What Should Have Won the Bloggies
The Bloggies wrapped up this week. Congratulations to the winners! Now I'm here to tell you which posts I thought should have won in each category. We are all very fortunate that I am not in charge.
I look for two things when I judge a nominee: utility, or whether it provides me with an actionable idea that I can put to use in my play, and novelty, meaning I'm usually going to be more interested in an idea I haven't seen before than I am in an excellent refinement of an existing idea.
Advice
This was a tough one for me, as there were four posts I thought could win the crown here. Ultimate, I think I have to go with Aboleth Overlords' Action-Oriented Interaction. It's short, sweet, and makes a strong point that the game world is almost always more interesting if the players are learning about it by having their characters interact with it rather than simply asking questions about it.
Honorable Mention - Writing Rooms in Pairs, Treat Illusions As You Would Any Other Lie: No Rolls, A Lock With No Key: Designing Obstacles for OSR Play
Critique
I have to give the nod to Prismatic Wasteland's Monster, Maiden, Madonna, Medusa in this category. I like the way Warren analyzed the Medusa encounter in Keep on the Borderlands using his encounter checklist, and the look at how gender has influenced several monster designs over the last half century is another reminder of how far our hobby has to go.
Honorable Mention - B1 and Toyetic Dungeon Rooms, How Jennell Jaquays Evolved Dungeon Design, Part 1: Pre-Jaquays Dungeons
Gameable
Valeria Loves' Promises, A Mythic Bastionland House Rule was the clear winner in this category. This takes something like the boasts from Wolves Upon the Coast (which I admit I have only heard about second hand, having read some of Gearing's blog posts and discussion elsewhere but not Wolves itself) and expands the idea into something I really love. Promises, Lessons, and Deeds all expand MB's Knights in interesting ways, both making them into more fully fleshed out people and hooking neatly into the mechanics.
Honorable Mention - 1d20 Diegetic Rules, 1d20 Hypo-Diegetic Rules, Wilderness Stocking - Expanded, Stacking The Deck – Mining Fallout: New Vegas for TTRPG Setting Ideas
Theory
Ben Robbins' The Star-Pattern: a Pitfall of GMing got at a problem I see so often when playing but lacked the vocabulary to describe previously. Games are so much more interesting when the players interact with each other rather than just the GM, and this post and its sequel are helpful in learning to break this negative pattern.
Honorable Mention - Books [Verb] Play, The 10 types of special rooms, Does Super Mario Bros. (1985) Have Rules?
Meta
There are an awful lot of "What is the OSR?" posts out there, and The Dodecahedron's The OSR Onion is my new favorite. It's got all the principles, it's got history, and it's got analysis of how those principles feed into one another and spur interesting play.
Honorable Mention - What is an OSR?, Mapping the Blogosphere, Don't wait to create, don't wait to learn, Same's Three-Question Taxonomy
Debut Blog
It's me! I'm the real winner here! In all seriousness though, I absolutely loved Dungeon Scrawler's Dungeon Room Index. It's been open in a tab for most of the last year, so it gets my vote.
Honorable Mention - Valeria Loves, The Garden Below, Afraid of Encounters
Blog Series
The voters got it right on this one. I loved several of these, but the Designing Dungeons Course walked away with it. This thing should be a published book! I can't believe they gave it away for free.
Honorable Mention - The AD&D Series, The Dungeon Room Index, The Seven-Part Pact