Gaming fandoms

[elf]

I want to make a bunch of gaming pages at Fanlore. Mostly tabletop RPGs, because that's what I know well enough to just sit down with a template and throw in data; eventually, some hex-map-based wargames, some board and card games, and probably some online flash games.

I'm trying to figure out how to start, and I'd like some advice.

I've got the page for the RPG infobox, which automatically puts a page in category:games. I'm trying to figure out what other categories they go in.

How granular should categories get? Do all games stay lumped together under "Games," or should we have Games:tabletop RPG, :board-and-card, :console video game, :MMORPG, :LARP, :flash-based, :wargame, :online RPG, etc.?

I mean eventually. Right now, a dozen subcategories would be silly. But if I make 50 pages for RPGs... I have about that many sitting on my gaming shelf right now, without having to look for games I don't directly know anything about... the "Games" category is gonna get crowded with RPGs and elf's-other-favorite-games. (I am itching to create gamer-lore pages. The rest of fandom should know that many gamers once claimed that FGU stood for "Fucking Game is Unplayable.")

Also not sure what other categories games should have. I think of them as "fandom by source text," but there's some disagreement about that. I don't want to create 30 pages with wrong categories. Does "source text" mean "any canonical material for this fandom," or does it mean "consumable media: movie, tv, book, browsable website?" Are they source texts, or canon types, or a community? Or something else?

I am aware there is no current absolute answer. I'm asking for discussion to sort these issues out.

In the meantime, I'm setting up a template page for myself for RPGs. Not a fanlore-template, which is a bit of wiki-code, but a Word doc with the fanlore template and a couple of categories (including the sort-as bit and a stub marker) at the top, followed by a set of pre-established headers, which I don't expect to be able to fill in all at once. I plan to use this for "small" rpgs; industry leaders like D&D, GURPS, and Vampire: The Masquerade might be much more individualized.

I'm planning on the following sections for RPG (and similar):

• top section, unlabeled, giving the game genre (if any), type of character creation (random or point-based, class-specific or open-ended, etc.) mechanics details: crunchy or light, general power level, and any special fame or noteworthiness the game has achieved.
• History & Convention Activity, including both con-sponsored games and whether it's prominent among gamers who attend gaming conventions.
• Awards, including both awards the game itself has been nominated for or won, and awards available to players of the game. (At tournaments, mostly, although the internet has invented a few other types of awards.)
• Notable People, or BNFs, but gamers don't often know the phrase "BNF" so it'd be odd to use that. Could include both players of note, and designers/publishers who are active in a way that fandom notices. I don't like the label for this section.
• House Rules common to the game, or not common but published.
• Controversies--gonna be empty in most, possibly enough to leave it out entirely. (However, any game that had a 2nd edition, probably had controversies between players.)
• Common Character Types--You *can* write up half-orc clerics in D&D. I even knew someone who did. Once. However, Aragorn-wannabes are in pretty much every group.
• Game Tropes--another one that I'm not happy with the label. Maybe should call it Game Clichés. Every D&D player knows the "you all meet in a bar" setup; Champions players are familiar with "you're all in a bank in your secret IDs when a team of masked villains start waving guns around."
• Sourcebooks & Modules--both popular "official" ones, and fan-made worldbooks. Some games won't have any, but anything that got played much at least acquired a few zine-style adventure modules.
• Misc/Other Details, because I want to leave space for things that don't fit in that, so that would-be editors don't *not add info* because they can't figure out where to put it.

That's a lot of sections. Most pages on Fanlore don't have that many sections. Many games, arguably, don't need that much detail; the Midnight at the Well of Souls RPG probably never got played enough to get house rules or even common character types. (I keep forgetting it's not an FGU game.) OTOH, if the page is made with sections, someone might fill them in. If the page just says "this game was published in 1985 by a company that's long out of business; it's based on a series of SF novels; most gamers have never heard of it or the novels," it's not likely to ever get more info. And maybe there was some group that played it, loved it, and has a Geocities page now at the Wayback machine about which of its alien races worked better as actual PCs.

(Oh. eep. There's no Fanlore entry for Player Character. Nor NPC. There's one for GM, though. But not "The GM's Girlfriend," a topic that might be more suited for TVTropes than Fanlore.)

The real questions here (if you read through all that) are:
1) How to categorize a cluster of gaming pages, mostly tabletop RPG, but possibly a few others, so that they probably don't all need to be retouched later, and
2) Is my approach to RPG pages reasonable, or something that doesn't fit well with the rest of the wiki?

Comments

[briar_pipe]

Most of the folks I know do play using specific rulesets (Paranoia, various White Wolf, Earthdawn, In Nomine, specific unpublished rulesets they created, or even D&D) with built-in world-building, which makes them very much canons to me.

It sounds like your experience has been a bit different. Do you think you're looking at canon types/subcategories? Or are you thinking maybe genres or even glossary terms?

To me, with or without miniatures is more of a style choice, but certainly some games run better with them, and some don't need them at all. I don't know if I would classify games with or without miniatures as separate types? But that may just be me, not being into miniatures. ^_^

[chomiji]

"Do you think you're looking at canon types/subcategories? Or are you thinking maybe genres or even glossary terms?"

Could be. As I mentioned above to elf, I may be going afield of what Fanlore is meant to do and be. My bad.

"It sounds like your experience has been a bit different."

Quite possible - I've been gaming since the late 1970s. Our current campaign is a space opera based on 1930-1950s pulp SF, using primarily D20 Modern and Future. At one point I was in a D20 spy campaign. I also played in some online games on the old CompuServe game forum, which were mainly GURPs-based, including the GURPs port of the White Wolf stuff. But there was also a GURPs Japanese mythology campaign.

So what would you do with game systems that aren't locked into specific types of worlds and scenarios, like D20 Modern, which can be used for spy games, urban fantasy, or whatever? Or GURPs, which has both modules that cover generic categories (like Black Ops) and modules for specific fictional works (like Bujold's Vorkosigan series)?

And I'm not into miniatures at all! We do often use some sort of tactical display when we have action scenes, especially with combat. Nowadays it's usually a whiteboard with the location plan drawn with markers, and magnets or sticky notes for the characters and opponents.

[elf]

magnets or sticky notes for the characters and opponents

We usually have figurines for the characters, although they don't tend to be too directly representative. ("Okay, who's using what? Doug's the mage, so he gets the mage figurine. Zak's wearing plate mail so he gets the guy in full armor. Elf is a woman, so she gets the woman figurine. Plz to ignore the fur bikini.") Opponents and NPCs are usually represented by extra dice.

Orcs are large 6-siders; kobolds are small 6-siders; ogres are 12-siders. Horses are 8-siders with another die on top of them. When the GM brings out 20-siders for "the surprise monsters in the hidden room," we know we've got problems.

[chomiji]

Hee! We have much the same thing when the GM breaks out the larger-size sticky notes. "OMG, exactly how how large are those guard robots ?!"

[briar_pipe]

I may be going afield of what Fanlore is meant to do and be.

Not necessarily! The thing about Fanlore is that it's got this great open theory behind it, but the actual organization was conceived within one particular meta-fandom (Western media fandom), so the structure started out very much tailored to that. Our purpose here is to shift that structure to fit Gaming fandom (which, omg, did I actually refer to all of gamers everywhere as part of some über-fandom? Because lol). That may require quite a bit of shuffling the original structure.

Basically, Fanlore organizes pages around Sources, Communities, Activities, Tropes&Genres, Fanworks, etc. I think elf was suggesting we put the actual rulebooks for tabletop into "Sources by Canon Type", along with a whole bunch of other game rules/structures/etc., as a Games category (which already exists), and then we make a bunch of subcategories there based on type of game. But then we can also create pages on particular modules, so I could see GURPS getting a broad page with a "Here are a bunch of modules!" section, pointing to modules that each have their own pages. And then there could also be Genre pages for Space Opera games, and Spy games, and High Fantasy games, etc., which could be cross-linked.

The question I really can't answer is, what does one call the gaming community?

(Magnets or sticky notes = much more fun than figurines. I also like the stuffed animal approach. ^_^)