The Gaming Den

Let's say the Den had their own gaming awards. What categories would you incude?

Ex: "Best beer&pretzels game," "Most concise rules," "Best genre emulation game"

...or alternatively, you could go all negative and turn it into gaming's equivalent of The Raspberries.

"Most Masturbatory Vanity Project" - so you have the various print-on-demand shit that serves as the White Wolf revival crap, but also the various "I used to work on D&D but then went off to do my own thing" stuff like Numenura (Doo-doooo-do-doo-do!)

"Most Impressive Waste of Paper" - not just shitty books that shouldn't have been written, we're specifically looking at books that have the worst ratio of content to page count. Such as late era 3.5 where each Prestige Class had about 5 pages to include "This PrCl in X setting" and "Here is an example of that class" and so on.

"Easiest Game to Play Drunk" - self-explanatory. Possibly call it "Easiest Game to Explain to Friends". It's to call attention to the simplest thing you can get people together to play when you have an evening spare.

The Den is probably the only place where you could have "Best of the Industry" (e.g. Cognitive Concordance, Functional Out-of-Box, Player Agency Advocacy, Mechanical Cohesion) & "Worst of the Industry" (e.g. Cognitive Dissonance, Barrel-of-Cocks Suckage, Referee antagonism encouragement, Mindcaulk Minefield) categories, and have such categories have any actual meaning.

In an industry that revolves around games that are played over and over again and sometimes take a long time to evaluate, I think it might make more sense to have the category "Best game of 5 years ago." Very often, awards in the Ennies or Origins or whatever end up going to the game in the shiniest box or the latest edition of a game that was cool several years ago or whatever. It's obvious that destructive playtesting of the stuff that comes out this year isn't really a realistic endeavor.

NWOD made a big splash when it came out, because obviously it was huge and new and based on a property that got a lot of people laid. But if you'd asked five years later whether it had been a good thing you'd get the right answer from pretty much everyone. 4th edition D&D had all those 4rries coming to invade our forums and "correct" our disparaging talk, but by 2013 those voices had mumbled off.

-Username17

I'm pretty sure there are more lurkers than posters on here so while I don't know if any Den based awards would be a good idea I'd be interested in the votes as a kind of barometer about what the silent majority of people actually game with. I really don't buy much RPG material so any good leads on rulesets worthy of being mined for homerules would be useful.

Alternatively we could just have a giant 'RPG suggestions' thread where people present suggested RPG material and why it's good or a series of threads about RPGs people here have played/read that aren't angry reviews but happier things.

Honestly, I Love this idea, I like everyone's suggestions so far, and I think we could put in categories like Frank is suggesting AND Koumei's ideas for one. After all, the Ennies have a bunch of categories anyway, so no reason we can't as well.

I'm definitely interested in the discussion, and am also curious what some polls on it would look like, assuming Denners Lurkers and Posters all voted.

The Gaming Den's Award is called "Certificate Of Competent Knowledge" or COCK. COCKs are given to the categories winners like diplomas.

The high point of the Awards Gala (a red carpet, white-tie event) is the traditional entrance of the COCKS, brought to the stage in a barrel.

nockermensch wrote:The Gaming Den's Award is called "Certificate Of Competent Knowledge" or COCK. COCKs are given to the categories winners like diplomas.

The high point of the Awards Gala (a red carpet, white-tie event) is the traditional entrance of the COCKS, brought to the stage in a barrel.

Yes.