TTRPG Databases

[stepnix]

Let's say I want to find a synopsis of a movie. I can check IMDB, that's a pretty good resource. Let's say I want to find a synopsis of a novel. I'd probably try wikipedia for that one. These are both very broad community-maintained resources, if not truly neutral they're at least generally acceptable.

If I want a synopsis of a TTRPG system? suddenly things become much trickier.

There's a few contributing factors here I think. For one thing TTRPGs are so information dense that it might be more apt to compare a system summary to the plot AND the set and costuming AND the cinematography, so this might be a little unfair to expect in the first place. But it still feels weird to me. If I want relatively brief summaries of a system I have to look into specific community archives (like the old 1d4chan wiki, or Something Awful's community read-through archives) or search for individual reviews from independent bloggers. The closest I've seen to what I'm envisioning as a "neutral ground" TTRPG database is RPGGeek. They do good work there, but they don't have much in the way of system summaries. I'm interested in investigating French site Le Grog more closely for how it handles things.

We got a reminder of how fragile the TTRPG ecosystem really is just last week, when Itch went down temporarily as a result of overbearing copyright claim by Funko (yes that Funko). I guess I'm worried that without much in the way of easily accessible reference points, we're going to have short memories and lose track of each others' work.

Comments

[catgiri]

as someone just getting into ttrpg, this is a very real frustration! a lot of info regarding indie systems is also paywalled, which i get is fair since they need to finance themselves, but at least the synopsis and most basic mechanics should be easily accesible imo, otherwise how are you going to build an audience in the first place? T-T

[stepnix]

I wonder how much of this comes from assuming too much audience familiarity? Like, the blurb might say "powered by the apocalypse" or "OSE-compatible" and the established community gets the picture, but for the newcomers it's meaningless.

[elf]

I'm in the process of building a small database for the games I've picked up in itch.io megabundles. (And a few others, but almost all itch.io stuff.) RandomBundleGame has a lot of bundles - but that's just info scraped from itch.io, which does not tell you much about them. And the tags aren't standardized.

[stepnix]

oooh that sounds great

[elf]

Database will indicate how many players for TTRPGs, which game engine they use, will eventually have page counts & word counts, how many/what kinds of dice, whether a GM is needed, and other important info, like "Does this game involve actual fire?"

Video games have about a dozen categories, and people who want to know video game info can be happy I am not categorizing them as "Visual Novel/Point-and-Click adventure/Walking Sim/Interactive text/Everything else."