I truly hope that you is kidding...
First because is out of proportion.
Second because "pretending that you is a female orc" is possible (and happens a lot) in every pen-and-paper RPG. (Basically, you is kidding with TES origins)

Don't talk BS when you haven't played the game.

Very well said. :thumbsup:

I can play Call of Duty and pretend I'm a strong independent black woman with herpes. Does that make Call of Duty an RPG?


What makes an RPG an RPG is that in a world, there are communities where people have roles, jobs, duties, goals, morals, desires, friends, enemies etc. An RPG provides you with a virtual world that provides all these things, then allows you to place yourself wherever you like. What makes an RPG better is:

1) When the game actively acknowledges what role you're playing. This can be done via giving the character a job title (classes), having people comment on the player's traits (comments people made about the character's stats in Oblivion, comments people made about the player's karma in FO3) or letting the player join any faction he likes so that people respond to you as a typical member of that faction.

2) Provide the player with interesting, diverse factions that have stereotypical habits and reactions to other groups. If the game simply provided us with group A and group B who were in a conflict with one another and gave them little to no personality whatsoever, then what fun is that? Yes, we're free to imagine whatever traits we like in this situation, but if WE have to write the game, what's the point in having the game at all? At that point you might as well turn the game off and just sit down and write your story without it.

And you know why I say "write down your story?" Because we're not kids anymore. We may have fun imagining up a story in our heads for a bit, but now, we want something to show for it. The moment you stop playing pretend, your pretend story dies. This is why people write; so the story lives on. And this is why we play the game: because we're no writers and can't think of a good pretend scenario, but we'd still like to pretend. And once we're done playing, we have something to show for it: our character is saved on our computer. We can load it up, show someone the world based on that character's actions and walk through town with NPCs saying "you're that skooma-addicted Bard I've heard so much about."

An RPG should basically be a good book, but with the added benefit of, after we read the book, we don't have to sit and think "I wish I was a member of the Legion;" we can be, thanks to the story being in the form of a game. The reason people are worried is that now, there seems to be less "story." No one's going to call you a bard because there are no classes. No one's going to call you strong because there are no attributes. Your character isn't going to be any less nimble than any other character because athletics and acrobatics were cut. The game no longer recognizes all of the individual character traits that previous titles acknowledged.

I'm not paying 60 bucks to pretend something.

I think Merari put it right:


Slyme also got good points.

Skills, stats, attributes and whatnot are not invaluable for roleplaying. They help establishing your character, yes, but not fully describe them.

What you can actually do is what matters.

While I appreciate your post and commend you for bringing some "calmness" to the anger and frustration that inevitably occurs when something is removed from TES, I don't think your anology is applicable to the TES (which, according to the box, should only be played by ages 17+......simply put, the game is meant for mature gamers)...

When you're a kid, imagination has no boundaries. When you're in high school, college, starting a career, saving up for a house, etc. etc., you seek out stress outlets and general enjoyment from many things, like, for example, video games...

You want the game to provide the creative parameters, the fantasy world, and all the little things that go in-between. I'm not playing a video game to escape into my on-the-carpet imagination land... I'm playing a video game because I want to immerse myself in the game's fantasy land.

This is just my opinion, but I hope you can at least see where I'm coming from

I try not to "formulate" ignorant opinions. You should try relaxing.

I think that there is a lot of great discussion on what is and is not role playing is going on in this thread. I don't agree with all of it but I am expanding my horizons

One last thought for now-

I guess I am just a little too oldskool. For me, every TES game is a different game. And when I approach that game in order to RP it, the ole D&D rules come into play: player knowledge vs common knowledge. In Oblivion, my character could create their own spells. In Skyrim that won't be possible. How does my character 'know' that? It doesn't. I know it. In Skyrim, that was never possible, so it shouldn't affect my RP. In Skyrim there will be slow health regen. Common knowledge time- in my RP, people have *always* had that ability. It's like eating or drinking. Everyone does it. It's not even something they consider. Because that is a part of THAT game world.

Does that limit other RP playstyles? Yep. And before reading some of these responses, I had no idea that some people RP under stricter guidelines than I would normally consider- only RPing eating or drinking if the option is necessary, for example. So for those people, I'm sorry the options were taken away. I understand more what that means for your experience. But I'm an eternal optimist, and I hope you still find a way to play an immersive RP in Skyrim.

What you can do is defined by your skills, stats, attributes.

Sometimes, yes...

But even though you have a high blade skill which meant that you can use any kind of blades really good, both longswords and claymores, would this make the game lose the roleplaying value?

No, you can only use one weapon at the time, and you can decide if you're going to use claymores or just longswords, not your stats.

Well you did literery write it down, maybe you need to be more imaginative with your explanations.....

Ohhh [censored] my kitchen floor is made of lava - I'm Fckd :flamethrower:

True. It's always been about your actions and the consequences that follows from those. the rules are just frames to make things easier.

have to agree with you on that. Stats are there to define and quantify your interactions with the world. If there is nothing you can't do, regardless of your skills and stats, then there isn't much of a game, it's just a virtual playground.

You can roleplay in pretty much any game, that does not mean that the game is a roleplaying game though. Roleplaying games are just games who makes it easier for you to do so.

Lol labels......That's what we call fluff.


Relationships, companions, town economy, carriages, better AI, living world REALLY enhance roleplay.

This is where I think a lot of people get hung up. There have been no cuts to Skyrim. I believe what you're really saying is things in past TES have not been included in Skyrim. Bethesda has always made each game within the TES series stand on its own. Now granted there are always elements that have been in from one game to the next simply because of general continuity, but they are not mandatory to be in each TES game. Reading and hearing all the incredible experiences people have had playing just short little bits on the demos gives me at least hope that role playing in Skyrim will be even more fantastic than its predecessors. I have come to realize though that I will have to adapt my roleplay for what Skyrim is rather than what the previous games were or any other rpg for that matter. That's just my 2 cents (well maybe only 1 cent)... :tes:

Finally. Someone on these forums who seems to get it.

Stop complaining and whining about something stupid like this... Really dude???

We all know that skyrim will have more immersiveness and all that jazz than any other game to date when 11-11-11 rolls around.

Why has everyone been trying to point out all the little negative things and build on them???

No, you still lose role playing value. I can't play a character who is skilled only in long swords, but not with claymores. Obviously, there is a practical cut off---We can't have infinite skills---but that doesn't mean that there isn't less role playing potential. When we examine things like this in the context of TES, which has had separate skills for different weapons, things like this can certainly be classified as a loss.

What you're describing is artificial, player-imposed restrictions. That's no different than speed runs or any other challenge players have decided to set for themselves. Without the game imposing restrictions (less effectiveness with weapons your character is unskilled in), the difference is largely meaningless. At least when we're discussing what your character can do. What they will do is another question, one more about preferences and personality than hard restrictions.

There will still be stats since what I use will determine my strength. We will still have to make choices about what and when we use and do things, we just won't have to bullet the choice. Instead we make the decision if we want to be a swordsman and then use a sword. Do we want to build our illusion skills? If so, we need to use it. In all of the games we made a choice about what strengths our character had and we will make that choice in this one...only instead of placing a bullet on a start screen, we decide by how we play and the decisions we make. Then we make more choices about it as we choose from our perks as we progress. Then we play the consequences if we make the wrong choices and end up with a borked character.

Perhaps a better term for it is LINEAR. The TES series is becoming more LINEAR.

Now this isn't so much about Skyrim, because MAYBE Bethesda learned something from all the criticism surrounding Oblivion, but maybe not.

Take Deus Ex for example which I am currently playing now. I am playing a pre-defined character... I didn't get to choose the name, background, etc. However, I consider it a FINE RPG. Why... because I get to choose how he acts. If I want to go through the whole game being a sneaky hacker who never ever has to get blood on his hands.... I can do that. If I want to find information in the police station, by walking in the front door guns blazing like the Terminator.... I can do that too. Someone holding a hostage... how does my character want to handle that... I get to determine how the character defines himself by his actions. THAT was missing in Oblivion. There were few options for ever handling a quest in anything but one very specific way. For all its open-world feel, it was a pretty linear game, where most options to handle anything were pre-determined for you. Sure you may have been able to decide where you go and what quests you accomplish first, but you pretty much always had to accomplish them the exact same way. That is NOT Role-playing. That is little more than reading a book, except you get to choose in which order your read the chapters.

:rofl: borked: bork = to attack (a candidate or public figure) systematically, especially in the media. :rofl: I'm sure that this isn't what you meant by that word, but I luved it nonetheless!

Sorry, but this is the biggest sort of [censored] justification and it keeps getting brought up again and again. Skyrim does not exist in a vacuum. It exists along side a buttload of other RPGs and, more importantly, within an established franchise. Comparing it with the standards set by it's sister titles and contemporaries is very valid. This implication that logically evolving the franchise, building off it's predecessors, instead of making arbitrary or gimmicky changes between each iteration means the games don't stand on their own is ridiculous.

That, of course would be your opinion, not mine, not others. Your vehemence and hostility toward me and others is unwarranted.