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Can you have an RPG without progression?

Grauken

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It could work if you get a sort of fixed character or fixed types to chose from, but the other game systems are almost as dynamic as a real P&P session and you could do real role playing in how to approach and solve situations. I don't see anybody doing this, but possible.

If you have characters with no progression except through equipment, you basically have action adventures, except the occasional health upgrades, so those can work, but they won't appeal to people who are in it for the progression itself.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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In Shadow of The Colossus, you get weaker as the story progresses. I can't explain as that would be endgame spoilers.
In Shadow of the Colossus, which is not an RPG, the player-character gradually acquires more health and stamina as the game progresses by obtaining fruit and lizard tails, though the player is not required to do so and the game could be completed without this.

The narrative cut-scenes are a different matter, but they are irrelevant to the gameplay.
 

Longshanks

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I'd say definitely yes. The core of an RPG is a game where actions are determined by a character's stats. Those stats can improve over time or not, either way, you could still have an RPG.

Why would you do it? I've not considered it in any depth, but one reason would be to bring the game back to (in my view) it's most important aspect: character creation. Too many RPGs are more about collecting cool stuff and becoming more and more powerful than about the character and tuning an experience to his unique build. Doing away with progression takes away a decent amount of distraction from this. The RPG genre is so broad and good, concrete roleplaying so complex that deciding to make a more focused game is a valid option. Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with progression, just that it's not foundational.

Do the double, remove combat and progression and you just may free up a developer to create a truly great RPG.
 

Norfleet

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I don't see why "progression" is somehow integral to the concept of an RPG at all. Is a single-session D&D game which doesn't last long enough to actually gain any levels still an RPG? Sure.

If anything, "progression" in a CRPG is mostly a distraction, since you're basically just running a treadmill in place against enemies which similarly inflate their numbers.
 

Grauken

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I don't see why "progression" is somehow integral to the concept of an RPG at all. Is a single-session D&D game which doesn't last long enough to actually gain any levels still an RPG? Sure.

that's true for P&P, doesn't work all that well in cRPGs
 

Norfleet

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I wouldn't say that's true. Although Crusader Kings is not purely an RPG, without the DLCs that add level-up memberships to things, there is no real "progression". Characters don't gain levels in things, they just have stats and traits. Most of the "progression" tends to involve getting stressed and depressed and dying of cancer, so there's not really any sense of progression, you don't "advance" in that way.

So it is entirely possible to have an RPG in which your characters simply do not gain any levels or otherwise have any form of progression, and simply spring into existence with the skillset they will finish the game with. You don't necessarily need character progression in the form of levels or items. Simply advancing through the plot should be sufficient. You don't NEED to gain more buttons and hitpoints and damage.
 

Grauken

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I wouldn't say that's true. Although Crusader Kings is not purely an RPG, without the DLCs that add level-up memberships to things, there is no real "progression". Characters don't gain levels in things, they just have stats and traits. Most of the "progression" tends to involve getting stressed and depressed and dying of cancer, so there's not really any sense of progression, you don't "advance" in that way.

So it is entirely possible to have an RPG in which your characters simply do not gain any levels or otherwise have any form of progression, and simply spring into existence with the skillset they will finish the game with. You don't necessarily need character progression in the form of levels or items. Simply advancing through the plot should be sufficient. You don't NEED to gain more buttons and hitpoints and damage.

Never played it, but from what I can see it looks like a typical strategy game and nothing about it speaks to me, as a cRPG. Again, I'm not saying a cRPG without progression isn't possible, just that it won't hook most players who like me really enjoy the progression and given how the majority of western cRPGs handle those aspects I would assume that's true for a lot of players.
 

Alex

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So basically if I DM a game where the players don't level up and only find fixed equipment in dungeon rooms (a classic high level dungeon crawl) I didn't play a RPG? These kind of consequences just shows the absurdities that follow with the Codex obsession of trying to define a RPG by a fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions or properties.

Well, you more or less need necessary and sufficient conditions to define a thing. Maybe we lack the necessary knowledge to define RPGs very well, but that doesn't mean there isn't a definition in first place.

At any rate, here is my take on this. You can't have an RPG, or a story, or much of anything, without progression. Now, this "progression" can be very abstract. I mean, even going "there" and then "back again" is a kind of progression. Of course, the thread is not about this abstract take on progression, but I wanted to mention this for a reason. When we consider tabletop RPGs, we do need some kind of progression. In particular, we need a character progression, that is, a progression of the character changing in some way in order to form the story of the game (in other words, we need an actual role that is played during the game).

This might seem like a story focused approach to RPGs, but it is actually easy to see how this applies even to D&D and other RPGS from that time. In D&D, your levels and classes represent a clear progression inside some kind of archetype from pulpy fantasy stories (the kind found on the so called Appendix N). Take a Fighter, and you have someone who goes from a tough, but very much mortal, warrior, to someone who can fight monsters alone, to a man who is an army by himself to a lord of soldiers who establishes his own law on the land. A thief goes from a street urchin kind of guy, to someone able to bypass all kinds of traps and rob others blind right under their noses, to a master of a crime syndicate.

The magic user goes from an apprentice capable of bringing about a single spell about each day (although, do note, 1st level spells can bring about a wide and interesting variety of effects, rather than just 1d6 of damage) to a pursuer of the arcane, capable of incinerating thousands of cubic feet, to an aspiring master of the inscrutable arts, with his own tower and apprentices, and capable of casting spells that blur the division between mortal and immortal. The cleric is a bit of an odd man out because, at least initially, the template was taken more from Christian tradition than anything, with spells that mirrored well known miracles. The cleric would start from a minor saint, going to become a beacon of light to those around and eventually becoming a great bishop with his own temple and performing feats such as resurrecting long dead people.

Someone might complain that this is not the point of progression in D&D. The point is not to change your character's position in the story, but rather to give you abilities to best the traps and whatnot of the dungeon. The point of gaining XP is not to become a great bishop that can perform miracles, but to be able to resurrect dead party members without paying heavy fees. That the point of becoming a fighter level 13 is to be able to withstand a lot of damage and manage to hit monsters with low armor classes. But I think it is important to understand those things together. You can't have a character with class mechanics that are disconnected from the game reality.

Anyway, although you can't have purely abstract mechanics in an RPG, that have no representation in reality (i.e. something that would be pure "crunch"), you can have things that have all sorts of things in a game without formal mechanics backing them up. For instance, depending on how the PCs converse with a ship captain NPC, the GM might allow them to hitch a ride on a boat without paying money for it, without a die roll to see if there is a problem during the voyage and even without rolling any kind of reaction roll; maybe based solely on the reputation of the PCs and how they approached the sea dog.

Thus, you can have character advancement in RPGs that is not dependent on any kind of hard mechanics. Jeepform is a mode of RPG where there isn't any kind of ability advancement (in fact, determining how competent your character is at something in jeepform is kinda besides the point). Also, many single-shot adventure games that are played on conventions, or just because you want to try something else, lack any kind of numerical advancement either. So, my point is that, at least in P&P, it is clear that this kind of advancement isn't needed.

Still, Sigourn, you made it clear you want to talk about CRPGs. Sorry for the long detour, but I think understanding what could be done in a CRPG requires you to understand what you can do in P&P. CRPGs aren't the same thing as RPGs, of course. But they are single-player games that nevertheless try to give a context, a story and setting, for the mechanics and hopefully make them come a bit alive on the player's imagination. CRPGs are then games that are similar to pen and paper RPGs in some ways. This is not a real definition (which is perhaps what moraes was driving at) but more of a subjective assesment. Who is tall and who is short depends on those who are around you, and being an RPG is a question of being similar enough to RPGs that the category makes sense.

In principle, you can do away with character progression based on hard rules in an RPG. You can do away with a lot of things. You could swap the combat system of the game for an abstract game where you roll dice until an outcome is decided. You could take away dialog and leave only some other mini-game to influcence NPC reaction towards you. You could take away all combat. You could reduce the exploration in the game and teleport the player around while mostly playing through "text adventures" with skill checks. You could make dungeon exploration into an abstract board game where you draw cards to determine what you find on each tile you land on. None of those things will absolutely not make your game an RPG much in the same way that no matter how short you are, you still have some tallness; even a drawing on a paper sheet has some tallness, the size of the thickness of the ink layer.

But like in the previous example, you would just be making your game less of an RPG, unless you are actually giving up these in favour of something else that would work well in its stead. The jeepform mentioned above does away with a lot of stuff because it is focused on dramatic situations, looking even a bit like a drama exercise. However, taking away mechanical advancement from CRPGs is just shooting one's foot, since the mechanical part is exactly where the computer shines, while the story crafting are only pale imitations of what you have in a P&P game. I mean, you can give attention to detail in a computer game you couldn't in a pen and paper one, to be sure, but you can't really give agency to the player in the same way. In fact, if you focus too much on making your story elaborate, it can end up being less of an RPG because the player can't really choose how to interact with it.

TLDR: If we are talking about CRPGs, there is little you can do that would make something not be an RPG. If you want, Doom, Zelda, Disco Elysium and even Tetris can be RPGs (where you play the role of a rocket engineer forever frustrated by soviet bad delivery practices and political enemies stealing your work). The issue is how much of an RPG your end game ends up as. Jagged Alliance 2 is more of an RPG than X-COM, since you have a clear in-game identity and since the units are much more human-like. Fallout is more an RPG than Underrail since the combat system in underrail is more abstract and with side-effects that make no sense. So if you want to remove progression from an RPG, but your game will probably be less of an RPG for that.
 

Alex

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Fishy

What exactly do you want a citation for? I mean, I wrote about a whole lot of stuff in that post, so if you could be more specific, it would be great. Most of the stuff I am talking about is how I've come to see the genre, since as far as I know there is not such thing as an actual authority in RPG design. Which is why I use words such as "I think" or "my take". But if you want a defence(or at least an explanation of why I think this way about anything I've said, I would be happy to comply.
 

Fishy

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Fishy

What exactly do you want a citation for? I mean, I wrote about a whole lot of stuff in that post, so if you could be more specific, it would be great. Most of the stuff I am talking about is how I've come to see the genre, since as far as I know there is not such thing as an actual authority in RPG design. Which is why I use words such as "I think" or "my take". But if you want a defence(or at least an explanation of why I think this way about anything I've said, I would be happy to comply.

Standard peer review process. The article has a nice flow, the author does express his theory rather clearly, and substantiates his point elegantly. However, it fails to reference its sources as well as the current state of the art, and as such, I can not recommend publication until this point is addressed.
 

Fishy

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I kinda agree with you on RPG as a spectrum, but not just in the more/less RPG direction. I've played AD&D games with 0 story where all we wanted was to roll dice and kill monsters, and Amber campaigns with no dice being rolled ever, and would consider both cases to be as much a RPG as each other (of the pen and paper variety, albeit in the case of Amber we didn't even need pen and paper).

I don't think removing some elements necessarily makes the game a lesser example of the genre. But remove enough elements and what remains will start falling into the "with RPG elements" category. That line is always going to be fuzzy though. I can see story and c&c being enough, like the choose-your-own-adventure books where I quickly stopped bothering with dice rolls. But change the media/perspective/setting, and I call it an adventure game from the Sierra/LucasArts school.

Ultimately, all I can say is that I know a RPG when I see it, but I'd be hard pressed to define how I do it.
 

Norfleet

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Never played it, but from what I can see it looks like a typical strategy game and nothing about it speaks to me, as a cRPG. Again, I'm not saying a cRPG without progression isn't possible, just that it won't hook most players who like me really enjoy the progression and given how the majority of western cRPGs handle those aspects I would assume that's true for a lot of players.
I dunno about that. Given the popularity of character-building independently of the process of levelling up, it may very well be entirely viable to create a game where the character is simply built as a finished product, and then the game is played balanced around a built character and how you use the build you have chosen to get through the game and its choices. In fact, I'm pretty sure there HAS to exist an RPG where your character simply starts out at a high level and simply never makes any significant gains from there because you're already a veteran whatever, instead of some noob. The very nature of a character progression system tends to be that the only characters you're allowed to play as are noobs.

Besides, progression is often just hollow anyway: You gain bigger numbers that you use to attack and defend against similarly bigger numbers, so nothing has changed.
 

King Crispy

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Another interesting way to look at this is to consider games that do feature character progression as well as skills and all the other things that we expect to see in traditional RPGs, but still fail to feel like they are RPGs.

Take Fallout 4 as an example. I know, bear with me.

Fallout 4 technically has stats in it. You certainly level up in it, hilariously quickly in fact. With its absence of global level scaling (such as in Oblivion), one can easily assume that leveling up in Fallout 4 is essential to achieving success in the game as well as completing it. But is it really?

Despite the fact that you can bring up your stupid Pip-Boy and have it display to you that you have numerical values representing your SPECIAL, it just doesn't feel like any of those "stats" really matter. Do they help you, the player, to aim better when a dozen raiders are attacking your settlement? Can you smash down a locked door if your STR is maxed out? No! They're really only there as gateways to gaining more and more of Bethesda's infamous Perks, which are often themselves gateways to overcoming any number of relatively useless obstacles in the game, none of which rarely matter much anyway (such as hacking terminals).

So what does this mean?

Fallout 4 could likely completely remove all its "stats" and its leveling system and still feel like Fallout 4. That, to me, basically takes it out of the RPG Department and puts it squarely in the middle of the Action Game Dept. The same could be said about many other games that claim to be RPGs, such as Witcher 3. It really is all about feel.

So that takes us back to the original argument. If you can remove what one would normally think to be such a core element of these action-oriented games and still have them play p. much the same way, you cannot perform this removal on true RPGs and have them feel like they're still genuine, no more than you could perform the inverse on an action game by adding stats and "leveling up" to it and have it magically transform into an RPG.

The further and further removed from the root of what makes RPGs what they are, the more and more you introduce almost an uncanny valley aspect to them; you're taking away their DNA and true nature. Those of us who have been looking at RPGs all our lives can tell when we're not looking at the real thing.
 
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Norfleet

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So that takes us back to the original argument. If you can remove what one would normally think to be such a core element of these action-oriented games and still have them play p. much the same way, you cannot perform the inverse of this to true RPGs and have them feel like they're still genuine. The further and further removed from the root of what makes RPGs what they are, the more and more you introduce almost an uncanny valley to them; you're taking away their "humanity", or true nature. Those of us who have been looking at RPGs all our lives can tell when we're not looking at the real thing.
Counterpoint: If Arcanum didn't have levelling up, and you instead simply started at some high level with the skillset you chose, and the combat was tuned accordingly, and you still had all the relevant dialogue, the choices, the consequences, the fancy epilogue describing how your actions fixed or fucked up the world, would it still be an RPG? Does the game truly gain anything by having a few buttons you can click to make some numbers bigger? Or was the game something else all along?

Or that Vampire game. Does the game actually lose anything if you simply enter the game with your character at max level? I am not convinced you actually miss any part of the experience if you simply cheat yourself to max level at the very start of the game, other than that the early combat would be trivialized because of stat inflation.
 

Alex

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I kinda agree with you on RPG as a spectrum, but not just in the more/less RPG direction. I've played AD&D games with 0 story where all we wanted was to roll dice and kill monsters, and Amber campaigns with no dice being rolled ever, and would consider both cases to be as much a RPG as each other (of the pen and paper variety, albeit in the case of Amber we didn't even need pen and paper).

Ok, but I want to explain something. I am using a rather abstract definition of story. AD&D games always have stories, even if they are more akin to a campaign journal of a mercenary company than a fantasy romance. By "story", I really mean any and all imaginative aspects of the game, independent of them making sense as a normal story. An RPG could have a moral built into its adventures like a fable, or it could not. It could have its rules geared towards telling stories about overcoming fear. Or they could simply represent a fantastical imaginary reality, where "overcoming your fears" is not the point anymore than it is in our world.

As for the Amber game... please let me know if you are ever GMing it! But seriously, Amber lacks dice rolls, but it still has a resolution system (I intend to make a post about resolution systems sometime this week). Using the dice like D&D or not like Amber, certainly make a big difference, but both ways accomplish the same thing, which is to create a way to determine what happens on hypothetical situations (ok, I try to force the iron gate open. I have STR 21, can I do that?).

I don't think removing some elements necessarily makes the game a lesser example of the genre.

Agreed. My point was that removing an aspect of the game that helps it be like an RPG, without adding something in return just made the game less like an RPG after all. My example with Underrail, for instance, was actually a bit unfair. After all, the combat system it provided, even if more abstract, did make your character building and combat decisions more meaningful, which can help it be more of an RPG, not less (I would argue Fallout still wins, although I am a bit biased).

But remove enough elements and what remains will start falling into the "with RPG elements" category. That line is always going to be fuzzy though. I can see story and c&c being enough, like the choose-your-own-adventure books where I quickly stopped bothering with dice rolls. But change the media/perspective/setting, and I call it an adventure game from the Sierra/LucasArts school.

Ultimately, all I can say is that I know a RPG when I see it, but I'd be hard pressed to define how I do it.

Fair enough. I think this line is subjective, like, if we had a lot of real high quality RPG game, with a lot of effort put into providing different ways to solve the game for different play-styles and a lot of care making sure the game world is interesting and comes alive as you play it, the bar would be higher. But this is something I am not sure either.
 

King Crispy

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Counterpoint: If Arcanum didn't have levelling up, and you instead simply started at some high level with the skillset you chose, and the combat was tuned accordingly, and you still had all the relevant dialogue, the choices, the consequences, the fancy epilogue describing how your actions fixed or fucked up the world, would it still be an RPG?

I would say no, but this is a rather unfair scenario. You're taking a true, well-known, genuine RPG and asking us to excise something from it, turning it into something else.

That "something else" is the heart of the question posed in this thread. You can split hairs all you want to regarding the dialog being unaffected, still being able to engage in combat, etc., but you're removing the entire point of playing RPGs in the first place: starting in once place at the beginning and winding up much farther away when it's over. That may or may not be literal but it certainly applies to how powerful your character(s) become in the process.
 

Norfleet

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However, taking away mechanical advancement from CRPGs is just shooting one's foot, since the mechanical part is exactly where the computer shines, while the story crafting are only pale imitations of what you have in a P&P game.
I disagree: CRPGs don't shine at mechanical ADVANCEMENT. They shine at mechanical RESOLUTION. JA2 doesn't draw its strength from the fact that your mercenaries can level up. It draws its strengths from the fact that there are rules to the play that are far more complicated than anything that could be done in PnP: If the mercenaries never levelled up, and simply started had their starting stats, and there simply wasn't a tier structure of "crap guns", "worse guns", "better guns", but simply had guns implemented in realistic detail as 1.13 tends to do, and whether a given gun is better or worse is just purely a function of realism and not a progression system where you find worse guns first and better ones later, WOULD IT STILL BE AWESOME? Does the additional layer of planting and then removing landmines, throwing knives at someone on the opposite side of window, punching cows, and jogging around Drassen overloaded actually ADD anything to the game?
 

FeelTheRads

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I don't see why "progression" is somehow integral to the concept of an RPG at all. Is a single-session D&D game which doesn't last long enough to actually gain any levels still an RPG? Sure.

Herp derp if I finish a level of DOOM by running to the end without killing anything is DOOM still a shooter????????

Your parallel is retarded.

You might as well say "but if progression matters then it means you don't play an RPG between one level and the next". You're retarded.

That's not the question. You still play a game that has progression.

A game without progression means it was designed to work without it for the whole length of the game. Not that you fucking skipped it or there wasn't any for some time.

Counterpoint: If Arcanum didn't have levelling up, and you instead simply started at some high level with the skillset you chose, and the combat was tuned accordingly, and you still had all the relevant dialogue, the choices, the consequences, the fancy epilogue describing how your actions fixed or fucked up the world, would it still be an RPG?

COUNTERPOINT HURR DURR: What if Arcanum was like you say when it came out and it was not called an RPG by the developers. Would you call it an RPG?

Anyway, the problem here is that it's a retarded question to begin with, as expected from that Sigourn retard. When your discussion is "but if I take A out of B is B is still B??????" it means you have first world problems. You have to ask yourself first, why the fuck would you do it in the first place? Why can't you take RPGs as they are and instead you jump through retarded hoops and come up with all sort of stupid semantics just to try to back up your stupid ideas? And even worse, start screeching if people don't agree with you, because wow they have such limited minds, they can't see the awesomeness of my ideas!

tl;dr: Hey guise im sigurn what if cut my dick off am i still a man i think i am what do u tthink herp derp
 

Cirtdear

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I created a system where you progress by investing points in not needing to invest. However you are not alone and some people are quite invested in not investing anymore.
infact some are so invested in not investing or progressing you can become quite challenged. To beat the game you need the right amounts of not being invested. Too much investment and you lose.
Some challenges require a certain amount of investment too!
 

Sigourn

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Fallout 4 could likely completely remove all its "stats" and its leveling system and still feel like Fallout 4. That, to me, basically takes it out of the RPG Department and puts it squarely in the middle of the Action Game Dept. The same could be said about many other games that claim to be RPGs, such as Witcher 3. It really is all about feel.

I've been playing Ys I & II for the last week and it's interesting that you mention this, because I've said it in the past myself. GTA V is a game with racing in it, but it is no racing game. Can you race cars? Sure. Is that the core of the game? Not really.
This begs the question: what is the core of an RPG? What is an RPG experience supposed to be like?

Ys I & II is an Action RPG. So is Fallout: New Vegas.
  • Both have stats.
  • Both let you gain experience and level up.
  • Both have equipment.
  • Both have NPCs you can talk to.
  • Both have shops you can buy items in.
  • Both have inventories.
  • Both have action-based combat where stats influence your effectiveness.
But while I've listed mechanics, I've said nothing about these mechanics at all.
  1. Ys doesn't let you pick your stats at the beginning of the game; New Vegas does.
  2. Ys doesn't let you pick your stats at level up; New Vegas does.
  3. Ys has linear equipment and there's no reason not to use better equipment; New Vegas has non-linear equipment and different kinds of weapons and armor.
  4. Ys doesn't let you pick dialogue options; New Vegas does.
  5. Ys doesn't let you sell items; New Vegas does.
  6. Ys relies on Strength and Defense to solve literally any quest in the game, and on its forced quest items and Magic skills as well; New Vegas lets you solve quests in different ways depending your available skills.
There's much more to be said. But while they both have things people usually refer to as "RPG mechanics", the true is Ys feels like an action-adventure with stats tacked on top (particularly because a handful of levels make the difference between "you cannot beat this boss" and "you can trash this boss", and ultimately the grinding for any given boss amounts to less than 20 minutes if you play the game normally).
 
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Trojan_generic

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Cool thread. Arriving to the party late as always, just one example keeps coming to mind of this 'choose your skills at the beginning of game and don't level up' approach that would make the game an RPG: Pirates! The old ones by Sid Meier. You choose one of 5 skills or so, improved sword skill, cannon skill, medicine or some other, and cannot change this in the course of the game. Still no one EVER even jokingly tried to call Pirates! an RPG.
Also, let adventure games be adventure games, if there is no character progress. There are/were also a lot of adventure games where you learn spells in the course of the game, but no, Sir, no RPG there.
 

Cirtdear

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Quests are all that matter. Briefly speaking a quest must feature either or both of

1) a purpose through choice and consequence
2) opportunity to express your character's personality

The majority of a game must be about these quests. Else it's not an rpg.

Western RPGs are a great mix of both.

An RPG Game is actually a thing too. It is a role playing game game. Which is an rpg that allows the gameplay itself to masquerade in a roleplaying fashion.
This would be intiiating an action that isn't limited to use in a quest but can affect a quest, and can say something about the character.
But that's just RPGG not RPGRPG.

If an RPG had no evolution for character stats, it wouldn't be a very realistic rpg on a large scale. Still all that really matters is quests.
 

Harthwain

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I disagree: CRPGs don't shine at mechanical ADVANCEMENT. They shine at mechanical RESOLUTION.
I recall a discussion where someone said that RPGs are all about their mechanics and systems being as complex and intricated as possible in order to render - in detail - what your character can or can't do. My position was that systems' mechanics are there primarly to provide a way to resolve situations so the Game Master and the players have an objective method of finding out if their interactions succeed or fail, and for that you don't necessarily need as complex system as possible, provided you can resolve the situation.

Does the additional layer of planting and then removing landmines, throwing knives at someone on the opposite side of window, punching cows, and jogging around Drassen overloaded actually ADD anything to the game?
I would say - yes.

To me RPG was always about interactivity or reactivity. This can be done by giving the player tools to play around with. The more tools, the better, because they give you more ways to interact with the world/the system. And mechanical advancement can be just another way of obtaining more tools. In similar fashion having more equipment is going to offer you more tools, although they would be tools of a different variety. One is strictly related to your character (race, skills, etc.), whereas the other is related to what items you possess and how they can be used in any given situation.
 

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