Inspired by Clayton Notestine's debrief on his participation in the 2025 Ennie Awards and Split/Party's "What awards do for us?" article (which I contributed to via an interview about The Awards), I've decided to start an open record of my thought process and design goals for The Awards 2026.
That's right! The awardiest awards of the TTRPG space are back baby! After a casual year off, we're back and better than ever, ready to deliver weird award excellence right to your grasping little hands.
My discussion with Lhuzie of Split/Party and Part 4 of Clayton's debrief helped crystallize ideas I've been ruminating on for the past few years, and the easiest way to further develop those ideas is to actually get them written down. Hopefully, by sharing the development of these ideas with more than just my own brain I can both hone them to a fine point and help build interest in this overall project. To start, though, I'm going to follow Clayton's article point-by-point to answer some crucial, foundational questions about The Awards 2026.
What's the purpose of The Awards?
The stated purpose of The Awards is to find and elevate small, weird bits of this artistic medium so that other people can play, enjoy, and be inspired by them. But beyond this, it's fun to get together with people (whether friends or relative strangers) and just yap about this shared interest of ours. Some of my strongest opinions about TTRPGs have been developed or changed during conversations before, during, or after game sessions (to say nothing of the time I spent as a judge for The Awards 2022) and I want The Awards to play a role in developing and improving that type of discourse more broadly.
What can The Awards produce?
Discovery
The Awards specifically wants to honor and recognize games that might have a hard time being discovered otherwise. Random shit on itch, games that had a small crowdfunding campaign, things that might get themselves deprioritized on social media algorithms, I want all of these to have a home in The Awards. I truly believe that many of these games are more than good enough to receive recognition from other TTRPG award shows, and I hope that they get it there too, but until then hopefully The Awards can balance out the scales a bit.
Education
I'm not so conceited as to think that I have such a singular perspective on TTRPGs that everyone can learn something from me specifically, but I'm a firm believer that a curated pool of judges with interesting perspectives and a lot of time to discuss games together can come up with some fascinating insights they might not have developed separately. I've never quite had the same space to discuss games as I did as a judge for The Awards 2022, mostly because there's never been another space where that's all we were doing for two months straight. A specific list of games, a specific goal to pick 20 of them as worthy of recognition, and a small group of people to bounce ideas off of can generate some real magic.
Change
My vision for The Awards is a constantly evolving one, and I hope that by doing stuff like these design diaries I can keep it fresh and interesting. Every previous version of The Awards has looked a little different than the ones before it, and I want to keep that ethos going forward.
3 things to steal from outside RPGs
#1 Some awards are not zero-sum games
Check! The Awards has always recognized submissions based on a general high caliber of artfulness and craft, which is why we don't even have a hierarchy of ranking winners. There are no tiers of recognition, just a slate of 20 winners that the judges think deserve both recognition and your attention.
#2 Many awards tailor their judge panels
This is absolutely the point I am thinking about the most right now, and one I will be devoting an entire post to at some later point. As our system currently stands, the Coordinator (myself) selects 10-12 judges from all applications, trying to self-consciously diversify both the TTRPG opinions and life experiences represented in the overall panel. Despite these efforts, all previous judges panels have been less racially and gender diverse than I personally would like to see due almost entirely to the demographics of the applicants we received. I see this as primarily a challenge upstream of the actual judge selection process (though I may also move to a more committee-based judge selection process in order to dilute biases I might have), and so I am tentatively declaring that the judges panel for The Awards 2026 must be at least 50% people of color and at least 50% people of marginalized genders.
I understand that quota systems come with their own issues, but right now I believe that making a public commitment to diversifying our judges panel will encourage a broader cross-section of the TTRPG community to both want to be a judge and submit their games for consideration.
To be clear, this approach to tailoring the judge panel is quite different than what Clayton is proposing, as his focus is more on drawing on professional expertise to lend legitimacy to awards like "Best Layout" or "Best Art". I think this works well for those kinds of awards, but part of my mission for The Awards is to develop and promote expertise. Anyone who takes the time to read 150+ TTRPGs (the lowest number of submissions we have gotten thus far) has the experience needed to decide which of those 150 are worthy of specific recognition, and the process of them discussing submissions with other judges will further hone their taste and discernment. Technical expertise (here meaning mastery of writing, design, editing, layout, graphic design, and/or visual arts) absolutely has a place in the judging of The Awards, but when I balance it against other priorities in the structure of the institution I do not consider it as fundamental of a goal. Preexisting expertise is certainly a plus when evaluating potential judges for The Awards, but I do not at this moment consider it to be a prerequisite.
#3 Most award shows have closed voting
Once again, check! Really not much to say here, other than I personally have no interest in a popularity contest deciding what is award-worthy (or at least not on a large scale; one could argue quite compellingly that any voting process is a popularity contest).
3 things RPG awards can change
#1 Roleplaying awards should specialize
The Awards is already specialized to some degree: we are focused on weirder, smaller, artsy games. The question that logically follows from this is, of course, who gets to decide what is weird, small, and/or artsy?
Well historically that has been up to the judges, and it's not like they have a rubric to say how 'weird' or 'artsy' something is. We have, however, previously used an unofficial metric to determine how 'small' a game is: in the first year of The Awards, the judges decided to disqualify anything that had raised more than $100,000 in a crowdfunding campaign. This metric was discussed in The Awards 2023 and 2024, but was ultimately not used in the latter (as is clearly evident by at least one winner having surpassed that benchmark). For The Awards 2026, I plan on making this metric official: any game, book, podcast, or other TTRPG-related material that has raised over $100,000 on a crowdfunding website is not eligible for The Awards 2026.
Let me be clear: this is not about gatekeeping who gets to be 'indie.' I do not give a shit about that particular wasps' nest of discourse. What it is about is the mission of The Awards, which is to elevate games that you might have missed out on or overlooked otherwise. A game that raises over $100,000 on Kickstarter? That's doing fairly well on the visibility front, even if it's not breaking crowdfunding records. A game released on itch that only the creator's followers might have seen? That could be genuinely mind-blowing, but only if enough people get their eyes on it.
Does this potentially exclude some genuinely incredible pieces of art from consideration? Yes. Was the $100,000 cutoff fundamentally arbitrary and chosen because it's a nice round number? Also yes. But this is part of the process of honing in on what exactly it is you care about when designing something like this, and at its heart what I most care about is leveling the playing field for games and artists without a lot of resources behind them.
#2 Roleplaying awards should be online-first
Check, check, check! The Awards really has no other choice, given that there are no sponsors or institutional backers behind it to fund anything in-person, but even if we did I would prefer to stay online for exactly the reasons Clayton outlined.
#3 Roleplaying awards should be about people
I could not agree more with this statement if I tried. This is why I decided to involve judges in announcing the winners of The Awards 2023 and 2024, to give them a chance to share what they found so great about the winners they had selected and to give a general audience the chance to see the people who had put in so much work and passion on this project. In a perfect world, I would try to extend this to the winners too, to engage with them after they won to help get the word out about their cool stuff, but as I am only one person I have to either proceed very deliberately so as to not overextend myself or find collaborators who can help with the vision.
Which brings me to my final point...
This is all incredibly preliminary, and even the definitive statements I've made here could be subject to change. There are several months to go before anything becomes official, and if you have opinions, ideas, or criticism about anything I've presented here, you can email me at theawards.games@gmail.com or DM me on Bluesky. I can't promise anything will come of it, and I reserve the right to ignore people who appear to be engaging in bad faith, but I do genuinely want to engage with people who care about this kind of thing.
So anyway, we've reached the end of this first Design Diary, and I just want to leave you with the (un)official motto of The Awards:
Make weird shit. Make shit weird.
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