For me the only rule necessary is the genre restriction. So if i want to make a list of the best turn based blobbers, i will just allow turn based blobbers, whatever the game platform. restricting the sub genre is enough to make a proper and useful list, instead of putting lots of retarded rules.
Why don't you start by listing all the "sub-genres" and their definitions? This should be good...
Vault Dweller made a thread at
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php?topic=198.0 but its pretty lacking
Now let me list the subgenres:
Tactical turn based games
Real time blobbers
Turn based blobbers
Hack and Slash
Fps rpgs
Third person rpgs
Turn based party based rpgs
Turn based story driven rpgs(Jrpgs galore)
rtwp party based rpgs
rtwp story driven rpgs(Dragon Age 1,2,etc...)
single player turn based rpg
Could have more though...
That's a very simplistic way of looking at it. Just trying to list all the combinations is a fool's errand. What is needed is to define what are the criteria used for classifying RPGs and then, for each criterion, decide what are the options. For example, I would propose:
1. Perspective:
a) subjective (first person or over the shoulder third person)
b) objective ("isometric")
2. Number of player characters:
a) single player character
b) party-based
3. Timing
a) fully turn-based
b) turn-based combat and real-time exploration
c) real-time with pause
d) fully real-time
4. Focus
a) story-focused (focused on storytelling)
b) exploration-focused (focused on exploring the game world)
c) adventure-like (focused on non-combat interaction with the game world)
d) combat-focused (focused on combat interaction with the game world)
5. Game world type
a) open world
b) semi-open world
c) linear
6. Character system
a) classless
b) class-based
7. System type
a) probabilistic
b) deterministic
Starting from this, you notice that you already have 2x2x4x4x3x2x2=768 possible combinations, which means MUCH more possible sub-genres than anybody tried to define. Instead of bitching about sub-genres, the best way to do it would be to get the full, raw list of candidate games, consider each option a tag and, then, to each game affix the appropriate tags . At that point, anybody could filter the list of games by the tags they're interested in and extract the information that they find relevant/useful.