The ENnies are a set of yearly RPG awards put on by ENWorld. I usually like the results, though I did note that the results seemed a bit wonky this year. Now there’s a bit of breaking news; one of the ENnies judges, Zachary the First, has resigned over what he feels are unfair practices re: publisher favoritism and lack of transparency. The ENnies have responded already at the bottom of their main page.
My take – Zachary’s whole thing about podcasts is a little drama queeny but he has some good points, the best of which (lack of transparency, bending of rules for publisher favorites) the ENnies don’t respond to in their statement. Although I am not privy to anything going on over at the ENnies, I’ve been involved in a lot of online RPG organizations and they seem to attract people who like closeted power. I resigned as VP of the Christian Gamers Guild over similar behavior, and saw the same thing with the RPGA especially regarding how Living Greyhawk was run (I was an original Triad for the Yeomanry region).
Whether it’s at the President of the US level or the online group of like 12 people level, there’s a lot of people who like to hoard power and make back room decisions, it validates them somehow. (Many of these people end up as forum mods somehow.) And for every one of those, there are five people who enable them by not calling them on their BS. So, I don’t know whether Zachary is “in the right” or not, but I like to see people willing to call shenanigans on a group even when it is not in their interest to do so (no more free games for Zach this year!). I raise a Lone Star to you. Fight the power!
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