Crispy™ What is an RPG Attempt #186,091

[Excidium II]

I think we have to consider the normative aspect of how PnP games are meant to be played. Otherwise, you can just say that a retarded game master and retarded players love to hang out to kill monsters in a stupid history, and that is the end of discussion. I can use my chair to hit people on their heads, but that is not what the chair function. I can larp Mario Brothers as an romance, but that is not how the game is meant to be played. If you approach the question from this angle, you can see what is wrong to state that a pure combat game is a cRPG. At the very least, you would have to concede that is a poor and very restricted cRPG, because that is what you would have said about a similar PnP campaign.

I think that is an important point, a poor RPG is still an RPG. So it does not do much to try and define RPGs by features that potentially sets good ones apart like C&C or inventories.

 

[Excidium II]

I think you all are overthinking things a bit too much. The requirements for a video game RPG are:

1. You can level up.

2. Health is measured by visible numbers.

Anything else varies from game to game.

CoD is an RPG.

 

[Lurker King]

The final definition likely has to include wording in it like thresholds. Like it or not, it's never going to be a cut-and-dried or irrefutable thing. Computer roleplaying games by nature have to be flexible things -- or, potentially more useful, have to be things that are not entirely inflexible

If a cRPG is a social artefact, and its nature is determined by its function, its nature is inflexible, since it is established on its origin. On the other hand, its nature is so broad that can encapsulate almost every content given the appropriate restrictions. Of course, if you assume a conventionalist view about social artefacts, and believe that their nature is solely determined by whatever the convention is established, then the discussion is pointless. You will have to check what most people think at a given time to conclude what is the prevailing convention about cRPGs. Most likely, it would be something that is indistinguishable from action games.

 

[Lurker King]

Oh, god. This thread is making me insane. This is a theme for a paper, not a post. Fuck this.

 

[Machocruz]

RPG:

=

Role-playing-game

=

Game in which you play a role

=

Practically every game in existence

And this is the mistake everyone makes in my opinion.

Lets go back to Doom and Bioshock: Infinite and the idea of "assuming a role." These are game pawns you control, nothing more. They are the shoe in Monopoly. At best you are joint role-playing these characters along with the script writer and voice actors. Even when playing with a premade PnP character at a convention, I get to choose how to express their personality and mannerisms, their voice inflection, I get as many ways of handling a situation as I can come up with within the limitations of my avatar, etc. Even when that premade character's personality is defined for me, I still get to be the writer and performer. The closest video games have come to this is allowing you to choose from different dialogue choices, choose a win pose, shit like that. Doom and BI offer none of this. They are weapons in space, tank turrets you control.

But if we're just going to list features, I think observable data about your character is important to i.e. the character sheet and stats. Your stats are an assemblage of your intrinsic, naked attributes -mental, physical, social, etc; the composition of your character before any gear is applied to them. The numbers represent the value of these attributes on the world scale, so if say 20 ST is the maximum strength any living being can have in the game world, and you have a strength of 18, you are pretty fucking strong (just an example). In a RPG, you have complete knowledge of all your capabilities within the world scale. But how do we know just how strong or intelligent Doom guy is, or Booker DeWiit? The feedback for this is very limited in the game. You can't know exactly what you are, so your performance is limited to mere mechanics of movement and attack.

The intrinsic attributes part is also important in sorting through the confusion. Many people have argued that Legend of Zelda is a RPG because you have hitpoints in the form of hearts, and you get stronger by getting more hearts. But how you get more hearts has nothing to do with how strength/durability is gained in the real world, which RPGs try to emulate (within the limits of not having your character die in one round form a axe strike, which would make for a less satisfying game). In the real world, you improve your bodily and mental attributes by taxing them so that they adapt and grow stronger. In DnD, you do this by fighting and your defensive attributes go up. The heart containers in LoZ are essentially power ups, not Link's body's response to stimulus. Of course DnD and others aren't perfect or even consistent, like why should you be able to raise Charisma if you leveled off of combat? Still, your character gets better through resistance, not pick ups.

In my view, RPGs in the context of videos games are those that emulate, mechanically AND cosmetically, their PnP grandfathers. So even though you don't have character performance in Wizardry, mechanically and cosmetically the game fits squarely into the RPG genre and nothing else. Character sheet, party, stats, random die rolls, to-hit chances, turns, iniative, etc. And there is observable information by which you can gauge a lot of this. Not so in Bioshock, Saint's Row, CoD, Uncharted, Ninja Gaiden, Mario Bros. Pac-Man, Pitfall, etc.

We can go into permanency of attributes and skills and things like that, too. Someone may argue that CoD4 has a character sheet with your inventory, perks, etc. But perks are just more power ups. They don't represent any innate characteristic of the character, you can swap them repeatedly. There is no attempt at simulation of how people learn things, increase and maintain skill level. And you still don't have information regarding just where your mind and body stand in relation to everyone else, nor are there any requirements to know these things. Traditional JRPGs, being limited, only pay lip service to a lot of this information, but cosmetically it's there. There is no confusion as to what genre they are trying to fit into.

Perhaps most importantly, Gary Gygax was terrible at naming shit.

 

[Rufus_T_Firefly]

CoD is an RPG

CoD doesn't use visible numbers to measure health.

 

[Malignant Manor]

It is a rocket propelled grenade which made the 2d Fallout games so great. Thank God, that New Vegas has a mod that makes it a true rpg.

 

[Machocruz]

Another thing: I think a lot of people, especially the console crowd, are very pedantic about the terminology. They focus on the"role-playing" part, take it too literally, and overlook the "game" part. They say things like "Stats don't define role-playing." No, but they are part of the fucking game aspect. They role-play in marriage counseling, but it's lame. The game part is what makes it the thing, gives it a firm structure.

There is also lack of respect for terminology, origins of terminology, purpose of terminology. I've never accepted the "language is fluid" idea. In practice this has been the case, but that means any person or group can massage words to fit their own agenda. People are not honest, don't act with integrity, don't care about consistency. Someones unmade bed can be called "art" now, and dumb action games can now be called RPG by pleb who want to think they have monocled taste. Because RPGs are like sophisticated and stuff, like Mass Effect.

 

[Azarkon]

Yes that is what I was saying. The only difference between the PnP version and the computer version is the human "AI", so you can discount it. The transition point I mentioned in PnP history, is where the answers lie.

I think the main value of looking at CRPGs independently of PnP RPGs is that the relevant differences between CRPGs are all capable of being systematized into their level of derivation from the "founding" CRPGs, and that the ideas introduced by these "founding" CRPGs for how to translate PnP RPGs onto the computer *are* the gameplay differences that Codex spends countless threads arguing over.

For example, 80+% of JRPGs - basically all the turn-based ones with menus - are derived from Dragon Quest. They are basically just Dragon Quest-clones, with a traceable trajectory of evolution and improvement over the years. Of course Dragon Quest itself took its combat system from Wizardry, but it was the first popular game, along with Final Fantasy, itself a Dragon Quest clone, to cement that set of gameplay components into a "genre."

Same with Fallout, the father of all turn-based isometric CRPGs, and Baldur's Gate, the mother of all RtWP isometric CRPGs. It is easy to list all the Fallout-clones and Baldur's Gate-clones over the years and when Codex talks about RPGs, that's what they usually think about, along with Wizardry-clones and Elder Scrolls-clones. Diablo-clones aren't talked about much here but they have an even larger following elsewhere and are what people think of when they hear "action RPG."

And every once in a while, we have a game sufficiently innovative, that it breaks out of its own group and becomes a prototype onto itself. A recent example of this is Aeon of Strife, best known today by its popular next generation edition, Dota, the defining game of the "Dota-clones"/"MOBA"/"ARTS" genre. AoS and its clones are sufficiently different from all previous games that the game becomes a "founding" father, and all Dota-clones are capable of being judged by how they improve upon the prototype game.

Just the same for CRPGs, in which it is very difficult to evaluate the quality of Diablo against Planescape: Torment because they are such different games, but it is easy to evaluate the quality of Titan Quest against Diablo because the former is the next generation of the latter. In the end, Codex fails each time at defining "RPGs" because "RPG" as an unique genre doesn't actually exist. What we have are several different genres of games that are all grouped under "RPGs" for no explanation except that they all utilize certain design concepts such as character attributes, experience levels, and inventory, which were initially limited to "RPGs." But the way these games use character attributes, experience levels, and inventory are all so different that it's not even valuable to put them side by side, and the fact that games solidly in the FPS and strategy genres are starting to make use of those design concepts make the "RPG" label useless altogether.

Consequently, when asked to evaluate a game these days I simply don't even ask whether it's a RPG. Rather, I look at other games similar to it and then see what it does that those games don't. Shots are, those were the same games the designers used as a model for developing their own game in the first place.

 

[Job Creator]

RPG is a game in which you play a character, where 'game', 'play' and 'character' mean what I want them to mean and nothing else

 

[Azarkon]

And this is the mistake everyone makes in my opinion.

Lets go back to Doom and Bioshock: Infinite and the idea of "assuming a role." These are game pawns you control, nothing more. They are the shoe in Monopoly. At best you are joint role-playing these characters along with the script writer and voice actors. Even when playing with a premade PnP character at a convention, I get to choose how to express their personality and mannerisms, their voice inflection, I get as many ways of handling a situation as I can come up with within the limitations of my avatar, etc. Even when that premade character's personality is defined for me, I still get to be the writer and performer. The closest video games have come to this is allowing you to choose from different dialogue choices, choose a win pose, shit like that. Doom and BI offer none of this. They are weapons in space, tank turrets you control.

But if we're just going to list features, I think observable data about your character is important to i.e. the character sheet and stats. Your stats are an assemblage of your intrinsic, naked attributes -mental, physical, social, etc; the composition of your character before any gear is applied to them. The numbers represent the value of these attributes on the world scale, so if say 20 ST is the maximum strength any living being can have in the game world, and you have a strength of 18, you are pretty fucking strong (just an example). In a RPG, you have complete knowledge of all your capabilities within the world scale. But how do we know just how strong or intelligent Doom guy is, or Booker DeWiit? The feedback for this is very limited in the game. You can't know exactly what you are, so your performance is limited to mere mechanics of movement and attack.

The intrinsic attributes part is also important in sorting through the confusion. Many people have argued that Legend of Zelda is a RPG because you have hitpoints in the form of hearts, and you get stronger by getting more hearts. But how you get more hearts has nothing to do with how strength/durability is gained in the real world, which RPGs try to emulate (within the limits of not having your character die in one round form a axe strike, which would make for a less satisfying game). In the real world, you improve your bodily and mental attributes by taxing them so that they adapt and grow stronger. In DnD, you do this by fighting and your defensive attributes go up. The heart containers in LoZ are essentially power ups, not Link's body's response to stimulus. Of course DnD and others aren't perfect or even consistent, like why should you be able to raise Charisma if you leveled off of combat? Still, your character gets better through resistance, not pick ups.

Choosing your mannerism not a very compelling case for what makes a RPG. A lot of PnP players don't even bother with trying to come up with a mannerism, voice inflection, etc. You also do not have these choices in JRPGs as the personality of characters are usually already defined. Ditto for action RPGs.

As for "intrinsic attributes" ie character sheets, people have tried to make this argument in the past but at the end of the day, how complicated your character sheet is is just a matter of ruleset. Certain rulesets have less stats than others yet there is no fundamental cut-off for how complicated a ruleset needs to do for it to be a RPG. Look at Bioware's latest Dragon Age game - the ruleset in that game is so fucking simple they even got rid of assigning attributes, yet Bioware and everyone else calls the game a RPG.

And your final argument about emulating life is pretty foolish. I don't think many people would agree that the "lore" behind mechanics have anything to do with RPGs. Say that I make a cyberpunk RPG tomorrow in which you get stronger by replacing your arm with a robot arm. Does that make my game not a RPG? Come on now. Also, JRPGs even besides Zelda and its clones are notorious for using power-ups for attribute gain, and that's when they even support attribute gain.

In my view, RPGs in the context of videos games are those that emulate, mechanically AND cosmetically, their PnP grandfathers. So even though you don't have character performance in Wizardry, mechanically and cosmetically the game fits squarely into the RPG genre and nothing else. Character sheet, party, stats, random die rolls, to-hit chances, turns, iniative, etc. And there is observable information by which you can gauge a lot of this. Not so in Bioshock, Saint's Row, CoD, Uncharted, Ninja Gaiden, Mario Bros. Pac-Man, Pitfall, etc.

We can go into permanency of attributes and skills and things like that, too. Someone may argue that CoD4 has a character sheet with your inventory, perks, etc. But perks are just more power ups. They don't represent any innate characteristic of the character, you can swap them repeatedly. There is no attempt at simulation of how people learn things, increase and maintain skill level. And you still don't have information regarding just where your mind and body stand in relation to everyone else, nor are there any requirements to know these things. Traditional JRPGs, being limited, only pay lip service to a lot of this information, but cosmetically it's there. There is no confusion as to what genre they are trying to fit into.

Perhaps most importantly, Gary Gygax was terrible at naming shit.

The problem with your definition is that the bulk of CRPGs - RPG video games - today don't emulate any PnP RPG. Instead, they emulate existing CRPGs. For example, think about this for a moment - what PnP RPG does Skyrim try to emulate? Any PnP RPG you could think of? Thought not. These CRPGs are so distant from their PnP "grandfathers" that it's no longer useful to ask whether Skyrim successfully emulates the PnP experience. That's not what people who play these games care about.

I also fundamentally disagree with the idea that any developer is "trying" to fit their games into the the RPG genre. Developers don't think that way. They don't care about how you define RPGs and whether their game is a RPG. Developers look at other games they've played and think, "this game is cool and all, but it still lacks XYZ, now I just need to add XYZ, and it's be an awesome new hit!" Developers think in terms of existing video games, not in terms of genres, and that's what people who want to evaluate these games properly also need to be thinking about.

And though this thread is sort of troll, it IS a much needed change, as I'm tired of going on Steam and seeing every other fucking game labeled RPG such that the filter has become useless.

 

[Gregz]

Imagine you're playing D&D and nobody is keeping track of or carrying any items. What is it you are playing?

a monk

 

[Jaesun]

 

[Job Creator]

Alternatively you could say that RPG is just a marketing term to designate games that are likely to appeal to an audience that enjoyed games previously designated as RPGs, recurring all the way down to the base case of the first generation RPGs that sought to imitate PnP games

 

[Machocruz]

Choosing your mannerism not a very compelling case for what makes a RPG. A lot of PnP players don't even bother with trying to come up with a mannerism, voice inflection, etc. You also do not have these choices in JRPGs as the personality of characters are usually already defined. Ditto for action RPGs.

As for "intrinsic attributes" ie character sheets, people have tried to make this argument in the past but at the end of the day, how complicated your character sheet is is just a matter of ruleset. Certain rulesets have less stats than others yet there is no fundamental cut-off for how complicated a ruleset needs to do for it to be a RPG. Look at Bioware's latest Dragon Age game - the ruleset in that game is so fucking simple they even got rid of assigning attributes, yet Bioware and everyone else calls the game a RPG.

And your final argument about emulating real life is pretty foolish. I don't think many people would agree that the "lore" behind mechanics have anything to do with RPGs. Say that I make a cyberpunk RPG tomorrow in which you get stronger by inserting mods into your abs. Does that make my game not a RPG? Come on now. Also, JRPGs even besides Zelda and its clones are notorious for using power-ups for attribute gain, and that's when they even support attribute gain.

These are good points. Though I'm not arguing that performance makes an RPG so much as that you don't do anything else in action video games besides control a game pawn. I think it's reductive to say that all video games are role-playing games when you are essentially just controlling a pawn. Most people just leave it at that and this is what I'm rebelling against, this simple minded reductiveness so that their game of choice makes the cut. It's not helpful and smacks of some kind of personal agenda at play. Still, those PnP players could get more into the performance aspect if they wanted to, which is more than could be said for any video game. But as I imply later, performance alone doesn't seal the deal on what exactly is a RPG.

I didn't play Dragon Age. I have no idea if it has enough cosmetic and mechanical similarities to sit it comfortably in the RPG genre and none of the other video game categories.

Your point about cyberpunk is correct. I was specifically thinking of games set in natural/low tech settings. Even then, you still have visible, intrinsic attributes that increase through trials, at least in the PnP sci-fi games I've played. Meanwhile, LoZ still only has power ups and you have no clue what else the character is, and such information wouldn't even come into use the way the game is set up. When the game came out, it was regularly called an "action-adventure" game by everyone I knew or read. Calling it a RPG only gained traction fairly recently. A health pool that increases isn't RPG. It's the how and why that makes the difference. The real world logic influencing how DnD does it is obvious to me, and if others don't see it or believe it, I think they just haven't thought about it enough.

The problem with your definition is that the bulk of CRPGs - RPG video games - today don't emulate any PnP RPG. Instead, they emulate existing CRPGs. For example, think about this for a moment - what PnP RPG does Skyrim try to emulate? Any PnP RPG you could think of? Thought not. These CRPGs are so distant from their PnP "grandfathers" that it's no longer useful to ask whether Skyrim successfully emulates the PnP experience. That's not what people who play these games care about.

I also fundamentally disagree with the idea that any developer is "trying" to fit their games into the the RPG genre. Developers don't think that way. They don't care about how you define RPGs and whether their game is a RPG. Developers look at other games they've played and think, "this game is cool and all, but it still lacks XYZ, now I just need to add XYZ, and it's be an awesome new hit!" Developers think in terms of existing video games, not in terms of genres, and that's what people who want to evaluate these games properly also need to be thinking about.

According to my definition, the bulk of what other people call RPGs today wouldn't make the cut. The skill levels, such as they are, no longer mean much in Bethesda games as they no longer enforce them. E.g. I was getting regular headshot kills in FO3 with a low gun skill. In Skyrim, I can flip flop between being a mage, thief, or warrior type at any time with little trouble. I only know how much stamina, magic reserves and health the character has, and nothing else about them. Perks in that game are your skillset instead of being modifiers on top of your skills like they are in Fallout 1 and 2. If they keep moving further along this path, I expect Bethesda's "character sheets" to look like Super Metroid status screen - inventory and powers.

I agree with your second paragraph here, accept that the creator of Dragon Quest was trying to make a RPG according to his experience with Wizardry and Ultima. He was also familiar with PnP I believe. Black Isle were trying to. SSI were trying to. Bioware used to try. Today developers want to make quasi-action/quasi-RPG crowd pleasers for everyone, checking off a list of features taken from all over the place.

 

[Telengard]

Because marketers were lazy, they didn't do their job and come up with a new name when things like Diablo and Dragon Age came along, and just called them all arpgs. But then, why do any work when you can just say these are the "new rpg" and people lap that up. And so now RPGdom has become too diverse to come up with a working classification definition. You can't combine Diablo, Dragon Age, Fallout 3, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, and Telengard into one single definition. There's too much diversity.

About the only thing you can possibly do is use "RPG" as a header category, as in:

RPG is a broad category of games that encompasses a diverse range of game types that have little to do with one another, but that retain some esoteric similarities in scope and flavor, even if they have little to nothing in common in gameplay or player interaction. These game types include: traditional rpgs, hack-'n-slashers, action rpgs, adventure rpgs (biromanceware), walking simulators, rogue-likes, and shit mmo rpgs.

And that's about all you can do - unless someone respected steps in and actually applies some different names to these things.

 

[Prehistorik]

Top this one!
CRPG is:
- set in post-apocalypse.
- turn based.
- coded by a fag.

 

[Johannes]

You can't combine Diablo, Dragon Age, Fallout 3, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, and Telengard into one single definition. There's too much diversity.

You can.

They're RPGs.

 

[Telengard]

Dude, you messed up the joke, bad. And after the great setup I handed you.

The proper line is - "I can. They're all shit."

 

[Morality Games]

An RPG is any game in which the player assumes the role or roles of a single or party of adventurer(s) and whose primary focus is on the narration of that player's/those players' exploits and accomplishments throughout a story, and, critically, the tracking and reflection of improvement of the statistics and other derived characteristics of that/those character(s) as they affect the outcomes of his/her/their actions in the game's world.

Come at me, bros.

I was going to say something but I suddenly became tired. So tired.

 

[Mackerel]

Like, life is an RPG, man.

 

[Ellef]

This topic is almost as tiresome as Microsoft ruined gaming.

 

[khavi]

I think you all are overthinking things a bit too much. The requirements for a video game RPG are:

1. You can level up.

2. Health is measured by visible numbers.

Anything else varies from game to game.

Fails because not all RPGs feature leveling as an advancement system for character progression. You disregard skill-based and incremental advancement. Unless you intended that to fall under the leveling category, but then you should have just stated 'character advancement system' instead. /austism

 

[RK47]

We are at a crossroads of will and ego.
It is a sign of things to come. Soon there will be a summoning of rebirth the likes of which the universe has never seen. Imagine an unfolding of what could be.

 

[Rostere]

Wow, so many stupid posts. And this is supposed to be a forum for serious RPG discussions?