In CRPGs, simulation IS the DM, and CRPGs are adventure sims

[General Disarray]

Abstraction is the substitute for actual simulation due to the limited capabilities of hardware and/or software

Not really anymore.

We already have the technology to make simulations with computer games. I'd argue the more an RPG leans towards simulation, the less of an RPG it becomes, because it's trying to simulate something instead of being a game, with its own rules. You can see this trend in Bethesda games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 actually. This isn't all or nothing in CRPGs though. But an RPG does intentional use abstract rules over simulation for player character skill expression, which is at the very core of what it is.

A simulation is something "with its own rules." The logic of rules in an RPG (including the logic of character skills) derives from its nature as a simulation (albeit in the tabletop and CRPG context, variously abstracted and simplified simulation).

Even the game aspect does, because everything about the game that's related to contention and challenge, the use of intelligence to solve problems, or the possibility of winning or losing, is derived from the simulated world being a hard reality that the player (character) bumps up against.

Again, as with the analogy of alternative geometries and number systems, there are a bazillion possible rule systems out there in possibility space, and many of them are turned into games, but only one subset of those possible rule systems - those that describe, more or less abstractly, more or less explicitly or simply, a virtual world in which the player plays a role in that virtual world, are properly called "RPGs" or "CRPGs." Everything either gamey or story-like derives (or I should say, is best derived) from that, not the other way round.

Yeah I agree with this. A "CRPG" where you can't actually get immersed and roleplay is only a tactical game.

The precursor wargames were also simulations and roleplaying games. Think of it this way: if you're playing Guderian or Alexander or whatever in a campaign, if it weren't a simulation, then there would be no meaning to the idea of "what if it happened differently, what if Alexander had done this instead, how would it have turned out?" For different outcomes to be possible, the thing you're acting and making choices "inside of" (so to speak) has to be the simulation of a world with its own rigid natural laws and rules.

I think some people are mixing up simulation with the "sim" genre. Like say a flight sim - a flight sim is not definitionally an RPG, for you are not (at least not typically - it's possible you might get immersed enough) playing a pilot in the virtual world, typically you're playing as yourself flying a virtual plane in a videogame, and even if there are gamey elements (like moving up a notional professional ladder) that will typically be just you the player "beating the game," it's a meta stance, not an immersed stance. (I know this goes a bit against the thread title I made, but it was kind of throwaway.)

It comes down to this: for roleplaying to be possible at all, it has to be roleplaying within a simulated, virtual/counterfactual world. You can't just "pretend to be a character" tout court, you can pretend to be a character only in a virtual world, with its own funny little ways. It's like two halves of a split boiled egg, each matches perfectly the other.

I think that for rpgs as a genre we must insist on abstraction, at a minimum for the player charcter. A system where you have good and bad skills. But I agree that those skills could be represented through either simulation or abstraction, like in Deus Ex weapon sway system or Morrowind roll to hit behind the scenes when you swing.

Immersion I think should be its own quality. And to qualify it with becoming immersed in the world as well, like one do when playing Morrowind. But I'm with you, I don't enjoy rpgs where you only play an avatar and can't truly play a role. As far as I'm concerned they are all blobbers, and that's not a compliment. Where do place games with fixed protagonist?

 

[Glop_dweller]

in all cases you're pretending to be someone in that virtual world

Do people actually do that? That's a costume quest IMO; I have never played a roleplaying game where I pretended to be someone [personally] in that virtual world.

*The operative word being some—one. Do you mean acting out a personality or a profession? IE. playing oneself as a wizard, or playing Gandalf the wizard? For me the whole point of roleplaying is to extrapolate the character role of somebody else, not to play a list of abilities (if that's what's meant).

 

[HappyDaddyWow!]

deceptively simple answer to an autistically convoluted question: if you play Mario 64, you are playing the role of Mario. But this isn't really "roleplaying" because this is a role enforced on you and without much choice in the matter, it's not like you can pick Luigi for a +5 dex bonus to jumping. An RPG is just a game where the player is given open-ended freedom to fulfill a role in a game world.

And before anyone gets nitpicky, as controversial as it is to say yes I don't consider games like The Witcher or Final Fantasy to be proper role-playing games because of the previous distinction.

 

[General Disarray]

Another way to look at it is that roleplaying is simply theater. This removes a lot of the definition questions, we all know theater and actors. Tabletop and dungeon and dragons are simply a friend group doing improv theater with rules. Where the players are actors. And actors play roles. So a player playing a roleplaying game should be able to act out a character and the game must support this. This perspective makes things a lot more cut and dry in my mind. Specially if we go with the hard rule that the game must allow you to create your charcter, then we shave of the witcher 3 and far cry and the likes.

 

[Bastardchops]

I've just been trawling around reading peoples' thoughts on tabletop, CRPGs and stuff, and two musings have been coalescing in the cloaca of my cerebellum, FWIW:-

1) since the DM's job in the classic OSR context is basically to referee a dungeon simulation, with the rules and dice rolls representing resolutions of those aspects of the virtual/abstracted world (including the players' notional virtual bodies, capabilities, etc.) that respond to player's decisions (and more importantly, are out of players' direct control, just as the "laws" of nature as we find them irl), then in a CRPG context, simulationism in the game is basically doing the same job. If the virtual world presented in the CRPG behaves much as you'd expect a somewhat abstracted, compressed version of the real world (or real world + whatever consistent magic rules, etc.) to behave, pending your interaction with it, then that is basically all the rules you need for roleplaying (i.e. pretending to be a character in that virtual world). This is the same idea as "reactivity" as descended from Ultima 7 and carried on by Larian (the virtual world is "prepped" for any damn fool thing that it might come into someone's head to do), it's also the same thing as the "immersive sim" concept (minus the first person perspective) and it's also the same thing that Ted Peterson or whoever it was meant with Daggerfall being "the game as DM."

2) a fairly tight dungeon crawl with a goodly amount of combat makes most sense in the context of tabletop, otherwise the resource management gets too unwieldy for a bunch of friends pretending to be rangers and wizards or whatever. But a CRPG doesn't suffer from the same sorts of limitations. I was thinking about this in the context of recent commentary on BG, how it had open empty areas - some people think that's pointless, but I think that was actually one of the things that made BG a hit. What the CRPG allows, is the possibility of the game expanding from being a dungeon crawl simulator to an adventure simulator, to include part of the outside roaming, with all the immersive roses-smelling that entails (that might otherwise be handled quite perfunctorily in a traditional context, merely referred to), interaction with factions, big evils, princes, having relationships and romances, etc. (Of course this is the danger point at which games seem to be drifting away too far from their roots, bringing in unwelcome casuals with alien agendas, etc., but it's not necessarily all doom and gloom, if held in the right perspective.)

The question is how does narrative fit in? So the CRPG is an adventure simulation and kinda-sorta a game (by virtue of the necessary abstraction and simplification the simulation requires), but we also want it to have a story, to have some kind of beginning, middle and end. Again, in the toy world of the dungeon crawl, all that stuff is out of purview, fairly irrelevant - you're in there for whatever reason, to get the x, kill the y or whatnot; what gives you that goal is outside of and irrelevant to that simulation. But in the CRPG, it potentially has the wider context, so the adventure is part of your own wider virtual life, the wider life of the region, the realm, etc. And in that context, then the narrative is more like history-in-the-making. It would be a reflection of how others see the lived life you lived through (in encountering the big bad or whatever). So like history, again, it's selective and picking out certain aspects of a whole net of circumstances as particularly important (with your actions as the hero(es) being particularly salient). Point here being that from your character's point of view, it's just the life they're living, they're not conscious of it being a story. It's a story from the point of view of the notional others in the game world, and from the point of view of you as the player. Not sure where I'm going with that, but I think keeping that observation in mind ought to "guide" writers (and/or, in the not-too-distant future, the AI DM) in an appropriate way.

People don't think in terms of simulation they think in terms of story. The DM provides a story where the elements of combat/social/other skills are simulated by the RPG system in question.

 

[Bastardchops]

I've just been trawling around reading peoples' thoughts on tabletop, CRPGs and stuff, and two musings have been coalescing in the cloaca of my cerebellum, FWIW:-

1) since the DM's job in the classic OSR context is basically to referee a dungeon simulation, with the rules and dice rolls representing resolutions of those aspects of the virtual/abstracted world (including the players' notional virtual bodies, capabilities, etc.) that respond to player's decisions (and more importantly, are out of players' direct control, just as the "laws" of nature as we find them irl), then in a CRPG context, simulationism in the game is basically doing the same job. If the virtual world presented in the CRPG behaves much as you'd expect a somewhat abstracted, compressed version of the real world (or real world + whatever consistent magic rules, etc.) to behave, pending your interaction with it, then that is basically all the rules you need for roleplaying (i.e. pretending to be a character in that virtual world). This is the same idea as "reactivity" as descended from Ultima 7 and carried on by Larian (the virtual world is "prepped" for any damn fool thing that it might come into someone's head to do), it's also the same thing as the "immersive sim" concept (minus the first person perspective) and it's also the same thing that Ted Peterson or whoever it was meant with Daggerfall being "the game as DM."

2) a fairly tight dungeon crawl with a goodly amount of combat makes most sense in the context of tabletop, otherwise the resource management gets too unwieldy for a bunch of friends pretending to be rangers and wizards or whatever. But a CRPG doesn't suffer from the same sorts of limitations. I was thinking about this in the context of recent commentary on BG, how it had open empty areas - some people think that's pointless, but I think that was actually one of the things that made BG a hit. What the CRPG allows, is the possibility of the game expanding from being a dungeon crawl simulator to an adventure simulator, to include part of the outside roaming, with all the immersive roses-smelling that entails (that might otherwise be handled quite perfunctorily in a traditional context, merely referred to), interaction with factions, big evils, princes, having relationships and romances, etc. (Of course this is the danger point at which games seem to be drifting away too far from their roots, bringing in unwelcome casuals with alien agendas, etc., but it's not necessarily all doom and gloom, if held in the right perspective.)

The question is how does narrative fit in? So the CRPG is an adventure simulation and kinda-sorta a game (by virtue of the necessary abstraction and simplification the simulation requires), but we also want it to have a story, to have some kind of beginning, middle and end. Again, in the toy world of the dungeon crawl, all that stuff is out of purview, fairly irrelevant - you're in there for whatever reason, to get the x, kill the y or whatnot; what gives you that goal is outside of and irrelevant to that simulation. But in the CRPG, it potentially has the wider context, so the adventure is part of your own wider virtual life, the wider life of the region, the realm, etc. And in that context, then the narrative is more like history-in-the-making. It would be a reflection of how others see the lived life you lived through (in encountering the big bad or whatever). So like history, again, it's selective and picking out certain aspects of a whole net of circumstances as particularly important (with your actions as the hero(es) being particularly salient). Point here being that from your character's point of view, it's just the life they're living, they're not conscious of it being a story. It's a story from the point of view of the notional others in the game world, and from the point of view of you as the player. Not sure where I'm going with that, but I think keeping that observation in mind ought to "guide" writers (and/or, in the not-too-distant future, the AI DM) in an appropriate way.

Why did you refer to your brain as a cloaca?

 

[Bastardchops]

Just because something's abstract doesn't mean it can't be a simulation. It can be a simulation to a certain grain (because it has to be relatively quick and easy to calculate in a social context with some friends, for example).

But a computer can do it to a finer grain, to the point that, in a CRPG context

Are you interested in a system where physics and chemistry of the game world are represented more accurately than before?

Well, the same as other aspects of the world, a certain degree of abstraction (e.g. you could model and quantify them as having attributes, roles in the world, goals, etc.).

Are you interested in a scenario where AI is simulated using symbolic logic (i.e. classical AI approach), or want to discuss search, deduction, agents and goals?

Or maybe you're interested in formalizing the gameworld's rules and reasoning about said rules?

I don't know how to bite it. My personal approach is having a finite amount of steps to when ideas can be turned into something cool and concrete.

In order to retain the balance between game, simulation and story, when it comes to the game side of it, the system has to be simple/abstract enough for the context. The tabletop context (people meeting socially and having a few hours of fun) demands a certain kind of abstraction and simplicity, and while the mechanics of a CRPG can afford to be a bit more complex than that, they still can't be too mind-numbingly complex.

That's why I think in a CRPG most of the complexity of simulation that the computer is capable of should be embedded in the world-reactivity and immersive sim elements - i.e. the virtual world should behave much as you'd expect the real world to behave when you probe it in a given way. But there still has to be a level of simplicity there (e.g. the game must have its own stylized way of presenting cues, so the player can easily latch on to the possible options available in a given scenario - e.g. so they can recognize fairly quickly what the stealth option vs. the brute force option vs the clever use of physics option is for a given scenario), and some aspects of the mechanics still have to be abstracted and exposed for pondering (especially those elements that are not "what you'd expect from the real world," e.g. magic rules, or not what you're really familiar with from the real world, like melee or ranged combat rules, or rules about lockpicking or whatever).

It has nothing to do with things being simulated with physics. The core of immersion is consistency. This is why great acting in a play with no props works.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

deceptively simple answer to an autistically convoluted question: if you play Mario 64, you are playing the role of Mario. But this isn't really "roleplaying" because this is a role enforced on you and without much choice in the matter, it's not like you can pick Luigi for a +5 dex bonus to jumping. An RPG is just a game where the player is given open-ended freedom to fulfill a role in a game world.

And before anyone gets nitpicky, as controversial as it is to say yes I don't consider games like The Witcher or Final Fantasy to be proper role-playing games because of the previous distinction.

You are describing something that I would call Larping not Roleplaying. Also the main mechanics of a game determine the genre ascribed to it. Even if Luigi had +5 bonus to jumping in Mario 64, the main mechanic of the game is traversing the terrain thru jumping that is done by the player makes it not an RPG, but a platformer.

First Witcher and most Final Fantasy games are RPGs.

 

[gurugeorge]

RPGs are abstractions, nots simulations. Everything from the armor system, movement, skill checks, combat...all abstractions. And it is exactly as it should be. They shouldn't try to be simulations.

For example, in a D20 system my armor class is 20 and you have to roll a 1D20 to hit fool. That's pure abstract mechanics. The same system has rolling 1 as always a critical failure even if you have enough bonuses to still hit and 20 always hits even if their AC is 5000. This doesn't work in a simulation, which would try to mock real laws of physics to be as close to realism as possible. RPGs don't work that way obviously because they use abstract systems AKA rules.

Wouldn't that make looter shooters the ultimate rpgs? Games where they truly have abstracted all gameplay values to symbolic values?

You may not like it, but looters shooters are what peak rpgs look like!

There's a sense in which that's true, but I think looter-shooters are too "meta" to be considered RPGs. Basically the loot part of it is the player sitting in their Herman Miller, Cheetos to hand, trying to "beat the game," so it's not really an RPG. Or perhaps you could say that whatever elements of RPG are in it are viewed from a "powergaming" perspective, which is anathema maranatha - even though we all succumb to that perspective eventually (powergaming = the heat death of the RPG ).

 

[gurugeorge]

Just because something's abstract doesn't mean it can't be a simulation. It can be a simulation to a certain grain (because it has to be relatively quick and easy to calculate in a social context with some friends, for example).

But a computer can do it to a finer grain, to the point that, in a CRPG context

Are you interested in a system where physics and chemistry of the game world are represented more accurately than before?

Well, the same as other aspects of the world, a certain degree of abstraction (e.g. you could model and quantify them as having attributes, roles in the world, goals, etc.).

Are you interested in a scenario where AI is simulated using symbolic logic (i.e. classical AI approach), or want to discuss search, deduction, agents and goals?

Or maybe you're interested in formalizing the gameworld's rules and reasoning about said rules?

I don't know how to bite it. My personal approach is having a finite amount of steps to when ideas can be turned into something cool and concrete.

In order to retain the balance between game, simulation and story, when it comes to the game side of it, the system has to be simple/abstract enough for the context. The tabletop context (people meeting socially and having a few hours of fun) demands a certain kind of abstraction and simplicity, and while the mechanics of a CRPG can afford to be a bit more complex than that, they still can't be too mind-numbingly complex.

That's why I think in a CRPG most of the complexity of simulation that the computer is capable of should be embedded in the world-reactivity and immersive sim elements - i.e. the virtual world should behave much as you'd expect the real world to behave when you probe it in a given way. But there still has to be a level of simplicity there (e.g. the game must have its own stylized way of presenting cues, so the player can easily latch on to the possible options available in a given scenario - e.g. so they can recognize fairly quickly what the stealth option vs. the brute force option vs the clever use of physics option is for a given scenario), and some aspects of the mechanics still have to be abstracted and exposed for pondering (especially those elements that are not "what you'd expect from the real world," e.g. magic rules, or not what you're really familiar with from the real world, like melee or ranged combat rules, or rules about lockpicking or whatever).

It has nothing to do with things being simulated with physics. The core of immersion is consistency. This is why great acting in a play with no props works.

Eh? I didn't say it was exclusively about physics simulation, that's just a part of it in a complete system. Things that are simulated that are not to do with physics would be the social aspects (e.g. the concept of "class" itself, factions, etc.), learned techniques, tradecraft aspects or whatever.

Plays with no props can work, but they're basically gimmicks. When people go to a play, they expect to be presented with the illusion of characters-in-a-world, not just the illusion of characters.

 

[luj1]

The precursor wargames were also simulations and roleplaying games.

Roles are not what you think they are. Else Monopoly would also be a roleplaying game.

 

[gurugeorge]

Abstraction is the substitute for actual simulation due to the limited capabilities of hardware and/or software

Not really anymore.

We already have the technology to make simulations with computer games. I'd argue the more an RPG leans towards simulation, the less of an RPG it becomes, because it's trying to simulate something instead of being a game, with its own rules. You can see this trend in Bethesda games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 actually. This isn't all or nothing in CRPGs though. But an RPG does intentional use abstract rules over simulation for player character skill expression, which is at the very core of what it is.

A simulation is something "with its own rules." The logic of rules in an RPG (including the logic of character skills) derives from its nature as a simulation (albeit in the tabletop and CRPG context, variously abstracted and simplified simulation).

Even the game aspect does, because everything about the game that's related to contention and challenge, the use of intelligence to solve problems, or the possibility of winning or losing, is derived from the simulated world being a hard reality that the player (character) bumps up against.

Again, as with the analogy of alternative geometries and number systems, there are a bazillion possible rule systems out there in possibility space, and many of them are turned into games, but only one subset of those possible rule systems - those that describe, more or less abstractly, more or less explicitly or simply, a virtual world in which the player plays a role in that virtual world, are properly called "RPGs" or "CRPGs." Everything either gamey or story-like derives (or I should say, is best derived) from that, not the other way round.

Yeah I agree with this. A "CRPG" where you can't actually get immersed and roleplay is only a tactical game.

The precursor wargames were also simulations and roleplaying games. Think of it this way: if you're playing Guderian or Alexander or whatever in a campaign, if it weren't a simulation, then there would be no meaning to the idea of "what if it happened differently, what if Alexander had done this instead, how would it have turned out?" For different outcomes to be possible, the thing you're acting and making choices "inside of" (so to speak) has to be the simulation of a world with its own rigid natural laws and rules.

I think some people are mixing up simulation with the "sim" genre. Like say a flight sim - a flight sim is not definitionally an RPG, for you are not (at least not typically - it's possible you might get immersed enough) playing a pilot in the virtual world, typically you're playing as yourself flying a virtual plane in a videogame, and even if there are gamey elements (like moving up a notional professional ladder) that will typically be just you the player "beating the game," it's a meta stance, not an immersed stance. (I know this goes a bit against the thread title I made, but it was kind of throwaway.)

It comes down to this: for roleplaying to be possible at all, it has to be roleplaying within a simulated, virtual/counterfactual world. You can't just "pretend to be a character" tout court, you can pretend to be a character only in a virtual world, with its own funny little ways. It's like two halves of a split boiled egg, each matches perfectly the other.

I think that for rpgs as a genre we must insist on abstraction, at a minimum for the player charcter. A system where you have good and bad skills. But I agree that those skills could be represented through either simulation or abstraction, like in Deus Ex weapon sway system or Morrowind roll to hit behind the scenes when you swing.

Immersion I think should be its own quality. And to qualify it with becoming immersed in the world as well, like one do when playing Morrowind. But I'm with you, I don't enjoy rpgs where you only play an avatar and can't truly play a role. As far as I'm concerned they are all blobbers, and that's not a compliment. Where do place games with fixed protagonist?

Yeah that's an interesting grey area. If the protagonist has too much of an already established backstory, then it gets a bit dubious - but I suppose if your "story" is free to create going forward from the point you join the game, and the backstory isn't hard-limiting too many choices, then it's still an RPG. The way Twitcher did it seemed pretty okay - you started with "Geralt skills" to a certain level, but you were free to develop in an RPG fashion from there, in several possible ways (e.g. more tanky power hitter vs. more agile fast hitter).

Re. the weapon sway reference - that's another interesting area where the type of interface intersects with all the stuff we've been talking about. Like for example, theoretically you could have a true RPG in the Holodeck, in which case your engagement with the game is full-spectrum, full-body, both hands with five fingers, feet, muscle, bone, etc. - however, some way would have to be found of morphing your body image and your native skills to fit with the character you're playing (so effectively you'd have to be "wired in" to the simulation so that your native skills were "translated" into character skills).

So then, each case that's more limiting than that - where you have particular kinds of interfaces, like m+k, controller, or whatever fancy-schmancy interfaces people develop between now and the advent of the Holodeck - will demand some kind of abstraction and explicit rules, so you know the parameters of what you're dealing with.

It's quite a condundrum, how to abstract and represent the accuracy and shooting skill of a character whose role the player is playing, when the player's native accuracy and shooting skill are of a set quantity and degree that's outside the simulation. Which I think leads some people to believe that an action game can't be an RPG, but I think that's maybe going a bit too far - you can easily work around it by notionally allowing that a certain level of accuracy is necessary for the character to be a character of that role (e.g. a skilled merc, assassin, handpicked elite soldier, etc.) and just removing character accuracy from the equation (in which case crit and damage could still be abstracted).

 

[gurugeorge]

The precursor wargames were also simulations and roleplaying games.

Roles are not what you think they are. Else Monopoly would also be a roleplaying game.

Monopoly's not being a roleplaying game has to do with it being a game played between players as players, and not between players playing roles, otherwise it would indeed be a kind of roleplaying game, and it's quite easy to think of something adjacent to Monopoly that would morph it into a roleplaying game (e.g. tighten up the rules to be a bit more representative of real business dealings, and a bit more realistic - i.e. more of a simulation, and remove the meta element from negotiations - i.e. negotiation between players would have to be via their roles, through means and methods described by simulationist rules). Then you'd have EVE Online (except EVE Online has a vast and extensive meta element too, and that's been a bone of contention since forever - e.g. when does a legitimate in-game "cheater" cross over into becoming a real world cheater?)

Again, the distinction between roleplaying in a game and just playing a game lies in the absence of the half of the term in one of those cases.

It's the combination of the different "headspace" (otherwise it's not a roleplaying game) plus simulation (otherwise it's just LARPing, as we say).

 

[BlackAdderBG]

It's quite a condundrum, how to abstract and represent the accuracy and shooting skill of a character whose role the player is playing, when the player's native accuracy and shooting skill are of a set quantity and degree that's outside the simulation. Which I think leads some people to believe that an action game can't be an RPG, but I think that's maybe going a bit too far - you can easily work around it by notionally allowing that a certain level of accuracy is necessary for the character to be a character of that role (e.g. a skilled merc, assassin, handpicked elite soldier, etc.) and just removing character accuracy from the equation (in which case crit and damage could still be abstracted).

It's something that is up to debate and you have to make judgment call on how much player's personal aim contribute to the shooting. I would say games that do that are somewhat hybrids and can be called RPG depending how much player's physical skill is part of the encounter resolution. I personally would compare games on a scale with Morrowind- RPG, Alpha Protocol/First Witcher-Hybrids and Oblivion/Dark Souls- Action games. Even if all of them invole simulating of skills with stats the degree they inluence the gameplay is different.

 

[gurugeorge]

I've just been trawling around reading peoples' thoughts on tabletop, CRPGs and stuff, and two musings have been coalescing in the cloaca of my cerebellum, FWIW:-

1) since the DM's job in the classic OSR context is basically to referee a dungeon simulation, with the rules and dice rolls representing resolutions of those aspects of the virtual/abstracted world (including the players' notional virtual bodies, capabilities, etc.) that respond to player's decisions (and more importantly, are out of players' direct control, just as the "laws" of nature as we find them irl), then in a CRPG context, simulationism in the game is basically doing the same job. If the virtual world presented in the CRPG behaves much as you'd expect a somewhat abstracted, compressed version of the real world (or real world + whatever consistent magic rules, etc.) to behave, pending your interaction with it, then that is basically all the rules you need for roleplaying (i.e. pretending to be a character in that virtual world). This is the same idea as "reactivity" as descended from Ultima 7 and carried on by Larian (the virtual world is "prepped" for any damn fool thing that it might come into someone's head to do), it's also the same thing as the "immersive sim" concept (minus the first person perspective) and it's also the same thing that Ted Peterson or whoever it was meant with Daggerfall being "the game as DM."

2) a fairly tight dungeon crawl with a goodly amount of combat makes most sense in the context of tabletop, otherwise the resource management gets too unwieldy for a bunch of friends pretending to be rangers and wizards or whatever. But a CRPG doesn't suffer from the same sorts of limitations. I was thinking about this in the context of recent commentary on BG, how it had open empty areas - some people think that's pointless, but I think that was actually one of the things that made BG a hit. What the CRPG allows, is the possibility of the game expanding from being a dungeon crawl simulator to an adventure simulator, to include part of the outside roaming, with all the immersive roses-smelling that entails (that might otherwise be handled quite perfunctorily in a traditional context, merely referred to), interaction with factions, big evils, princes, having relationships and romances, etc. (Of course this is the danger point at which games seem to be drifting away too far from their roots, bringing in unwelcome casuals with alien agendas, etc., but it's not necessarily all doom and gloom, if held in the right perspective.)

The question is how does narrative fit in? So the CRPG is an adventure simulation and kinda-sorta a game (by virtue of the necessary abstraction and simplification the simulation requires), but we also want it to have a story, to have some kind of beginning, middle and end. Again, in the toy world of the dungeon crawl, all that stuff is out of purview, fairly irrelevant - you're in there for whatever reason, to get the x, kill the y or whatnot; what gives you that goal is outside of and irrelevant to that simulation. But in the CRPG, it potentially has the wider context, so the adventure is part of your own wider virtual life, the wider life of the region, the realm, etc. And in that context, then the narrative is more like history-in-the-making. It would be a reflection of how others see the lived life you lived through (in encountering the big bad or whatever). So like history, again, it's selective and picking out certain aspects of a whole net of circumstances as particularly important (with your actions as the hero(es) being particularly salient). Point here being that from your character's point of view, it's just the life they're living, they're not conscious of it being a story. It's a story from the point of view of the notional others in the game world, and from the point of view of you as the player. Not sure where I'm going with that, but I think keeping that observation in mind ought to "guide" writers (and/or, in the not-too-distant future, the AI DM) in an appropriate way.

People don't think in terms of simulation they think in terms of story. The DM provides a story where the elements of combat/social/other skills are simulated by the RPG system in question.

That's just part of the limitation derived from context. If the simulation were extensive enough, the players could "create their own story." But to have a 3 hour fun experience in a social context, with a DM who's not a hyper-advanced quantum computer, you string the character roleplaying on a story; similarly with most CRPGs.

Again, it's the limitations and context short of full, perfect simulation that describe the various lineages and genres of "roleplaying game."

Or to put it another way, the "space" of any given RPG is (so to speak) "carved out" of full, perfect simulation, based on limitations (time/energy/computing power, etc.) and context (social/time/attention constraints, solo vs multiplayer, etc.).

 

[gurugeorge]

I've just been trawling around reading peoples' thoughts on tabletop, CRPGs and stuff, and two musings have been coalescing in the cloaca of my cerebellum, FWIW:-

1) since the DM's job in the classic OSR context is basically to referee a dungeon simulation, with the rules and dice rolls representing resolutions of those aspects of the virtual/abstracted world (including the players' notional virtual bodies, capabilities, etc.) that respond to player's decisions (and more importantly, are out of players' direct control, just as the "laws" of nature as we find them irl), then in a CRPG context, simulationism in the game is basically doing the same job. If the virtual world presented in the CRPG behaves much as you'd expect a somewhat abstracted, compressed version of the real world (or real world + whatever consistent magic rules, etc.) to behave, pending your interaction with it, then that is basically all the rules you need for roleplaying (i.e. pretending to be a character in that virtual world). This is the same idea as "reactivity" as descended from Ultima 7 and carried on by Larian (the virtual world is "prepped" for any damn fool thing that it might come into someone's head to do), it's also the same thing as the "immersive sim" concept (minus the first person perspective) and it's also the same thing that Ted Peterson or whoever it was meant with Daggerfall being "the game as DM."

2) a fairly tight dungeon crawl with a goodly amount of combat makes most sense in the context of tabletop, otherwise the resource management gets too unwieldy for a bunch of friends pretending to be rangers and wizards or whatever. But a CRPG doesn't suffer from the same sorts of limitations. I was thinking about this in the context of recent commentary on BG, how it had open empty areas - some people think that's pointless, but I think that was actually one of the things that made BG a hit. What the CRPG allows, is the possibility of the game expanding from being a dungeon crawl simulator to an adventure simulator, to include part of the outside roaming, with all the immersive roses-smelling that entails (that might otherwise be handled quite perfunctorily in a traditional context, merely referred to), interaction with factions, big evils, princes, having relationships and romances, etc. (Of course this is the danger point at which games seem to be drifting away too far from their roots, bringing in unwelcome casuals with alien agendas, etc., but it's not necessarily all doom and gloom, if held in the right perspective.)

The question is how does narrative fit in? So the CRPG is an adventure simulation and kinda-sorta a game (by virtue of the necessary abstraction and simplification the simulation requires), but we also want it to have a story, to have some kind of beginning, middle and end. Again, in the toy world of the dungeon crawl, all that stuff is out of purview, fairly irrelevant - you're in there for whatever reason, to get the x, kill the y or whatnot; what gives you that goal is outside of and irrelevant to that simulation. But in the CRPG, it potentially has the wider context, so the adventure is part of your own wider virtual life, the wider life of the region, the realm, etc. And in that context, then the narrative is more like history-in-the-making. It would be a reflection of how others see the lived life you lived through (in encountering the big bad or whatever). So like history, again, it's selective and picking out certain aspects of a whole net of circumstances as particularly important (with your actions as the hero(es) being particularly salient). Point here being that from your character's point of view, it's just the life they're living, they're not conscious of it being a story. It's a story from the point of view of the notional others in the game world, and from the point of view of you as the player. Not sure where I'm going with that, but I think keeping that observation in mind ought to "guide" writers (and/or, in the not-too-distant future, the AI DM) in an appropriate way.

Why did you refer to your brain as a cloaca?

It's a self-deprecating joke, I'm British

 

[gurugeorge]

in all cases you're pretending to be someone in that virtual world

Do people actually do that? That's a costume quest IMO; I have never played a roleplaying game where I pretended to be someone [personally] in that virtual world.

*The operative word being some—one. Do you mean acting out a personality or a profession? IE. playing oneself as a wizard, or playing Gandalf the wizard? For me the whole point of roleplaying is to extrapolate the character role of somebody else, not to play a list of abilities (if that's what's meant).

I'm using "pretending" in a very general sense, I don't mean you have to put a gaily coloured-costume with ruffles on if you're playing a Bard The "pretending" just means: your decisions are constrained by the nature, abilities, social role, etc., of the character you're playing, and are limited to being based on that character's notional knowledge of the virtual world. You "inhabit" that role, you pretend to be that character, in that world, and the fact that what you really are is part of a small social circle in a house in Alabama or some chump sitting in a Herman Miller Aeron starting at a screen and filddling with gadgets - those are "bracketed," temporarily set aside.

It's an exercise of the imagination, and to some extent, as others have said, a form of escapism.

 

[Stormcrowfleet]

The precursor wargames were also simulations and roleplaying games.

Roles are not what you think they are. Else Monopoly would also be a roleplaying game.

Monopoly's not being a roleplaying game has to do with it being a game played between players as players, and not between players playing roles, otherwise it would indeed be a kind of roleplaying game, and it's quite easy to think of something adjacent to Monopoly that would morph it into a roleplaying game (e.g. tighten up the rules to be a bit more representative of real business dealings, and a bit more realistic - i.e. more of a simulation, and remove the meta element from negotiations - i.e. negotiation between players would have to be via their roles, through means and methods described by simulationist rules). Then you'd have EVE Online (except EVE Online has a vast and extensive meta element too, and that's been a bone of contention since forever - e.g. when does a legitimate in-game "cheater" cross over into becoming a real world cheater?)

Again, the distinction between roleplaying in a game and just playing a game lies in the absence of the half of the term in one of those cases.

It's the combination of the different "headspace" (otherwise it's not a roleplaying game) plus simulation (otherwise it's just LARPing, as we say).

I think the headspace/context is important. I remember playing RP version of Age of Empires 2 with friends. We'd play an actual "role", build our civ accordingly, create roads, trade, etc. all with roleplay. In other words, is Monopoly an RPG? No. But within the right 'context', the mechanics of Monopoly could be framed to be an RPG.

 

[HappyDaddyWow!]

deceptively simple answer to an autistically convoluted question: if you play Mario 64, you are playing the role of Mario. But this isn't really "roleplaying" because this is a role enforced on you and without much choice in the matter, it's not like you can pick Luigi for a +5 dex bonus to jumping. An RPG is just a game where the player is given open-ended freedom to fulfill a role in a game world.

And before anyone gets nitpicky, as controversial as it is to say yes I don't consider games like The Witcher or Final Fantasy to be proper role-playing games because of the previous distinction.

You are describing something that I would call Larping not Roleplaying. Also the main mechanics of a game determine the genre ascribed to it. Even if Luigi had +5 bonus to jumping in Mario 64, the main mechanic of the game is traversing the terrain thru jumping that is done by the player makes it not an RPG, but a platformer.

First Witcher and most Final Fantasy games are RPGs.

If you're playing as a predetermined character with a set personality, goals, abilities, etc it's not a role-playing game. Role-playing implies player agency. If your only definition for RPG is stat-based gameplay and character progression, then technically call of duty is an RPG.

I'm sure there's some branching paths in The Witcher games but it doesn't change the fact that you're playing as Geralt and confined to how he would behave and what abilities he has. I like Final Fantasy 7 but it's a linear game and story with no major choices beyond what materia each character uses. In both examples I'm not roleplaying.

 

[Glop_dweller]

A roleplaying game is not impaired by providing a character role. Planescape comes first to mind, as it is the best RPG that I am aware of.
An original user generated PC is not required as the mechanics of an RPG are unchanged whether or not the PC is an original player character or one provided by the developer; one simply plays the role.
It's certainly fun to create one's own, but in fact the developer PCs allow for far greater tailoring of the game to the known personality; especially where backstory (training, life experience, and past acquaintances) are concerned.

 

[Butter]

Rogue, Wizardry IV, and Ultima VII all lack character creation. Anyone who's arguing that they aren't RPGs is not a serious person.

 

[HappyDaddyWow!]

A roleplaying game is not impaired by providing a character role. Planescape comes first to mind, as it is the best RPG that I am aware of.
An original user generated PC is not required as the mechanics of an RPG are unchanged whether or not the PC is an original player character or one provided by the developer; one simply plays the role.
It's certainly fun to create one's own, but in fact the developer PCs allow for far greater tailoring of the game to the known personality; especially where backstory (training, life experience, and past acquaintances) are concerned.

Planescape and Disco Elysium skirt around this distinction by very purposefully having an amnesia subplot where the main characters know nothing about their past or even much about themselves, and the player is left to decide how they behave and what decisions they make through out the game. This allows you to roleplay in the absence of proper character customization.

Rogue, Wizardry IV, and Ultima VII all lack character creation. Anyone who's arguing that they aren't RPGs is not a serious person.

The Avatar in the Ultima games is just a blank slate for the player to project themselves on. From what I remember his actual name isn't even revealed. And especially in the earlier Ultima games, you can just abandon all the paragon of virtue stuff and slaughter innocent townsfolk if you really wanted.

Going back to the Final Fantasy example, in FF7 you play as Cloud Strife. Cloud Strife has an established personality, background, and relationships. You cannot make any meaningful dialogue decisions as him. Your actions as the player don't significantly change his personality or role in the world. The storyline is linear and doesn't have any player choice. There's no roleplaying, you're just proceeding through a series of scripted segments with turn-based combat in between. If FF7 is an RPG, so is Call of Duty.

 

[Butter]

The Avatar in the Ultima games is just a blank slate for the player to project themselves on. From what I remember his actual name isn't even revealed. And especially in the earlier Ultima games, you can just abandon all the paragon of virtue stuff and slaughter innocent townsfolk if you really wanted.

Going back to the Final Fantasy example, in FF7 you play as Cloud Strife. Cloud Strife has an established personality, background, and relationships. You cannot make any meaningful dialogue decisions as him. Your actions as the player don't significantly change his personality or role in the world. The storyline is linear and doesn't have any player choice. There's no roleplaying, you're just proceeding through a series of scripted segments with turn-based combat in between. If FF7 is an RPG, so is Call of Duty.

Where's the roleplaying in Eye of the Beholder or Wizardry? Are those not RPGs? Your standard is simply untenable. RPGs are games in which you do "RPG things", like killing monsters, finding loot, and leveling up. That's why Final Fantasy 7 is an RPG and Call of Duty isn't.

 

[gurugeorge]

Abstraction is the substitute for actual simulation due to the limited capabilities of hardware and/or software

Not really anymore.

We already have the technology to make simulations with computer games. I'd argue the more an RPG leans towards simulation, the less of an RPG it becomes, because it's trying to simulate something instead of being a game, with its own rules. You can see this trend in Bethesda games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 actually. This isn't all or nothing in CRPGs though. But an RPG does intentional use abstract rules over simulation for player character skill expression, which is at the very core of what it is.

A simulation is something "with its own rules." The logic of rules in an RPG (including the logic of character skills) derives from its nature as a simulation (albeit in the tabletop and CRPG context, variously abstracted and simplified simulation).

Even the game aspect does, because everything about the game that's related to contention and challenge, the use of intelligence to solve problems, or the possibility of winning or losing, is derived from the simulated world being a hard reality that the player (character) bumps up against.

Again, as with the analogy of alternative geometries and number systems, there are a bazillion possible rule systems out there in possibility space, and many of them are turned into games, but only one subset of those possible rule systems - those that describe, more or less abstractly, more or less explicitly or simply, a virtual world in which the player plays a role in that virtual world, are properly called "RPGs" or "CRPGs." Everything either gamey or story-like derives (or I should say, is best derived) from that, not the other way round.

Yeah I agree with this. A "CRPG" where you can't actually get immersed and roleplay is only a tactical game.

The precursor wargames were also simulations and roleplaying games. Think of it this way: if you're playing Guderian or Alexander or whatever in a campaign, if it weren't a simulation, then there would be no meaning to the idea of "what if it happened differently, what if Alexander had done this instead, how would it have turned out?" For different outcomes to be possible, the thing you're acting and making choices "inside of" (so to speak) has to be the simulation of a world with its own rigid natural laws and rules.

I think some people are mixing up simulation with the "sim" genre. Like say a flight sim - a flight sim is not definitionally an RPG, for you are not (at least not typically - it's possible you might get immersed enough) playing a pilot in the virtual world, typically you're playing as yourself flying a virtual plane in a videogame, and even if there are gamey elements (like moving up a notional professional ladder) that will typically be just you the player "beating the game," it's a meta stance, not an immersed stance. (I know this goes a bit against the thread title I made, but it was kind of throwaway.)

It comes down to this: for roleplaying to be possible at all, it has to be roleplaying within a simulated, virtual/counterfactual world. You can't just "pretend to be a character" tout court, you can pretend to be a character only in a virtual world, with its own funny little ways. It's like two halves of a split boiled egg, each matches perfectly the other.

I think that for rpgs as a genre we must insist on abstraction, at a minimum for the player charcter. A system where you have good and bad skills. But I agree that those skills could be represented through either simulation or abstraction, like in Deus Ex weapon sway system or Morrowind roll to hit behind the scenes when you swing.

Immersion I think should be its own quality. And to qualify it with becoming immersed in the world as well, like one do when playing Morrowind. But I'm with you, I don't enjoy rpgs where you only play an avatar and can't truly play a role. As far as I'm concerned they are all blobbers, and that's not a compliment. Where do place games with fixed protagonist?

Yeah that's an interesting grey area. If the protagonist has too much of an already established backstory, then it gets a bit dubious - but I suppose if your "story" is free to create going forward from the point you join the game, and the backstory isn't hard-limiting too many choices, then it's still an RPG. The way Twitcher did it seemed pretty okay - you started with "Geralt skills" to a certain level, but you were free to develop in an RPG fashion from there, in several possible ways (e.g. more tanky power hitter vs. more agile fast hitter).

Re. the weapon sway reference - that's another interesting area where the type of interface intersects with all the stuff we've been talking about. Like for example, theoretically you could have a true RPG in the Holodeck, in which case your engagement with the game is full-spectrum, full-body, both hands with five fingers, feet, muscle, bone, etc. - however, some way would have to be found of morphing your body image and your native skills to fit with the character you're playing (so effectively you'd have to be "wired in" to the simulation so that your native skills were "translated" into character skills).

So then, each case that's more limiting than that - where you have particular kinds of interfaces, like m+k, controller, or whatever fancy-schmancy interfaces people develop between now and the advent of the Holodeck - will demand some kind of abstraction and explicit rules, so you know the parameters of what you're dealing with.

It's quite a condundrum, how to abstract and represent the accuracy and shooting skill of a character whose role the player is playing, when the player's native accuracy and shooting skill are of a set quantity and degree that's outside the simulation. Which I think leads some people to believe that an action game can't be an RPG, but I think that's maybe going a bit too far - you can easily work around it by notionally allowing that a certain level of accuracy is necessary for the character to be a character of that role (e.g. a skilled merc, assassin, handpicked elite soldier, etc.) and just removing character accuracy from the equation (in which case crit and damage could still be abstracted).

Just a bit further on that last - it occurred to me that in the RPG-action context, you could actually have an in-game official testing scenario where your average twitch accuracy as a player is measured, like in an in-game target shooting scenario, and then that's set as the accuracy of your character, and then the engine would determine hits by that accuracy. So it would be like a Morrowind scenario, but it would fit you like a glove because that would actually be your accuracy as a player, so it wouldn't feel "off." Maybe players who have really high twitch skills would notice and feel the difference, but I bet you to most players it would feel ok. I mean, if people can happily shoot using aiming help, then it's not much different, just in reverse.

I suppose the only problem there is that there could be no progression - but on the other hand, isn't it the case that if we play for a while, we do in fact get a bit more accurate? Maybe the game could surreptitiously keep measuring your target accuracy, and if it did increase slightly, a level-up would "award" you with higher acc

 

[Glop_dweller]

...

Planescape and Disco Elysium skirt around this distinction by very purposefully having an amnesia subplot where the main characters know nothing about their past or even much about themselves, and the player is left to decide how they behave and what decisions they make through out the game. This allows you to roleplay in the absence of proper character customization.

In Planescape the Nameless is a 25th level character in every available class—but an amnesiac. In the Witcher 1 it is similar; unfortunately. Nameless' condition of losing himself (a bit) with each physical death seems fitting to the setting, and gives the mechanics of plausibly picking it all up again (very quickly) in each trained class. I was not happy about him not being a multi class character though.

Still... I'd say that one can make a one act RPG where the player simply plays the role without advancement of any kind; they roleplay the PC in the given situations, and the PC reacts to the events in the way that they would, and are able.

The RPG Unrest is —somewhat— like this. You start the game as a young girl being forced into an arranged wedding. You do not become a demigod in two weeks of epic adventure... you switch characters to a non-human diplomat in a dicey negotiation with potentially dire consequences.