Oh, certainly they're fixable. In fact, a good way to help eliminate player subversion is to completely remove statistics from the interface: no more levels, attributes, classes, racial modifiers, weapon and armor statistics, spell costs, HUDs, etc. If the player has no access to these numbers and is forced to play based on his sensory experience of the game world and the common lore of the game world, the result is a better RPG. You'd have no choice but to engage in only the activities you felt fairly confident of. You'd only try 'risky' actions in relatively safe situations. And the beauty is that you could make everything dependent on character stats and the player reallly wouldn't be able to tell. He'd just know he was swinging his sword too slowly, or that his arms tremble when he draws a bow.

You'd have to conceal this statistical information from players of course, who would try to access it and put it up on wikis and forums in an attempt to meta-game.

Edit: Of course, everyone would call this game an action game, not an RPG.

While it does work (I played through FO3 HUD-less, relying on visual and audible clues to judge the status of my character), it's not the only way. Randomisation of results and methods help a lot.


No amount of concealing survives the contact with a dedicated user base.

There's a different big problem with RPGs however: You can make the character only act as good as his statistics suggest he would, and no better, no matter how good the player is at the game. You can't do the opposite - no matter how good the character is at reasoning, strategy, reflexes and so on, you can't make him be better than his player is (without trivialising the game, that is). This is not only an unsolved problem - it's considered unsolveable by game developers. At most, we can attempt to make the game adapt to the player and be easier on him if he struggles too much, but that still won't make his character act any faster or be any cleverer.

Its just a name, we feel the need to categorize everything so that we can identify them easier and games are no different. Who says Saints Row isnt a gang banger RPG, who says I'm not roleplaying as the head coach of a team when I play Madden? In a way, every game is and no game is. If I can get into a game and a suspension of disbelief occurs I consider it a roleplaying game.

No, they are not for the better. If you can't do the basic math repuired to calculate stats, then you shouldn't be playing RPGs. Cutting out one of the main qualities of an rpg is [censored]. That means it is no longer an RPG. Stats allow for a variety of things that is not possible without them. You calculate these things with math. The majority of things in life require basic math skills. You sound like you want to play a mindless game involving no thought process at all. That is what shooters are for, not RPGs.

RPG is not some subjective term that differs from person to person. It is a defined genre like sports, action, ect.

Simple, straight forward, to the point.

Then why can everybody agree what a sports/action game is, but people always debate what makes a game an RPG?

Because they don't know what the actual meaning is. Which is leveling up system, which all rpgs have in common.

Exploration
Character Progression (both Advancement in terms of strength and character development)
Some form of Stats
A System of rules that governs how the game plays and that can be very flexable depending on the DM.

Unfortunately, insufficient. Does a good job capturing the spirit of the genre, tho. At a minimum a good definition of RPGs is going to require disjunctive clauses. RPGs are games that have x and/or y.

I worked in a movie store for 13 years. About 10% of the movies that get made are hard to classify. It's probably about the same for games. Out of 100 people, I would expect about 99 of them would classify Skyrim as an RPG. This one is a no-brainer as far as the public is concerned. The only people who question it's status are people clinging rigidly to a narrow set of criteria.

The only important fact in deciding whether or not a game is an RPG is whether or not it supports my intention to RP. If it does, it is, if it doesn't, it isn't. It's completely subjective. The only way you could argue that it isn't is by ignoring about a bazillion threads that argue otherwise. We call that ignoring evidence. Absolutists do that when they've run out of arguments.

The reason why most people agree on the same group of terms is that those mechanics really do support RP. But you don't need every element every time to make an RPG, just like you don't need guns or explosions to make an action movie. I can imagine game designs that don't require character ability > player ability and/or leveling mechanics that would still be considered RPGs by a lot of people. Absolutists wouldn't agree with me, depending on their intellectual attachments, but a lot of people of equal intelligence and sophistication would. Because it's subjective. Like art.

Clearly you're wrong, since Cecilff2 doesn't mention that at all. His only condition is that the player's ability doesn't subvert the character's ability. (And that's probably about the best pat answer you can make to the question.) Leveling mechanics are separate from player/character disjunction, though they're typically found together.

Every RPG or game with"rpg elements" I have played and heard of involves some sort of stats and leveling system.

You're probably right, but that doesn't make it necessary.

Let's say you're playing a game where you assume the role of a character that you can customize. You can pick their race and gender, change their appearance, choose an occupation or class, choose from a number of different starting locations, and choose different advantages and weaknesses, like 'high pain threshold', 'extremely flexible', or 'quick learner'. You then talk to some NPCs who offer you a number of different alternatives. You decide to follow one of the NPCs up on their offer and go wandering through the countryside where you encounter enemies that you have to defeat, loot that you can collect, and other NPCs to talk to. Eventually you join a guild and they start giving you assignments. You have to go to dangerous locations and retrieve objects and do all the other routine chores. You notice that, over time, you seem to be getting better at beating enemies. They're going down quicker, and you're weathering their blows with a little more hardihood. Eventually, you find yourself in the middle of a great war between the forces of good and evil. Fortunately, the choices that you've made have made it possible for you to forge strong alliances with other factions, save important heroes from the jaws of death, and retrieve powerful artifacts to aid you in battle. If you'd made different choices, you would have been on the opposite side, with different allies and different weapons of mass destruction, but your choices led you to where you are today. A powerful guild leader wearing weapons and armor that you found randomly in your adventures, stole from enemies, or hand-crafted, depending on other choices you made. But in all this time, never once did you see a single statistic. You were forced to make decisions for your character based only on what was available to his senses and gleaned from conversations and books.

Alternative 1: Unknown to you, your chance of succeeding at any task was based entirely on your character's skill, but you never knew what it was because there were no attributes, no levels, no DPS or AR or anything else accessible through a character menu. If you had chosen a different class or race or occupation, you would have had a different experience entirely, but you don't know that because the game mechanics are concealed in binary and are never made accessible to the public.

Alternative 2: Unknown to you, every action you performed was based on your own skill as a player, but you never knew that because the experience was so well constructed that every decision you made felt natural. You wanted to play as a thief, so you chose the thief class, acted like a thief, joined the thieves' guild, and you could see your character getting better at every thing he did over time as he gained more experience.

In both cases, your experience has been exactly the same. You don't know if everything is stat-based or player-based because you don't have access to any of the information. In this scenario, is the game an RPG or not? Is a game classified as an RPG based on whether or not it has visible statistics? Or is it enough that every one of your character's actions was indeed determined by a rigorous ruleset that you just didn't know about? What if the developers released the ruleset and it demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that the game was based on inflexible character mechanics? What if it was then revealed that the ruleset released to the public was an elaborate hoax and it was all twitch-based? Are you going to flip-flop on your decision? Can you reclassify a game based on this new knowledge? If someone told you beforehand that a game was an RPG because it had a rigorous, character-based ruleset and you played it for 200 hours under that assumption and then the hoax was revealed to you, would you then decide that for the last 200 hours you 'weren't really role-playing, you just thought you were role-playing'?

Defining the genre is not as easy as you think.

Alternative 1 would still be an rpg because it still has a stat system, it's just hidden. I don't think the second one is possible, because I don't think any developer has that much talent.

How about this.

A CRPG aims to create characters that is reflected by its own ruleset definitions. The characters proceed in the course of the game according to player defined attributes to the characters instead of player attributes, while the environment simulator changes accordingly.

An action game allows players to define characters by player attributes, while the environment simulator does not have to change accordingly.

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

The reason why so many can't define RPG well is because most younger generation were never exposed to the origin of RPG in the first place. D&D type RPGs has been considered by teens a nerd game for basemant virgins with no life. Even tho most D&D players are people with far better and happier lives than the video gamers. Because RPG gamers know how to separate things, they can easily define what is fantasy and what's real. While video gamers indulge themselves in simulation and never considered coming out of it.

The very basic of RPG is IC (in character) and OOC (out of character). There's no such thing in video games, or at least in all those game manuals they all advertise the simulation part of it and never the RP part of it. You are who and who, what and what, not you rp who and who in what and what context. Cause that's boring to sound.

By that definition, the only computer RPG in the world is http://progressquest.com/

In Morrowind, it was player skill that decided to move forward or backwards, to attack now and not later, to equip that sword and not that other. So I guess Morrowind isn't an RPG either. In fact, with your definition, the only RPGs are movies.

You're cutting corners here. Surely you understand that the general concept here refers to tasks where the is relative skill to determine the characters aptitude. If there is a skill governing general movement, then that should determine whether the character moves or not; if there is a skill for lockpicking, then that should determine the characters ability to pick locks. It's that the player makes the decision for the character to make an attempt at a task, and the character then performs as commanded, but succeeds and fails according to his/jher skill (instead of the players). Consider the player - technically - as the characters conscience, intuition or motivation (or what ever) and the character the physical vessel to carry out those tasks within his/her limits and capabilities.

Agreed. It's kind of silly when someone puts down a game as not being a "true" RPG because it's not like the other RPG's they've played. Since D+D first came out, there have been literally hundreds of RPG's with both similar and completely different gameplay, both P+P and computer/video games. I'd be willing to bet there are a number of old school RPG fans that will tell you ANY computer or video game RPG is not a true RPG because of the lack of a GM and the intra-personal co-operation of live people. It alawayss seems to me the basic complaint is "It's not a true RPG becasue it doesn't handle combat the way it was done in X+X game, therefore it's garbage." It's kind of a silly and self-centered way to look at it. People often have way too rigid a concept as to what a true RPG is.

"Aims to create characters that are reflected by its own ruleset definitions" just implies that the designer's intent is sufficient, so best just to leave that out. Nice job including character customization and character progression inside the character skill > player skill argument. A little convoluted, but whatever works. Not sure what "environment simulator changes accordingly" is meant to imply. Do you mean that the gameplay changes to adapt to the character's attributes/skills? Also, I think someone has edited the wikipedia page you linked to. At least, I couldn't find a single clear definition of RPG anywhere on that page. A lot of tentative statements about different sub-genres, though, which is my point. Thanks for the assist.

The whole "younger generation" argument is bull, of course. I'm surprised that people even use it, since it's completely lacking in merit or objectivity. Even if there were any truth to the "not your daddy's RPG" argument, and a genre could be defined by its first instance (which it can't), the whole paragraph is just unbridled elitist twaddle. I doubt you could find any statistical evidence to support your bias. If anything, extreme simulationists are going to be better at distinguishing real from unreal since they're highly motivated to make fine distinctions between what looks realistic and what looks fake. "That water looks so fake, it doesn't even use x, y, or z" (insert appropriate physics formulas here, since I don't know anything about physics). Go spend some time on a CG technical artist's forum. Those guys are far, far from being "lost in a cloud of simulation". I'm surprised they enjoy games at all since most of them are incredibly critical of them.

Companies advertise simulation aspects because simulation shows up in a screenshot, unlike more elusive elements, like gameplay. That's why they use bulletpoints to define the basic mechanics. The fact that they say things like "you can do x, y, and z in this incredible, living world!" instead of "your character can do x, y, and z in this incredible, living world!" is because they're aware of the elementary fact that players play games, not characters.

In other words, RPGs are games where the character's physical mobility is determined by statistics, but everything else is up for grabs. So, if I take my brain and stick it in a digital body, that's RP? The problem is, who decides what needs a statistic and what doesn't? Is reaction time a character attribute or a player attribute? If character skill is responsible for 80% of my chance of success and player skill for the other 20%, is it an RPG or not? If it has to be 100%, then you've effectively removed the entire ES series from the genre of RPG. The only games left are turn-based. Any game with a RT element is automatically excluded. If I'm playing a warrior and I always use a certain axe and then I run into an enemy that I, as a player, know is immune to attacks from my axe, should I be allowed to equip a different weapon? If you say 'yes' then you support player subversion, only you've substituted intellectual dexterity for manual dexterity.

Here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment.

+ 10

That's playing a role in the roles terms in a cRPG, you cannot play anymore into a role than that. As to who decides what needs a statistic... The developer calls the shots there (according to the used ruleset), but it is common practice that all out of ordinary (ordinary being tasks like moving, talking, basic functions like opening an unlocked door and such), anything that needs speacial knowledge, is governed by stats and skills. And no, realtime games are not excluded (Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age: Origins, being good examples of that).

The subgenres also exist to cover the "close by" or "genremix" cases (aRPG, jRPG, etc). Weren't we talking about "troo" RPG, the very core of it and not what all it can blanket when starting to mix and match?

RPGs are so contaminated by strategy elements, it is hard to salvage that right now. The general love for story isn't helping either.

So I will attempt to explain the RP in RPG. I think that could work.

RP of RPG: Innovating/improvising/co-creating a story through interaction with setting and characters.

This is my definition, I even put it in my sig. It is not very different from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game Also note the "Not to be confused with other forms of role-playing." warning there.

Basically, it is all about storytelling. It is just like writing your own story, only it happens through interaction. Now, let's look at how we create a story if we were to write our own novel.

A book would have a plot, a plot would have events. Events would be triggered by characters. The characters would be defined in appearance, personality and background. And all of this would happen inside a setting. The writer would use their imagination to clash characters with each others and/or setting to drive the story forward via planned or spontaneousness events/situations. It is expected from the writer to create a coherent story without plot holes.

I probably failed at describing it efficiently but I hope you get the gist of it. Can you recognize all the elements which are needed for an RPG from there?

Now, in a roleplaying environment these parts are shared by different people. That means we have to give up some creative freedom. Everything from here is about different permutations.

This will naturally lead to two questions:
How much freedom are we willing to give others as a roleplayer?
How do we regulate this? Do we need a system?

But movement and timing is THE most important factor in sword fighting. Saying that you need a dice roll to decide if my sword (that visually perfectly cut the oponent in half) actually connected but that placement and timing which are handled by the player do not need stats to govern them?

And anyway, in Skyrim the charact stats ARE fundamental for combat. Without good training you do pitiful damage in the first place. It's just that designers went away from a "can hit, can fail" rule system into a "always hits but skill instead is used to modulate damage done". I like the later more, even in turn based games because too much dice rolls tend to mess up combats with excessive randomness. I like it more deterministic because I find it more "strategic" that way and less luck based.

Does running require a statistic? Anybody can run, but some people train to be marathon runners and others to be sprinters and they have completely different physiques. Same goes for jumping. What about jogging? The problem is someone has to decide what constitutes "special knowledge". Hitting someone over the head with a hammer doesn't require special knowledge, but you get better at it by doing it over and over, at which point you start to accumulate special knowledge, which is a function of experience.

Any realtime game involves something known as reaction speed. Anyone here want to tell me whether that's mental or physical? Is that player-based, or character-based? Does it affect combat? If so, how important is it in combat? Does it account for 5% of your success? 10%? 1%? At what % does an RPG become an action game? Is it enough that your character's skill imposes some kind of impact? Let's say my chance to hit is player-based, but my damage is character-based. How much of my success in combat is character-based? 50%? Is that enough for me to call a game an RPG? What about lockpicking? If a player playing the lockpicking mini-game requires on average 10 locks to pick an Expert lock with a skill of 30, and only 3 locks with a skill of 60, what's improved? The player's skill or the character's skill? If the player's skill accounts for 70% of the success, but character skill accounts for 30%, is it still a RP feature? Is 50% the magic number? Should our definitions be: "RPGs are games where character stats determine 50% of the chance of success at performing a task"? Should that number be 95%? In a RT game, it's never going to be more than 99%, since reaction time always plays an important role in combat.

My point is that people who advocate absolute definitions of the genre are basing their arguments on a number of unexamined assumptions. It's just a mantra. It captures the spirit, but not the truth. People need to stop mistaking one for the other, or we'll never have productive conversations about the genre.

Ah. Good luck with that definition. I don't think it's going to go over well, though it sounds nice.

My definition is: If I play a game with the intent to RP and the game supports my intention, it's a RPG.

That's too subjective for most people. Apparently uncertainty is a hard thing for RPers to live with. They need to know the % chance that their definition is correct, and it only succeeds if that chance is 100%.

Let's use another anology. What is a vampire? It's a pretty good anologue for "what is a RP game?" because they are both products of the mind, as opposed to physical objects which can be studied at microscopic detail.

Is a vampire a creature that drinks blood? Is it undead? Is it a creature that bursts into flame in the sunlight? Does it recoil when you hold a cross up to it? Is running water a barrier for it? Do they have to be invited to enter your home? Can they turn into bats and wolves? If you meet a creature that is all of these things except one (eg. it's not undead, but a living organism or it's undead but it doesn't drink blood) is it a vampire? You can't make a single definition that encompasses all of the different things that people consider to be vampires. Vampires are not static objects. They are compositions. A good definition will capture that by saying that vampires are creatures that are x and/or y and/or z. As long as a creature has enough of these elements, it's a vampire, as far as 99% of the population is concerned. And the 1% that disagree are the people who can't live with disjunctive definitions. There's probably something you can take for that.

The game and the design of it dictates what needs a skill and what does not. You could well have a game, where you would need a skill in able to function at all. The core thing is, that once there is a skill, it should dictate the successrate of the actions that it governs. A healthy dose of common sense is (should be) involved in implementing the skillset too - according to the goal of the game and the intended gameplay - it's not really that hard to figure out that running or eating or talking is a basic function of a normal person, whereas lockpicking or hacking or adept fencing is not (for a couple of examples).

You could look at it from the point of view that the initiation of the attempt (with the skilldriven cases) is about playerskill (and I never claimed otherwise), but the result is of the character (in relation of the task and its variables). You can figure out what kind of percentages that gives for who's driving what and how much, but crux of the issue is there. Player commands, character acts and succeeds according to his abilities.


Read above.


Pitiful damage is still damage. If you can handle the characters movement, and if you have the right preparation for it, you can handle any combat situation with a skill of 1. In these recent games, the skills are but aids for the players own dexterity and fingermuscle.