You’re aware that BoardGameGeek is the best-in-breed website for information about board games. The incredible thing about BGG is that it doesn’t require the qualifier hobby board games, or adventure board games when you describe it. It’s a site for geeks, about board games, whose purview legitimately expands to include definitive information about even mainstream games, for mainstream humans.
Those behind BoardGameGeek have recently launched a similar site for tabletop roleplaying games. It’s apparently part of a new umbrella brand they’re trying to create, “Geekdo.” This, clearly, is a horrible name—worse than “Gleemax”—but who am I to complain if it results in a site for RPGs that brings the raw information and functionality of BGG to the unwashed masses of roleplaying. Luckily, it appears that we can all safely refer to the new site as “RPG Geek,” since rpggeek.com seems to redirect to rpg.geekdo.com.
The unique excellence of BoardGameGeek lies, largely, the way it leverages the site’s community to create excellent content. The first step in launching RPG Geek toward similar greatness is to get on over there and start plugging in a breadth and depth of great RPG info. Let’s get to it!
Just read your escapist article. Good to hear I’m not the only one who thinks RPGs are due for a shake-up. Also good to see that someone finally decided to get a website up to catalog RPGs!
Glad to see this place in existence, finally. It needs some momentum to get up and running, though. There are a lot of products in there that need reviews and analysis, and without the easy-to-compare actual play of board games, I’m exceedingly curious to see what kind of bias naturally develops among RPG Geek reviewers and raters. (This is not meant as an attack — I think SOME bias is inevitable as the audience self-selects; just a fact of existence.)
I, for example, so far find the ratings on a few of my books to be not especially helpful, since there aren’t comments to go with them.