So what is a "real" RPG?
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Roleplaying Games are actually defined differently within the videogames industry than within the wider gaming industry. A Roleplaying Game within the wider gaming industry is like Dungeons and Dragons, and similar, which involves players creating their own characters and then improvising their own stories.
Roleplaying Games in video games often using the mechanics systems from roleplaying games, but very rarely actually involve any roleplaying at all. This is because, on one hand, quite a few video games provide characters where you play a role, thus rendering roleplaying moot - whether you are Mario, Gordon Freeman, Link, or whatever, you are presumed to be playing a role, and thus roleplaying. Yet, in reality, these are better defined by the genre of their gameplay, which is often platformer, first person shooter, and action-adventure respectively. The other reason is that most of these games enforce a story on the player through a distinct narrative, with very little choice and freedom. There's no question the Mario, Gordon Freeman, or Link won't follow the story in the game, because that's the game - if you didn't want to follow the story, you might as well play another game.
Yet, roleplaying includes the freedom to create a character and make choices that are important, and thus direct how the adventure turns out. This is easier said than done, but a few games manage this - but even then, they still have limits to what is actually encoded within the the game itself. You cannot play a mage in a game where there isn't any code for magic, for example, although in a tabletop RPG, this is indeed possible if the GM allows it, and is the nature of the true roleplaying game - although trying to justify exactly why your character is able to discover and use magic is an adventure in itself.
In general, there are very few real computer roleplaying games, without having to change the definition of what a roleplaying game is. Ask anyone who comes from the roleplaying game hobby and/or industry, and they'll tell you this. If you learn roleplaying from video games - which is now a common method - you'll find that you'll have to relearn everything because video games themselves use every bad practice in the book with their own idea of roleplaying.
I am somewhat of an expert on this, as the lead of the Legend of Zelda Roleplaying Game (www.legendofzeldarpg.com) which has spent the past ten years turning the franchise into a Dungeons and Dragons-like roleplaying game, and you can see where the narrative cracks are. The storylines of the games themselves are extremely simplistic and bland, and the limitations within them are often limitations due to technology, and flawed assumptions by the designers. In short, they clearly weren't designed as a roleplaying game adventure - it was designed as a video game story.
The only ones that stand up any where close to such scrutiny are true RPGs, typically because they are designed as roleplaying games. They use roleplaying game systems, roleplaying game practices, and roleplaying game concepts. Although even then, they often have their limits, because they can only include what is scripted, and everything has to be top heavy. Freedom has some very undesirable traits - for example, being able to kill key NPCs. In an RPG, it's fairly easy for the GM to create a new NPC or shift their role to another existing NPC that is appropriate, or build a new adventure on the basis of that. If the PCs dick around in one area, they can move onto the next and need never return. In a CRPG, it's not so easy, and killing key NPCs can break the game, and dicking around in an area can result in making the game unplayable, simply because there are only so many areas to go to.
Ultimately, roleplaying in computer games means that you can play the game in a variety of ways, even though this is not the same definition that roleplaying has elsewhere in gaming. There's more to roleplaying than character customisation - it needs to also include meaningful choice on the story. Choosing whether to kill via magic, archery, or swords is not roleplaying as in the rest of gaming.
In fact, this is pretty much an insult, and it's pretty much the misunderstanding of what roleplaying is that has led to the current issues within the roleplaying games industry today, as many are coming from the video games genre, and trying to adopt video games models for roleplaying, and many roleplayers just aren't buying it. Only those newcomers who think roleplaying should be like World of Warcraft, Diablo, Two Worlds, and Dragon Age seem to be obsessing about making it such.
Roleplaying Games in video games often using the mechanics systems from roleplaying games, but very rarely actually involve any roleplaying at all. This is because, on one hand, quite a few video games provide characters where you play a role, thus rendering roleplaying moot - whether you are Mario, Gordon Freeman, Link, or whatever, you are presumed to be playing a role, and thus roleplaying. Yet, in reality, these are better defined by the genre of their gameplay, which is often platformer, first person shooter, and action-adventure respectively. The other reason is that most of these games enforce a story on the player through a distinct narrative, with very little choice and freedom. There's no question the Mario, Gordon Freeman, or Link won't follow the story in the game, because that's the game - if you didn't want to follow the story, you might as well play another game.
Yet, roleplaying includes the freedom to create a character and make choices that are important, and thus direct how the adventure turns out. This is easier said than done, but a few games manage this - but even then, they still have limits to what is actually encoded within the the game itself. You cannot play a mage in a game where there isn't any code for magic, for example, although in a tabletop RPG, this is indeed possible if the GM allows it, and is the nature of the true roleplaying game - although trying to justify exactly why your character is able to discover and use magic is an adventure in itself.
In general, there are very few real computer roleplaying games, without having to change the definition of what a roleplaying game is. Ask anyone who comes from the roleplaying game hobby and/or industry, and they'll tell you this. If you learn roleplaying from video games - which is now a common method - you'll find that you'll have to relearn everything because video games themselves use every bad practice in the book with their own idea of roleplaying.
I am somewhat of an expert on this, as the lead of the Legend of Zelda Roleplaying Game (www.legendofzeldarpg.com) which has spent the past ten years turning the franchise into a Dungeons and Dragons-like roleplaying game, and you can see where the narrative cracks are. The storylines of the games themselves are extremely simplistic and bland, and the limitations within them are often limitations due to technology, and flawed assumptions by the designers. In short, they clearly weren't designed as a roleplaying game adventure - it was designed as a video game story.
The only ones that stand up any where close to such scrutiny are true RPGs, typically because they are designed as roleplaying games. They use roleplaying game systems, roleplaying game practices, and roleplaying game concepts. Although even then, they often have their limits, because they can only include what is scripted, and everything has to be top heavy. Freedom has some very undesirable traits - for example, being able to kill key NPCs. In an RPG, it's fairly easy for the GM to create a new NPC or shift their role to another existing NPC that is appropriate, or build a new adventure on the basis of that. If the PCs dick around in one area, they can move onto the next and need never return. In a CRPG, it's not so easy, and killing key NPCs can break the game, and dicking around in an area can result in making the game unplayable, simply because there are only so many areas to go to.
Ultimately, roleplaying in computer games means that you can play the game in a variety of ways, even though this is not the same definition that roleplaying has elsewhere in gaming. There's more to roleplaying than character customisation - it needs to also include meaningful choice on the story. Choosing whether to kill via magic, archery, or swords is not roleplaying as in the rest of gaming.
In fact, this is pretty much an insult, and it's pretty much the misunderstanding of what roleplaying is that has led to the current issues within the roleplaying games industry today, as many are coming from the video games genre, and trying to adopt video games models for roleplaying, and many roleplayers just aren't buying it. Only those newcomers who think roleplaying should be like World of Warcraft, Diablo, Two Worlds, and Dragon Age seem to be obsessing about making it such.
Words mean things, but the meaning isn't something immutable carved into stone to last forever and ever. Instead the meaning is assigned by whatever is the common use of the word and changes over time. Like it or not, these days an RPG is anything with stats that go up as you play, sometimes with a story attached to it. You can try redefining the word all you like into whatever pen-and-paper fantasy masturbation session you think is the original meaning, but it still doesn't change the fact that when a game has numbers that go up with a story attached people call it an RPG.
Its the same thing as when people call any tactical-level wargame a strategy game even if they have little to no relation to actual strategy in its original military meaning.
Its the same thing as when people call any tactical-level wargame a strategy game even if they have little to no relation to actual strategy in its original military meaning.
Eh... I'm gonna go with "no." A video game with stats and level-ups? That's a CRPG. A computer (or console) role-playing game. A pale shadow of the real deal.Soiha said:
"RPG," meanwhile, is of course much broader, because real RPGs don't always have classes, skill systems, or experience levels. Sometimes they don't even have stats (e.g. FUDGE). LARPs don't count as RPGs, since they're not properly "games." But if you look at the whole spread of tabletop games that do fit the definition, even just the classic ones from the 80s, you'll find that leveling is the exception, not the rule. D&D was first, so it gets all the press, and RIFTs has levels because it's a D&D knockoff, but most RPGs are usually skill-based and may or may not have any kind of advancement mechanic. RuneQuest, Traveller, Alternity, Champions, Hero, any WoD game... sci-fi and supers RPGs are especially prone to bucking the trend, but the majority of fantasy games do the same just to differentiate themselves from D&D.
I think the first reply nailed it. An RPG, by its very bloody definition, needs to have some sort of roleplaying. Now, it can be argued that you play a role in every game, but that's not really true to actual roleplaying.
Let's take a game like Dragon Age or Fallout: You start the game by creating a completely customized character, complete with stats and appearance tailored to the way you'd like to play the game. Then, you play that character through various scenarios that have multiple possible solutions that are, once again, dependent on how you'd like to play the game. Your character also tends to progress and grow more powerful as they gain experience, further adding to the customizability of the character.
In short, a true RPG is about giving the player freedom to build and play their character the way they want. The combat system in DAII doesn't define it as an RPG one way or the other, but the fact that the player controls a custom-built character alongside a handpicked party of allies actuall does help to define it as an RPG. Thus, the people complaining that the combat makes DAII not an RPG are about as backwards as one can get; they mean that it's not a traditional old-fashioned tactical RPG, but really aren't capable of accepting that RPGs could exist outside of their narrow definition.
Let's take a game like Dragon Age or Fallout: You start the game by creating a completely customized character, complete with stats and appearance tailored to the way you'd like to play the game. Then, you play that character through various scenarios that have multiple possible solutions that are, once again, dependent on how you'd like to play the game. Your character also tends to progress and grow more powerful as they gain experience, further adding to the customizability of the character.
In short, a true RPG is about giving the player freedom to build and play their character the way they want. The combat system in DAII doesn't define it as an RPG one way or the other, but the fact that the player controls a custom-built character alongside a handpicked party of allies actuall does help to define it as an RPG. Thus, the people complaining that the combat makes DAII not an RPG are about as backwards as one can get; they mean that it's not a traditional old-fashioned tactical RPG, but really aren't capable of accepting that RPGs could exist outside of their narrow definition.
What the fuck defines an RPG, that's the big question. Surely if an RPG is defined simply by playing the role of something then even games as simple as Pong can clarify as an RPG.
As mutable as words are, it's the misconception that maths has to be involved in roleplaying that leads to the idea that anything with maths and a story is a roleplaying game, and quite frankly, neither of these are definitive to a roleplaying game at all - the real definition of a roleplaying game got lost some time ago.
A big part is because whenever someone says "what's a real roleplaying game?" the typical response is "Dungeons and Dragons." Yet, Dungeons and Dragons is, in itself just a portion of what roleplaying is, focusing on a certain type of playing style.
In roleplaying games, there has been a standard classification system of categoryising various systems in terms of three points - Gamism, Simulationism, and Narrativism. Dungeons and Dragons is itself a highly Gamist, Simulationist system, although the latest incarnation has lost a lot of it's Simulationist edge with the idea of disassociated mechanics.
Thus, people are assuming that there needs to be math in every roleplaying system, simply because one system that everyone knowns focuses heavily on it. It doesn't matter that there are lots of roleplaying systems are in fact simple and have very little math, instead focusing on other aspects. In fact, you can do roleplaying without any math at all - it's not necessary. It's only because increasing numbers are an arbitrary way to show improving scores which would otherwise have to be rigorously encoded within the game world itself.
Think about it - which is the easier reward system to demonstrate advancement: A +1 bonus, or getting a plot of land? Which is easier to code in a video game? For that matter, which is easier to mark on a character sheet? On the tabletop, a GM can easily award character huge tracts of land, and that's that, because the GM can create assets out of nothing, but in a video game, those assets take time and effort to produce and cannot just be conjured on the fly. So instead, coders go for easy reward systems.
The same deal goes with the story - if the player wanders to the edge of the map, the GM can always create new material off the cuff, since there's a whole wilderness out there normally. Exactly how far are the PCs going to wander into those trackless barrens before getting bored and turning back? But they can enter those trackless barrens. And the GM can put stuff in those trackless barrens for them to do. In video games, such areas are often blocked off completely - you can't go anywhere you are not meant to go.
This goes with choices - you can't make choices that simply haven't been coded in. In quite a few roleplaying games, being "evil" means being a murdering sociopath, because that's the only option that's been encoded. In others, there's option besides the one being given - you aren't making decisions and playing a role - you are following a story while doing stuff in between. You can't make your own solutions to puzzles, no matter whether to solutions are viable or not - you have to use the solutions the developers created. That's not roleplaying - that's following a script. Roleplaying and acting are not the same - the former includes the freedom of choice that is missing in all these games.
You can tell when you are playing a true roleplaying game when you are given freedom of choice, and it actually means something within the game world itself. Choosing between using ranged and melee combat to kill people is NOT a meaningful choice. It may change the gameplay - presenting different challenges to the character, but in the end they are both ways to kill things. Being able to choose who to kill and having that matter in the game makes it a roleplaying game. These choices are more than just a case of whether or not you do a sidequest for a bonus or not - if the game world itself changes because you did or didn't do a sidequest, then you are in a roleplaying game. Most often these choices resolve around conflict - you much choose one side or another. A choice in which you side with the forces of good or the forces of evil is a meaningful choice - since you will often find yourself facing the other as opposition, and thus it will be very hard to maintain a neutral balance with everyone.
This is not a definition from some "pen-and-paper masturbation session" - but a definition from the eyes of top games developers throughout many branches of the gaming industry. But then, sometimes in today's ADHD-riddled "tl;dr" generation, the concept of choice is lost in favour of just having someone to kill, without meaning or purpose.
A big part is because whenever someone says "what's a real roleplaying game?" the typical response is "Dungeons and Dragons." Yet, Dungeons and Dragons is, in itself just a portion of what roleplaying is, focusing on a certain type of playing style.
In roleplaying games, there has been a standard classification system of categoryising various systems in terms of three points - Gamism, Simulationism, and Narrativism. Dungeons and Dragons is itself a highly Gamist, Simulationist system, although the latest incarnation has lost a lot of it's Simulationist edge with the idea of disassociated mechanics.
Thus, people are assuming that there needs to be math in every roleplaying system, simply because one system that everyone knowns focuses heavily on it. It doesn't matter that there are lots of roleplaying systems are in fact simple and have very little math, instead focusing on other aspects. In fact, you can do roleplaying without any math at all - it's not necessary. It's only because increasing numbers are an arbitrary way to show improving scores which would otherwise have to be rigorously encoded within the game world itself.
Think about it - which is the easier reward system to demonstrate advancement: A +1 bonus, or getting a plot of land? Which is easier to code in a video game? For that matter, which is easier to mark on a character sheet? On the tabletop, a GM can easily award character huge tracts of land, and that's that, because the GM can create assets out of nothing, but in a video game, those assets take time and effort to produce and cannot just be conjured on the fly. So instead, coders go for easy reward systems.
The same deal goes with the story - if the player wanders to the edge of the map, the GM can always create new material off the cuff, since there's a whole wilderness out there normally. Exactly how far are the PCs going to wander into those trackless barrens before getting bored and turning back? But they can enter those trackless barrens. And the GM can put stuff in those trackless barrens for them to do. In video games, such areas are often blocked off completely - you can't go anywhere you are not meant to go.
This goes with choices - you can't make choices that simply haven't been coded in. In quite a few roleplaying games, being "evil" means being a murdering sociopath, because that's the only option that's been encoded. In others, there's option besides the one being given - you aren't making decisions and playing a role - you are following a story while doing stuff in between. You can't make your own solutions to puzzles, no matter whether to solutions are viable or not - you have to use the solutions the developers created. That's not roleplaying - that's following a script. Roleplaying and acting are not the same - the former includes the freedom of choice that is missing in all these games.
You can tell when you are playing a true roleplaying game when you are given freedom of choice, and it actually means something within the game world itself. Choosing between using ranged and melee combat to kill people is NOT a meaningful choice. It may change the gameplay - presenting different challenges to the character, but in the end they are both ways to kill things. Being able to choose who to kill and having that matter in the game makes it a roleplaying game. These choices are more than just a case of whether or not you do a sidequest for a bonus or not - if the game world itself changes because you did or didn't do a sidequest, then you are in a roleplaying game. Most often these choices resolve around conflict - you much choose one side or another. A choice in which you side with the forces of good or the forces of evil is a meaningful choice - since you will often find yourself facing the other as opposition, and thus it will be very hard to maintain a neutral balance with everyone.
This is not a definition from some "pen-and-paper masturbation session" - but a definition from the eyes of top games developers throughout many branches of the gaming industry. But then, sometimes in today's ADHD-riddled "tl;dr" generation, the concept of choice is lost in favour of just having someone to kill, without meaning or purpose.
Agreed. Video games have never been able to provide the adaptability of a human GM so players have never been able to shape the story being told in video games they way they can in table top games. I've always thought of RPGs in the context of video games as those games that told the story through gameplay. Thinking back to the days for the NES, most game stories were one or two paragraphs in the manual that had little or nothing to do with the game itself. In games like Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy, the story was revealed through gameplay as you spoke to NPCs and quested for macguffins. The menu driven combat and chance based actions were inspired by table top games and is probably why they came to be known as RPGs. The combat system also simplified combat, saving a lot of precious space on cartridges for story elements.Da_Vane said:
Many video games on modern consoles tell their stories through gameplay, but they don't resemble tabletop games in any way so we don't think of them as RPGs (usually). We think of them in terms of their gameplay genres. Games which feature character progression (usually an experience-based level system) and customization (class choices or equipment such as weapons, armor and enchanted accessory items) are generally thought of as RPGs or as having "RPG elements" because those were the gameplay elements that we associated with RPGs 30 years ago.
RPG is a stupid term that needs to die. Nothing more, nothing less.
In fact, we've already killed it, we really just need to stop beating its dessicated corpse.
It can mean anything from Final Fantasy to Diablo to Baldur's Gate to Mass Effect to Oblivion to Fable to Tactics Ogre. You know what all of those games have in common? None of them particularly belong in the same genre as any of the others.
People really, really need to shut up about what is and isn't an RPG. It's gone beyond stupid and clear on through hilariously fun and is now into painfully embarrassing. Just knock it off already.
In fact, we've already killed it, we really just need to stop beating its dessicated corpse.
It can mean anything from Final Fantasy to Diablo to Baldur's Gate to Mass Effect to Oblivion to Fable to Tactics Ogre. You know what all of those games have in common? None of them particularly belong in the same genre as any of the others.
People really, really need to shut up about what is and isn't an RPG. It's gone beyond stupid and clear on through hilariously fun and is now into painfully embarrassing. Just knock it off already.
Too bad most of them are extremely linear and you don't really feel that you play YOUR OWN character, just one of the few characters you can play depending on what sort of dialogue you are provided. I.e every Bioware RPG out-there.Psychotic-ishSOB said:
Well, several people have pointed out that there are conflicting definitions or whatnot, but I didn't see anybody flat out say we should stop using the term because it's so badly broken that it's actually become anti-useful.veloper said:
Because that's what I'm trying to say. I'm just going to completely stop using the term RPG to describe any game ever, and I strongly encourage everyone else to do the same.
You know, honestly, I wouldn't call anything a RPG unless you design your own character from scratch, write a background story for him/her and then act out his/her actions with either script or live-actions.
So you want a RPG? Go play MUDD/Digichat or pick up tabletop-games.
So you want a RPG? Go play MUDD/Digichat or pick up tabletop-games.
Well yes, but we're going to start doing that by having discussions on the matter, aren't we? I mean, I know I can't magically make everyone agree with me overnight, and really if I'm the only one that feels this way there's not a damn thing I can do at all, but is it really so wrong to say it?veloper said:
Maybe I need to do more? Perhaps we should start coming up with better names for the various things that will need new genres? Names that don't confine a type of game to a specific region, which is essentially nonsensical?
Heck, maybe even just figuring out what lumps together well with what is a good place to start.