The Problem with "RPGs"

The Game Room
1

“RPG’s” are not role-playing games. I’ll use bullet points to illustrate my contention, to avoid expatiation –

• The character used - be he/she/it human, elven, orc, robot… whatever - has no baring on narrative beyond the canned story strands a developer may (or usually won’t) include in the game –
The player is not undertaking the “role” of anyone. Rather, they’re playing through a predetermined, linear (though sometimes branching) path with no [organic] influence on proceedings whatsoever. RPG’s barely qualify as those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books of yesteryear, in how limited the influence the player has over a game’s narrative and denouement. Let alone are true, emergent stories, fashioned and uncovered by the player through their own actions.

• Upgrading and progression are merely ‘pay walls’ that prevent a player from accessing game content and are not reflective of individual player / character gameplay traits –
Skills and traits are not honed or granted after one perfects them – they’re simply transacted for in-game currency. This is not progression - as, for example, acquiring a “double-jump” action for using the jump action repeatedly, would in fact be - it’s just the locking away of in-game content behind a variant of a pay wall. Thus, this model of progression is fundamentally unrewarding and little more than a ‘grind’ for players, in any game that copy-pastes such a system for itself (i.e., most all applicable games).

• There are no ‘pure’ classes in RPG’s, irrespective of how many character customisation skill options may be present –
Almost all RPGs end up relying heavily on hack and slash gameplay, above all; with [functional] unique classes the extreme rarity. The prime example would be magic-wielding classes: These character persuasions are always heavily restricted in how magic spells can be used and the efficacy thereof. Of course, magic, in and of itself, is a ‘cheat’ (if given unbridled reign), as it can notionally do anything. However, RPG’s seem to handicap the use of magical spells so stridently, that they cannot be used beyond an ‘off-hand’ novelty, and also only for very specific applications. This renders all RPG’s (the non turn-based variety, that is) fundamentally hack n’ slash games, with skill trees tacked on to qualify the “RPG” moniker.

My underlying points are: What we dub “RPGs”, are not role-playing video games; in neither the sense that one is undertaking a role and thus inherently influencing outcomes thereinafter; nor in how the genre allows players to progress regarding their character development; nor in how the games permit a player to play them, with respect to character builds and classes.

The genre, in my opinion, needs an injection of innovation… and soon. As RPG’s feel as stale as cancerous first-person shooters do, and this can only result the death of the genre in the eyes of those who expect more than a glorified button-masher with purchasable trinkets, for their role-playing fix.

2

Alright.

3

You’re not wrong but they’ve been called CRPGs since their earliest days (at least per my old Dragon magazine articles) so no one is going to change it now.

Everquest has a system where you increase your skills by using them – swing your sword enough times for “You have become better at One-Hand Slash! (22)”. What it results in is skill grinding where you fall down a hill repeatedly to practice Safe Fall or spam open and close a bank door 2,500 times to cap out your Lockpick or cast Resist Cold 175 times to cap out Alteration (or whatever spell class it fell under). Good times.

These days, RPG in a video game sense is pretty much a catch-all for story-heavy, stat-based games usually with skill progression.

4

Do you have some recommendations?

5

I’m not sure this is a super-relevant objection, for two reasons:

  1. We lack anything approaching an AI sufficient to allow truly organic gameplay. In my tabletop game, I can come up with an entire bogus secret society my character invents, and the GM can respond to that, even though nobody in our group has ever done anything like that before. My next character might have an absent mother that she’s trying to contact, and the GM can build that into the story. There’s absolutely no way to write a computer program that can respond similarly to player designs. We all understand that a CRPG has limits that a tabletop RPG doesn’t.

  2. A first person shooter doesn’t actually involve guns. A sports game keeps your butt on the couch. A puzzle game in which you match jewels involves no real jewels. For every genre, we understand it’s a computer simulation. RPGs are working in the same vein.

6

This is why I prefer tabletop RPGs.

7

I agree with you about the new “Action” rpgs. Which is why Dragon Age: Inquisition was such a disappoint to me. I wanted Dragon Age: Origins, Part III.

I have similar gripes about Skyrim and Fallout 4. No defined classes. I’m not saying those games can’t be fun but they lack something for me.

I’ve never played at a table but I am playing a couple of “play-by-post” games that are a lot of fun.

ETA: even if the other posters/gm don’t keep up as much as I’d like :slight_smile:

8

Divinity: Original Sin got pretty close to the feel of a tabletop RPG game IMO. Still a lot more restricted of course, but at least you can teleport chests, use Rain spell to douse fires and solve quests in more than one way. D:OS 2 with its 4-player mode and further improvements aimed for player freedom should come even closer to the chaotic anything-goes tabletop feel. It’s a hell of a lot of work to make it all work though so it’s no wonder most developers don’t even try.

9

CRPGs are to table top what solitaire is to poker or bridge.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but they’re not the same experience at all.

For myself, I think the old-school formula for CRPGs works OK. Often, the attempts to make it better or more realistic just plain suck - Jophiel’s example is spot on for why using a skill to advance it makes game play less fun. There are some attempts to do things other than combat that have worked. On the other hand, I haven’t actually bought a CRPG in years… and that’s fine for me, but probably not so good for the industry.

10

Agreed there although I enjoyed all of them. Partially as a result of making games more console/controller accessible for sales reasons and partially as a push towards more “cinematic” experiences which mean voice acting which means fewer dialogue options (and, in fact, fewer overall options such as not voicing out a bunch of evil plot options).

11

RPG computer games are called that because they are an adaptation of tabletop role-playing games. Yes, the name no longer reflects the actual mechanics, but that applies to a lot of common english phrases. When’s the last time you “dialed” a phone number with a rotary dial?

12

What else would you call them?

13

I think that most of the issue isn’t necessarily with the game design per se, but more along the lines of technical limitations for abstraction and simplification.

I mean, HOW would you actually make an open world single-player CRPG? The number of things to be calculated based on each of the player’s actions would be immense, and I’m not convinced we can do that with today’s hardware. So we end up where the stories are more or less on rails, or at best, driven on a wide road with high curbs.

And the whole idea of a stat system for a RPG or CRPG is an abstraction, and reflects reality in a fairly murky way. When was the last time you heard of a D&D character gaining a strength point because they always lugged the treasure around? Or gaining some wisdom because they made mistakes and learned from them? In reality that kind of thing would be happening all the time, but again, it’s hard to model. So they give you experience points and let you direct it, which people tend to prefer over “you’ve been walking around forever with too much crap. Your strength and endurance go up.” or “You haven’t talked to a human in 3 months. Your charisma goes down” or whatever.

Hell, they can’t even realistically model radiation effects, so why in the world would you expect them to accurately model all the character and NPC interactions that result from one in-game decision, and to also accurately model skill acquisition and improvement?

14

It’s always going to be up to the player to do the role-playing. This goes for both pen-and-paper and computer RPGs. The rules are simply the mechanics for doing things: the universe of possibilities.

The original post is mostly complaining about the mechanics and not so much the lack of role-playing. That’s fine–everyone has their preferences and if those games don’t do it for them, they’ll have to find another. But don’t lose sight that the most a game can do for role-play is hold your hand. You’ll have to internalize your own role-play when you play.

For example, two of my favorite games are Crusader Kings and The Sims. While not traditional “role-playing games”, they are games which easily permit the player to role-play. Or not, if the player simply wants to play the games without role-playing.

15

A few points:

  1. Limited storylines are an inherent limitation of the medium. If you think games today are too limited, I suspect you never played Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger.

  2. Every game (in every genre) is a Skinner Box to some degree, even if the only investment required is time and effort.

  3. Compared to tabletop games, CRPGs are vastly easier to play in single-player mode.

  4. Compared to tabletop games, CRPGs have much better graphics.

16

For what it’s worth, that’s always bothered me about tabletop role-playing games. “Real” humans are not super-specialists who trade leet skills in one area for falling-down-incompetence in another. We can, and do, learn from multiple areas that give us benefits. For example, in a high-magic world, it would seem to me that simple selection pressure would make everyone learn at least a few spells, even just to enhance their professions skill sets; Iin many games, most classes are flat-out prohibited from doing so (or have the even weirder “spells that only certain classes can learn” bit).

Skill trees and classless systems seem a much better representation of that reality, as evidenced by the fact that–faced with such a “classless” system–many players do, in fact, generalize rather than specialize.

17

I get what you’re saying and I wouldn’t want to go back to games wear mages couldn’t wear armor and such nonsense but I’d still prefer some restrictions.

Consider Michael Jordan. Great basketball player, good baseball player (compared to most people), mediocre golfer.

When I play games, I want a challenge, not to be invincible. Taking out a Revenant in Dragon Age: Origins after 5~8 attempts was so gratifying I still remember it.

18

Yep. It took me a moment to realize that the OP was on about video games.

19

I’m aware that some games, usually MMO’s (clearly implemented to induce grinding) do have this kind of system. However, the system is hardly the trope for RPG’s, and irrespective of shortcomings, the system is far more preferable than incongruously ‘buying’ skills.

To counter the repetition and balance the grinding inherent in having to use a particular item in order to ‘skill-up’ with it, they could prescribe a dynamic whereby how an item is used, dictates what skills one unlocks with it – e.g.: A shield with the potential uses of blocking, parrying, repelling etc., could have said abilities improved and better variants thereof unlocked, relative to how often and how well said traits are utilised. For instance, if a particularly difficult opponent (say, a boss) is blocked, the blocking ability progress far more than it does if it were used against mere grunt opposition.

It’s not a perfect solution–granted–but this is just a spit-ball suggestion and yet still lends more weight to acquiring a given ability than simply transacting for it at a cookie-cutter vendor does.

Well, the fleshing-out of the above upgrading related mechanic/s could be a one place to start.

Further, I guess they could also implement random enemy placement as standard (would imbue immense replay value and foster emergent gameplay experiences); adaptive boss enemy “A.I.” script (so boss fights do not all boil down to rote pattern recognition); procedurally generated environs (obvious benefits over static vistas); particular focus on atmospheric aesthetics (e.g., lighting to lead thunder; organically moving clouds; dynamic weather; dark / night settings that aren’t just ‘Hollywood nights’…).

Another area of import is environmental interaction (where applicable) – games were the player has direct control over the character to traverse a game world, almost exclusively only permit ‘canned’ interaction. That is, a character who stand its ground against a comparatively giant monster and leap wide chasms, cannot step over an ankle-high ledge, climb a parapet or clamber up an escarpment…? :confused: ‘Invisible walls’ need to be thrown in the video game rubbish bin annuls, once and for all.

I do not understand why a particular class cannot be “balanced” in order to be used effectively and without breaking the game. (To use magic as the example du jour), why cannot caster classes not be pure magic users and have their obvious advantages offset by porcelain-like fragility and / or weak constitution / stamina / strength…?

Is this perceived as making the class type too frustrating to play for some and the minority must be catered for? Is it too avant garde a direction to proceed and defies a historically cookie cutter genre? It’s too difficult to code enemy script to be both challenging yet fair, for lazy game producers…?? :confused:

20

Look at D&D 3.x, or Pathfinder. Any PC can learn a variety of magical spells simply by taking a level of wizard or cleric or sorcerer or whatever. Fighters, rogues, monks, and several other classes are otherwise spell-less (in Pathfinder rogues have a way to gain some spells, but set that aside for now).

Almost no fighter character multiclasses into wizard. Nor do most monks, or most rogues. It’s not a good idea.

And I’m okay with that. I suspect President Obama doesn’t know how to install RAM on his computer, nor does he likely know how to bake a mean chocolate chip cookie, even though I regard these both as highly useful basic skills. It seems likely to me that most very powerful people in our world don’t know how to do these things: they’ve specialized their skillset and in so doing become very, very good at one thing, whether that’s politics or business or acting or whatever.

The rest of us, who learn how to do a lot of things? That’s why we’re commoners :).