Long ago I wrote a guide to grades here at the Alexandrian, but at the time I was mostly focused on reviewing narrative works (books, films, etc.). I use the same scale and same basic principles when providing review grades for RPG books, but people are sometimes confused about why I might give an adventure I liked a grade of B- or the like. So I wanted to update the grading guide to discuss how I grade RPGs, supplements, and adventures.
Broadly speaking, here’s how I think of the letter grades:
A – Excellent
B – Good
C – Average/Mediocre
D – Poor
F – Worthless
To get a little more specific, let’s first talk about how I use grades for roleplaying games:
A — This game is brilliant. I think it’s destined to become a classic. I’m excited to play it and I think you should play it ASAP. Even if it’s not the genre or type of game you might usually play, you might still want to check it out.
B — This game is very well designed. I recommend it.
C — This game is okay. If it’s in a genre you particularly like and if the mechanics sound like the sort of thing you usually enjoy playing, you’ll probably find something to enjoy here. But there are a lot of problems that will likely detract from the playing experience. Expect to use a lot of house rules here.
D — This game is seriously flawed. I wouldn’t refuse to play it, but there’s not enough here for me to recommend it on any level. Approach with extreme caution.
F — Complete and utter waste of time. Unless someone is paying you to play this game, don’t bother.
And for supplements:
A — This supplement is essential. Assuming you have interest in the topic covered by the supplement, it’s a no-brainer to use it in your game.
B — This is a very good supplement. I recommend it, and you’ll likely find it enhancing your game in a lot of ways.
C — The supplement is functional. It’s giving you the rules or setting information you need for whatever the topic of the supplement is. But there’s also probably a bunch of stuff you’ll want to ignore, tweak, or need to expand to make it usable.
D — This supplement is seriously flawed. I think you’ll end up ignoring most of it, but there a few gems hiding in here that might be worth prying out.
F — Complete and utter waste of time. Whatever the supplement is talking about, you’d be better off designing from scratch.
And for adventures:
A — This adventure is a classic. It makes me want to drop everything else and start running it for my players ASAP. Everyone should play this one.
B — This adventure is very good. I’d be willing to run this adventure without making any changes (although, in practice, I probably will).
C — This adventure was okay. It would be fun to run, but there are significant issues that I would feel compelled to fix before trying to run it.
D — This adventure is seriously flawed. It’s not a complete waste of time and if the concept sounds intriguing it may still be worth checking out. But there’s not enough here for me to recommend it, and you’re probably going to have put in a lot of work to make it playable. Approach with extreme caution.
F — Complete and utter waste of time. Probably not even worth strip-mining.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Pluses and minuses generally modify or color the grades described above. An A- would be an excellent adventure, for example, but have a few flaws you might want to address before running it. A B+ adventure, on the other hand, would be a really good adventure with a really awesome elements (characters, scenes, situations, concepts, etc.) scattered about.
An A+, it should be noted, is reserved for a game or adventure that immediately finds its way onto my personal Top 50. This isn’t an exact science, since I don’t actually keep a precise Top 50 list, but if I’m giving it an A+ it’s because it compares favorably with Ten Candles, Technoir, Alice is Missing, Blades in the Dark, Suppressed Transmissions, Masks of Nyarlathotep, Banewarrens, Eternal Lies, Dracula Dossier, and City of Lies.
The basic theory of this grading system is Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. I figure if something falls into that 90% range, then it’s not worth wasting the time determining exactly how crappy it is — all of that stuff is just graded F. The other grades deal entirely with the 10% of stuff that’s in any way worth taking our time to consider.
Thanks for this explanation. Your grading scheme is thought out well. However, if people don’t know how you grade stuff, it will be strange. Many online tier-lists make S the highest rank. As someone who was never graded using the FDCBA method, I would have considered B- to be flawed. I am not saying that you should change and accept the changing meanings of these tiers. It would have helped me, when I read your candlekeep mysteries reviews to have a link to this article somewhere.
I wonder why searching “Grade: A” here on Alexandrian finds only older reviews even though the string exists in newer posts as well.
Quick investigation suggests it’s formatting.
Some older posts have Grade: A or Grade: A, but a lot of the time I’m formatting it as Grade: A. The difference is that, in the former cases, the formatting tags are around “Grade: A”, while in the latter case the formatting tags interrupt the string:Grade: A.
WordPress’ rudimentary search function apparently doesn’t ignore the formatting tags.
Concerning wokste’s post, it’s worth explicitly pointing out that there being an “S” tier above “A” is something that is part of video game culture, as opposed to deriving from American-style letter grading. People who are only familiar with the concept of video-game-culture-style tier lists might not realize that it was built on the foundation of letter grading in schools in a different country to begin with. It may be worth explicitly calling out that you’re basing it on the older, more official version rather than the newer, pop-culture version, and that therefore “S rank” is not a thing.