Board Game Geek's RPG Beta

[stuart]

The more, the merrier, I say. The site with the best info will win out, and Acaeum has quite a head start on D&D as a topic. RPG Geek will have the advantage of covering non-D&D material, though.

I've been adding a bunch of old Marvel Superheroes and Palladium: Robotech modules + supplements to BGG's list. The Acaeum is great, and will likely remain more detailed that BGG... but BGG has other features that compliment that site as well. It's nice seeing the "weight" and rating that people give to games and what the averages are. It's also nice seeing reviews, play reports and miscellaneous linked files.

 

[Punnuendo]

My new quote of the day is "They don't understand the nuances of RPG collecting."

Really though, I'm pretty pumped over RPGG. It'll give me even more ways to find things to spend money on...

 

[davethegame]

Apparently several folks at the Acaeum with pretty-extensive experience with the politics at BGG are not too excited about their project: see RPG Geek coming soon! for details

Wow. I'm pretty connected as far as RPGs on the Internet go, and I've never heard of the Acaerum before today, and I'm not all that sorry. Lots of misrepresentations of BGG (and insults) right off the bat. While they may better information as far as specific information goes, RPGG is going to be a whole lot more accessible.

 

[Piratecat]

Wow. I'm pretty connected as far as RPGs on the Internet go, and I've never heard of the Acaerum before today

That surprises me, Dave. I wouldn't judge them by that thread; the site is a superb place to learn more about the history of the game.

 

[grodog]

I agree that the Acaeum site members are not coming out against BGG because they think the Acaeum should be/is the only source of RPG data on the net; from my reading, they're saying that they've had experience with the local politics, levels of detail, and general approach to games descriptions at BGG, and that the BGG approaches to how they handle the indexed/described content don't really apply as well to RPGs in the same way that they do to board/war games. And the folks there know that there are several excellent resources for RPG researchers out there, many more detailed and broader in scope than the Acaeum, including (from most- to least-broadly focused):

- The Tome of Treasures @ http://www.tomeoftreasures.com/ and http://www.tomeoftreasures.com/forum/index.php (a pretty comprehensive gaming site/forum, with core focuses on D&D, other RPGs, magazines and fanzines, wargames, and other ephemera like licensed toys, etc.)

- The TSR Archive @ http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/ (a broad tracking of D&D across all editions, including third party materials from generic 1e/d20/OGL publishers)

- AfterGlow2 @ http://www.afterglow2.com/ which is itself inspired by Matthias Bok's original afterglo site, now only available via the Internet Achive; the updated site focuses on non-TSR/generic D&D publications by OD&D/1e/2e "third party" publishers

All of these resources, in turn, owe a great deal of initial inspiration and research footwork to Lawrence Schick's Heroic Worlds, which is the first really comprehensive effort to catalog the RPG industry.

 

[Mike Selinker]

As a multiclassed boardgame designer/RPG designer, I've been poking around on the RPG Geek beta quite a bit. It's amazingly comprehensive. It's pretty darn impressive that they just turned 3200 entries on at once, in contrast with the slow build of Board Game Geek. I encourage everyone on these boards to check it out.

Mike