d6ideas turns 500 (and 1) – a little navel-gazing

We nearly missed having published our 500th article. In fact, we only noticed it because we were curious how many more articles we would need to reach 500 and then saw that we were already there. This is our 501st.

Time for a little recapitulation.

Mainly, we want to know one thing: How well did we manage to adhere to the original idea underlying what became d6ideas – a platform for “playable material”? How many of those 500 articles live up to that idea?

Unfortunately, this is not all that easy to determine.

336 articles are definitely in. These are house rules and setting information, creatures and NPCs, adventures and equipment, spells, character classes, locations and similar material for a number of games ranging from our go-to standards Blue Planet, SLA Industries, The Red Star, Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay and Unknown Armies over Cthulhutech, Earthdawn, Shadowrun or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to Changeling, D&D, DSA, Feng Shui and others. Also within this category are a number of homebrew games and campaign worlds.

89 articles are definitely out. News, portraits of games, comments on community developments and discussions, announcements (or recaps…) of our own blog activities, but also general roleplaying tips and techniques or administrative stuff for the German RPG-bloggers’ carnival are all far from “playable” even in the most benign interpretation.

75 articles are inbetween. Here, we have articles intended to lay the groundwork for specific rules development projects, thoughts on individual game or setting elements and their application, material for use as inspiration, brief thoughts or outlines, actual play and session diaries could go either way, depending on exactly how generous the playability idea is interpreted.

This leaves us with something between 67.2 and 82.2 %. There is definitely room for improvement.