litphoria

Perhaps, for those who want a ruleset for some of their plays, add in a "Game System - [D&D/Fate/Etc]" interest? The interest would be Game System, and the sub-context would be the system's name itself, like D&D 3.5e, FATE, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulu, or whatever else? Forum RPs that deal with combat could have a collective group of players who want to use these systems, and prostpecting RPs may need to find someone who is interested in using the system in their RP?

Most systems lack 'families', since they are based off of 'genres'. But most do end up having editions. Like D&D has Advanced (2nd), 3e, 3.5e, 4th Edition and Next (5e).

Care to elaborate on the "genres"? Would it be meaningful to categorize around them? Moreover, is there any categorization at all that could be used here? Maybe calling some of them "D&D-like" or similar?

Genres are just that; Genres. Most fit into a main genre and a subgenre. Call of Cthulu is an Adventure-Horror system. D&D a Fantasy-adventure system. d20 modern is a Tactical-Modern system. If these tags are going to go into play, I'd suggest ones that would actually be used; D&D 3.5/4e, FATE and a few others. Just whatever people would actually use most.

System-wide, there are several names for them. The ones that come at the top of my head are D20 (D&D, all editions, several 'off shoot games, like D20 modern), then there's Dice Pool (WoD, Shadowrun...) Then there's my Iron Monger (A system I developped that's based around a hybrid of a few systems...) now, the beautiful thing with Iron Monger, it would be very easy to implement into a website since it has One System for Everything. But well, its not really complete yet. I've completed the Grid Based RPs for it, but not the "Gridless Ruleset" ... so it wouldn't yet be the best of choices when it comes to sites. Anyways.

We could have a bit of a system built-in into the site. Something open-sourced, and open-creative so people can make what they want out of the rules they have for RPs. There are quite a few systems we could look into, but that would be something of a shiton of work to implement...

Now, generally, its not going to be possible to list all systems available into a list, because that list is evergrowing as we speak. People develop systems, systems get extended, systems get obliterated... D20(D&D, Pathfinder, countless variants...), WoD (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc...) NWOd (same, but ... revewed rules or something.) Returners' Final Fantasy (Pretty much an abandonned project...) Iron Monger...

So in my opinion, a list of the most common systems (D20, WoD, Other...) and a way to add a line to describe which system exactly it is that we plan to use.

Implementing a system like that into the site would be ... different? But I imagine difficult. The systems probably have more differences than they do in common, and trying to write a system based off the commonalities would probably be so generic as to not be all that useful. Having a billion rule sets for the difference systems is again... interesting and different, but I'm not too sure it's worth chasing that much.

I am just trying to see if we could reasonably group all of the various systems into <30 meaningful categories for searching.

I am not sure. But I guess, like I said, just go with the <30 most used systems for the categories. Perhaps this is best left for later, when I can figure out what those might be. I only play D&D, so you can see my issue with figuring out what's popular xD I am a little biased.