I made a website to compare TTRPGs

[The Digital DM]

Hey all,

I've been working on a project I think this community will find useful, a site dedicated to comparing TTRPG systems side by side.

Right now it's early days, and honestly a site like this lives and dies by its contributors. If you've got deep knowledge of a particular system (and this crowd definitely does), I'd love to have you involved. I've got a corrections form on the website, and you can go to r/ttrpgwiki to see the methodology.

A few things I'm hoping to cover well:

• Core mechanical philosophy (roll-under vs roll-over, dice pools, etc.)
• Tone and genre fit
• Complexity level
• Accessibility (i.e. free rules, still in print, ect.)
• Community and third-party support

Would love to hear what comparison categories you all think are most important when evaluating a new system. That kind of insight from experienced players is exactly what would make this resource genuinely useful.

Check it out at ttrpgwiki.com and let me know what you think.

 

[GMMichael]

Wow! Way more convenient than the previous GLOGs* I've seen. The "dice" category in the overviews doesn't seem to be doing much work; it seems to mean "you won't be able to play this game if you're missing this die in your set." What about diceless games?

I might like to see categories like:
GM duties - who or what adds setting, current events, or NPC decisions to the story.
Player agency - do PCs make decisions from a list of actions (even "downtime activities"), do/try whatever they want, dictate their own outcomes, dictate NPC outcomes, defer to a GM (or not). . .
Engine emphasis - what do the rules want you to do? Fight, foster relationships, forge holdfasts, forage for fruit?
Modability - Does tinkering with the rules break the game? Can you play just part of the game? Can you add rules (or a module of rules) to change to game into something else?

The "complexity" category looks like the most useful for me, assuming it means "amount of required rules to navigate." I'd just navigate to the Very Low/Low end. (By the way, if Cypher System is as complex as Numenera, I'd put it at Medium complexity.)
After a quick look around, I couldn't find an explanation for "accessibility" on the site, so it's not too helpful just yet.

The project is off to a great start. Give us updates!

P.S. A scroll-up-to-filters button would be nice once those filters are off-screen. Wait . . . there's one of those on my keyboard. So why have I seen that on other sites? More coffee . . .

*Giant Lists of Games.

 

[aco175]

@The Digital DM welcome to the site. I'm more just D&D instead of other games, but many here will tell you why a certain game is the best game in the history of games- ever. Hope they help you out.

 

[The Digital DM]

Wow! Way more convenient than the previous GLOGs* I've seen. The "dice" category in the overviews doesn't seem to be doing much work; it seems to mean "you won't be able to play this game if you're missing this die in your set." What about diceless games?

I might like to see categories like:
GM duties - who or what adds setting, current events, or NPC decisions to the story.
Player agency - do PCs make decisions from a list of actions (even "downtime activities"), do/try whatever they want, dictate their own outcomes, dictate NPC outcomes, defer to a GM (or not). . .
Engine emphasis - what do the rules want you to do? Fight, foster relationships, forge holdfasts, forage for fruit?
Modability - Does tinkering with the rules break the game? Can you play just part of the game? Can you add rules (or a module of rules) to change to game into something else?

The "complexity" category looks like the most useful for me, assuming it means "amount of required rules to navigate." I'd just navigate to the Very Low/Low end. (By the way, if Cypher System is as complex as Numenera, I'd put it at Medium complexity.)
After a quick look around, I couldn't find an explanation for "accessibility" on the site, so it's not too helpful just yet.

The project is off to a great start. Give us updates!

P.S. A scroll-up-to-filters button would be nice once those filters are off-screen. Wait . . . there's one of those on my keyboard. So why have I seen that on other sites? More coffee . . .

*Giant Lists of Games.

---

Thanks for the detailed feedback, this is exactly the kind of thing that helps.

Dice: Fair point. It's mostly there so you know what you need in your bag before showing up. Diceless games like Wanderhome, Microscope, and The Quiet Year all list "None".

Your suggested categories: These are genuinely interesting. GM duties and player agency in particular. Some of this is captured through tags (GM-Less, Solo-Friendly, Collaborative, Fiction-First) and in the Core Mechanic/Best For fields, but you're right that none of it surfaces as a filterable axis. I'll keep these in mind as the site grows. Engine emphasis is the hardest to operationalize without it becoming a wall of text, but I like the thinking.

Modability: This one I've thought about before. There was actually a "Hackability" metric in an earlier version of the site that tried to capture exactly this. It got cut when I narrowed down to the current three core metrics, but the idea didn't go away entirely. It might come back in some form.

Cypher System: Noted. The score is meant to reflect the core system in isolation rather than any specific game built on it. Numenera layers a bit of setting-specific machinery on top of the core Cypher ruleset.

Accessibility: There's an info toggle on each card ("What do these mean?") but it sounds like it's easy to miss. I'll look at making it more prominent, and adding a dedicated methodology page is on the list.

Scroll button: You answered your own question better than I could have