What awards do for us?
What are awards in TTRPGs even failing to achieve?
One of the most surprising things about awards in TTRPGs is how overwhelmingly negative the general population's opinion of them is. People usually know only of one or two, and what they know leaves them happy never to hear about TTRPG awards. Nominated, winning, organizing, neglected, standing by—very few people ever have an opinion more positive than “conflicted” or “neutral, with maybe a bit more of good than bad.” The popular opinion seems to be that this all is a big mess, but where everyone disagrees is in what their worth is, if they can be fixed, and how to improve the current status quo—or dismiss the very notion as doomed to belong to “industry” cliques and vapid marketing.
What seems to be their key problem? People really cannot answer what the purpose of most of them is. If you don’t know what an award seeks to achieve, how can you consider whether it fails or succeeds, what problems are to be addressed, and what are just features working as intended?
What is an award for?
We can break down awards in different categories based on what they seek to do, so we can have a picture of what we are talking about:
Professional Acknowledgement. These awards are the “trade show” type, which mainly serves an identity-forming purpose for an industry or art: the purpose of the award is to have you be “seen,” and by your very presence and consideration there, to be included as part of the in-group of “professionals.”
Marketing. These awards seek to showcase the products released by an in-group defined by the parameters of the awards, acting as a shared catalog/marketing initiative for the entire in-group. Think of it like a catalog for the entire industry.
Seal of Quality. These awards have the goal of acting as a “guild stamp,” the identity of the in-group connected to the awarded, the awarded considered meeting the estimation and standards of the group.
Seal of Popularity. These awards face towards the public, assessing the popularity of a given work, marking the popularity as a seal of quality, and using it to guarantee that it meets the standards the award stands behind.
Extraordinary Achievement. The award seeks works and participants with outstanding contributions to the industry or art and uses itself to remark on and acknowledge them.
Performance Competition. The awards seek to recognize those who outperform their competition according to a standard of productivity established by the award.
Discovery and Recognition. The award defines an in-group and actively seeks and awards those that are not part of the defined in-group in order to expand who is considered part of an industry/artform.
When we think about TTRPGs and awards, we can see that the best-known ones try to do as many of these as possible, while the most effective and successful stick to just one or two of these. This further reinforces the idea that every single award is probably trying to do too much, with sometimes conflicting goals.
Case Study: The ENNIEs
To many, when they think of TTRPG awards, they think of the ENNIEs and that’s it. For no small reason: it is old, it is at GenCon, and it is tied to a TTRPG online platform. It tries to hit all the categories mentioned above and then some more. It tries to be everything, and in the end is… the ENNIEs.
For all the attention placed upon it, for something so central to the artform in its positioning, the operation of the ENNIEs is covered by multiple layers of obfuscation. So, I’m trying to summarize what I learned over the years and while researching for this piece.
The ENNIES are closely intertwined with Gen Con and ENWorld, but at the same time present themselves as an ephemeral organization that assembles and disassembles every year. When the designers of Lancer wished to withdraw their nomination for the actions of the 2017 ENNIEs, the ENNIEs presented themselves as a different organization, as the ENNIEs are the Judges of a given year—and some admin staff are tied to ENWorld, GenCon and supporting the Judges, who are the actual ENNIEs for that year. Every year the ENNIEs die, and every year the ENNIEs are reborn. Judge candidates are voted upon by the public. The new judge panel takes over the organization. Over the course of a year, candidates apply to the ENNIEs by sending copies of their games to all the judges. The judges go over the nominations. Nominations are put to a public vote. At GenCon, the ENNIEs runs a silent auction of all the submitted candidates and announces the awards. The winners can then pay to have a physical award sent to them.
This is all I can confidently state about how the ENNIEs work. From this, I went into identifying stress points and trying to get further clarification, to which there is sometimes contradictory information—or no information at all.
They’re A Labor Nightmare
In 2024-2025 there were over one thousand submissions for the ENNIEs. That’s over a thousand entries that had to be evaluated and considered by the same five judges. The amount of labor to do this job poorly and in a small window of time is already nightmarish; it is not feasible to do it as the art demands. This, of course, is going to put different pressures and biases about how different submissions are going to be perceived and handled. Being an ENNIEs judge could be someone’s full job, but no, it is all unpaid volunteer work—and you get what you pay for. The work has to suffer, and has to suffer for no reason at all; it does not have to be like this. This is one of those situations where being unpaid really hides what is happening here and prevents this problem from ever being considered—much less addressed. If a judge was paid even a cent per hour, this amount of labor would be a cost the ENNIEs would be under pressure to reduce; they would be under pressure to be more efficient on labor allocation. Instead, it just burns through unpaid judge labor each year. What if every year the submission numbers keep increasing? Cannot even get more judges to ease the process, because that would be just more labor being burned, as they still have to go through a thousand games and one.
Judge labor is not valued in the ENNIEs, which is one hell of a stress point when literally everything of this award relies on it.
They’re Expensive and Exclusionary
The ENNIEs cost a lot of money, both for award submissions and judge applications. That’s six physical copies that you have to ship to six different addresses—one for the ENNIEs, five for the judges. Not only that, it is expensive in a way that makes this a US/CA event for US/CA people. It is a considerable sacrifice to submit anything to the ENNIEs if you are not there—and not just to you. Judges have confirmed that these shipping expenses and customs are also covered by them, which automatically makes being a judge outside of those two countries impossible for all but the most wealthy. As such, the material conditions of the ENNIEs being as they are, they will be a US event for US people judged by US people. Or you submit your work digital-only, which (at least as of last year’s awards) segregates you to only certain award categories. An important stress point, considering the international audience it has, being connected with an online platform as much as it is connected with GenCon.
With 2025, the ENNIEs has started to accept submissions of games not yet on sale, not yet released—in fact, games running crowdsourcing campaigns at the same time they were finalists considered for voting. Despite this being explicitly against the rules for submissions (since you cannot buy them anywhere, and no, crowdfunding platforms have stood many times in court and claimed they are not stores and do not offer products, and even if they did, they could not through the nomination process). ENNIEs has stated that these exemptions can be granted freely, as any given game can only be nominated once. While this opens quite the can of worms (every new reprint, repackaging or compilation of a game can now be picked again as a “different game” right? After all, how much Call of Cthulhu, DnD and Pathfinder stuff is nominated every year when it is all the same game— and this time, while their crowdfunding campaign is funding, using clogging the labored backs of laborers with games yet-unreleased-but-also-check-the-old-print), it also creates another venue accessible to a small slice of TTRPG artists. Who gets granted these exceptions? Who can even create and ship expensive physical prototypes when their own project depends on crowdfunding to even exist? This is an option only for established publishers that use crowdfunding for marketing/pre-sales, unavailable for anyone relying on those platforms for their games to even exist.
Just another way that, across indies, they seem to end up often paying more for less.
Unhappy if you win, unhappy if you won’t
I was surprised to find out how common these feelings of frustration were among finalists and winners. Getting short-listed as a finalist offers less than many expected, and even award winners have ended up disappointed in the outcome. This seems not really to be a problem with bigger companies; this is just showcasing the products they have launched over this year—nice marketing, another cog in that promotion machine. But indies often end up leaving with a sour taste from being acknowledged as “the real deal” by the ENNIEs.
In conversation with indie nominees and winners, most of them talk of a small bump in the sales upon finalist lists release, and that’s it—in many cases not enough to cover up the cost of the submissions (and let’s not forget all that judge labor being burned to produce this output). They got no benefit they can correlate to winning—no more sales, no more fresh eyes on the thing, no more artistic acknowledgement of their work, it is not played more or less, and no more job opportunities for other projects. Some even report receiving backlash for their short-listings/wins: that this has put them in an “in-group” of industry insiders, that they are now some sort of labor aristocracy in the artform. However, they remain the same precarious workers as before, perhaps even poorer.
This is universally thought of as one of the indisputable good things about the ENNIEs. Even its biggest critics always admit that they do a lot to get people to know certain games even exist, and the finalists are an excellent way to discover new games. It has been my biggest disappointment related to these awards to learn this is highly exaggerated, but honestly, I feel rather stupid for having taken that at face value for this long. There are many ENNIEs winners we covered in Split/Party because people don’t know them at all. I should have known better!
It is a popularity contest, of course! You don’t win if nobody knew your game, saw it in the list of finalists, and enough people checked your game to decide you’re the “best” of a given category against the opposition—all within the voting window. So, even if you are discovered by being selected as a finalist, you won’t win. Because again, if you win, you are already popular enough among the people that care about the ENNIEs. Almost every single winner of the ENNIEs of the last fifteen years that “broke out” with a popular game that people actually play in the wild was already quite popular before winning. The only exception seemed to be Fabula Ultima. I was pretty confident that this game had been made into the household name it is now, all the way from a humble Ryuutama spiritual/mechanical successor, by the attention brought by these awards. But it turns out I was wrong. Fabula Ultima had become pretty popular in the months leading to its nomination by perfect timing: the OGL fiasco led to Dicebreaker to promote various alternatives to Hasbro’s IP—with particular emphasis on Fabula Ultima. This effective marketing, the genuine despair of Hasbro’s players, and the association with an even more popular IP, allowed Fabula Ultima to tap into a space unusually allowed to indies—catapulting its popularity already by the time of the ENNIEs. It was the one indie TTRPG that was on the tip of the tongue of even people that did not know any other TTRPG besides the Hasbro licenses.
I have no choice but to accept that in terms of discoverability and promotion of new games and indie designers, the people that make these games are justified in their disappointment. Being an ENNIEs winner is supposed to give them an in, to make them part of the industry, to have their art acknowledged. But it keeps out indies and the Origins Awards or Diana Jones. It has the illusion of being a “real” professional with none of the benefits.
What’s the deal with the auction?
This is the part of the ENNIEs that is a complete mystery to me, so I bring you only odd tidbits that have found their way to me; I’m relaying it as a black box for consideration. At the end of GenCon, there is a silent auction. One of the copies that you have to submit is reserved for this auction, plus additional material donated for the auction, as well as any judges’ copies they return to the ENNIEs (it is unclear how ENNIEs get these copies from the judges, and if they have to cover it from their own pocket).
The stated reason for this auction is to support the costs of running the ENNIEs. Makes sense, but what does that exactly entail? None of the former judges I have contacted for this piece was ever paid, so this money is not used for partial/symbolic compensation for their arduous work. Are the support/admin people being paid from this, at least? GenCon is an expensive event, but the ENNIEs are considered one of its institutions and a primary draw of the convention. It is pretty much accepted by everyone that the ENNIEs are one with GenCon, and assured venue space, sponsorship deals with the convention, and/or symbolic minor payments—accepted, but despite that, it is not clear how much it costs to host the ENNIEs. Perhaps this money has to cover venue costs? Or maybe it covers web infrastructure and hosting? Stipend/grant programs? It is quite unclear how this money, got from the submissions and sponsors, is spent—and it is no clearer to those sending submissions than it is for me, as many did not even know about the auction until I asked them about it. This stood out as peculiar; any of the "smaller" awards that have some sponsorship have been quite open about what that allows them to do.
What many people that attended GenCon have volunteered to me, however, was that this is a charity auction and most of the proceeds are given to a different charity each year. Despite this being something that one would expect to be openly disclosed, I could not find out any of the charities that have benefited from the ENNIEs in the past. When contacting the ENNIEs as a donor for the auction, and inquiring about the charities involved for tax purposes, we got no response.
Just another thing we cannot know more about.
It is de facto a trade show
Despite its claims, reach, and all it tries to do, ENNIEs is a TTRPG trade-show event at GenCon and the awards reflect that. Being around the ENNIEs while being at GenCon is part of the socializing and networking with “peers” in the industry to become recognized as a fellow professional.
The reality of its local nature may be behind the feeling of disappointment that some finalists and winners share. Having a ENNIE means little if you cannot attend GenCon and capitalize on it. That is where the actual magic happens, where the awards actually can open doors. A key element that you are missing.
This is further exclusionary. It is not just limited realistically to the US/CA. It is now primarily for those of social-economic status to attend GenCon. And even then, it further excludes those that are kept away from events like the mixer—the more expenses, social environment involving alcohol, further placing more pressures, etc.
While not uncommon or unexpected, this is often a feature of other types of awards. We see this at trade shows across the world, where judges are integrated into an event and award participants based on their experience. Regional and national awards across the world do something similar too: with judges mingling with people during the event, visiting booths, attending panels, playing games, etc. Awards, in these events, highlighting of the experience of the trade show as much as anything else—and are treated with all that implies. However, not only do those usually have modest goals that acknowledge their limitations, but they demand no extraordinary labor by judges. That ENNIEs de facto end up as an Indiana TTRPG trade show, which not only is a serious mismatch of the international state-of-the-art of TTRPGs over the last year by and for a global audience, it utterly wastes much of the absurd amount of labor gifted to them by the judges.
The ENNIEs just do not have the social media presence to be anything more than a trade show. Unfortunately, as the internet is today, a forum will not cut it. If the ENNIEs is indeed to be international, for the fans, and to highlight new games, it needs to have an active presence on social media. Not start a Bluesky account days before this year’s award. Of course, this would need to have a dedicated social media staff, which would need to be paid, but without it, you are not putting games in front of eyes except those that have already seen them before—and you at best get them to crack the books open.
That may be it: the ENNIEs take the resources of at least 2 different awards, and it ends up having at least two competing goals. Success in one comes at the expense of the other.
Other Awards
The bad news: I ended up centering the ENNIEs more than I intended on this piece because their mistakes are repeated all across other awards in TTRPGs. Better to put them all once in a single case study than repeat them individually.
The good news: every single other award, individually, manages these challenges better than the ENNIEs. The ENNIEs are indeed an institution of TTRPGs—and as such, their primary goal is to ensure their continuation.
A funny thing, ubiquitous across TTRPG awards, is that no award show wants to accept they are a popularity contest. Including the ENNIEs? Especially the ENNIEs, arguably the popularity contest of all popularity contests. Despite being “a fan-celebration of excellence in TTRPGs”, despite judges being voted by popularity vote and winners decided in a popularity vote, even when they cannot go against the results of the popularity contest in 2017. Why? Well, because it also tries to be a lot of other things, that comes into conflict with being a popularity contest. If it is a fan celebration, it has to be expected to be a popularity contest!
The CRIT Awards have recently shaken the TTRPG media environment, born from the cascade of frustrations with mainstream TTRPGs in early 2023 and the desire to highlight all the amazing work being done by those moving away from mainstream TTRPGs and into the indie space. Focused on the community, they are aware they need to do things differently to succeed at what other awards fail, and this involves a lot of trial and error. Laborious and frustrating as that can be, it has provided them much insight on how to run awards. For starters, the importance of social media. To support their goal of being representative, discovering and showcasing multiple artists, the CRIT Awards know they need to have a substantial presence in social media—and put in the heavy labor that requires. Their goal is to uplift the community as a whole, being very public-facing and transparent, trying to be as neutral as one can in a media where people are rarely more than two degrees of separation from each other’s works. The CRITs have had hits and misses, falling short more because of their ambition—50 categories and growing, with constant reimagining of how to highlight as many people as possible—than from any systemic failures. Knowing what they are, they have refused pop/trad sponsorships and nominations, have one of the most consistent anti-LLM stances, and have halted their presence at GenCon due to the Indiana’s convention support of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. This mission demands a lot of labor, which puts more stress upon the workers responsible for the CRITs… and mistakes happen under these work conditions, with nominees that use LLMs and not properly vetting of certain sponsorships. Still, this is what a “for the fans by the fans” award looks like; do not mistake growing pains with obfuscation: the CRITs are quite open about any sponsorship, partnership. Being open with their finances and how they use the support they get from sponsors, it is also clear how much finances limit what they can do; that and a lack of a way to properly contact and coordinate with so many creators and community members associated with the art form—with the imposter syndrome of so many making a challenge to ever contact them to speak about their work. At the current moment, the CRITs operate the following way: there is an open call for submissions from the general public and community, as well as that year’s categories and requirements (last year they had twice the nominations of the ENNIEs of the same period, over 20 thousand!); this is followed-up with a verification panel that oversees if nominations meet the requirements, do not violate any of the open terms for CRITs consideration, and, more important in this era, do not involve LLM and their poison in its production. Finally, the board—or, in case nobody on the staff is qualified for a given work, someone invited for consultation—assembles a list of finalists for each category; once this is confirmed, they confirm with the finalists and move for community voting. Again, this seems to be the way to do a “fan-celebration” awards; if you are not Indiana-bound, then the work of the CRITs may be worth your attention. They love working with smaller companies as sponsors, so feel free to hit them up; for the general public, keep spreading the word of the award and keep submitting the things you love to the awards—and give them a way to contact the creators!
The Awards may be the best “put together” TTRPG awards out there. However, there are no shortcuts: they achieve their goal through meticulous, intense labor that puts even that demanded from ENNIE judges to shame. They ran for three impressive years and had to take a hiatus for 2025. The Awards are the ultimate award for discoverability. Their process is quite transparent. Submissions for judges are accepted, after which all submissions are considered. A first round sorts which submissions will or will not be given further consideration after each judge’s judgment. Works that meet a certain threshold will move to the finalists, 40-50 works per year. Judges convene and discuss the merits of each finalist’s work, choosing twenty winners for that year through weighted-voting systems—each judge has an amount of votes that they can distribute among finalists in whatever way they decide. Without the chains and expectations of categories, the winners of The Awards have never failed to offer a slice of the most intriguing art done in the artform over that year. From no other awards have I discovered so many more new games or game-periphery artwork. For all the work The Awards demand, it is really difficult to see any of it as “wasted.” Many of the judges uplift and/or produce work related to their work there, with many critique pieces elevating the artform. Still, even that could be used for other purposes: every work that manages to cross the threshold is, without a doubt, a great contribution to an artform that year. And of course, outside the selection process, The Awards does not really have a platform to actually put eyes on itself—and the games covered. That would, of course, be much more work put on top of all the considerable work they already demand; The Awards rely on word-of-mouth and recognition by the TTRPG community. The Awards has no sponsors and has no desire to attract them, relying on volunteers and support from the community. All that is asked is for you to engage with the art promoted by The Awards seriously and on its terms, and we all get a better artform for it.
As I mentioned before, there are countless smaller award shows across the world, aware of their limited and local nature. They tend to act more like trade shows and excel at those. However, despite the social nature of the award processes, only award winners tend to draw any attention at all outside of the event. Perhaps a more lavish handing out of awards can improve discoverability of remarkable works; it seems to work with wine. Awards like the Ottos can The Awards can be the standard for other events for the artform.
Final thoughts
“Solving” the situation with awards will not be easy, but the more I learn and think about it, the more often I find myself at the starting point: an award needs to know what it is, try to achieve that goal, and not try to be what it is not.
The labor issue will always be the principal obstacle for any award worth its name. Trade show-like, small national and regional events do the best at this, asking little extra from the judges. There are no magic solutions, so the best-case scenario? The labor that needs to be done is labor that would already have to be done for other purposes. You do not want to waste vast amounts of labor from volunteers, judges, and admin people—if they would already be participating in a con, if they would already be reading and playing those games for other reasons, if a social media presence is also maintained for other purposes, etc.
More awards may be the solution here. It is a popular idea, but whenever it is proposed, ENNIEs 2 is what the majority of people think. No, there should be more local awards, more national acknowledgements, more niche awards, etc. Smaller awards, micro awards, minor spotlights, matching the level of labor already being deployed.
Overlapping the previous two points, there is a change in critique culture that has to accompany those measures. Awards shows are downstream of a critical and review friendly environment. For people that think it is upstream, they will remain unsatisfied: awards can then never be fixed. They will never create an environment more conducive to critique and review. However, an environment full of critique and review is one where much of the necessary work to properly support awards is already being done; creating one will make more awards less of a logistical and labor nightmare.
We keep discussing making the “Splities”, yearly overview of games we find have merit to the artform. But that would put more work on us, keeping us from writing more for Split/Party; it could even run against what we usually do with those games, doing a critique of them or at the very least trying to squeeze talking about them in another article. “Splities,” whatever they would be, would be better served if they used work that we are already doing. Perhaps when you curate a game jam also give abundant awards in between them? Or if you are covering indie TTRPGs, maybe also aggregate the results of all different awards? The SPG Awards been one of the best awards in TTRPGs. Possibly more peer-judge contests?
The tyranny of yearly awards and categories does not have to hold sway. Sometimes it does not make any sense for it, with overfilled and underfilled categories, or trying to meet annual requirements, or games that fall through the cracks.
For the ENNIEs in particular? Let’s face it, they are two award shows in a trenchcoat. They should split into the GenCon trade show awards, and instead of categories have judges in attendance and the other judges showcase “Judge’s Choices” and the fan-ENNIEs. To free up the workload from judges, judges would not have to cover all categories, and their work should be pure filtering: it is always going to be a popularity contest, so a judge’s place is to sort which works have the merits to pass to the first phase of voting, and the voting should first be broken in a first mass phase followed by a “finalists” phase. Further developing the regional trade show Gen Con, maybe expand the auction as an event, hopefully something that could better support the ENNIEs—including having a dedicated, continuous social media member of the staff.