Genres

We are thinking of added more advanced methods of getting around the site, finding campaigns and settings, etc. One of the things that comes up is to be able to sort/filter content on the site by genre.

To help with this we need to come up with a fairly comprehensive list of genres to select from. We don't want to get too specific or niche, do want to provide a useful set for people to choose from.

Here's what we have so far. We invite people to chime in here and help us come up with a good list that's not too long, but covers more RPG settings:

• Fantasy - High Magic
• Fantasy - Low Magic
• Fantasy - Modern
• Fantasy - Future
• Modern
• Modern - Pulp Adventure
• SciFi - Steampunk
• SciFi - Cyberpunk
• SciFi - Space
• Horror
• Western
• Historic
• Super Hero

This is just what we have to start, and we'll edit the list with reasonable suggestions!

I might suggest a distinction on Fantasy - Medieval to:

• High-magic fantasy
• Low-magic fantasy (or Sword & Sorcery)

Also, a couple that could be added:

• Super Hero
• Pulp Adventure
• Steampunk
• Cyberpunk

I replaced Fantasy - Medieval with high and low magic fantasy (I think medieval is implied.

I don't know how I forgot the super hero genre!

Thanks for the suggestions!

How about Fantasy - Heroic, and Fantasy - Gritty?

what about live action games?

I don't think LARP is a genre itself. However, we should probably add a property that indicates whether a game is a live action or table top RPG.

How about Anime?

A few examples to test whether the genres cover:
Where does Call of Cthulhu (1930s) fit? - Horror, I guess.
What about Spirit of The Century (a truly awesome FATE species) - it's 1930s, pulpy, somewhat fantasy - is that modern? history? fantasy-modern? Starts to get difficult.

I'm running an online game elsewhere which starts in the Dark Ages, and moves through to today. How to categorise that?

How about allowing multiple attributes for your game, tags effectively, mostly drawn from your suggested list.

So you could have:
Horror, History (Cthulhu 1930s, Cthulhu Victorian Era)
Fantasy, Modern, High Magic (Old World of Darkness Mage)
Fantasy, High Magic (MERP, Rolemaster, Stormbringer)
Fantasy, Low Magic (Lord of the Rings CODA)
Pulp, History (SOTC, Indiana Jones)
Fantasy, Future (Star Wars)
Horror, Future (Aliens)
History, Modern, Future (Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet)
History, Modern, Future, Fantasy (Dr Who)
Modern, Low Magic [this implies some magic, otherwise you wouldn't mention magic at all] (some flavours of d20 Modern)
Future, Apocalypse (Twilight 2000)
Future, Apocalypse, Fantasy (Tribes 8)
Modern (Conspiracy X)
Future, Cyberpunk (Cyberpunk, Cyberspace)
Future, Cyberpunk, Fantasy (Dark Conspiracy)

If you want to allow a cutting-down of the enormous list of games, you could build an additive filter (I've clicked History, that was too many, now I've clicked Fantasy, show me only History + Fantasy games).

I think by splitting it into a set of tags which you can attach a number of to a game you have the most flexibility, and the best chance of stumbling across something new and exciting while browsing.

That is an excellent idea. The whole reason for starting this thread was because we knew we were getting in over our heads with the possible genres. Of course, the implementation is a bit more tricky this way...

Yes, I know; sorry about that. It requires two logical tables where the other approach might only require one (and amendments to an existing table); the code is more complex to manipulate the data and filter, too....

... but it's a much better solution really.