In that sense, yes. It depends on whether you view 'playing a role' as bound by statistical evidence or the skills you use, or as based on dialogue options.

Or, put another way, is your 'role' based on the things you can do or your personality.

EDIT: Both are true, it's just a matter of opinion

It wouldn't be an RPG at all, since your stats are rendered meaningless by the fact that there's nothing to apply them to. Without interaction, either with NPCs or the game world itself, there is no role whatsoever. It's just a bunch of numbers, which are in fact in every video game. The real issue is that nobody here can truly answer the question of what a role-playing game actually is in a satisfactory manner. Some people have come close, touching on stats, which are important because they define your character's capabilities, but that in and of itself comes secondary to what really matters: choices.

Choice is king in RPGs. Without choice then it's not really a role-playing game. A game can have what people refer to as RPG elements, but when they say that they're talking about characters not being set in stone, having statistics that can be raised and altered through their choices and their equipment (and usually through a lot of grinding.) But Diablo is not really an RPG. Stone Soup is not an RPG. Hell, GTA San Andreas is not an RPG, nor is it claimed to be, in spite of the fact that you can greatly alter your character's appearance, improve his abilities over time, and interact with the game world to an impressive degree. (Own property! Romance girlfriends! Hire a prosttute and then beat her to death so you can get your money back! Follow the damn train about 30 times!) You know why? There's only one way to do things. You go on a mission? You have to do it the way the game tells you to do it or it's not getting done. Hell, you could use this logic to argue that Oblivion was no more an RPG than San Andreas was, and that Morrowind wasn't much better either. You could get locked out of certain paths but that's not much of a choice. The closest the series has come to proper RPG play was Daggerfall, and even then only because of the multiple endings, which were really only affected by a single decision you made, namely who you chose to give control of the Mantella to.

So really, the reason stats are important is because they define what you can do. In other words, what choices are actually valid ones. It still falls to the game itself to offer those choices to you, and those choices have to have real, lasting consequences if they actually matter at all. I could go on and on about this, but it's just easier to link you to an http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,186.0.html that mirrors these views, written by someone who's making a very traditional CRPG that cleaves closely to the example set by the original Fallout. Be warned: he's a sarcastic bastard and he pulls no punches with his opinions. The F-word is thrown around quite liberally on those forums as well, particularly by the game designer who wrote the post. If you think your tender and sensitive feelings might be hurt, don't bother looking. If you're going to post about how he's stuck in the past since he's making a turn-based text-heavy RPG you probably shouldn't bother registering to tell him so, since not only will he not care, but also the rest of us will make fun of you and possibly throw pennies at you until you cry.

Anyway... what does this mean for Skyrim? You will probably justifiably be able to consider it not to be much of an RPG. Which means that it fits in perfectly with the rest of the series, in my eyes. Although truth be told if they're not lying about side quests having choice-consequence trees and factions having "turning points" that can affect the final outcome of their subplot and Radiant Story presenting certain quests to your character that others will not get it will arguably have stronger RPG elements than the rest of the series, not weaker ones. Even if it doesn't, I really won't mind, since RPG play has never, ever been the main draw of the series. What has been? A massive open world laden with interesting locales to explore and interesting characters to interact with, and a "have it your way" type of play style that lets you do whatever the hell you want and approach problems in different ways, even if the outcome is largely the same. Skyrim will have that in spades. They're the shiny objects and sweet candies that attract curious children to the world of Tamriel, and it looks like they'll be shinier and sweeter than ever before. So come on, dumplings. Hop into Uncle Crassius's windowless van with unregistered license plates and let him take you away to a magical land. You'll love it so much that you'll probably never come back, and despite extensive inquiries by the local law enforcement they won't be able to pin a damn thing on him.

Well, according to The Todd, COD is the level of RPG they're aiming for with Skyrim.. It's a very hardcoe RPG man!

That was an interesting post Gregasaurus, as was the link provided. This thread certainly seems to have highlighted one of his early points, that there is little agreement as to want constitutes a role-playing game.

I very much agree with your comment about choice being king in RPGs. For me at least the most enjoyable choices in RPGs have revolved around how I upgrade my characters skills, attributes etc over the course of the game. They are an essential piece of an RPG by my definition as they define the role your character will play.

Choice is the main aspect of any game to a certain degree, its what makes them a popular form of entertainment.

A game without choice would be a quicktime events movie where you hammer on buttons or the screen goes ded.

Yes, absolutely!

I think this is why many of us who have played a lot of pen-and-paper RPGs tend to gravitate toward the open sandbox Bethesda games, because we are used to an infinite degree of choice.

While obviously there are many limitations with Morrowind, Oblivion, FO3, etc., it is somewhat closer to the feeling of infiinite choices in a pen-and-paper game.

Sure, I can, for example, choose to be doublecross a particular companion in a Bioware game, or help the Illusive Man, for example, which will have some greater impact when importing savegames to ME2 and ME3, but why the hell can't I walk over to the other side of this freaking building? Why can't I just say screw the Reapers, I want to hang out on this planet over here and become a scientist, etc.?

As far as videogames go, I can appreciate the rigidly structured games with deeper main quests, but the open sandbox Bethesda games feel much closer to the roots of pen-and-paper games where player choice is truly infinite, limited only by your own imagination.

Here's the Gama Sutra quote again :
"You look at Call of Duty, the most popular game in the world, and that's actually pretty hardcoe. At the end of the day, it's a hardcoe game, has RPG elements in multiplayer, making classes, picking perks. I think the audiences are there, and we tend to make our game more for ourselves and other people who play a lot of games."

Nope, don't see anything about aiming to make that level of RPG. Of course if you want to slag off BGS games, which you are entirely within your rights to do so, then twisting any mention of COD to suit your purposes provides plenty of ammo.

"Choice" referring specifically to different and discrete ways to approach a problem, each with an appropriate outcome and consequence. Sure, in Prototype you can choose to use your sword arm and armor powers and leap across the city, or you can latch onto a helicopter with your tentacle whip and consume the pilot, or just throw tanks around all day, but when you get right down to it there's only one way to complete each mission: the way the game tells you to complete it. You can only kill the bosses by following their pattern. You can only finish that mission by blowing up those buildings. The ways you can get to that point are not choices in the sense I mean when we're talking about choice and consequence in an RPG.

And again a choice without a meaningful consequence is not really a choice at all, it's just an illusion of choice.

I'd go as far as to say that a game that pigeonholes you into being able to do this or that is less of an RPG. I wouldn't want to be some bad mo fo and then be told that I can't at least pretend to be a good guy, because the game said so. There's a reason a lot of serial killers are so successful, it's not like people walk around with signs on their forehead saying, 'hey, keep your distance. I'm a very bad person.' Same goes for the opposite as well, Can you imagine playing like the most righteous, saint-like character in TES and then going to swing your sword on an NPC and you can't kill them because of the choices you've made... "Sorry you're just too damn good to complete this action." Which brings me to the reason I love TES so much, it's one of the only games where I truly feel like I'm a conscience being, not some marionette having my strings pulled, or a robot designed to dance and only dance. Because in Elder Scrolls, 'We can dance if we want to.' Oh, jeez.

Not sure if serious...... :blink:

I've actually been playing SR2 again just this past week or so. You can't even really compare SR2 with a TES game they are so different. SR2 is a fun game and I enjoy it for the experience it is meant to give but there really isn't anything even comparable between the two.

This thread makes me want to play some Pen and Paper RPG right now :thumbsup:

This is the difference between an RPG and any other game, one is about altering the outcome of events, the other is about participating in events.

This is according to Wiki what defines a rpg



So in some way, Saints Row could also be a rpg?

The one thing I think is most important when it comes to roleplaying in video games, is choice.

The more choices, the larger the room for roleplaying. Take Call of Duty's singleplayer campaign. You can roleplay - albeit minimally. The only real choice you have is what weapon to use, and it's of course limited to what weapons you find. Does your Jackson prefer shotguns when in war? Does your Roach perhaps use pistols as much as possible because he likes small and light weapons? I'm not saying that CoD is an RPG, I'm not even saying that choosing weapons can be labeled as "RPG elements", but you can roleplay. All games are limited in choices, where corridor shooters like CoD perhaps have the most limitations.

I roleplay in Jedi Academy. Once again, there's not enough choices to call it an RPG, but towards the end the choices are large enough to be labeled as RPG elements IMO.
Over the course of the game, you can choose your Force powers. In one playthrough, I only used dark side powers and slaughtered every enemy I saw, sometimes cruelly dangling them over drops before letting them fall to their death. I used my lightsaber most of the time but used ranged weapons sometimes. I used a doublebladed lightsaber because my character thought it was the fastest and most effective way to kill my enemies with. Towards the end I picked the evil ending.
In my other playthrough, I only used light side powers. I tried to force pull the weapons out of most of my enemies hands and spare them. I only used my lightsaber. I picked two lightsabers because my character thought that it was the best choice of weapon to defend with. Towards the end, I picked the good ending.
There wasn't that much to choose from, but I did roleplay with the choices I had.

In a real RPG as Oblivion or KotOR, there's choices everywhere.
In KotOR you can choose your response in every dialogue. You can choose what you and your party members should wear and wield, and what stats they should have (what they are good at).
Sometimes the dialogue choices have more repercussions than a different answer, like how a quest ends.
In Oblivion there's less dialogue choices, but instead you can choose where to go, what do do, anytime. As it is an open-world sandbox, you can choose to fish for scales and pearls in the Rumare, then hire a room in Pell's Gate. You can steal a horse and go to Bravil and sell the pearls there. Or you could buy the horse and go to Skingrad and stalk Lazare Milvan. Perhaps join the Fighters Guild? Or screw the pearls, why not rob Countess Umbranox and join the Thieves Guld, selling the jewellery to Ongar? Or play as a law-abiding dungeon-crawler who only explores caves because forts and Ayleid ruins scare him (because of a hideous event that transpired when he was a child, and therefore he will try to extract revenge on his childhood demon, which is http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Jalbert).

I got a bit carried away, but my point is that, mostly because of the open world, there's so many choices in TES that you can build a roleplaying story like no other - and I haven't even mentioned your stats and equipment, which are just as diverse as KotOR's.
I think that BioWare games are more epic and "tight" than TES games, but in TES the epicness is more spread out over the game world, and with all the content and the freedom the game length is a lot longer, and your roleplaying choices are even more. :tes:


I agree... to an extent. Remember that a lot of the role-playing experience comes from yourself, from what you imagine and then project onto the game.
A conversation in KotOR can have 3 dialogue choices, where two of them, while different, can lead to the same answer. The result of the conversation will be the same, and you get no different remarks from party members or anything. But if one choice was rude while the other one was polite, you are still defining your character even if nothing in the game reflects this. It's like walking instead of running inside cities in Oblivion - NPC's does not care whatever you do, but you may decide that your character doesn't want to disgrace her/himself by running inside a bookstore.

The choices alone don't really make of fake an RPG. You can have all the choices and consequences in the world in a Monkey Island game, but it still wouldn't be an RPG but a multisolution adventuregame. I do have to agree with the guy who said stats are the defining factor. Because stats define the "role" in an RPG, and without the "R", you only have "PG".

Some say 'roleplaying' doesn't require stats, but 'roleplaying' is different from a 'roleplaying game' as one can roleplay in every game in existence, and even without a game. It's the "G" which makes the stats a required feature in an RPG, so that you'd have the role to be defined in the first place.

So, to make it sound even more complicated... The "G" creates the necessity for the "R" to require stats in an "RPG" for it to be an "RPG", because stats - in essence - are the "R" in that particular combination of letters because of the "G".

Did I get it right? :laugh:

Wouldn't you say that the choices you make (as the character) define the "role"? The stats just alter what choices you have access to.....


(The choice thing is one of the reasons I don't agree with the bashing of ME2. Yeah, ME1 had a better story.... but ME2, for all it had less stats and inventory, had more interesting and varied conversational choice & decision making. So, to me, the "roleplaying elements" were stronger in ME2.)

To me there is a distinct difference between "role" playing and "roll" playing. I do think stats are very important and love playing around with them, but they don't make or break the role playing experience for me (though they can greatly enhance/support it).

In the end the term rpg means different things to every poster here, every gamer that buys games, every developer that makes games, etc., etc. You'll never come up with one "definition" of RPG, I think the best one could ever do is come up with a suggestion of guidelines for "what is an RPG".

Good thing Todd said this in the fan interview: "We do have some stuff that gets locked out based on decisions you make. It’s wherever it felt natural."

(no longer directed towards you)
Locking out some content based on how it feels naturally is a great thing. Doing it arbitrarily is not. Some of my playthroughs in Oblivion, I did all of the questlines. Same with Morrowind, barring the three houses. And you know what? I had fun doing it. If I needed to justify it in a roleplaying sense, I'd just say my character, after being in Morag Tong, had a change of heart and joined the Imperial Cult. When I make a new character, I get attached to them. I put in a lot of time and a lot of effort to make them someone I like playing with. Telling me "well, you can't play this and this and this content because you decided to do this other thing first" is fine in small doses but that's it.

Too much of it, and you can hurt a player's curiosity. They might go look at a wiki or a strategy guide or whatever to see what effect a certain decision might have to make sure they get the "right" outcome. If anything breaks immersion, it's stopping the game to look at a wiki.

You kinda partly answered that yourself. If the stats offer access to choices, which and as they should, the choices are basically byproducts of the "role" (stats) in the game and not straightly defining factor. Choices (unrelated to what the "role" is), in my opinion, are an icing over an RPG -- and very welcome ones at that.


.

To the firts part... If there are no stats, the roleplaying, basically, happens inside your head instead of the game -- and thus it has no effect to the "role" in the game, which, in turn, goes against the G in an RPG.

The definition of an RPG lies in the PnP and boardgames of the old (and new). It's more that peoples interpretation of the definition varies. But I guess you're right, someone should make some guidelines.

I've played some very fun pen-and-paper RPGs with absolutely no stats, no dice, just the GM and some characters with infinite choices open to them. As the players role play their characters, the GM plays the part of all the NPCs, weaving the planned adventure into the narrative that develops out of the player choices and actions. Even in games with all the detailed stats you can think of, there are many, many more details about each character that could never be represented by a list of stats.

If you take away the wide open, infinite choices but instead keep the stats and dice rolls, you are no longer playing a role-playing game, but a tabletop battle simulator game. In the history of wargames, there have been many of these types of games, which can be fun but are not RPGs.

In a video game, there is no GM, and there are many technological limitations to prevent the infinite degree of choice in pen-and-paper RPGs, but whether your character has 50 different stats or 5 stats, an open sandbox game like Skyrim, with a detailed and very large game world, lots of interesting NPCs, factions, organizations, activities, economy features, etc., preserves a much greater degree of that freedom of choice that is essential to all forms of role playing games, compared to non-sandbox, more rigidly structured video games with a more detailed main quest plot.

I certainly don't mean to beat on Bioware games, for example, because personally I can also enjoy a well designed, more rigidly structured interactive movie type game. I am only pointing out where the sandbox games share more qualities with pen-and-paper games, regardless of the number of stats the PC has.

Wrong. You're still playing the role of another character, with stats in place defining their abilities. Whether you simply move your character around the room a bit, or jump up and down on the spot and influence those stats, you're still playing an RPG. You don't need an NPC to come along and give you a quest to make it an RPG. You don't need items in the room to play around with. It's just a featureless room.


Choice is a very important feature, especially in non-linear RPGs. It is NOT however a vital feature of all RPGs. A game where your character's abilities are clearly defined by stats that can increase over time depending on your character's actions can lead you down set paths, get you to perform set tasks, etc. with no element of choice whatsoever. The game tells you to do, yet you're still playing the role of that character and increasing their stats as you go.

GTA San Andreas isn't considered an action-adventure game with RPG elements instead of an RPG because there's only one way of doing things. (That would just make it a very linear RPG.) Technically, it is an RPG, however the stats that define some of your character's abilities (ie. RPG elements) are so limited and unimportant next to the action and sandbox elements that it makes a lot more sense to call it an action-adventure or sandbox game with RPG elements instead of an RPG.

Likewise.

The OP is acting like modern media with a Trollish catch phrase for a title.