Kodex Kritikal Konsensus: What is an RPG?

[J_C]

RPG is a role playing game.

A game that you role play.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

It just needs a person willing to undertake any role.

You dont need a setting, or a character. It does not need to believable or realistic or have any kind of coherence. It does not even need to be presented in a specific way. It does not have a specific target audience or specific purpose. It does not require any specific behavior or action either.

Everything else is just subjectivity.

Its just the branch of games dominated by imagination.


Always define something by the minimum common denominator. If something goes against it, detract all conflicting fragments from it and try again.

What is this? I don't even....

Seriously, I don't even understand what are you trying to say.

 

[Azrael the cat]

is it that time of the year again?

So a bunch of Blatantly Butthurt BROs have complained about Desu Ex threads being moved to General Gaming.

general rpg discussion is not only for rpgs but also for rpg related stuff, including games from other genres that have rpg mechanics.
dx:hr and dx both have rpg elements so the question whether they are rpgs or what defines an rpg is completely irrelevant.
they belong in grpgd and grpgd mods are giant twats.

Let's consider those mainstream gamers who love Deus Ex. Do they tend to be proper RPG fans? No. No they don't. Ask those people to list their top 100 games and while Deus Ex might be somewhere near the top, even first place, the rest will severely lack Codex approved RPGs. I predict you'll find Mass Effect and Oblivion high up. Therefore the main appeal of Deus Ex is not the RPG elements. It's something else entirely. General Gaming is fine for Deus Ex threads.

Counter-example = me

I consider Deus Ex, DE:HR, System Shock 1-2, Thief series and Ultima Underworld to be their own genre, which can borrow rpg elements so strongly that the rpg title is warranted, or very weakly. Game genres lean towards being vague, but this set of games - being something that never took off long enough to get its own genre other than being called hybrids, despite being a specific type of hybrid with its own shared style - are particularly vague.

Nonetheless, one can call Deus Ex a crpg and you can tell what they mean by that. It's hardly bizarre - and you'll find plenty of folks here who like Deus Ex along with Fallout or PS:T (and in my case Wizardry and Ultima series, with Wiz 1 being my first home computer game). Just like you'll find plenty who like it together with stealth games, and plenty who like it along with Mass Effect.

Guess what - if 'mainstream gamers' is your yardstick, then rpgs do not exist. You could take the few 'mainstream gamers' who like Wizardry, and their favourite crpgs will include Oblivion and Mass Effect...BECAUSE they are mainstream gamers. You see your logical hole, here? By using 'mainstream gamers' as a yardstick, you are automatically defining the target audience as those who like the major mainstream hits of the last 5 years, i.e. Oblivion and Mass Effect etc.

And since when did shared fanbase count for definitions? Twilight is a goddawful vampire romance series, not a Gossip-Girl-esque teen soap opera, even though it likely has more of a shared fan base with Gossip Girl than with Anne Rice novels or the Buffy series. Blur was a pop band despite having more of a shared fanbase with Ride (shoegaze) and Smiths (post-punk) than with the Spice Girls. Oasis and Britney Spears both identify as pop acts, but you could send Oasis to a rock festival and they'd get on just fine, while Spears would get heckled off stage.

 

[Cassidy]

Just like P&P RPGs were originated from wargames, the first CRPGs orignated from P&P RPGs, trying to adapt the experience of such tabletop games to a far more restrictive and limited environment like the PC(IE: Ultima, Wizardry, Might and Magic), while a second wave during the 1990s came in with a greater focus on story and dialogue choices in conversations with NPCs(Fallout and others), and after that the genre practically died in videogames, and "Roleplaying Game" became just a marketing buzzword to attempt differentiating Gears of War clones from Gears of War. My definition is the gamist one, not a straight copy of mondblut's:

On electronic mediums, a roleplaying game is a game where you, instead of interacting directly with the world and its obstables through defined rules that challenge your own skills(IE: twitch-gaming), resort on creating or using one or more preset characters and relying on characters' skills combined with equipment and items gathered through to achieve objectives and overcome challenges, while this character evolves its skills and capabilities based on the same rules through the game.

I don't consider any game that tries to blend player skill with character skill in combat or in noncombat(FUUUU SHITTY MINIGAMES) a RPG. But simply -insert other genre here- with RPG elements. On the other hand I consider Jagged Alliance 2 a RPG, regardless of laptop guy having no stats. Because the laptop guy isn't a playable character, and since when must all NPCs have visible stats for the player? But that is another discussion.