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.