Jessica Redekop

Online Nickname: tectonomancer

Introduction 

I am Jessica Redekop, a professional game designer working in TTRPGs. I do freelance writing primarily for Paizo Publishing on the Pathfinder and Starfinder product lines. The current direction of the games industry is extremely exciting and I love to watch as new games build on the shoulders of those who came before, the innovations that grow from fertile soil and the new and novel ideas that germinate from outside the industry’s current scope. I would like to bring my perspective on gaming as a non-binary game designer who started playing RPGs in the late 90s and early 2000s and watched as the misogyny I and others like me face in gaming spaces changed but has still not entirely gone away. I have been attending GenCon consistently for the last several years and intend to attend again next year.

Why do you play/run RPGs?

I love collaboration and collaborative storytelling, and the spontaneous turns that can arise during an RPG when another player makes a choice you did not expect. I love the empathy RPGs encourage by inviting players to inhabit another person and consider how they would make choices if they were someone else and came from a different perspective.

The ENNIES requires a major commitment of time and energy. What resources do you have that will help you discharge these responsibilities? Will your gaming group or other individuals be assisting you? Does your family support you?

I have multiple regular gaming groups, both in person and online, that are dedicated to exploring and learning about new games, as well as TTRPG content creator friends who I sometimes join on stream for review and preview content. If I were a judge and had access to the submitted games, I have an existing framework of reading and playing games the submitted games could easily be fit into, and I could spend the time leading up to the awards focusing on only those games.

Judging requires a great deal of critical thinking skills, communication with other judges, deadline management, organization, and storage space for the product received. What interests, experience, and skills do you bring that will make you a more effective judge?

I do freelance game design for RPG publishers and community management of game design-oriented Discord servers. In the past, I have done community management in forum environments as well as in online gaming spaces.

What styles and genres of RPGs do you enjoy most? Are there any styles or genres that you do not enjoy? Which games best exemplify what you like? Do you consider yourself a fan of a particular system, publisher, or genre?

I primarily write for Paizo, but I would not say I am biased toward the Pathfinder or Starfinder games. I am interested in playing any game and analyzing the choices it makes in its design to further its agenda in the types of stories the creator imagined the game would create. I believe all games are technical writing and their job is to deliver a curated experience, and as long as the game delivers on the experience it’s meant to deliver, it’s a successful game regardless of whether or not its genre is my personal favourite. A game can be excellent but still not be for me personally, and I delight in discovering successful games of any type.

List (up to 5) games you’ve played in the last 2 years. What drew you to playing them? Which did you like best and why?

One of my gaming groups chooses new games to try randomly via wheel-picker, because our objective is to experiment with different games and systems. In the last year alone, we have tried The Darkest House, Heart, Not The End, and the Magnus Archive RPG.

Of the four, I enjoyed Heart the most. I was especially draws to progression mechanics where the player is meant to choose the story beat they want to pursue, as I believe many games don’t do enough to encourage above-table communication between GM and player to ensure the player (separate from their character) has sufficient opportunity to collaborate in the story.

We finished a Magnus Archive scenario last week, and though I am not familiar with the Magnus Archive podcast, I question if the cypher system was a good choice for executing on a horror RPG. Compared against Paizo’s newest game, 13 Omens (which I was able to play in a preview game at a convention), I think 13 Omens is much more successful in horror pacing and setting up the bounds of a story where the inevitability of tragedy still feels good for the players, rather than like the consequence of failed rolls (which was my experience with TMA).

Have you been a game master in the past 2 years? If yes, what games have you run? What made you decide to run those games?

I have primarily run Pathfinder and Starfinder in the last 2 years, because I usually run the games I’m writing for, and because in my other regular groups other friends have been GMing. Because my choice in what I am running is based on the system I need to familiarize myself with for work or other research, I would run other games if I were writing for them, or if I were judging them for the Ennies.

Summarize the criteria you would use to determine if a game deserves to be nominated for Best Game.

* Is the game easy to teach
* Do the game’s mechanics match its objectives
* Are there extraneous design choices that seem out of place within the greater whole of the game, or has it been successfully curated into a coherent final package
* Does the game successfully deliver its promised game experience
* Has the game innovated on the types of designs that came before it

How will you judge supplements or adventures for game systems whose core rules you are unfamiliar with or you believe are badly designed?

I am an adventure writer and don’t particularly feel my familiarity with the game system will really matter for judging an adventure product, as I have very strongly defined ideas of what makes an adventure product good or bad. Most importantly, an adventure is (even more than any other TTRPG product) a piece of highly technical writing where the author instructs the reader in how to run a session as if they were the author. It is important for adventures to understand that their audience is NOT the game table and the players, and that an adventure author is not writing a narrative. The biggest problem with adventures, in my experience, is this misunderstanding where authors believe their job is to write a narrative or a story, rather than write an instruction manual for an adventure that will ultimately be operated by a reader who will always be unknown to them, who can have nothing clarified for them, and who should ideally be invited in to collaborate with the manual.

How would you like to see the ENNIEs change? What should remain inviolate?

Judge diversity has been a fairly consistent problem, tbh.