How ratings work
A score is the plain average of all ratings. Three corrections keep it from misleading you.
The scale
One person’s rating is a whole number from 1 to 10. Each step has a word, so everyone means the same thing by a 7.
- 1Awful—as bad as it gets
- 2Very bad—a waste of time
- 3Bad—I wouldn’t recommend it
- 4Not so good—there are better ones
- 5Average—take it or leave it
- 6OK—has its moments
- 7Good—worth a try
- 8Very good—I’d recommend it
- 9Excellent—one of my favorites
- 10Outstanding—the best of its kind
Three corrections
A score needs five ratings
A single 10 from the author or a friend says nothing. Until a game has five ratings, we show how many there are and the ratings themselves, but no average.
Without it
With it
The spread sits next to the score
The same average can belong to a game everyone finds fine and to one that half the players love and half can’t stand. The bars show how many people gave each rating.
Without it
With it
- 1: 0 ratings
- 2: 0 ratings
- 3: 0 ratings
- 4: 0 ratings
- 5: 20 ratings
- 6: 20 ratings
- 7: 0 ratings
- 8: 0 ratings
- 9: 0 ratings
- 10: 0 ratings
- 1: 20 ratings
- 2: 0 ratings
- 3: 0 ratings
- 4: 0 ratings
- 5: 0 ratings
- 6: 0 ratings
- 7: 0 ratings
- 8: 0 ratings
- 9: 0 ratings
- 10: 20 ratings
Top lists weigh the number of ratings
In top lists, a game with a handful of ratings is pulled toward the site average, so six raves don’t beat two hundred good ratings. The game’s own page always shows the plain average.
Without it
- 1Game A6 ratings9.8out of 10
- 2Game B200 ratings9.1out of 10
With it
- 1Game B200 ratings9.1out of 10
- 2Game A6 ratings9.8out of 10
GM score and player score
An adventure can be a joy to play and a pain to run: heavy prep, confusing maps, rules scattered across the book. It happens the other way round too. So a rating from someone who marked “Ran” counts toward the GM score, and one from someone who marked “Played” toward the player score. If they marked both, it counts toward both. Every rating also counts toward the overall score.
What we never do
- We never sell places in top lists.
- We never use hidden weights: every rating counts the same.
- We never edit ratings by hand.
For the curious: the formula
Top lists are ordered by a Bayesian average:
(v × R + m × C) / (v + m)
- v is how many ratings the game has;
- R is its plain average;
- C is the average across the site;
- m is 5, the number of ratings a score needs.
Averages are rounded to one decimal, halves up: 8.25 becomes 8.3.