The RPG Basement

So, Christopher Lehrich's 'Ritual' essay, and Jonathan Walton's essay at RPG.net about it made me think about the RPG basement, to wit, the collection of tools and pieces we've collected over the years from published roleplaying games and house rules and settings. It reminded me of a talk I heard Jim Dunnigan (president and founder of SPI) give a number of years back.

In the talk, Jim told us that SPI had, essentially, inventoried their own 'basement' of wargaming pieces. They had a big 3-ring binder filled with all the different pieces they had used in their games over the years, complete with their movements, special powers, and such. If a designer was ever stuck for an idea of what to do with their pieces for their new game, they had only to page through the binder to come up with ideas to steal, er, 're-purpose' ;-)

So that made me think: would it be profitable to inventory our own basement? I could see it being broken down along Ron Edwards' five categories of roleplaying components: Character, System, Setting, Situation, and Color. (Though I'm not sure about the last--it seems more a 'miscellaneous' category than the more concrete other four, at least as far as a project like this goes. ) Some categories would have more things in 'em than others, of course--there'd probably be lots of bits and pieces for System, but not so much for Situation.

The main advantage to having such a resource would be for inspiration for game designers. Just paging though such a resource might trigger ideas, or they could look up a particular mechanic to see where it was used before and how effective it was. Another advantage might be that it would point out obvious holes ('Hey, nobody's done a game set in Modern China yet'). It also might help some of the RPG theoreticians in their categorization and analysis.

Practically, a project like this cries out to be a wiki. If there's interest and if I could find some web space, I could at least get it started, though I'm sure there's many out there more qualified than I. What do you think?

-Lucian