Great idea, although it won’t be that useful for many people, I think, until it supports a wider variety of systems and editions. The current selection is quite small. I also think, as somebody has commented, that having boardgames and wargames in it would be great. But nice idea, it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves from here.
Which systems and editions would you like to see? Adding new ones is pretty trivial, the current list is based on my own (limited) market research of what is popular. I don't want to allow freeform text because I'm worried the search will become too fragmented.
Thanks for asking. :) The thing is, if I were to use it I would (personally) be interested in some that aren’t that popular, and in different editions of the same game. Like for example, Runequest 3rd edition - but also the new 7th edition. The Call of Cthulhu 3rd edition - but also the new edition (7th). I know some people that play Cyberpunk 2020, I think. So it’s more that from my perspective if I were a user I would want to create campaigns or games for systems that are old, fringe or very specific... not being able to do it kind of makes the site unusable if that’s what one wants. I was actually interested to see if there were people organising games for some of these, or wargames like Battletech, and others, and seeing that it wasn’t an option was a little bit of a disappointment. I understand what you say about not wanting users type the name of the same game in a myriad different ways, and I don’t know what would be the solution to it. Maybe boardgamegeek offers a service to get roleplaying games names data? I also don’t know how would I present the options to the user so users both get a reasonable list of defaults straight away and are also able to input more bizarre choices. Anyways - cool initiative, I’m sure these kind of issues will be solved somehow in future versions of the website.
But I think that there’s a lot of value in allowing less popular choices because when one goes to the internet to find players, perhaps it’s because the game is so niche that it’s hard to find them in real life.
Any games you'd like to see, I am happy to add. Perhaps I need to look at a better way of handling editions than totally separate games. In the meantime, you can also use the "Other" game option and mention what system it is in the description. I'll take a look around at BoardGameGeek and some other data sources to see if I can expand the catalog.
My thought is at the minimum you should be able to say "X RPG, any edition" and "X RPG, these editions only" - my thought is a lot of people would play AD&D 3rd and 5th editions but not 4th, or at least they say that online :)
Relatedly you can have campaign settings as well, AD&D certainly has several but the official/custom split potentially applies to any game with its own setting. Could just be handled by tags though.
Roll20 has done OK with freeform text, I think. I'm not a UX expert but... what if the pulldown menu displayed the top 20 systems for the previous month, with an Other submenu that displayed everything else?
