…sitting around with your buddies, suggesting that your experience with tactical wargames and action-oriented RPGs would make you the perfect people to plan super secret operations for NSA black ops, or something?

What if the government had agreed? What if they had come to recruit you?

From time to time, my weekly gaming group (now almost a year old!) goes through a period where almost half of the players are unavailable, usually for six to eight weeks at a time. In the past, we’ve handled this in a variety of ways, alternately proceeding with the game we’re already playing (currently 4e D&D) or playing one-shot games (Zombies, Munchkin, Kobolds Ate My Baby). However, as I have a subgroup of players who are nearly always available, I’ve recently been thinking about adding a “side campaign” to the roster, and pressing forward with that.

This, of course, would bring the number of games I’m theoretically actively running to four, which could be somewhat complex. We’re playing 4e right now, while the Mutants & Masterminds game we began with is on hold (though soon to return, I think, based on the general tenor of the group’s assessment of 4e). Meanwhile, I’m running a separate M&M game for a different group of folks. If I started up a fourth game, I’d want it to be something different…maybe Hollow Earth Expedition? Star Wars?

Something to ponder…I’m not sure I could manage a 4th campaign even if I wanted to.

Neverless, I sometimes wonder how others deal with problems like these…what do you do when you just don’t have enough people to push forward?

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was hoping to share a little bit about the process I use to evaluate products for the ENnies. However, before I get into too much detail, I think it’s important to note that I see judging and reviewing as very different tasks.

This is not to say that reviews aren’t valuable–they are! However, reviewing a game product is, essentially, like comparing it to every other game that has ever existed. Reviewers are trying to determine how good or bad the product is when compared to an enormously large field of contemporaneously available products (and even some that are just fondly remembered). Because that field is so large, if reviewers attempt to assign any values to the products they evaluate, they’re essentially limited to assigning them ostensibly objective values (three stars!), rating products on a numeric scale (seven out of ten!), or some other, similar substitute.

That, on the other hand, is not what an ENnies judge like myself needs to do. My job is to evaluate products released or entered over a single twelve-month period, comparing them only to the other products that are submitted by publishers or highly motivated fans. Comparing Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy to Space:1889 might be an interesting exercise, but doing so isn’t really going to help me determine whether Dark Heresy, which was entered this year, deserves to be nominated for an award.

Leaving aside the fact that my opinions about what should be nominated will have to be compared to four others judges’, I need to make a solid snapshot of the upper crust of the entries: somehow, I need to rank them. Trying to list the entries from best to worst would be an unrealistically daunting task, and even if it weren’t, it would be terribly imprecise, and potentially biased.

So what will I do instead? I’ll use a pair-ranking system. Most simply, pair ranking ensures that I’ve compared each product entered to every other product in a category, one pair at a time. Let’s assume, for a second, that I’m evaluating only three products - Product A, Product B, and Product C. To pair rank them, I need to carefully compare each pair, and determine a winner, like so:

Product A vs. Product B? I like Product B better. Product B wins. I tally the scores like so:

• Product A (0)
• Product B (1)
• Product C (0)

Product A vs. Product C? I like Product A better. Product A wins. I tally the scores like so:

• Product A (1)
• Product B (1)
• Product C (0)

Product B vs. Product C? I like Product B better. Product B wins. I tally the scores like so:

• Product A (1)
• Product B (2)
• Product C (0)

Obviously, Product B wins overall.

1. Product B
2. Product A
3. Product C

This process works more or less exactly as stated for categories that are largely matters of personal preference - Best Cover Art, for example. I can look at the covers, and pair-rank them as I do. Other categories, like Best Rules or Best Game, are slightly more complex, and are treated slightly differently, even though I’ll use the same basic system as I judge them. Want to learn more? Stay tuned.

As a giant nerd, I find a good deal of my idle time is spent conceptualizing characters for the various RPGs that I run or participate in.  However, I occasionally hit a mental block. When I do, I nearly always return to a source of inspiration from my childhood:

Old live-action Disney films.

To whit: Blackbeard’s Ghost.

“Do you think World War Two would have gone differently if Hitler had been bitten by a werewolf?”

“Not really,” I thought to myself, “but supplying all those Shermans with silver shells would have played havoc with the global economy.”

Before this blog goes all the way live, I’m curious if you loyal readers like the look of the site? What do I need to do differently? Is this thing a visual disaster?

As some of you may know, I was elected to be a judge for the ENworld Gen Con RPG Awards this year. Indeed, if you know about it, it’s probably because I e-mailed you and asked you to vote for me. Thank you to those of you who did. Due at least in part to your efforts, I will be inundated with Roleplaying Game (RPG) products over the next 9 months, ultimately nominating 5 products in a variety of categories that will be then be further narrowed to a first- and second-place winner by thousands of RPG fans, online.

For those of you not already intimately familiar with the awards, I should note that I won’t be alone in this process. There are 4 other judges that I’ll be working with to judge this stuff, and considering the vastly disparate set of “likes” and “dislikes” we all share, coming to a consensus on what deserves to be recognized is going to be a very difficult process. Nevertheless, it should be a great deal of fun, and certainly satisfying when it’s all said and done.

Over the next little while, I hope to detail a little bit about how I plan to evaulate the products that are entered this year, and perhaps highlight some of the more interesting items that cross my desk. In any case, I hope you’ll come along for the ride with me. It should be reasonably safe, and I can say with certainty that, if you read this blog, you won’t be destroyed by space lasers (at least not because of me).

If you’d like to get a little headstart on where I’m going with all this, I recommend that you read The Thinker’s Toolkit, by Morgan D. Jones. I’ll be using the weighted pair-ranking system described in that book to do the bulk of my assessments, and if you’re really interested in the process, it’s the best explanation of it that I’ve ever come across. It won’t really help illuminate what kind of games I like (which will also deeply affect this process), but it should give you an idea of how I’ll compare one thing to another.