Perusing the categories list, I notice that there is no effective way for players to search for ‘games’ that provide useful gaming materials, and no logical place for GMs to put the stuff so it can be found.

I know a number of people have created indexes to the portrait gallery, lists of ‘grab and go’ NPCs, game design forums, etc, but it’s almost impossible to find all this useful stuff because there’s no logical search category for it, and GMs seldom advertise it under Players Wanted.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just search through a list of Gaming Aids, finding what you were looking for easily, and discovering lots of useful stuff you never knew existed?

Not just aids, but non-games.

I have one game that is just a few writing challenges, suppossed to be for anyone who wants to do them and open for all to read. So it really isn't a game persay.

Can the main menu have sub topics?  Perhaps Game Aids could have a sub topic under Game Systems instead of it's own separate category?

Work around?  People could create a "game" with their aids.  The game name/title is what is searched on so it would have to be descriptive.  When creating the game, if it for a specific genre, like fantasy or survival mark it as such and people can search on this too.

A suggested format: simply have Game Aid as part of the name of the game.

This makes me think of a possibility instead of having it's own category, you could make a genre "Game Aid".

The Heaven forum ( link to another game ) can be used to store character sheets and other game aids (such as links to name generators, etc).  Just submit the item that you want to add in an RtJ.

One could also build a game and work towards getting it submitted as a Discussion category.

So if one were to make a board to help people play 5th Edition DnD or perhaps Pathfinder.  After running it as a basic game for a while I believe you can apply to have it become a Discussion forum.  Providing such content in a sticky thread would seem an appropriate use of a Discussion forum.  Submitting new material and such and other discussion about the game could occur there.

Just a thought.

What about putting "game aids" in as a game system? the make up of such a game could be rather specialist, or very broad.  So in most cases what was normal makeup of that Game would need to be made clear in the name or discription anyway.

I support C-h Freese suggestion, this seems like an easy and elegant solution!

The advantage of the Heaven forum is that it is moderated, so we don't see the same links posted a hundred times by different people, something that would probably happen with a "game aids" category or system option.

Also note that people can already specify the system as "game aids" if they want to - the field allows for text entry.

Not sure I'm understanding -- exactly -- what everyone means by "game aids?"

One that I have on my sticky list that might be an example:

There is a game that is devoted to finding identities for all the portraits in the gallery. Inside the game, there is a thread for listing any identifications you've made so they can be added to the list. Then there are separate threads for female and male. In those threads, there is a post for each subsection of the gallery with tables that list the portrait ID with the name of the person in the portrait and any extra information (like what movie, etc. the picture is from).

There is no actual play in this game. The entire purpose is to have a group of people identifying the faces in the portrait gallery. So, for instance if you had a character and you thought, "She would look just like Penelope Cruz." you could go into the threads, search for Penelope Cruz and see if one of her portraits in the gallery looked right.

It's set up in a game, but it's not actually a game. It would be more of a game aid.

I assume there are other games that are similar but with different purposes.

I hadn't considered problems with multiple links, but then I'm looking at it from a player/GM's POV not a moderator's. I can't picture how much of a problem that would be.

Yes, people can describe their games as 'game aids' if they want to, but how many would? How many variations of that might there be? For the purposes of a search, it would be useless. Likewise, how many of the currently available goodies are listed in Heaven? And how do you find the ones that aren't? There don't appear to have been any new posts to Heaven since 2012! How popular is that?

My difficulty is simply this:
There are a number of 'games' in existence, such as the portrait identifier described by Maidenfine, or collections of ready made, off-the-peg NPCs, or similar provisions, but there is no way to find them.

There is no way to search for all the game aids that have been made, and unless the GMs advertise them every week in Players Wanted, nobody knows they exist - except by some underground grapevine, if you're fortunate enough to stumble across one. And the grapevine has to be underground because you get your knuckles rapped if you openly try to point someone to something they need.

The only chance you have to find something like that is if the people who create them put them in the same place. But there is no obvious place to put them. Every creator makes a different choice for description, and the searcher hasn't got a hope of finding the resources s/he needs.

I'm simply suggesting an obvious place to put them.

I agree with icosahedron152: I am sure such things exist, and I am equally sure that while Heaven is a good Start it is a vastly restricted and restrictive resource: For example: I have created an Exalted character sheet which is based on the ones listed in that forum: but more set up for ease of use on an RPoL character sheet: but I have submitted such things in the past and they were not posted cause they were 'too similar' to what already existed.

Sure, they are: they are based on that good work after all: But to quote Chairman Shen'ji Yang: "Technological advance is an inherently iterative process, one does not take sand from a beach and produce a data probe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each iteration is a step in the process and all of the steps must be taken."

Now if we had a searchable category or system we could at last summon together all of the resources ginned up by the RPoL community and share with each other all the incremental improvements that right now are being wasted because this 'moderated' forum does not recognize the need for incremental advance and development.

The "system" is searchable, and can be set at any time (meaning that the existing forums, such as the portrait search ones, can be "retrofitted" with the appropriate tag).

Actually it does (just about every feature on the site was suggested by users).  However, as an individual site user, I am simply pointing out that this particular suggested feature actually duplicates an existing one.
This message was last edited by the user at 03:43, Wed 04 Mar 2015.

But which appropriate tag? Everyone chooses a different one, because there is no official one.

One GM will tag it 'portraits', another will tag it 'game-aids', a third will tag it 'discussion', a fourth will tag it 'avatars', a fifth will tag it 'useful stuff'...

How do you search for it?

The tag can be set by the user, so we don't have any control over what they use.  Even if we set a "game aids" one, people would still be free to use "portraits" or whatever instead.

I'm curious about the reluctance of people to accept that there is an official forum which ALREADY exists for listing this sort of thing, which I mentioned above - Heaven.