Hello,

For a school project, I'm building an RPG database utility for cataloging RPGs according to 30 or so criteria. When finished, it should be fairly simple for users to submit data about the RPGs in question, or to search for a game based on combinations of criteria.

The basic purpose of the utility is to find games according to your current desires. Say that you want to play a modern horror game that works well with 3 people, is ideal as a two-shot and is coherently Simulationist, the utility should be able to list all such games that have been submitted to it.

So my first two questions towards its design are:

A) Does something like this already exist? If so, then I'd like to see what cool ideas I could rip off.

B) What criteria would you have to find a game you want to play?

Thanks!

- Sean Musgrave

Hey Sean-

rpg.net has a fairly sizeable rpg database, however it does not have nearly that focused of a degree of criteria.  It's still pretty nifty and expansive.

Sadly, most of the things that make a game cool to me are subjective, and databases have trouble searching for subjectivity.

What type of subjective data are you thinking of?

Most of the data I'm thinking is highly subjective - For example, the 'ideal number of players' data. In such a case I'm turning to the author if possible/appropriate, then my own judgments, then guesswork. even then it can be somewhat controversial ( For example, Polaris, wherein the inside of the book seems to strong imply exactly 4 players as the ideal number, but the outside does say '3-5' players and rules are made as exceptions, AND ben Lehman states that he likes running three player games now. Also, I just played a totally awesome two player game of it.)

There's a couple of strategies for working around the issue of finding a trustable source of subjective data - Information could be voted in, subjective information could be signed by authors of the information and you could be inclined to find information from authors you agree with. Personally, the latter sounds the most useful to me though the hardest to implement, so I'll probably hold off on it till I get the skeleton working.