Crispy™ What is an RPG Attempt #186,091

[Lurker King]

i'm going with the theory that the ideal rpg would be defined by a sum of features. you take the open world which worked well for arcanum, morrowind, daggerfall, bg2 to some extent, fallout... combine it with the theory that a character or a party in an rpg is supposed to be free to travel if the setting doesn't imply him being locked away in some dungeon and you're done with one of the features. rinse and repeat for all other pertinent features and you don't get skyrim because some of them might be hand placed npcs, monsters, items, wide ranges of c&c and sensible dialogues but you do get the open world of skyrim as one of the features. see, i don't think any of them is intrinsically bad, they just don't get implemented thoughtfully and probably there's also a money factor but that shouldn't be a problem for a definition.

But you are just selecting the things you like in the games you classified as cRPG. Suppose some popamole disagree with you. He only plays Diablos or Diablo clones. For this guy, the perfect cRPG is the perfect improvement of Diablo. Now what? How are you gonna argue with this guy that his preference sucks without debating about the nature of cRPGs? You would argue about the importance of exploration and skill checks, but he doesn’t give a damn, because he doesn’t need these elements to play Diablo. Calling him an idiot won’t help either, because he will just insult you back. The only rational way to sustain your point, is to argue that these different features are important for a cRPG, given that cRPGs, by their very nature, are such and such [Insert definition here].

 

[Reapa]

But you are just selecting the things you like in the games you classified as cRPG. Suppose some popamole disagree with you. He only plays Diablos or Diablo clones. For that guy, the perfect cRPG is the perfect improvement of Diablo. Now what? How are you gonna argue with that guy that his preference sucks without debating about the nature of cRPGs? You would argue about the importance of exploration and skill checks, but he doesn’t give a damn, because he doesn’t need these elements to play Diablo. Calling him an idiot won’t help either, because he will just insult you back. The only rational why to sustain your point, is to argue that these different features are important for a cRPG, given that cRPGs, by their very nature, are such and such.

given that the definition would be for an ideal rpg i couldn't care less about what diablo clones do with what little they have. it's the thing you worry about when you want to make a definition of the genre and include all kinds of fucking action games. also discussing with idiots is not something worth doing no matter the circumstances.

 

[Lurker King]

given that the definition would be for an ideal rpg i couldn't care less about what diablo clones do with what little they have. it's the thing you worry about when you want to make a definition of the genre and include all kinds of fucking action games. also discussing with idiots is not something worth doing no matter the circumstances.

That is like discussing about the definition of the ideal chair without defining what a chair is in the first place. Someone enter in the discussion and say that a mattress is the perfect chair, and you ignore him. You can’t even formulate the definition of an ideal cRPG without defining a cRPG in the first place. The most you get is to list the features you like the most in some games you decided to call cRPGs. But that list won’t help you to convince other people of the importance of these features.

 

[eremita]

But you are just postponing the problem. If a game has various RPG elements, what is an RPG in the first place? If there is not a thing that we can refer as RPG, then you can’t talk about RPG elements.

.

That is even worse. If RPG is a property that we can attribute to certain games, then we not only have to provide a definition of this property, but we also have to assume that is an abstract entity that is instantiated in different things.



But if RPG is a property that you attribute to things, you can’t have different amounts of the same property. They are there or not. You can't say that a game has differement amounts of chess elements. That doesn’t make any sense.



Why? Because the topic is abstract, controversial and difficult? That doesn’t prove that is arbitrary, but just that is abstract, controversial and difficult. Lack of consensus just shows lack of consensus, nothing more.

The point was to show that an idea there's such a thing called RPG, which is definable in the same way as circle is, is flawed. The notion of RPG is just a summary of various elements. So you have it backwards: there are elements first including the element called "playing a certain role", then there's a summary of those elements (Meanwhile, the term role playing or playing a certain role is changing and part of its change is that it's artificialy aplied to elements which - when taken alone - had nothing to do with role playing in the first place, like inventory management for example. This is happening because of need to create a category for elements which were more or less arbitrarily ijoined together.) called an RPG and only because this process is not known, you are able to take this so called notion of RPG (summary of elements) as a subject and seriously demand a definition.

No, not because it's abstract and difficult, but because it's fundamentally impossible.

 

[Reapa]

That is like discussing about the definition of the ideal chair without defining what a chair is in the first place. Someone enter in the discussion and say that a mattress is the perfect chair, and you ignore him. You can’t even formulate the definition of an ideal cRPG without defining a cRPG in the first place. The most you get is to list the features you like the most in some games you decided to call cRPGs. But that list won’t help you to convince other people of the importance of these features.

how would you define a chair without the features that make it a fucking chair???
that's all a chair is, a fucking sum of the features a chair has to have. if the ideal chair happens to define every chair, i'm not gonna argue, and if it's a mattress, maybe we haven't been sitting around as comfortable as we should have.

 

[eremita]

I don't understand the question.

How about an RPG where is no narrative whatsoever?

 

[Lhynn]

Anyone posted this already? im going to go ahead and post this.

Spoiler

 

[Desur]

The problem with trying to come up with a set definition is that in reality RPG is way too broad a term to be in any way meaningful. As such we either have to strip some titles (potentially including classic of the genre) of the label because they do not fulfil the necessary conditions or find ourselves including almost every game if the criteria are too general (CoD, Bioshock and Deponia could all be RPGs, why not?). I personally do not believe that there is just one way cRPGs can work, you cannot quantify RPGness just like you wouldn't ask: 'Which is better 'Halo' or 'Monkey Island'? - there is no right answer, it's all subjective.
I would therefore postulate to just focus on the sub genres of RPG - you can then proceed to define what exactly makes an action RPG and so on. This of course creates another problem - a lot of the games could be put in two or more different categories but does it really matter that much?

 

[King Crispy]

If you have a problem with the exercise of attempting to define what an RPG is then what are you doing here? It's like joining in a pick-up game of hoops and all of a sudden saying, "Guys, this game's too hard! I don't like basketball!"

Get the fuck off the court then!

 

[Azarkon]

The two requisites for a game to be a cRPG:

1. There is a rules system that determines if the actions of the characters are succesful or not, as well as other effects. This system takes into account character advancement, items and other special circumstances.

2. The player controls a "player character" or optionally a small party of player characters. This PC will have some freedom to explore the game world and interact in different ways with it, typically solving quests and puzzles. The game offers the ability to personalize/customize the PC(s) according to the rule system in point 1.

Point 1 is shared between RPGs and strategy games; point 2 is shared with many action and adventure games. But a RPG is the only game that will combine both.

Plenty of tactical strategy games, especially squad combat games such as Xcom, allow for both the former and the latter. Just replace "quests" with "missions" and "puzzles" with "tactical situations."

 

[DavidBVal]

Plenty of tactical strategy games, especially squad combat games such as Xcom, allow for both the former and the latter. Just replace "quests" with "missions" and "puzzles" with "tactical situations."

quoting myself

This PC will have some freedom to explore the game world and interact in different ways with it,

also a quest is not the same as a mission. A mission implies a battle of some sort, while a quest is a much broader concept. But agreed that it can be worded better, likely.

 

[Azarkon]

An RPG is never a game itself, but a game has or has not various RPG elements (character progression, choices and consequences, inventory management etc.). In other words: the term should be used as a predicate not a subject. Thus, when comparing Mass Effect with Age of Decadence for example, we're comparing games with different amount of RPG elements. It's obvious now that asking which one is or is not an RPG is meaningless. Unless of course you decide, which RPG elements are essential for calling a game an RPG. But that's arbitrary. A simple listing of various RPG elements is the closest thing to definition.

As you can see, I have solved the problem, because I have discovered that the logic behind question "What is an RPG?" is fundamentaly flawed. So It's ok now, after all these years, you can finally put the issue to rest. You're welcome guys. For my undisputed intellectual prowess, I demand a tag. Like dumbfuck or something.

The only "elements" of RPGs that were actually unique to RPGs are one-to-one character-player identification and narrative choices & consequences.

Before RPGs, the player was usually treated as a disembodied decision maker with no equivalence to any character under his/her control. The player could own/command units, buildings, etc., but had no physical presence as an avatar. RPGs made physical the player character via its rulesets.

As for narrative choices & consequences, RPGs actually predate choose your own adventure stories and were the first games to formalize the idea of "playing" through a story. Although such activities were done informally long, long before RPGs - say, between kids playing make-believe - RPGs were the ones to introduce it as the narrative component of what was otherwise a tactical strategy game.

The whole idea that games cease to be RPGs when they take player skill into account is inane. That's not an RPG idea. That's how practically all board/war games were structured. Nobody thought that to decide which soldier won when two of them went at it in a war game, the players had to act out the battle and decide with their "skill." Having stats decide battles is as old as strategy games.

But of course, just because you have "elements" drawn from RPGs does not make you a RPG. First-person games today virtually all make use of one-to-one character-player equivalence, and are increasingly giving those characters stats you get to improve. Narrative choices & consequences are also not in any way unique to RPGs as we see in adventure games, action games, and so forth.

The bottom line is that "CRPGs" are several different genres that, were they not all forced under the CRPG label, are all capable of having informative genre descriptions.

 

[Azarkon]

quoting myself

You could also explore and interact with the "game world" in Xcom, unless by "game world exploration" you're talking about exploring an overland map, in which case a lot of CRPGs aren't RPGs.

 

[Azarkon]

Epicnamebro talked about the topic some time ago in one of his Dark Souls videos, and he kinda had it spot on. Rpg is not a genre anymore, since it evolved so widespread into other genres and created hybrids and hybrids of hybrids, it lost its distinctive classification as a genre and has nowadays become more like an overarching theme across the whole gaming industry. Many games have persistent worlds, many games have dialogue trees or reactive narration, almost every fucking game nowadays has a leveling system. Hell even in Fifa you have attributes now and you can train them and level up. At the same time the rpg genre took alot of influences from other genres, dwelved into the shooter genre, the action adventure genre, took gameplay elements from the metroidvania series etc etc.

I would say defining a game as rpg should be handled like diagnosis of mental diseases. Take borderline as an example. There is a wide catalogue of symptoms, and if you match enough of these and if your behaviour is altered in a substancial way you are considered a borderline patient. If a game offers enough features out of the "rpg catalogue" it should be considered an rpg.

He's not wrong, but what he's missing is that it's still valuable and necessary to have genres for games that used to just be called RPGs, because those games fall into easily distinguished groups deriving from specific "founding" games. That is to say, it's not that "RPG" is a completely useless term - it's that it's a term that serves only to distinguish the games that fall under it from other games that are "not RPG," as opposed to being actually informative in and of itself.

For example, it's easy to distinguish Diablo and its clones from other games. It's also easy to distinguish Fallout and its clones from other games. We need terms for these groups of games. But "action RPG" vs "isometric/party-based/classic RPG" are shit terms because it makes us think Diablo and Fallout are similar games when they aren't, it makes us think that Diablo isn't an isometric game even though it is, it makes us think Fallout is all about the party when you don't even want one, and it makes us think Diablo developed out of Fallout when it didn't. Basically, calling both games RPGs make us less informed.

These problems aren't limited to RPGs. Strategy games have the same issue as anything could be said to be a "strategy game." However, strategy games have sub-genre labels that are very informative. For example, mention 4X and you instantly know what sort of strategy game you're talking about. Mention "action RPG" and we could be talking about Diablo vs. Witcher, which is just what the fuck?

 

[Stormcrowfleet]

Looks like an old debate between followers of Plato and followers of Aristotle, only with some autistic relativist also participating.

As far as a functional definition can go, I'd stick with what was said in the earlier pages by someone : a cRPG is an attempt at porting a RPG into the media of video games. You can define pen and paper RPG afterward, but that is gonna be much more easier.

 

[dagrims]

If you work in management in a finance role and you'd be somewhat embarrassed by talking with co-workers at a happy hour about playing it at length, it's likely a cRPG.

Purely hypothetical, of course.

 

[shihonage]

How about an RPG where is no narrative whatsoever?

Give me some concrete examples.

 

[King Crispy]

Give me some concrete examples.

I think many roguelikes would qualify. Are they RPG's?

 

[Neanderthal]

Combat, conversation with cunts and crap collecting simulators, usually in corridors.

 

[shihonage]

I think many roguelikes would qualify. Are they RPG's?

Technically they still provide a continuous narrative, and due to lack of explicitly written one, it always makes sense. "I went into the room, I disarmed a trap, then 3 nanofrogs attacked, I shot my freeze-ray, then hauled ass".

However, going down this road would mean that you could technically say "Doom" is an RPG. It provides very limited ways of interacting with its world, but they always make sense within the context. "I went into the room, fired BFG, lured the survivors into a narrow corridor, then rocketed them".

Given how my scale isn't binary, "on some level" both of these would be an RPG. Doom would be on the very very low end of the scale, almost zero, because of how shallow the player agency is. A roguelike would be significantly more of an RPG than Doom, because of wide range of player agency.

However both would be trumped by an RPG which has agency freedom of a roguelike, but takes care to string an actual story, a mix of pre-written tokens and aforementioned "gameplay-created narrative", which together all still makes sense. It's a harder design goal, a higher calling, if you will. A step forward, a "MORE".

A "truer" RPG includes the stat-crunching of roguelikes, but it gives your actions meaning. It is richer and more complete in that sense.

So yeah, what I have is not a definition so much, but a scale.

 

[King Crispy]

And having that scale is fine as a crutch to help us hobble along on this journey, but it's not getting us over the hump of the threshold that I mentioned before. At what point is an "almost-RPG" no longer not an RPG? What qualifies it for crossing that border? What exists beyond the RPG event horizon?

The world may never know.

 

[Cadmus]

And having that scale is fine as a crutch to help us hobble along on this journey, but it's not getting us over the hump of the threshold that I mentioned before. At what point is an "almost-RPG" no longer not an RPG? What qualifies it for crossing that border? What exists beyond the RPG event horizon?

The world may never know.

You can ask the same fucking question about a chair and not get an answer or the answer will be really long and complicated akin to RettardX's RPG anal-izer.

 

[King Crispy]

The chair shit again? Are you retarded?

 

[Cadmus]

The chair shit again? Are you retarded?

I haven't seen it refuted yet.
Besides, you made this topic.
What's more of an RPG - a chair or DOOM???
Currently airing on RPGCodex - Programme for the Mentally Challenged

 

[King Crispy]

A chair is a seat for one person that has a back and usually four legs.

An RPG is...