What is a Role-Playing Game to you?

[PaladinHeart]

The basic meaning is that you "roleplay" so technically the exact definition of RPG can not work on a video game, since you can't control every action that the main character makes or chooses to do. The closest you can get is those old text-based adventure games.

To me, its a game in which you either play the role of a character, or you take on the role of the main character.

Today, I think that most companies find the meaning quite flexible. Even going so far as to name anything an RPG that does not involve direct control of the character, but rather, a system where you say "attack" and they do so. Basically, having to press your button more than once to actually hit something.

So what do you think an RPG is?

[LlamaGod]

And RPG is a Role-Playing Game, dummy.

A good RPG like Fallout is were you create your Role (character creation) and you.. play it. And then to support good roleplay, the world will react to your character's design and support that design like all the others (and support it well). Therefore a role is established and you're playing it.

It's sort of hard for me to explain, but I hope you understand that bit.

SPECIAL rocked because the skills reflected the stats and Perks were available to certain stat and/or skill combos (the role is being defined even more that way).

The basic meaning is that you "roleplay" so technically the exact definition of RPG can not work on a video game, since you can't control every action that the main character makes or chooses to do.

Which good RPGs has this occured in? Either stop making stuff up to try and sound like a smart-guy or play better games. ProTip: Dont buy "RPGs" from companies that start with Bethe, BioW, or Blizz (those are the 3 that I can think up right now).

[Megatron]

The closest you can get is those old text-based adventure games.

Aren't these even more linear than current rpgs?

I think any game that doesn't have a background for your character and allows the player a different playing style is basically an rpg, but there's probably other shit that has been discussed to death on codex or something.

[Grey Fil]

For me roleplaying games are games where the character can choose between diferent actions or do the action in different ways. The diferent ways must also have diferent results in wich the game develops. Character creation and upgading do not make roleplaying. I can imagine a game with a standard character that upgrades according to the characters actions and not by the players choice and call it a roleplaying game. I do not consider games where the character fights to gain items and experience points to spend in upgrading his stealing skill as a roleplaying game.

[atoga]

-non-linearness. A character should be able to interact with everything, and the world around them should react accordingly. Anything is possible, though that doesn't mean it will work. Sometimes, you can attack things from many different angles; other times, you need to do one specific thing.

-character depth. Hidden flaws, strengths or whatever-have-you. Again, everything should be possible. Any character you want can be yours.

-not too much combat! Hack-happy roleplaying games like D&D are terrible. Most fights should be able to be avoided somehow. Good combat, when it comes to it, is also important: nothing is more boring than just endlessly rolling to hit / clicking on the target. Tactics and loads of options which make the difference between life and death also make things a lot more neato.

I can probably think of a buncho more things, but those are the main ones off the top of my head.

Oh, and depth. Role-playing needs immersion, dammit. Half-Life is more of an RPG than Diablo, for instance, since in HL I felt like Gordon Freeman at the center of an unfolding plot. In Diablo, I was just a guy cutting shit up in a catacomb. Numbers mean very little.

[PaladinHeart]

And RPG is a Role-Playing Game,

Agreed.

dummy.

:roll:

A good RPG like Fallout is were you create your Role (character creation) and you.. play it. And then to support good roleplay, the world will react to your character's design and support that design like all the others (and support it well). Therefore a role is established and you're playing it.

It's sort of hard for me to explain, but I hope you understand that bit.

I think I understand what you're saying. You have to be able to:

1. Make your own character.

2. Make your own choices.

I've played other games like that before. I guess that's one of the things that made the Ultima Underworld games so great. The first game was a better example. You're thrown in this dungeon, with all these different factions, and you can converse and be nice, or go on a killing spree

There aren't many games like Fallout and Ultima Underworld.

SPECIAL rocked because the skills reflected the stats and Perks were available to certain stat and/or skill combos (the role is being defined even more that way).

I disagree here. This is what confuses people. The stats and perks are just that. Its a strategic option and is usually a part of an RPG but doesn't necessarily define the genre. Sure it can say just exactly what your character can do, but do you seriously think all those Multiplayer 10K Fallout Tactics guys are thinking of Roleplaying when they're building their character? NO! They're thinking of winning. I wonder how many Multiplayer FOT people actually have characters with an age that is not 19?

I think you have this mixed up with traits like an eye patch, hair color, and the character's personality. Which, in computer RPGs, are usually based solely on your imagination unless you're playing something really creative where you get scars and stuff. I don't think there is a game that does that yet.

Which good RPGs has this occured in? Either stop making stuff up to try and sound like a smart-guy or play better games. ProTip: Dont buy "RPGs" from companies that start with Bethe, BioW, or Blizz (those are the 3 that I can think up right now).

I was referring to tabletop RPGs, "dummy". There ARE no CRPG's, or console RPG's for that matter (or should I say "statistical epic adventure game") that can do this. They can't, we simply don't have the technology yet.

You're good at pointing out the games we shouldn't buy. Mention a few that that take your points into consideration (besides Fallout 1 and 2).

[EvoG]

I was referring to tabletop RPGs, "dummy". There ARE no CRPG's, or console RPG's for that matter (or should I say "statistical epic adventure game") that can do this. They can't, we simply don't have the technology yet.

Sure we do...we just don't have the market. Its more a logistical nightmare than a technological inability. The 'only' thing that would fall short is AI ( compared to playing with RealPeople.tm around a table ), and even then, as you mentioned with text adventures, you can get a decent level of interaction with a text parser ( surprised this hasn't been explored even in the indie community ).

Its possibly a matter of time.

Anyway, pseudo intellectualism and elitism on the subject aside, every game you play has you taking on a role ( the role of the protagonist ). Semantically, its the derivation of a virtual characters numerical representation of human(commonly)attributes translated into a relative easily digestible form and used to represent yourself(avatar) as the player in the virtual world. This includes the characters possesions and his ability to partake of any action he wishes in said world at any time with no limitation short of the players imagination. :p

Cheers

Cheers

[LlamaGod]

Arcanum.

But I think Perks and Traits and Skills in FALLOUT (not shiTactics) helped define a character better.

Like a character who's good at Stealing and is quick, he gets a Perk which makes him a better theif, sort of like a descriptor of his mastery of those things. Maybe I just read more into them then most people, but hey, it works.

[PaladinHeart]

I think what would be MORE fun, would be an RPG where you don't make your own character, but rather the choices you make along the way ultimately affect the choice your character makes.

Like you could tell him/her to be good while they're conversing with someone, and they end up killing the guy anyway (based on their predetermined personality). You keep doing this though, and eventually they start learning not to kill people :P It would be even better if the character started out with a different personality every time.

Its a crude example, but I think you get the point. The thing I don't like about Fallout and UU, is the lack of any personality in the character you portray. You're always telling them what to do and thus, they end up a little stale and don't really make an impression.

Heh, I guess my idea is more along the lines of "role changing" than "role playing".

Imagine if you could have done something like this in Torment. It would have added a lot more depth to "The Nameless One".

Its funny, most games that exploit choices either let you be "really evil" or "goody goody twoshoes". They don't really explore the intricacies of character flaws, and how a character could make a good decision that leads to bad things happening (sorta like giving the Gecko data disk to Vault City).

I don't think characters should always be just good or evil, but they should always have flaws that can devastate the character's chances of survival, or at the least give them big problems. Being too good or too evil should always have its drawbacks. But im really talking about quirks.

Just imagine the funny possibilities. A sex crazed charachter catching something REALLY bad, a good guy has an itchy trigger finger and accidentally kills an important good guy (for example what if you couldn't have kept your guy from killing Lynette in VC?), a gullible character that always believes whatever he hears (can you say "led into a trap?"). Maybe even a character that refuses to hurt animals, even to the point of dying first.

[LlamaGod]

In Fallout and Arcanum you were Good and Evil, but if you strived to do more good and do less evil, that was your goal.

You ideas sound flawed, what if you change your mind after choosing? You're PLAYING the Role, not Deciding how it will play itsself.

[Wolfman Walt]

What you're talking about sounds remarkably like "Black & White" and how you could train your animal god avatar thingy. Pretty fun, but it's hard to impliment, not to mention alot of people would rather control their character, not just influence what that character does.

[OnTheBounce]

I think what would be MORE fun, would be an RPG where you don't make your own character, but rather the choices you make along the way ultimately affect the choice your character makes.

This has been done on the table top, but I don't think it's ever been done for a computer game. AD&D had an extension that allowed for "0-level" characters that were basically raw material that would be refined through game play and they would develop into 1st level characters of a certain class, based on how the player used them.

The extension came out just as 2nd Edition was released. Needless to say the hack 'n' slash tastes of most AD&D gamers made for an unpopular extension that was soon dropped.

The thing I don't like about Fallout and UU, is the lack of any personality in the character you portray. You're always telling them what to do and thus, they end up a little stale and don't really make an impression.

I don't know if I'd like to play a game that featured a character that I couldn't control. While I could see temporarily loosing control of your character as part of a Trait -- say, not allowing a character who had a Trait called "Berserker" to retreat from combat -- things like that should be handled w/caution. Who would want to play a character that played the game for you? I certainly wouldn't.

My main gripe w/CRPGs is that the world they are in doesn't react quite the way a good GM/DM can to the player's actions. While some things can be handled w/the "logisitical nightmare" of complex scripting -- say, reinforcements if you attack a place, then beat a retreat -- there is just no real way that game designers can anticipate what the thousands of people that will play a game will do. A GM/DM, on the other hand, knows his/her group, and can often anticipate what they will do and plan accordingly, not to mention improvise once they do something he didn't anticipate.

Another gripe is that CRPGs by their very nature are aimed at a large group of people, so when the designers sit down they're basically catering to the mean of their audience. I've yet to play a CRPG that I was really satisfied w/the dialogue options for my character, and that's because I was supplied w/options geared toward the "mainstream" of the people that the designers anticipated playing that game.

I don't see this being solved in the foreseeable future, either, since it'd take something akin to ST: TNG's holodecks to get around that.

OTB

[PaladinHeart]

I recall that in the D&D tabletop game you have to make decisions based on your alignment. And if you fail to do that, then your alignment will change. This isn't so bad for most characters, but it could take away certain abilities of others, such as the paladin and druid.

I guess a better solution, than what i talked about, would be letting the player make all the choices through the first chapter of the game. This would establish what kind of personality their character has. Then, at the end of the first chapter you take away their option to control the character. They randomly make choices based on what they did in the first chapter. Kinda like those old games where your character's stats were based off of some questions you have to answer (like in Jagged Alliance 2).

I think it would make for some interesting gameplay, and you could play through the game multiple times just to see how the main character reacts to the situations later in the game.

But, as before, this would take too much scripting and just isn't feasable. I get a headache just thinking about what it would take to do all this :P

[Grey Fil]

Taking away the possibility to make the decisions doesnt look like a good idea. That is what roleplaying is about, the player roleplays the character. But the oposite is IMO easy to make. If you roleplay as a thief, the character improves the thieving skill by stealing, trying to solve problems by choosing diplomatic solutions improves the speech skill and so on. The character can begin simple and neutral and by making certain playing options the skills related with those options increase. One thing that annoy me in the DD games is the alignment thingy, I think that good or mean moral options are subjective and create constraints that reduce roleplaying. But most DD games I have played in the computer are not RPGs, as I said before killing monsters to gain exp and items is not roleplaying, its just upgrades to beat the inevitable boss.

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

Character stats, alignment and the chance of advancement aren't the be all and end all of an RPG, they're just icing on the cake. The bare bones of what makes an RPG is your interaction with the game world and the characters in it. That interaction doesn't need to be reflective of who your character is, or their skills but what you do in the game. Adding the choice of customising your character and then having the options available to you or the reaction of other characters depend on who your character is just fleshes the game out.

Take Dungeonsiege for instance, that claims to be an RPG but even though you can customise your character you can't really interact with other characters. You can recruit them, or strip them of their equipment and abandon them in the middle of nowhere if you meet someone better, you can even go back and recruit them again if you change your mind and they won't object. There's no consequences to your actions, you don't have a choice to refuse their quests or what order to do them in.

That's the important thing for an RPG, choice and consequence.

[Bleusilences]

Well I like MOST of the BioWare rpg with the sole exception of NWN, i like Baldu's gate and kotor. And btw the ultimate ROLE PLAYING experience is Planescape Tourment. You start as a figther but the more the game advance, the more you gain up to 3 class and can change at anytime. It pull the amnesia routine but this time it kick ass, I can't say more. The game is quite long (20 hour and more) and the game is very detail story wise, only little hole (nothing is perfect). Give it a try.

[American Tourister]

That's the important thing for an RPG, choice and consequence.

You have hit the nail on the head with a supersledge! That is why I like the Fallout world so well: so many choices to make, with real consequences resulting from them. Not just good vs evil either, but as in New Reno where you can join any one of the four families, but then the other three become your sworn enemies. You can be pure evil or pure good, or anywhere in between.

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

One thing that sets RPGs apart from other game genres, is the ability to fail. In virtually all other kinds of games if you have been given an objective you need to complete it to continue playing. If you can't complete the objective game over time to reload. In a true RPG the only objective that you have to complete is the main quest.

[Yossarian]

I think it is a nice idea if the player loses control over the character in a few incidents. In GURPS (tabletop) , you are able to choose disadvantages for your character. Some of these mean that just that will happen. A greedy, cowardly, berserk, racist, lecherous, etc. character may do some really stupid things. It makes for great role playing, as you (as a player) encounter really nightmarish scenarios ("And there I stood, buck naked, a bag of choice cocaine in one hand, the bloody, gnawed-on leg of the congressman's daughter in the other, in slaughtered cuddly kittens up to my knees, while the secret service battered down the door..."), and - do not underestimate this - people are not always masters of their actions...I wanted to work on a paper this weekend for instance...but I'm lazy.
This should not be overdone of course: If you have no control whatsoever over your character, it is not your character, and you are not playing a RPG, but listening to a story (tabletop) or watching a movie (CRPG).

A bit of this was nicely implemented in FO1. Didn't you shoot the overseer only if you were an evil bastard?