Are text adventures RPGs?

[almondblight]

For instance, MUDs display the workings of their engines on ASCII output, however they're not adventures but RPGS. The same goes for Nethack and roguelikes and DF.

Very much this. There were MUDs with character systems and combat on par with typical dungeon crawlers. Here's a video of combat from the MUD Medievia. He's just spamming one spell at a low level enemy there, but you get the idea. It's basically like the combat log you'd find in a typical RPG, without the superfluous graphics, and with the player typing in commands rather than selecting options from an interface. Kind of a shame we didn't see much in the way of single-player text RPGs (and now it seems like even the MUD scene is dying).

So in the end "text" is just describing how things are presented, like saying something is 2D or 3D. We might as well be asking "Are 3D text adventures RPGs?" Fundamentally the question is about adventure games and RPGs, it doesn't matter if the presentation is text, 2D, or 3D.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Which is what Bardstale, Wizardry, and Might & Magic did mostly. If you had to describe the hallways, items, monsters, etc to replace all the graphics it'd be more or less the same game but in text. And, it'd be a fuckload of text describing EVERYTHING! I can't be entirely sure it'd be possible.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

MUDs made heavy use of colorcoding for... everything. Actually added a lot of flavor. Roguelikes picked this up to some extent, you can see an extremely bastardized, inbred offspring in a lot of modern RPGs with things like loot color coding.
If something was important, it was emphasized in some way so you didn't skip over it. Descriptions of effects would use color to describe what they are(You see a giant fire rat) etc.,

 

[JarlFrank]

There a list of all these "text crpgs?" Links? I'm genuinely curious and wonder how well reviewed they were.

I was hunting for them a long time ago and made a small list of my own. Dunno if it's exhaustive. Any text adventure with stats and combat qualifies.

Eamon is an 80s text RPG with a module editor, pretty cool.
Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom is a humorous sword & sorcery text RPG, mechanically pretty simple but it qualifies.
The Supreme Element is a tickle fetish text RPG with D&D 2E rules... yes, that exists.
Kerkerkruip is a text-based roguelike with randomly generated dungeons and an interesting leveling system.

That's all the ones I know of. I'm surprised there are so few of them considering how popular the text adventure genre was in the 80s, and it still exists today (other than Eamon, all of my examples were made after 2000).

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Yeah so few. For me it is a reminder of CYOA gaming books like Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, and a slew of other books. I was always disappointed those didn't make the cut for crpg play (minus a few exceptions).

For just adventure, Zork and Scott Adams got me started. While AI dungeon is interesting in its own weirdness I wouldn't mind seeing more Text RPGS. And there are bigger more fancy fonts that could be used.

 

[Zeriel]

I think it depends on what you mean by "text adventure". You can create and use RPG mechanics in a text adventure. So they can be an RPG if you do that. If you don't, then, no. It's purely a question of design.

Zork is not an RPG, but a room-based MUD that uses much of the same systems and engine (or singleplayer version of the same) is an RPG.

I think a better delination here is "text-based game". A text-based game can be anything. But if we are using "text adventure" to strictly mean Infocom style games where all you do is solve puzzles and move between rooms with no real stats, then yeah, not an RPG.

 

[Zeriel]

There a list of all these "text crpgs?" Links? I'm genuinely curious and wonder how well reviewed they were.

I was hunting for them a long time ago and made a small list of my own. Dunno if it's exhaustive. Any text adventure with stats and combat qualifies.

Eamon is an 80s text RPG with a module editor, pretty cool.
Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom is a humorous sword & sorcery text RPG, mechanically pretty simple but it qualifies.
The Supreme Element is a tickle fetish text RPG with D&D 2E rules... yes, that exists.
Kerkerkruip is a text-based roguelike with randomly generated dungeons and an interesting leveling system.

That's all the ones I know of. I'm surprised there are so few of them considering how popular the text adventure genre was in the 80s, and it still exists today (other than Eamon, all of my examples were made after 2000).

I think the main thing is there's little reason for a game leveraging text for ease of creation of content and small/zero budget to not use some level of multimedia now. So, for example, I would argue King of Dragon Pass would be the "semi-modern" descendant of a "text-based game", but it uses images and music, so someone might get autistic and say it isn't a text-based game, even though almost everything that matters in it and most of the "flavor" is text.

Browser-based games that primarily used text with some splash images were very common in the early days of the internet. I can't remember it's name, but there was a cool semi-shared online RPG that did this in the early 2000s. Archmage is a famous Master-of-Magic style text-based strategy game from the late 90s, etc. There is a largely text-based Majesty browser "mmo". I think the story of modern iterations of this is almost none of these are professional or profit-based projects. They are someone's passion or brainchild or artistic creation. There's no money there. But the format is still compelling to players, I'd say. Sometimes, more compelling.

 

[JarlFrank]

I mean parser-based text adventures where you type in your actions like in Zork etc.
Graphics are okay to qualify for that particular genre (or subgenre if you will), there are plenty of graphical text adventures with parsers:

And the genre of parser-based text adventures is still alive and well, it's just called "Interactive Fiction" now because the people who make them are pretentious. Here's a really cool game by Emily Short for example:

Considering how common parser-based text adventures were in the 80s, and how there's still an alive-and-well community producing the things on a regular basis, I'm surprised how rare the combination of parser-based text adventure and RPG is.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

 

[InSight]

Unless you intend to tell us that dungeon crawlers are not RPGs.

Yes, they are CRPG and not RPG's. CRPG often are estimated to be 90-98% tactics/strategy with exploration. One is to consider CRPG an alternative/substitute to RPG's on a basis of what came/existed/was before.
Most RPG's in computers/video-games are in the MMORPG genre.
Such details/specifics/distinctness are of no importance/significance/consequence to many, outside these who seek to be more accurate, evaluate/factor/consider both the inner & outer as if one test's the DNA.

 

[Lukifell]

Do MUDs count as text adventures?

 

[Arryosha]

I think some early crpgs could fairly easily have been text based without much loss--even a game like Wizardry 6, though the art in that game is terrific. Some things, like navigation, would be more cumbersome. But text-based has certain advantages over a gui, one of which is immersion. My visual memories of novels are often much more vivid than my visual memories of video games.

Now I'm trying to imagine what we would have got if some good rpg studios had given text rpgs a shot.

 

[Absinthe]

Really depends on the text adventure. The amount of character building, mechanical depth, decision-making, and player reactivity can vary massively from game to game when it comes to text adventures. What I can tell you is that Colossal Cave Adventure is definitely not an RPG, and that's the game the adventure genre took its name from.

 

[Star Citizen]

Naw, they're generally extremely linear games where progress, your fate etc is predetermined through a narrative. While I adored it I don't even consider PST an RPG, that shit's more like a interactive CYAO visual novel.

 

[wishbonetail]

There are textual quests in Space Rangers in a variety of genres, management, rpgs, survhorrors, adventures, puzzles.

 

[Rincewind]

No.

 

[Daemongar]

The first thing I thought of when I saw this thread was one of the first programming books I ever wore out - Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer - it was and still is awesome and I still have a copy which I page through every so often. If you follow the link provided and click on Chapter 15 effectively it takes you through creating text adventures that have stats, hps, weapons, armor, rng, enemies with different stats, experience, food, etc. Everything that you'd want in a crpg but in text form - but I still wouldn't call text adventures crpgs. They are text adventures - as simple as that. No sense muddying the water for no benefit.

 

[Alex]

Depends on the text adventure.

I would say Zork is more of an RPG than many games that call themselves such nowadays.

 

[Alex]

text adventures are text adventures, idk how someone could choose "yes"
if it was an rpg it would be called "text rpg"

Those are different categories. It is like how a mammal can be either biped or quadruped.

 

[Rincewind]

That has become a kind of a trend in meat advertising, and I've always found it bizarre and even disturbing.

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

I mean parser-based text adventures where you type in your actions like in Zork etc.
Graphics are okay to qualify for that particular genre (or subgenre if you will), there are plenty of graphical text adventures with parsers:

And the genre of parser-based text adventures is still alive and well, it's just called "Interactive Fiction" now because the people who make them are pretentious. Here's a really cool game by Emily Short for example:

Considering how common parser-based text adventures were in the 80s, and how there's still an alive-and-well community producing the things on a regular basis, I'm surprised how rare the combination of parser-based text adventure and RPG is.

That doesn't look very Kosher.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

The salt was.

 

[JarlFrank]

"Look! I'm cannibalizing my family!"

 

[Stella Brando]