I share your feeling of disappointment in finding out a game is not at all what I thought it was or was looking for. I’ve begun to believe that we really need some well-defined subcategories for this poorly-defined misnomer we call “role-playing games”. I’ve seen discussions where people will respond to questions like “what game should I buy for <genre>?” with gushing recommendations for a variety of games that differ drastically from each other in fundamental ways—so much so that it’s quite likely the buyer will be highly disappointed with some of them if they have any expectations about what a <genre> RPG looks like, and aren’t just in a mindset of looking to try something new, don’t much care what, run with <genre> to spark ideas for suggestions. (I apologize for that sentence; it was atrocious even by my own low standards.) If, on the other hand, the buyer could have asked with a set of parameters that were generally understood, half of those suggestions never would have come up (or would have come up with an express statement that they didn’t quite fit—which can actually be really useful for providing new options without being confusing), and the potential buyer would get the information they need and not be stuck with a pretty game they’re never going to play.
So: What you are looking for is doable. I don’t know how to do it yet; but it’s doable.
I have some brainstorms pointing in that direction. I’ll divide them into part 1 and part 2. I do this because part 1 is short, but might garner a lot of discussion, and that’s not what I’m really intending since part 2 is more directly addressing this particular thread. So I’m dividing them up by intent.
Part 1: A very general categorization like G/N/S theory would be useful here. I don’t hold to all of the developments from that theory, but I do like the basic initial insights and have yet to develop any other alternative taxonomy that is better. While it is imperfect it, quite frankly, works. If someone tells me that a game is “highly narrativist”, or “heavy on simulationism”—despite the fact that the theory says you can’t classify games themselves that way—I get some really valuable information about that system before I even look at it. And so far I have never derived mistaken impression from such simplistic statements as saying where a game fits into those styles. I’m very open to a better system (and always trying to come up with one), but GNS works at a basic level.
How would you use this sort of thing for classifying games? I’d go with identifying intent and implementation separately. For instance, you might say that a game’s intent is highly narrativist, but the implementation is moderately simulationist with some awkwardly bolted on narrativist flourishes. Or you might say another game is an unusually successful blend of a baseline of simulationist task resolution, with gamist play elements, and integrated narrativism throughout (how I might described Torg: Eternity). Tell me that about any game and you’ve given me enough to go into it with a significantly lessened chance of having completely missed my expectations.
Part 2: I think we can do better by getting into more detail about various elements of a game. Sufficient detail can make it a lot easier to identify objective information that can be conveyed. It’s up to individuals to say whether they think it was done well or not, but we should be able to objectively define much of what was actually done. A few ideas.
Rules Heaviness: One could separate this into a couple of categories, such as quantity of crunch, and diversification of systems. So a game that only has a few basic systems, but has books and books of additional crunch content (say, books with additional powers, races, classes, that sort of thing) that uses those same systems would be high crunch quantity but low system diversification. The opposite would be a game whose rules all fit within 30 pages, but has a different subsystem for everything. And you could have rules that are heavy on both of those or light on both of those, etc. That’s much more useful than saying a system it complex or rules heavy.
Play-Style Intention: A couple of the ones that I find most prevalent are Plot Development—where you are really focused first and foremost on telling a story—and Setting Exploration—where the game is designed with a really interesting world for you to sandbox around in and do whatever. I suspect these are somewhat opposed to one another—the more you are just soaking in the world the less you can be focusing your play experience on a story, and vice versa. But I’m not sure that’s the case. In any event, those are some things where the design intent is usually pretty obvious. A game isn’t limited to just one intent either. “Works equally well in providing a sandbox to explore as it does in providing a strong story-focus” is a perfectly good description. There are other elements that need to be addressed here. I don’t have a comprehensive list, though I’m sure it could be narrowed down to a few big categories that most people will find useful.
Task Resolution: Others have already addressed this, and this is one of the ones that tends to be put front and center before you even try the system, though sometimes it isn’t. Good and concise explanations here would be useful. “Uses d10s” says nothing. I’m not sure what sort of descriptive conventions would work here, but there is definitely room for improvement since the concise descriptions that work aren’t accessible unless you already have a lot of experience with RPGs and enough experience comparing them to get the jargon the writer chose to employ, while more accessible statements tend to be uninformative.
Setting: This is one of the easiest ones. Modern Fantasy. Space Opera. Wild West with Zombies and Voodoo. What’s needed here is a simple, one sentence, description that tells you what distinguishes this Space Opera from all of the others in such a way that the reader immediately knows if they will like it or not.
Scope: This expands on setting by explaining a few things you might not get in that first sentence. For instance, is meta-plot a thing? How much of a thing it is? Does the product line have an in-world timeline that marches along with mega-adventures and novels progressing it, or is there a vague menace out there somewhere with hints showing up in setting products that are otherwise more or less time-agnostic or snapshots of parts of the setting? Is there no meta-plot at all, and just an initial setup and then you do what you want? Is this system a toolbox for making your own setting, and if so what are the limits of what sort of settings it supports? Scope could also go beyond setting and include rules. Are there things that you might expect the rules to cover but that they don’t? What sort of power levels are supported? Are there any limitations in what levels of power player character have access to compared to other characters in the world? If so, are these inherent to the premise (the Darkened Evilites gain great power by foul deeds), or are they arbitrary? Here’s one that you don’t see brought up much: Is there an assumption that players start at a specific (generally low) power level (ie, “Level 1”)? Personally I think that’s a ridiculous assumption that continues to be built into games, but most people just assume it’s the case, so if a game doesn’t do that, it’s a feature worth pointing out.
Product Investment: How much do you get in the core books? How many other books are there, or are there expected to be, and what are you getting out of them? Do you just get a taste of certain elements in the core books and need further books to really get the full material on those? (Here it is definitely worth getting reviewer opinions, because publishers have a vested interest that might bias their descriptions, ie “all you need to….!” doesn’t necessarily mean, “all I actually want to…”) Tying-in to scope, how much investment do you need to get the scope you want? If it’s space opera, does the core material focus in on a certain part of the galaxy, and you need supplements to get the rest—or does it give you a high-level overview of everywhere and supplements go into more depth? How many supplements are there, and how much material do you get out of each?
Game Presentation: This is sort of a catchall category for things that are more or less external to the system and setting, but will matter to consumers and can be categorized. One might be maturity rating (both as far as what sort of players it might appeal to, as well as how much mature content it contains—which are by no means correlatable). Another would be the amount and quality of art and how enjoyable the books are to read by themselves. Is it something that sparks the imagination with lots of ideas (whether for adventures to run with this game, or just to get you thinking in general)? Is it concisely organized?
For time purposes I’m going to stop there. I see that I’ve wandered from classifications to something more like review advice, but I think most of what I talked about (and whatever I missed) could be condensed down into maybe 10 different categories. They wouldn’t all be ratable on a numeric scale, but they could be rated with a few words each, ie “highly focused on setting exploration, minimal emphasis on storylines”, usually in a similar format. Some categories would be more akin to crates you stick some keywords into. You might throw this into a Scope category for a game: Meta-plot heavy, solid world-overview, setting details in supplements, zero-to superhero advancement.
