Many authors think that simply publishing a great roleplaying game is enough. What they're missing is that no game has truly made an impact unless it is adopted by fans eager to make that game their own.

The Roleplaying Game Database Syndicate hopes to show just how powerful individual contributors can be in marketing your game via word of mouth and better results from web searches.

What's wrong with the community publishing model today?

If you're doing a web search today for specific content such as a new character class or a specific feat or class ability, more often than not you're sifting through multiple web sites to find just the right content you're looking for. Many authors are content to publish material on their own web sites without regard to the searchability or accessibility of the content.

In addition, much of the content that exists out in the wild today lurks somewhere on various fan messageboards across the web. Serious or semi-serious content authors crave feedback and in order to give feedback on messageboards or other sites, specific critiques and comments are usually left by a poster who must be identified by name. Someone who wants to simply post that "this class has balance issues" or "I don't like it" is dissuaded from doing so in the messageboard context because the messageboard model craves in depth feedback. Authors generally would rather receive any sort of feedback rather than zero feedback for most of their work.

What does a Roleplaying Game Database site do differently?

The Roleplaying Game Database model is about individual contribution moderated by someone with just enough editorial expertise to filter out unusable content for one reason or another. The remaining content, which is usually of near-print publication quality, showcases the best ideas that exist amongst the web community with the production values of a professionally published web site.

What's more, with single site searchability, search engines such as Google rank the entire site higher in search engine rankings because of the number of pages on the same site as well as the higher number of internal links that exist on the page.

An added bonus is the ability of a Roleplaying Game Database site to add on layers of extra value through promoting authors by listing other content they've written as well as showing rankings of content through user votes. This feedback increases the quality of the content because authors whose content is not popular are passively encouraged to improve the quality of their submissions before submitting new content.

Doesn't a wiki site do the same thing?

For content publishers looking to solicit new content from the roleplaying game community and increase popularity of their game, a wiki only pulls in a segment of the community who is interested in editing wiki markup. The wiki markup is at least as difficult to understand as HTML markup, so the need for a person with specific markup skills remains.

By passing this effort on to an editor with both basic editing knowledge as well as markup skills, the overall value of the content increases because of the quality of the presentation.

Got more questions?

Feel free to contact the site to ask more questions or get a response from the administrator directly.