>Out of curiosity, should I not have bothered entering this
>month, as you cited my last month's win as sort of a DQ'er?
>The rules state *generally* we can't win again.. are there
>cases that you can think of that WOULD allow a contest winner
>to win again? (this question can go to any judge of a role
>contest, BTW, not just you, Cyradia.)

This is something we've been talking about recently.

The tradition for a while now has been that if you win, any chapters that were valid for your win can't be considered for future contests. In practice, this has pretty much disqualified previous winners -- a lot of the best roles often start with one or two brilliant chapters with subsequent chapters being much less polished. (Not saying this is what we'd love to see, just, the way things tend to go from most of the roles I've seen.)

Now we're sort of thinking, maybe if you win that should just be it. You could still get more imm XP for your role, get custom rewards based on doing a good job playing your role as written / conveying changes in your updates, but not for writing more role in a vacuum. (I try to factor in how well people play their role when I judge a RC, but even in that case the role as written is the biggest factor in winning, and for many judges it's the only factor.) The idea being, hey, you've gotten this pretty cool reward for excelling at this aspect in the game, now go out and excel in some other aspect as well if you want more goodies -- lead a cabal, get a tattoo, be a standout RPer / PKer / explorer, etc. I think that makes a certain amount of sense.

The question that I think is still up in the air and may or may not end up being one of those 'depends on who's running the contest' things is what constitutes a win. First place or first tier or the equivalent in anyone's contest pretty clearly does; honorable mention in contests where it's just a small immXP or edge credit or a train reward probably isn't. What about something like the honorable mention in most of my/Rayihn's contests or the second tier in this contest, where those characters are getting some kind of special reward custom to their role/character, but not as good as a first prize? I don't know. I can argue that either way.