After reading the thread What is your favorite type of Rpg?, I got curious about what people think constitutes a RPG. What's the core of the genre?

My own guess:

A RPG game is founded upon the traditions of tabletop roleplaying. The players sole aim is to evolve his character to become more powerful, and there is a lot of choices on how to build your character. The story is also somewhat dynamic, enabling the player to give his character a personality of its own.

I think that's about covers it. Case closed! Unless someone has another definition...?

This came up on the official Cyberpunk 2077 forum awhile back. Lots of arguing, but we (that is, everyone who matters; obviously there were uncool holdouts) eventually came up with a list of things almost all RPGs share across subgenres to get to the heart of what causes us to label certain games that way. The thread's here: http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/29535-What-makes-an-RPG

Feel free to make an account and bump it. Driving the moderators insane gives me warm tinglies.

First of all, I consider genre definitions to be defined by the core gameplay, and not by peripheral thing like growth systems. As a result, whether the game has a growth system is irrelevant when drawing genre lines.

The way I see it, one thing that sets RPGs apart from other genres is the amount of control you have over your characters. In an action game, you directly control your character. In an RPG, by contrast, you only tell the character what to do, and that character then performs the action.

Another distinction between action games and RPGs is how the success of an action is determined. In a typical action game, when you attack, the game uses collision checks to determine if your attack hits; if the attack collides with an enemy, it's a hit; otherwise the attack misses. In an RPG, by contrast, when you attack, the game rolls dice (or, more precisely, generates random numbers) to determine whether an attack hits or not; there's no collision check involved.

That type of Munchkin thinking I would definately not agree with. Yes, there needs to be a way for the character to grow, get new skills etc. but that should not be the goal, just the means to an end.

Other than that I think the debate is a little pointless. For me, while the clsoer a game is to a tabletop RPG the more I would consider it a "pure" RPG, I still have no doubt that Elder Scroll games and Deus Ex are RPGs too.

CRPG is a game where you develop the skills of your character(s), and have to rely on said skills to survive in the gameworld. So your success to beat the game relies mostly on your ability to develop your character's or party's skills adequately, and depend on those skills in a correct way, e.g. if you are good with magic, you shouldn't maybe rely on your melee fighting skills; or if you are a dumb boxer, you shouldn't maybe try to negotiate with NPCs which are far smarter than you, other than for a comic effect. Just punch their lights out instead, that's where you are good at.

Like with most games, a story can make the gameplay and the gameworld more interesting, but is not necessary for a game to be considered a CRPG. For instance CRPGs like The Elder Scrolls: Arena, Darklands and ADOM have very little or no actual story. Just the gameworld around you where you have to survive the best you can with your skills. TES Arena is partly also an action game, the other two are maybe "purer" CRPGs instead of including several different genres.

Nowadays most games include aspects from many genres, so there are less games which are purely action, or CRPG, or even strategy games. But the part where you develop the skills and rely on them with the different challenges or encounters the game throws at you is the RPG aspect of it. Isn't that true to also e.g. adventure games, and possibly at least many strategy games?

I mainly class games where you level up and gain / improve skills as RPGs.
So Zelda is not an RPG as you don't actually improve skills (I don't count gaining hearts) but an FPS could be if it included levelling up systems.

CRPG revolves around exploration, progress and stat-driven combat as core elements. Progress has 2 main vectors:
- Character(s) progress, measured by numbers in statistical form and their increase during the game.
- Global progress through the world/dungeon (can be measured by Exploration%), but istatistical representation isn't necessary, it can optionally be represented by various keys and access events).
- Stat-driven combat.

In more popular words, CRPGs is where you kill dragons, get their loots to kill more powerful dragons, all being measured in statistical ways and accomplished via your character(s)'s abilities (and not by player's dexterity "skills").

I always use term "CRPG" as people associate "RPG" with some abstract "role-playing", and who might consider even Doom as RPG (you play role of some solider, etc.). No, Shooter is Shooter, Strategy is Strategy, Visual Novel is Visual Vovel and CRPG is CRPG (and not some abstract metagenre).

Same here, I try to always be very careful using CRPG instead of RPG, when referring to video or computer games of said genre. You know, the kind of games which started with Ultima 1 (or Ultima 0, Akalabeth?) and Wizardry 1.

If I use RPG, I expect some robe-wearing DM to jump out from the shadows "That's not what the pen&paper RPGs were like when we played them with my friends in the late 70s!!!". Ok then, but I was not talking about pen&paper RPGs, but the descendants of Akalabeth and Wizardry.

Of course you have some joker start talking about rocket-propelled grenades as well...

First off in that thread it would/should be CRPG in order to make it clear the topic is about the genre of video games and not PnP or even LARP.
As for the genre, it's too complicated to put into just a few words.
For example DT's definition is insanely narrow.
Off-topic, it's interesting how often I see people write solider.

I laughed... I hate mistyping, but I hate it twice as much when I make mistypes myself -.-

cRPG = character development, statistics driven combat, an interesting world full of lore. The more tabletop-y it is, the better.

Then there is the personal taste, for example:

- real time combat vs turn based
- simple statistics vs D&D system or The Dark Eye system
- 2d vs 3d
- open world for a more make-your-own-story feel vs a solid linear story

Actually, there were even older games. Oubliette appeared in 1977, and there are even older games made, like pedit5, released in *1975*. Rogue (the first roguelike, if that term even makes sense in this context) came out in 1980, for comparison.

I just feel like commenting on this point:

For an RPG, whether a game is 2d or 3d is purely asthetic.

This is in contrast to a platformer, where 2d versus 3d changes the gameplay enough so that the games are essentially different genres. I consider Super Mario 64 (and other 3d Mario games) to not be in the same genre than the original Super Mario Bros.. They are both platformers, but are actually very different.

(It's also interesting to examine this in the context of the Ys series; Oath in Felghana is not in the same genre as the game it is supposedly a remake of (and yes, I have played both games).)

Yeah, my knowledge (and interest) lies mostly on games released for home systems. Apparently Oubliette was for some PLATO mainframe systems?

It was then made for DOS, and seems that it was recently remade for smartphones. DOS version is available on zimlab site.

You makes some good points. And finding the core, the essense of what the genre is actually about is what makes this is worth debating. But I don't think character growth is peripheral. On the contrary, I think of it as the core of the genre. Is there any RPG that doesn't give the player that nice dose of 'getting-more-and-more-awesomely-powerful'?

You also mentions that: I think this is merely a sub-element of RPG's focus on growth. The purpose of the dice rolls is to give the character growth more influence on the gameplay, by letting higher skill level and better equipment give a higher percentage of success.

You said that the game 'rolls dice'. This element is keeping up with the traditions of tabletop roleplaying, with 1d20 and such. Sticking to traditions is a vital part of RPG. When traditions is an essential parts of a genre, it is understandable that things get heated when it is debated what onstitutes a RPG.