’s a seven hour trip from California), staying until Sunday morning and flying back. But that just seemed insane, and my year for insane trips was 2010. So instead I was home, spending time with a dear friend, hanging at Endgame playing Pandemic, when I get the news.

I got a call from Lenny, Amanda & Clark, and we talked for a bit about it in amazement (and a bit about me being missed there). We hung up, and I went back to curing the world of all disease.

It hit me that winning the Origins Award feels about as real as playing a CDC agent flying through Milan dispensing cures. Which makes me right now think for a bit why that is. I’ve explained to friends before that when Dresden won Golden Geek awards, I felt like it was my friends winning awards for their book. And I’m proud of them; it’s not said with disrespect or bitterness.

When I look at Dresden, I can see the parts I wrote, parts I edited, parts where I made huge structural changes, things like that. I know the conversations that took place to forge it. It was a hell of an effort. But I also know it was a drop in the bucket compared to the work Lenny Balsera did retooling Fate after years of Spirit of the Century being out and played with. I know the huge amount of groundwork that Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue put into both Fate and the initial Dresden manuscripts. I know how indispensable Chad Underkoffler’s setting brain was to the project. Amanda Valentine’s prints are all over the thing, having edited us into clarity and consistency. Clark Valentine[1] saved the book by doing a lot of eleventh hour work when the rest of us were stretched too thin elsewhere. Kenneth Hite, Genevieve Cogman, Adam Dray, and of course Jim Butcher are all also to thank for this product and this moment in time.

Probably sounds like I’m throwing around faux-humility here, but it’s not about that. It’s more like I see myself like the doctor that delivers a child. The child grows up to win awards, and that’s cool. I can be proud, but it’s not me winning the award. Turns out I’m not the only person on the Dresden team that feels like this. And that makes me think that maybe the delivery room doc analogy is almost apt. Except, I’m not to doctor. I’m one of the parents.

The Dresden Files RPG is the collective child of the seven of us: Fred, Rob, Lenny, Chad, Amanda & Clark, and me. (Along with our allies of Ken, Genevieve, Adam & Jim.) None of us really won the Origins Award. Instead, our kid did.

That’s pretty fucking cool. I’m proud of my kid. Our kid.

With that, I’ve gone from feeling disconnected from the award (and the Golden Geek, and awards for other things) to feeling the right emotional context around it. I wish I could have celebrated with most the rest of the crew there[2], to be in that moment where we were all stunned at what just happened. But I’ll take sharing in the somewhat befuddled glow that we have as parents of this book.

I’ll end by thanking the Academy of Adventure Game Arts and Design, those that voted at Origins, and especially our fans around the world. Our book–our kid–would not exist without your support. And in that way, it makes this award as much yours as it does mine. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

- Ryan

[1] Remember how I talked recently about people who complain about not having time? Clark has a demanding day job. He and Amanda have kids. And he still finds time to work. He makes the time, even if it’s minutes. He has discipline the likes of which I rarely see.

[2] I was there in spirit.

The list of nominees for this year’s Origins Awards are up, and The Dresden Files RPG is among them (for best roleplaying game & best roleplaying supplement). I’m honored to be in such august company, so I want to take a moment and talk about some of that company — at least, those games I’ve had contact with. There is a heartfelt cliche in the awards worlds: “It’s an honor to be nominated.” In the case of the Origins Awards, it’s very much true, because the awards serve as beacons of awesome every year for so many gamers.

[Real quick: Dresden teammate Rob Donoghue has similar thoughts to share & Fred Hicks talks about the awards in overview.]

Of the RPGs nominated, the only one I have yet to play is DC Adventures by Green Ronin, though I did get my copy at GenCon. This game is fucking gorgeous, and looks to be nothing short of a love-letter to DC.[1] I have had the joy of playing the Dragon Age RPG (also by Green Ronin — you’ll notice a theme in the awards this year), both over skype with Daniel Perez and in person with DARPG’s line developer, Jeff Tidball[2]. I find the AGE system to be pretty sweet — other games can learn from that dragon die/stunt mechanic. And Gamma World was a joy to run for my friends. I’ve only gotten to play it once, and only as a GM, so clearly I need more Gamma World time.

Fiasco gets it’s own paragraph, because it’s…it’s fucking Fiasco. There isn’t a game out there quite like it. I’ve been promoting the hell out of Fiasco for a year now because it’s impressed me, because the guys at Bully Pulpit Games are total fucking gentlemen[3], and because the game has honestly changed my own design philosophy. (There’s a Forge and post-Forge sentiment with fictional components where one asks “how is that mechanically reincorporated?” Jason and company ask “Does this need to be mechanically reincorporated?” That is the smarter question.)

I don’t really have any contact with the supplements…yet[4]. So, moving on to the Best Boardgame, I’ve only played one: Castle Ravenloft. I fucking loved it. But since the Origins Awards serve every year as a beacon of awesome, I know I must now hunt down and play Defenders of the Realm, Fresco, Lords of Vegas, and Nuns on the Run. Lords of Vegas was already on my radar from months back, but every time I had my hopes of finally laying it up, they were dashed by the lords of chance. One day! One day! (And in looking for links, I’ve discovered Defenders of the Realm is a 1-4 player co-op game, which is like saying “Ryan, you want to play this hashtag-eye-see-emm-eff.”)

Similarly, I don’t have a lot of contact with most of the other products nominated (though we played a fun drinking game variant of Zombie Dice after hours at RinCon last year). Again, they’re beacons of awesome telling me I should seek them out. I’ll end by talking about one of the Game-Related Publications that greatly impressed me: Hamlet’s Hit Points. There are proper reviews on the interwebs, but if you like making stories, thinking about stories, playing out stories, or any other verbing of stories, this book is for you. It’s a master class on story analysis. If you haven’t read it, I have but one question to ask: why do you hate freedom?

Okay, I lied, I’ll mention one more: the Green Ronin The 100 Best series is really fucking awesome[5]. They have very much earned their nomination for Family Games: The 100 Best.

Go check out these beacons of awesome. And if you’ll be at Origins (which sadly I’m 99% unlikely to be), please vote!

- Ryan

[1] It’s also the origin of my “Batman has only two powers” joke that Sage LaTorra mentioned on his blog a few months ago.

[2] That’s a damned beautiful website, Jeff.

[3] Outed!

[4] Insert joke about including my own in that. Someone who is cleverer than I can make that joke.

[5] Bummed to find I can’t link to them as a category on their site.