When you people hear the word RPG what do you think

so this is actually related to something i want to try and create hence the title what do you think when you hear the word RPG.

Discribe in the best possible ways you can, however keep it short and simple .

Generic RPG = ?

i look forward to hear from you people and your ideas about RPG.

 

What I think when I see a RPG related thread...

 

RPG has lost all meaning for me game genre wise so now it's this:

 

For the generic term RPG I don't think of any one specific game nor 2D or 3D. I consider it only to mean there is added depth and customization in the game. I'd expect my character to gain experience and levels which offer new (or at least improve the characters existing) abilities & skills and possibly even use this as a way to choose my specialization (such as a Warrior, Wizard, Thief or other melee, range, stealth types if not in the D&D type of scenario). However, I'd also expect to possibly be able to choose from various characters or various classes for my character. Finally, I'd expect to possibly be able to upgrade my gear.

 

Role Playing Game, as in playing a role in a game.

That's short and simple..

 

Here we go again, when it is preceded by: 'I want to make...'

 

Skyrim for PC. Dungeons and Dragons for table top. And their are also various live action types.

Role playing games are about taking on the role of some other character. And having the freedom to make the choices the character might make. All of the choices, from what to wear, who to fight, who to fall in love with, what politics to follow and so on.

It's worth noting that by nature PC games have limited choices, and make for inferior role playing to table top games.

 

Baldur's Gate, Fallout 2, Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun, etc.

Isometric perspective one or more people in the party, usually medieval world with swords and magic.

 

Despite the literal translation, I don't think it actually means "a game where you play a role" to anyone, not even the many people who say that, since literally almost every game involves playing a role. If you took one of these literalists and said "Hey check out this cool RPG" and then showed them Asteroids, they'd be rightfully confused, even though you could say "But see it's a game and you're playing the role of a little spaceship pilot shooting Asteroids" and they would be forced to agree. To most people, including the people who pretend they think it means any game where you play a role, it actually means a game with an emphasis on stats, leveling up, and getting new equipment, usually while following some sort of series of quests.

 

Polyhedral dice.

 

plus

 

I think the key fact is the extent to which you play the role. Playing asteroids you just shoot things. A real space pilot does more then shoot things. He eats drinks and sleeps. He has a romantic relationship his copilot that the keep secret because of regulations. And the powers that be are suing for peace with the enemy but they killed the pilots family and the pilot is torn between loyalty and revenge.

When every one of those decsisions is in player hands you start moving towards role playing.

Levels and stats and many sided dice are a key part of one system of role playing games, and have been very influential. Often we describe games with character progression as "having RPG elements". But these are not the heart of a role playing game, and there are plenty of role playing games that don't actually have levelling or stats.

That's why I think table top RPGs are superior. As a dungeon master I had a player approach me and say "I want to play a pixie from the old folk lores. Someone inherently magical, but with weak physical abilities." The game designers had never anticipated anyone playing as a pixie. There were no rules around creatures with a permanent flying ability. No prebuilt scenarios where a pixie was actually useful. But we built a few house rules and managed it anyway.

 

Until the DM stops putting up with it and towns start teleporting so that you'll finish the damn quest. Really, the point of the DM is just so your opinion can look like it mattered.

 

Cheating is an important part of the DMs role.

 

I guess I should have specified that "RPG" means very different things in video games versus tabletop. I'd agree that for pen and paper games, RPG means a game where you pretend to be someone and tell a story, vs other tabletop games like Monopoly. But in video game terms, RPG means something totally different since almost all video games involve pretending to be someone and have a story. A game that focuses heavily on story and characters but doesn't have stats and equipment is usually described as an adventure game or a narrative game, not an RPG. Most people wouldn't call the Telltale games RPG's. In the video game world, RPG means stats.

 

We use the term "dramatic interpretation/application of the rules/rolls".

 

Well, it does mean that to me. And you seem to be trying to start a semantic/dictionary argument.

Roleplaying game ultimately gives you a choice, consequences of that choice, and ability to choose a story, or drive it towards certain outcome. That's the core of an RPG - "choose your own adventure" book.

Most of the games that are marketed as RPGs today are action-adventure games with RPG elements. Skyrim, for example, and latest fallout has very little from the RPG core in it. Almost no branching choices. Having stats and skill trees does not make your game an RPG. It is essentially about writing and making outcomes with impact on the world.

Decent rpg:
Start game, have several branching choices, reach same ending.

Good rpg:
Have major different outcomes. Join the bad guy. Become the bad guy.

Perfect RPG:
Unscripted major consequences of all your actions.

Spoiler

You have mission to slay a dragon.
Sample outcomes:
1. Slay dragon.
2. Become the dragon.
3. Ally with dragon.
4. Marry the dragon.
5. Say "screw it", and spend the rest of your life hiding from agents of the king trying to kill you for failure to obey royal order.
6. Successfully escape royal agents, and become a pirate.
7. While travelling as a pirate become incredibly strong, ascend to demigod status, fight the gods, win, and undo the whole world into nothingness.
8. Remake the world to your liking. Populate it with dragons. Reincarnate yourself as a giant human princess avatar and harass the sentient dragons till the end of time.

Basically, computer storyteller or computer DM with a world to control. Completely impossible at this time. Dwarf fortress tries to achieve something similar.

 

Grinding.

 

That's MMORPG.

 

It's common in single player RPGs too.

 

I spent enough time hacking at Red slimes to get enough experience to fight wyverns in dragon warrior that I can confirm this assessment.

 

Swag lewt.

 

You're doing that thing again.

I could agree if you said JRPG (those have grinding in larger quantities). But RPG? Nah. It is a story.

 

No, you just haven't played enough RPGs.

An RPG has a story but as the name implies it's a game too. Grinding is never quite as bad as a JRPG but some of them still have it. It's a way of extending the life of the game while being on a budget or platform that only allows so much content.

 

To most people I think it means "game with stats that can be increased". I feel that Diablo and similar games are responsible for that meaning, since they pushed it pretty hard. In those games "role" generally means "the kind of weapons you're good at clobbering people with".

Personally, I want it to mean "a game where you role play a character", which is somewhat different from just "a game where you play a role". Role playing involves trying to think and behave as if you were in someone's role. Most games don't actually let you do that, they tell you what to do and everything is about the level of skill with which you do it.

 

Probably more the paper/dice games of olde that pushed that

 

It could be that we played different games, perhaps. The ones I played (pretty much D&D, and admittedly not a whole lot) heavily used stats, yes, but they were generally used to support the role playing aspect. If a character is good at negotiation then they're probably better off trying to talk their way out of situations rather than clobber someone, and the more they do that (or otherwise invest in that skill, depending on the rules) the better they get at it. Combat was a significant portion of the game, but the rule books actively encouraged making sure that there's plenty of other types of encounters in your games as well and, unless you're deliberately playing a combat oriented adventure, to avoid forcing players into combat too much.

Also, paper-based RPGs are far better at some of role playing part than a computer can be, because of language and creativity limitations. With a computer we get multiple-choice decision trees and... that's it. With a human being standing in as one of the characters or running the world then you can have truly free-form conversations or adventures, because the human being can ad-lib rather than processing a script.

 

But just as likely all of theses are mediocre.

Choice is overrated. For one, it's become conflated with choices. It's no longer about having a decision to make, but about what you can do. The matter of the choice itself becomes completely meaningless and trivial. It's a line of thinking where a kid having an argument with his girlfriend would respond by building a rocket ship, flying it to Mars, and banging a martian chick. While it certainly sounds like a cool thing to do (getting space herp), it serves no point.

 

I disagree, sounds fun to me and games are all about fun right?

 

Oh sure, it sounds fun at first, but then it starts space burning when you space pee and you have to deal with space child support payments. And lemme tell you, those space debt collectors are relentless.

 

Considering how RPG's are more than willing to explore depressing themes, I'm pretty sure we can set aside games being fun.

 

Some people have unusual definitions of fun.

 

Even more reasons not to use it.

 

I just generally ignore em', too busy building my space rocket..

I think @Murgilod is directly quoting Mass Effect though.

 

so first of all please keep within what i am asking i ask about Rpg Games and no i dont plan on doing a Mmo we already got to many of them.

but i am planning to create a Rpg only time will tell if i can do it or not.

 

You'll receive better responses if you ask better questions. What you're asking for is basically the definition of RPGs and in the time you asked the question and read the responses you could have gained a much more in-depth description by reading the Wikipedia entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game

 

Wrong forum for staying on topic.

 

No. It is about consequences and making perceivable difference to the world.

Mass Effect 3 reduced choices to +/- X to some arbitrary stat. Beyond Earth did the same.

That kind of consequences is garbage and does nothing to improve the story.

Consequences are underrated.

 

The term RPG just reminds me of how stupid our system for classifying games is.

What does it even mean? Most definitions I've ever heard are so vague that most games made today fit the classification. Under most generic definitions, Batman: Arkham City is an RPG. And the argument over if Zelda is an RPG or not will never end.

If FF1, FFVII, FFXV, Batman Arkham City, Legend of Zelda: OoT, Kingdom Hearts, and River City Ransom are all in the same genre depending on who you ask, then clearly there is something wrong with our classification system.

 

So you call Adventure games RPG's, and call RPG's Adventure games. I guess that's your perogative, but if you say Life Is Strange is an RPG and Diablo is an Adventure, you're reversing the genre classifications of the developers, all major game reviewers, and 99% of the gamer population. And doing it mostly just for semantics, which seems silly.

 

See? Semantic argument.

I'd expect most of the major reviewers to never play an actual RPG in their life. Same applies to significant chunk of gaming population. Was that an appeal to majority?

Diablo is an arcadey action game with clicky interface. It is not an RPG, and definitely not a CRPG.

I would consider Life is strange being much closer to an RPG than diablo game, because your choices have impact and world changes based on your actions. A lot of RPGs have "choose your own adventure"-style core in them.

 

One of the terms I frequently see for Diablo-style games is "roguelite".

 

The fact that it's a semantic argument is kind of my point. Saying that a word means something different "to you" than it means to everyone else is sort of defeating the whole point of language.

 

I just had to quote this. Nailed it!

I just finished playing through The Witcher III the other night. There's a lot I love about that game, but a huge part of it is the consequences of choices. Not just that there are consequences, but the way they're managed.

First up, the game is generally written and presented in a well grounded and believable way. (I'm tempted to go on for two or three paragraphs about how they manage that where most games don't, but I'll resist.) What's important is that it makes it easy to feel invested in the world. So the player is running around in this world making choices that effect the people in it. The cool thing, though, is that the consequences of those choices are often neither straightforward nor immediate and, moreso, often aren't what you'd expect.

Right near the start of the game you walk into a bar and a fight breaks out. Geralt, the protagonist, sees a thug violently threatening the barmaid and demands he back off. The thug responds by attacking Geralt, at which point his gang joins in. Geralt defends himself, and is then run out of town by the barmaid he was defending. (I think Geralt's challenge is that he keeps making the mistake of assuming humans - first the thug and then the barmaid - will respond rationally. Again, I digress.) This is in the intro section, so the player isn't making many choices at this point, but it's a great example of something typical of The Witcher in both its book and game form - a reasonable series of choices rapidly escalating into an unfortunate, believable, and not easily predictable series of events.

The consequences in that game aren't usually about stats at all. In fact most of them are completely divorced from the stats system and are about characters or the world. Plenty of them effect choices available to you later on in the game, so you want to think about not just achieving your current goals but also preserving relationships in case you need them later in story arcs that haven't even started yet. They're unpredictable, and that makes them interesting.

 

Huh? It has plenty of branching choice. It's literally all that those games do - let the player do literally whatever they want. The thing is that the tree is a super broad but super shallow one, rather than narrow and deep, and the consequences are often cosmetic or non-existant, which I think are side effects of spreading everything so thin. If you want you can ignore the story and just become a wasteland trade mogul or whatever. That's pretty darn cool, though I'd personally find it pretty darn boring. They offer a very light role playing experience, but I don't really have a problem with that.

Contrast that to The Witcher where there's detailed consequences to everything, but you can't actually do as much stuff. You are a Witcher, and you more or less stick to doing Witcher type things. You couldn't become a trade mogul, but the upside to that is that the developers were able to put much, much more detail in to the things you can do.

 

But it's also exactly the thread's question. "When people say RPG what do you think"?

It's pretty clear that to most people it means "game with stats to increase", but it's also pretty clear that it means something different to plenty of people, too.

 

I don't know why semantics bugs me but it does. I think lots of people want to say "I like games with deep stories" but the proper way to say that is "I like games with deep stories" not "RPG means games with deep stories". Especially since almost everyone I know who insists that RPG means something like "has a cool story" still doesn't actually use the term RPG to refer to a game that has a cool story but no stats and character advancement. If they did, it probably wouldn't bug me. But to say that "RPG" just means "story" and then to call games that are just story "narrative adventure games" and still only use RPG if the game also has stats and character advancement is... eh... whatever, never mind. I just stopped caring about this thread.

 

Things don't have to fit into single, neat pigeonholes, you know?

Who has argued that stats/character advancement should be mutually exclusive from role playing? Maybe someone said that and I missed it, but as far as I'm aware the argument isn't "RPGs shouldn't have stats" but "RPGs often use stats, but the stats aren't what makes it an RPG".

 

It was neginfinity who said he believes RPG means "any game where you play a role" (therefore, literally every game), and then added that it also has to have a story, meaning, literally almost every game, but specifically excluding almost every game that is actually an RPG regardless of story according to the developers, for reasons. So, Sonic the Hedgehog is an RPG, because you play a role and it has a story, but Diablo is not an RPG, because the developers say it's an RPG but the story is not good enough. To sum up: If someone says that an RPG is an RPG, it is required to say that it's not really an RPG, because the story is not good enough. But if someone says that a game which is not an RPG is not an RPG, you have to say that it is an RPG, because RPG means any game in which you play a role. Yeah, nothing wrong with semantics there.

 

It's like Schroedinger's RPG. Every game is both an RPG and not an RPG until you are forced to argue about it on the internet, at which point you take whichever viewpoint seems most contrarian at the time.