Evaluating Adventures

Recently, Patchwork Paladin published her criteria for judging adventures, including what is required for an adventure to qualify as "good" or "great" in her estimations. I think it's a good post, offering both a neat set of criteria, and some insight into what she values in adventures. More importantly, to me, the post prompted me to think about how I evaluate adventures (and RPG books in general), and the usefulness of such criteria. Ultimately, I think a judging rubric is a necessity if you're aiming for any sort of fair ranking comparison. As Clayton over at Explorers Design shared in his Ennies Debrief, that award lacks any sort of scoring rubric, much to its detriment. A set of criteria such as this is crucial for guiding judgement to the parts of the subject matter chosen for judging. In point-based systems, the allocation of points between categories communicates what the judging system cares about, and even if categories are equal in their weighting, the selection of which…