Thoughts about creating and maintaining a personal ttrpg database for two years, give or take

21 Mar, 2026

Love me a long title. It reminds me of writing "practice" scientific papers in high school and it makes me wonder if any of our teachers ever thought someone from over there would actually end up in academia, I know one friend who did. Not that I've been keeping up with people from high-school.

Now that I've wasted your time for a short paragraph, I'd like to talk about "The List". The List is (was?) a personal project of mine that I decided to commit to around 2023, when I first got into ttrpg discourse and indie ttrpgs in general. I had been interested in ttrpgs since the mid-2010s but I don't think I had ever played a published one until 2020¹, when a friend decided to run Blades in the Dark and, about a year after that, another friend decided to run that game with a dragon and a dungeon, that has about five editions². Blades went mostly as expected, but Dee and Dee was a bit of a shock, since I had heard so much about it and wondered how it would be - and it was kind of bad...?

Don't get me wrong, I was having a lot of fun playing with my friends, but it felt like it was despite the rules of the game, not thanks to them. And that felt really weird, because even though Blades was also a big chonky book with hundreds of pages, it didn't play like that³. That thought lingered in my head for a few years until I made the grave mistake wonderful decision to start looking up stuff about ttrpgs online and lurking around engaging with ttrpg discourse. And despite the psychic damage that comes with interacting with online communities in general, it was great! But there was just so much stuff!

Enter The List⁴!

I decided to log all games I wanted to take a look, read and/or play on a spreadsheet - and make it public so that I could share it with my friends who also didn't know much about ttrpgs⁵. My main goal was to, like, have a lot of book covers in one place, with a little opinionated description and a link to the game page. To be easy to browse and show to peeps. As I said, this started as a Google Sheets spreadsheet, which was horrible for basically all the reasons you can think of. Looks like shit, reads like shit, searches like shit, edits like shit, belongs to Google, so on and so forth.

After a while, I then decided to move it to Notion. I had seen some cool stuff a friend had made in it and thought it would be easy to make something that looked nice and, well, it was. I'm very much a visual person and having every game's cover lined up on a grid made my heart smile. However, Notion came with a lot of problems of it's own.

First of all, I had to email them to disable the AI bullshit. I think it's a bit absurd that it's not a toggle, I had to personally email them asking for it to be off and then confirm it via another email - and I also had some friends who tried it and didn't even get a response. Then, there was the problem that I moved from one platform with questionable private ownership to a better looking platform with questionable private ownership. Besides that, to have the pretty visualization options that I wanted, I needed to use Notion's database functions and like, they're ok and look nice, but the templates and properties and sorting options made me constantly think that there had to be a better way. So to finish talking about the technology side of things, let it be known that I'm coding a new website from scratch to house The List.

So now that I've digressed for a few long paragraphs, let's talk about the ttrpg and categorization aspect of it.

One of the first things I realized is that there were more things than games to log. A lot of the cool O/NSR stuff I found was in blogs and there were a lot of modules, dungeons, adventure sites - things that made sense to be in a ttrpg list, but didn't fit into my initial model. At first I thought to create different Lists for these things, but after some failed attempts, I think it ended up being better to have everything in the same spot, but with different tags to better describe each item.

Then came the tags. Tags are great, but creating a good tagging system comes with a lot of problems. The most fundamental and unsolvable problem is ttrpg discourse as a whole. If I tag something as rules-light, what does that even mean? Am I going to tag things as trad? As OSR? Is OSR trad⁶? Don't I need to explain what those mean? Don't I need to explain what those mean for me? The introduction of tags also meant that I now needed separate pages to explain that kind of stuff, which led to the meta tag and a lot of time spent trying to create this weird, non-deterministic taxonomy. I knew some things wouldn't be tagged and I knew some tags couldn't be described properly.

Tags also led to the rethinking of all text in each of the games' pages (previously entries, I guess). Back in the Sheets version, I had a short description for every game, but considering a lot of them were things along the lines of "a rules-heavy game about being a depressed queer superhero", I could now just add a tag for each of these things, with the actual text about the game being more about my opinions and impressions. This not only raises the problem of "at which point do I take a tag as an objective categorization instead of an opinion", but also the much bigger problem of "jesus fucking christ I don't wan't to rewrite the text on the hundreds of entries I have on this list". Around this time I decided that the two viable ways out were either try to rewrite everything in a pattern that makes sense and compliments the tags or to start a blog for opinions on stuff and keep the tags as objective as I can. I'll let you guess the one I picked. It's still not a solved problem though... I don't believe I can be objective and maybe the meta entries or a glossary of some kind is needed. For the future website version, I have no idea what I'll do about it.

As time went by and the List became nicer and more readable, I started wondering who it was actually for. I have no doubts that I did it for my self-indulgence, but as it became more presentable, I started wondering if more people could benefit from it in some way. I always intended to share it with friends, but it was never meant to be an all-encompassing catalog and, as the blog idea came up, using it as a library or gallery of sorts, even if it was just for the stuff I was interested in, seemed to be a rather nice direction to go in.

I guess this is the point where I also mention that I was using the List to keep track of things I had played, read, and purchased. Besides just being useful to me, this came along with the idea that, if I was sharing an opinion regarding a game, the person reading it would probably like to know how much I actually interacted with it. I can have an opinion about something from reading an itch.io page or from reading the book or from running it a couple times - and opinions may change according to that as well. It did become a bit boring to have to manually input every single game that interested me from big itch.io bundles in the List whenever I got them, but I think it serves a purpose.

So... Words are no longer just appearing in my mind and being typed. I think I got most of what I wanted to share out and now must think of a cohesive way to end the text. I'm gonna uhhhh do a list of final considerations.

• Listing and categorizing things is pretty fun. I had to rework the organization of the contents a few times and even though it was a bit of chore, every time I revisited a game's entry it made me think about it again, ponder what changed since the last time I thought about it, re-read some stuff, re-ignite the flame to play some other stuff...
• Notion is ok if you want to quicky set up some form of visualization of your list thingy, but I wouldn't recommend it in general. Kinda clunky to use, questionable ownership weird for exporting your data.
• I'm not sure if I'll continue adding things to the Notion while I'm building the new website, but for now I see no reason to take it down from there. Once the new version is up I'll probably kill it.

If you have some time to kill and like looking at pretty pictures of ttrpgs, maybe check out the List. I'll make a blog post about the new one when it's presentable, but don't wait up.

anb

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#ttrpg