What is an RPG? (Or: People are wrong)

(Cross-posted from my sorely-neglected personal blog; I'd do pictures, but I'm not sure what's acceptable to post on dtoid)

Yeah, yeah, I know. You’ve heard the debate hundreds of times already, and none of them were to your satisfaction, and nobody got everywhere. I am not, by any means, attempting to change the world here; people are stupid and stubborn and they’re not going to change just because I make a well-reasoned argument, after all.

So why do it?

Well… ’cause I’ve never seen the argument made this way, and I think it’s an angle worth tackling. Instead of going back to simple, objective things like etymology, dictionary definitions, and commonly accepted usage, which people prefer to ignore in order to further their own ends, I’m going to… well, you’ll see.

Before I do, though, let’s cover something: the sanctity of the RPG. Apparently, RPGs are sacred. I don’t personally subscribe to that belief, but I know a lot of people who do. To suggest that a game is not an RPG is, in these peoples’ eyes, some sort of insult. I will very strongly suggest, by the end of this post, that a certain type of game is not an RPG. I’m sorry, but RPGs of any flavor are not special, not magical, not the best thing ever. The genre is not sacred. It is important that you understand that I am not saying that they are worse, merely that they are different. You can still like the thing you thought was an RPG, just, please, call it by a more correct name. I’m here to define, not attack.

Bad definitions lead to confusion. Alan Wake is a bad survival horror game because it’s not a survival horror game, it’s a psychological action thriller. Of course it’s a bad survival horror game. Thrillers tend to have much more action than slow, creeping dread, because dread and thrill are two different emotions that people feel. Today, I read a forum thread by someone complaining that they “didn’t like RPGs,” and then proceeded to list a very specific genre of games. When several people pointed out shooters with RPG elements, immersive sims, and European RPGs, the poster seemed much more receptive. Because of the mistake in classification, someone nearly missed out on an entire genre of games. Surely we can all agree that missing out on a good game is a bad thing; we don’t want that!

In addition, we’re going to run off the assumption that tabletop RPGs are the archetype from which all RPGs descend (and this is objective fact), which means that if something common to video games is not a defining element of a tabletop RPG (for instance, an authored, rather than emergent story), then it is not part of what makes an RPG.

Lastly, if you don’t know what an abstraction is, you’ll want to, or things might not make sense, because it’s a term I’ll be using. Essentially, an abstraction is a complex idea broken down into something simple, usually with the idea of making it manageable. An example of this would be turns. Those mainly exist to allow calculations to take place between actions to allow a DM to determine random things (does this monster dodge? Etc).

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to list the most common “it must have this to be an RPG” statements I’ve heard, and debunk all of them, because they are almost all wrong.

We good now?

Great! Onward!

ARGUMENT #1: An RPG has stats/skills/leveling/some sort of XP progression.

Nope! Sorry.

To understand this, we need to ask ourselves what XP is? The answer? It’s just A Unit Of Currency. In some RPGs, you can put your earned XP towards unlocking something (Fable), and in others more closely based on the DnD mold (which is not the only way to do an RPG, as any reasonable tabletop gamer will attest), as you earn XP, you gain a level, which grants you points to put towards unlocking new abilities or strengthening your character in some way. There are other ways of handling character progression as well. Some do it through awarding better equipment, others do it through use, and so on and so forth.

Let’s be theoretical. What if your game takes place in a very short period of time? Is it reasonable or realistic to have them “level up?” Let’s say that your RPG takes place during a party one night, where you must rob a safe? You may not have any character progression at all.

Check out God of War. It’s got a leveling system. You gain XP through the environment, which you can then put into various skills you unlock throughout the game. “But Doc,” you may protest, “those are items, not physical abilities or attributes!”

So what? They’re functionally identical. Darksiders, God of War, and other games in which you gain some form of XP aren’t considered RPGs, and why should they? If that doesn’t sway you, however, let’s consider Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, or another modern military shooters. If a skill/level/whatever system is required for a game to be an RPG, then Call of Duty is an RPG.

No? Okay, fine, what makes them not RPGs?

ARGUMENT #2: HP/MP is a must.

Nope, sorry. In a game where health isn’t an issue, you don’t need HP. Likewise, in a game that isn’t turn-based, you don’t need MP . Ultimately, MP is just a way to balance abilities (mostly magic, but it can be applied to other things as well) in a turn-based game; in a real-time game, cooldowns work just fine. Ultimately, there are a ton of implementations of MP and some are basically “here is how much magic you can use during a fight,” which seems arbitrary and silly, but mostly exists to balance magic users in games.

Let’s go back to the idea of being a con man during a party. What would you use MP for? Let’s say you want to break into a safe. “BREAK INTO SAFE,” the skill/ability, would be an abstraction. You’d use MP to perform it. Maybe your turn ends when MP is all used up (so MP is effectively some sort of action system). However, in a real-time game, MP for this is totally unnecessary. Why on Earth (or whatever game world you’re playing in) would you be limited to the amount of times you could attempt to break into a safe? A real-time game would be more likely to say “okay, you have X number of lockpicks and can do it so long as no one sees you.” For that, MP is completely unnecessary.

In addition to this, every video game with combat has HP, even if you don’t know about it. Age of Empires has HP for all its units. Gears of War has HP for all its enemies, and DMG for all its guns. You might not see it, but it’s there. Its existence, therefore, does not make a game an RPG.

So! Summary: HP’s really only necessary if you’ll be involved in combat (you could, for instance, take hits to charisma and intimidate skills if you got punched out in a game), and MP’s just a balance tool best-used in turn-based games, which are ultimately unnecessary to the RPG experience.

ARGUMENT #3: They must have turn-based mechanics!

(this section is going to refer exclusively to video game RPGs, because it’s very hard to do a real-time tabletop RPG)

Now, there are actually good arguments for this. The idea is that, in a live-action game, you might be forced to do something that your character cannot. If you create, for instance, someone who is terrible at shooting, but a game is reliant on shooting, then you will use your OWN skills to shoot things. What these people fail to realize is that you could intentionally shoot poorly (though the temptation to be a good shot would be great).

Now, consider the converse. What if you are terrible at first-person shooters, but your player character is some amazing gunslinger? I would suggest turning on auto-aim and playing the game on easy, but, still, it kinda breaks the idea that your player character is a great gunslinger if you are not.

That said, this doesn’t always matter. Mostly, turn-based games only help in regards to combat, and, to be honest, lowering difficulty levels can help players who aren’t great at gaming. Essentially anyone should be able to play the badass warrior Geralt in The Witcher and feel like a badass warrior, regardless of what skills they use and how they define him. Still-roleplaying, still-real-time, but not particularly reliant on player skill.

Also, for what it’s worth, where does player skill end and character skill begin? Think about it! In a turn-based game, you might be playing a dumb character, but you might be really smart. With plenty of time to think about your actions, you may come up with and execute a brilliant strategy to solve a problem—which means that your skill as a role-player is actually pretty poor. Ultimately, anyone who plays the game is bringing their skill level to it, which means that who a person is influences absolutely everything they do. Real-time or turn-based, it doesn’t matter. Your skill affects the game you play, no matter how much you claim to be distanced from it.

I don’t think I’ve actually heard anyone use this argument before. Huh. I think it’s pretty good.

ARGUMENT #4: RPGs require bestiaries!

No. This is silly.

A bestiary, for those of you who don’t know, is essentially a book that lists all possible enemy NPCs you may fight in an RPG. Obviously, in a game where you do not fight, it is not important at all (go back to that possible party game. Even if you do fight, it isn’t inherently important, beyond the game having some sort of database which lists all the behind-the-scenes monsters.

Gears of War has one.

…does that make Gears of War an RPG?

Every video game with combat has to track things like HP, in-game “actors” (an evil beatnik in Earthbound/Mother 2, for instance), and so on and so forth, because that is the way in which you fight things. Essentially every video game ever has some sort of DnD-derived combat system, in that every enemy is in a list, every enemy has some sort of number value describing its health and the damage it can do, and so on and so forth.

That con man game wouldn’t have any of this. It would just be you and a bunch of people you could talk to. No bestiary required, just a list of NPCs.

ARGUMENT #5: Can’t have an RPG without an inventory.

Obviously, in any game where you are able to pick up and interact with stuff, you’ve got to have some way to see what you have and what you’ve played with. Any RPG is likely going to feature the ability to pick up and use items, thus, it must have some way for you to store them, even if it is just in your hands.

However, does that make it an RPG?

Nope.

Sorry. Every game with items you can use is going to have some sort of inventory (from Sanitarium to Zelda to Half-Life to STALKER). While every RPG must have an inventory of some sort, pretty much every game is going to have an inventory of some sort, so it’s somewhat useless to argue that an inventory is a defining trait of an RPG.

ARGUMENT #6: Stories are a must!

Yes. No. Sort of.

See, here’s the thing: simply by playing a game, particularly one where you are literally adopting the role of a character in a world (it is not abstract in the way that Tetris is), you are creating an emergent narrative. Bam. Story. It exists. However, most people tend to use this in the sense that there’s some sort of authored narrative, which is pretty silly.

Again, back to that con man game. It does not inherently need a plot. A DM or the game could literally just go “okay, player, you are a con man. You are in a party. Try to steal something from the vault,” and that’s it. Every NPC at the party may have their own personal history or whatever, but LORE and STORY are two different things (one major complaint I have about the love for Bioware games is that people often confuse their lore with the game’s actual story). There is no story but what you make through your role-play.

Planned stories are unnecessary to RPGs.

ARGUMENT #7: THEY MUST HAVE PARTIES!

Okay, there are two major flaws with this.

First, games like Morrowind prove you can have RPGs without a party.

Second, plenty of games have “parties,” of a sort. Look at squad-based Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon games. Are those RPGs? Nah, they’re first-person shooters!

Parties only existed in RPGs to begin with because one-on-one rpgs, with one DM and one player character, tend to be boring. It’s much more fun to have it be an asymmetric multiplayer experience—one DM versus a team of adventurers. Parties aren’t a requirement, especially in video games, that can allow for great solo experiences.

ARGUMENT #8: An RPG must have sidequests!

If this were true, then open-world games would be RPGs. They’re not, of course.

…wait.

hm.

Okay, yeah, most sandbox games aren’t RPGs. They’re just very large worlds in which you run around and do stuff. To make those worlds interesting, developers often implement sidequests, or suffer the fate of Mafia II.

ARGUMENT #9: AN RPG MUST COMBINE ALL/SOME OF THESE THINGS!!!

Don’t be absurd. Why do these mechanics exist?

I lied earlier. I’m totally going to get definitional on your ass now.

Role-playing and acting are not synonymous. Yes, in acting, you “play” a “role,” but that is not role-playing (brief English language digression: two words, used in conjunction as a phrase, can mean something different than those two words in a related sentence; “hat trick” is not a trick involving hats, but a term used to refer to someone scoring in a game three times in a row). Wikipedia’s article on role-playing in an acting context explains out that the practice is specifically related to improvisational acting or training, not acting. Improvisational acting is, of course, when an actor makes up stuff for their role on the spot. It’s not a case of “oh, I know exactly who this guy is and what his lines are,” it’s a case of improvising stuff. Making it up. Being someone. Likewise, learning to act isn’t about being limited to a script (though that is a skill one will have to learn) as much as it is merely… well, learning to act.

In the games context, it is the same thing. RPGs, at their core, establish a framework which facilitates role-playing. That’s really all that matters. That’s why some RPGs have skill systems and others don’t. That’s why some are turn-based and some aren’t. The specifics don’t really matter: the only thing that does is whether or not they facilitate role-playing. How could a game that does not offer any sort of role-playing be a role-playing game?

And, to those who would suggest that playing the role of a character is role-playing: if this is true, then any game with you playing the part of a character is, inherently, a role-playing game. No one in their right mind would suggest that, as it would render the genre pointless, all games would be RPGs, and every genre claiming to be an RPG would need a new name to separate it from the others.

None of these mechanics are required to make a game a role-playing game, because if they were, then individually, or even in combination, they would… but they don’t. Having a squad of NPCs to command in a story-driven game with unlocks doesn’t make Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 a great RPG, so it’s bullshit to argue that it does in, say, Earthbound. I love that game to pieces, but man, it is not an RPG, so please stop calling it one. It can only fall short in direct comparison.

So, basically, what I’m really trying to say is that JRPGs generally aren’t true RPGs.

The Ice Cream Store

Hopefully, throughout this whole thing, you’ve noticed that a lot of mechanics associated with RPGs can be found in a lot of other games. That’s important to understand. Really, that’s why JRPGs aren’t RPGs. When Yuji Horii created the JRPG, he did so from a mistaken understanding of what RPGs were. The game that inspired him, Wizardry (and possibly Ultima, though this MIGHT be apocryphal), had many of the mechanics people find in JRPGs today. While those games, as technology advanced, were able to rid themselves of the abstractions that had held them back from being RPGs, Horii, and later Sakaguchi, embraced those limitations and remixed them into something entirely different—the JRPG.

Penicillin, I’ve read, was an accident. A mistake. It saved lives. The JRPG was an accident too, and while it probably won’t save lives, it’s still nothing to sniff at (if you’re starting to sniff, just take peni—oh, come on, that’s a terrible joke, Doc).

You know that bit in Lord of the Rings where it looks like they’re getting a denouement, and then SUDDENLY SARUMAN?

Well, SUDDENLY, NERDS.

Here’s the thing: I’m not an RPG purist. I can’t be. They would have you believe that for a game to be an RPG, it must allow any possible permutation of circumstances to occur.

They would have you believe that an RPG will allow for every option ever, and that if a game does not allow for this, it is not an RPG. Can’t make a self-loathing misandrist idiot werewolf trombonist in your game? Well, to them, that’s no RPG (okay, I’m totally exaggerating just a little bit, I think).

Imagine, if you will, three people who have decided to visit an ice cream shop. The first person says “no, that’s no ice cream shop! It only has thirty flavors of ice cream! A real ice cream shop would have at least a thousand!” The second person says “hey, let’s go to the ice cream store titled “Froyo Only!” Frozen yogurt is a frozen dairy treat, after all, so it’s ice cream by another name!”

Me? I’m the third person.

I say “hey, you know what? We said we’re going to an ice cream store, so let’s go to that one. Sure, it doesn’t have every flavor ever, but I want ice cream, and I’m not feelin’ froyo right now.”

Ultimately, what we see is this: these mechanics can all be found elsewhere, and when they do exist in RPGs, they only do so because they are the abstractions that facilitate role-playing. By themselves, and even in concert, these mechanics do not make or break a game as an RPG, and the only context in which they do so, to be honest, is in certain dungeon crawlers and JRPGs.

But, hey, I know some of you are prone to logical fallacy and will want to question my authority on the matter. While I’ve worked on RPGs in the past, I’m certainly no big name in the genre. You know who is, though? Brian Fargo. Here’s what he has to say on the matter: “I think he scratched a nerve when he said ‘hey, there’s people that still like adventure games’, and same thing with real role-playing games, things that are more PC-centric kind of role-playing experiences. “