RPG Research's Writing Style Guide

For consistency, we use the following standards for writing:

1. For all of our research, and most of our formal releases, we follow the APA (American Psychological Association) style guide.
2. For formal press releases to be submitted to the Associated press (AP) and other formal news media outlets, we follow the Associated Press style guide.
3. In ALL cases, we follow the "Oxford Comma" (aka serial/series/Harvard comma), this has important legal consequences if not follow closely, so this is mandatory no matter what any other style guide we may use suggests.
4. Use hyphenated role-play as the root word format. For now (though we are starting to see some recent industry-wide shifting, so this may change in the future), we follow the standard of role-playing with the hyphen, no spaces. We are seeing an increasing number of publishers recently migrating to roleplaying without space or hyphen. For now we are sticking with the hyphenated version. As of 2022 most dictionaries and electronic auto-correction software will allow "role playing" or "role-playing" but for now flag "roleplaying" as a typo. For consistency we always use the hyphenated "role-playing".

RPG Research specific writing guidelines

For role-playing game formats it is mandatory to use the following in ALL cases (see the 4 RPG Formats diagram for guidance)

1. RPG or TRPG, never TTRPG or PnPRPG, when discussing pen and paper tabletop role-playing games and gaming, while this may seem pedantic, it is important for consistent professional standardization of terminology. As some have pointed out, TTRPG could mean Therapeutic Tabletop Role-Playing Game, or Tactical Tabletop Role-Playing Game, and others.
2. ERPG for the top-tier of electronic role-playing games, any game that requires electricity to play. There are many subsets under this, such as:
3. CRPG for personal computer-based, console-based, mobile, phone, tablet, and other RPGs that require a CPU (central processing unit). Some might better fit as an HRPG sub-format, such as Return to Dark Tower being a board game, but it requires using a mobile app on a mobile device in order to play (and isn't really a role-playing game, but on the outskirts as an RPG-inspired hybrid board game).
4. ARPG for audio role-playing games
5. VRRPG for Virtual Reality (VR) role-playing games
6. ARRPG for Augmented Reality (AR) roles-playing games
7. xRRPG for xR (all reality variations) of role-playing games
8. LRPG is the top-tier category for any role-playing games that have a live-action element as part of the game play
9. Larp is a subset of LRPG. Regular LRPGs tend to still have TRPG elements, with live-action components added, while larps have no dependency on TRPG style of play. Note that as of 2012, Oxford and others now accept larp as a word rather than an acronym. So it can be larp, Larp, larper, larps, larping, etc.
10. HRPG, hybrid role-playing game, is the catch-all term for all other RPG formats that are a combination of, or do not fit under, the other three major formats. Example HRPG sub-formats include:
11. SAB, solo adventure books
12. SAM, solo adventure modules
13. SABM, solo adventures books/modules