21
votes
What's an RPG? (video game)
like how is it different from other games ? what makes a game an RPG game? I never really understood
like how is it different from other games ? what makes a game an RPG game? I never really understood
Originally, an RPG was any videogame trying to simulate/copy a tabletop RPG.
From there, it started meaning "any videogame similar to RPG-simulating videogames". In particular, any game that 1) is primarily about managing character skill growth instead of you playing as that character and your performance being measured by your own skill, and 2) tries to have a particular emphasis on story,possibly which gives the player choices on where the story goes (like in a tabletop RPG)
And from there it sort of lost any coherent meaning - an RPG is what an RPG is. It's a fuzzy "I know it when I see it" thing.
Mostly though, when I see it I assume someone wrote a list of 'videogame genres' 30 years ago, and simply hasn't bothered to update it since. Much like when I see "action" and "adventure" categories. You're confused because you're trying to make sense of something senseless.
I always interpreted it by its "literal" meaning: any game that lets me roleplay
But I admit even then, it's still murky, because technically there are many games that let you roleplay and no one would necessarily call them RPG's, even me. E.g. F1 2025, where I like to play career mode and pretend I'm a new and promising driver. I am roleplaying, but I wouldn't call this game an RPG.
This is a complete red herring though and it's one of the sources of these sometimes highly explosive debates on what RPG even means. It's a holdover from tabletop RPGs, but even there some games focus almost exclusively on the roleplaying itself and others put a lot of focus on complex gameplay systems - character stats, fighting systems, magic systems and many others. Most of the OG tabletops were closer to the latter, the former only came later.
And most of the early attempts to transfer tabletop RPGs into videogames, establishing the videogame RPG genre, focused on the systems, because that's what was easily doable and actually brought some improvements to the formula (being faster and managing the complexity for the player), not on the roleplaying. You pretty much had roguelikes, dungeon crawlers and some open-world RPGs like Ultima, which were the only ones to feature some actual role-playing systems (virtues and alignment), and that was iirc only in Ultima IV.
Since then (and even just 10 - 15 years after the first games) the genre has expanded greatly, but the core of RPGs were always the systems and not roleplaying itself, and that applies today as well.
I see where you’re coming from, but I think anchoring RPGs to those old definitions just doesn’t hold up anymore. Yeah, those early games ran with stat-heavy systems from tabletop because that’s what computers could actually do. But fast-forward to now: tons of RPGs toss stats out the window and focus on player choice, role immersion, and branching stories. Think of games where you barely see stats, like Mass Effect; where they are interwoven into the narrative, like Disco Elysium; or games where stats barely matter or don't exist, like Pentiment; yet everyone calls them RPGs.
Genres evolve. At this point I think that "RPG genre definition" is a can of worms and always will be, not only because of the evolution itself but also thanks to its own (non-helpful) name "Role Playing Game".
But honestly, I don’t even care about nailing the “right” definition (if that’s even possible). At the end of the day, like PuddleOfKittens said, RPG really is one of those “you know it when you see it” genres, blurry edges and all, which is why these debates will never actually get resolved. And I’m fine with everyone bringing their own take.
Not really imo.
Fair point, though it is not stat-less, it does have many of the systems including resource management and item management, only simplified, and it is sometimes, imo accurately, called a third person shooter with RPG elements (surprisingly this is what Wikipedia says).
There has been a lot of discussion in enthusiast circles about whether Disco Elysium can still be called an RPG or not. Saying that it's not is a bit extreme, but I think a non-controversial consensus is that it is clearly an edge case.
I don't know this game, but none of its Steam tags say RPG.
I agree with this. But I think that focusing on role playing itself is clearly incorrect because it excludes not only games that defined the genre but also many RPGs that are still coming out now, and it includes some visual novels that almost nobody calls RPGs. Whereas when you focus on stats and leveling and other systems ("RPG elements"), with a wide net (not needing to have all of them in depth) you still catch even most of today's edge cases, so while the definition does not describe the depth of the genre as it currently is either, it at least does cover most of the games.
By this definition alone, couldn't one argue that almost every game is a RPG as well? F1 has stats. Football manager has stats. GTA 5 has stats. FIFA. Call of Duty. XCOM. Total War. Need for Speed. And so on and so on.
I don't think so because those are all primarily different genres - their features associated to other genres are much stronger than their features associated to RPGs. They also have so few systems specifically associated to RPGs that we could still draw a line between them and Mass Effect with relative ease I think, maybe with the exception of XCOM - there is kind of a sliding scale between party based RPGs, tactical turn based games and some strategy games based mostly on tactical turn based party combat. When San Andreas came out (iirc the one that introduced character stats that could be levelled and put the most focus on them), reviewers said it "added some RPG elements", which seems descriptive enough.
Exactly, you had to introduce that "primary genre" filter to keep games like FIFA and XCOM out of the RPG category. But that filter relies on the same kind of judgment calls you found problematic with my role-playing approach.
I see where you are coming from when you say systems-based criteria might be more practical than role-playing for boundary-drawing. But when you say XCOM’s “features associated to other genres are much stronger,” or that we can distinguish Mass Effect from FIFA “with relative ease,” those are still subjective determinations, aren’t they?
Once genres cross-pollinate, old definitions start to break. Mass Effect forces a call about what counts as primary: the combat loop, or the progression and dialogue gates. Disco Elysium shows that role immersion and narrative agency can outweigh visible stat sheets for many players. Meanwhile, XCOM and GTA: San Andreas have real progression systems, yet most people still won’t call them RPGs because the core loop “feels” tactical or sandbox rather than role-driven. That’s community salience, not an objective threshold.
To keep hybrids from flooding the category, your approach adds more filters: “with RPG elements,” “edge case,” “primarily a shooter”; which is the same fuzzy boundary-policing you criticized in the role-playing lens. Different landmarks, same kind of judgment calls.
So, yes, systems-first is often a more practical heuristic than pure role-play, especially for older CRPGs. But that definition worked best when progression systems were rare outside RPGs. Today, with skill trees, inventories, stats, etc everywhere, it runs into the same problems as mine: subjective thresholds, case-by-case exceptions, and a reliance on “I know it when I see it.” In the end, both frames describe a cluster rather than a fence. And in the modern landscape, your definition has many edge-case headaches and will keep having more as more games come out, because the games are evolving but the definition is not
I didn't have to, it just makes it easier. I don't want to spend the time specifying all the common RPG systems, but I already specified that it's not just evolving character stats, I mentioned inventory management and resource management. If, as a start, we look at the systems in early D&D edit: part of this sentence fell out for some reason, the ending was something like "than that filters out most of the "uses stats" examples like FIFA or Football Manager".
I don't understand. My argument is that saying specifically "RPGs are games that focus on role-playing" is a bad idea because it doesn't cover many RPGs including foundational ones and does cover some non-RPGs. I don't think my argument applies to other genre definitions or extrapolates in general.
I'm not saying that genre definitions in general can be defined exactly, I'm saying that focusing on systems withing the definition of an RPG covers the actual games with fewer false negatives and false positives than focusing on role playing. I think what I already wrote does either explicitly state or implies that imprecision and some necessity to do subjective judgment calls exist, yes. That has nothing to do with the fact that one description can be more precise than the other.
This implies that there is a correct list of RPG games, my point is that there isn't.
If we're both acknowledging that genre boundaries require subjective judgment calls and community consensus, then "false positive" and "false negative" don't really apply, there's no objective ground truth to be more or less accurate against. Your systems-based approach might align better with how RPGs developed historically, and mine might capture how many players like myself experience them today, but neither can claim to be more "correct."
I think we're probably not going to bridge this gap, but it's been an interesting discussion mate 👍
It is murky, yeah. Regarding this, I'm always thinking about Space Station 13, a game which is quite literally about role-playing, but shares fairly little with anything under the RPG name regarding its gameplay loop.
RPG is one of those hold overs from the time when games were far less complex. Mecanically restrictive and extremely linear. RPGs were classified as games with blank slate characters that you play to fill a specific role. And the best way to differentiate roles when there was strict limitations story and personality, is combat. Stats, gear, powers, perks, classes. But most times the class and gear you chose would not play a part in the progression of the story.
The most notable evolution that I remember is Fallout. Where the characters behaviour and charisma plays a big part on what opportunities and outcomes the players gets and your options are tied directly to you combat capabilities.
Over time RPG elements started to creep into other genres where loadouts and classes allowed players to differentiate a playstyle. Arcade shooters became loadout based. Sports games started letting you create players with custom stats. Immersive sims gave you a character with a broadly defined role that you specialize as you discover a style.
Currently RPGs are in a definitional swamp. Theres the gear farming RPGs like Diablo, Destiny and Path of Excile where you grind for itwms across complex systems of challenges and activities. Theres the character driven games like Witcher, Mass Effect or Horizon where you manage the fighting style of a defined character through mostly linear stories. DnD style games like Baulders Gate, where it's a mix of story and gear choices. Full story games like Telltales Walking Dead (Edit: for some reason i had Last of Us) and Life is Strange where its all about character choices and its impact on a grand narrative. Combat focused games like Elden Ring where gear/class is a factor but it's more about mechanical mastery.
The lable of RPG is in a place of "you know it when you see it". Single player CoD has RPG elements occasionally but it's clearly not RPG. Procedurally generated games lean heavily about character/gear loadoits but are most often not RPGs.
What everyone said, but there's also Japanese RPGs in which you control a team of already named characters, with characters' personality and backstory and the main story mostly set in stone. You basically go through the game loop and challenges on a linear path in an interactive novel. Final Fantasy, Tales Of ---, Legend of Mana etc. It's different from other interactive novel type games (like say Phoenix Wright) because it's usually in a fantasy setting, there's some level grinding, with warrior mage cleric archer types, and battle monsters until you battle the Big Bad.
These are very different from the original tabletop RPG (think Dungeons and Dragons) where you roleplay as a unique and new character with your choice of backstory and actions to take, but JRPGs are still called such for historical reasons, to distinguish between JRPGs and arcade types of games like driving shooting fishing puzzle Zelda-like etc. See also kinship with
strictly speaking, the closest genre to tabletop RPGs is actuallythe dating sim genre of games, where you roleplay as a (usually) male protagonist who chooses character development beats and chooses which girls to talk to / date. But dating sims are not called RPGs because they lack the fantasy setting grind, set classes, monsters big bad mechanics.The closest genre to tabletop RPGs is certainly CRPGs -- 'Computer RPGs"; the name is a holdover from when computer games were completely new -- games like Disco Elysium, Planescape Torment, Pillars of Eternity, Baldur's Gate, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Warhammer: Rogue Trader all aim to capture the full experience of a tabletop RPG, including buildcrafting, role-playing and branching narratives. The CRPG genre probably has the strongest writing of any game genre, apart from maybe visual novels. But the games also tend to be a little slow, thorny, and inaccessible.
There's this one dating sim I played years back called Boyfriend Dungeon that incorporated dungeons, mobbing, grinding, and buildcrafting but I still don't think it was experientally very similar to a TTRPG at all. In contrast, the Immersive Sim genre feels more like a TTRPG to me, despite very different mechanical identities, because of the emphasis on branching narrative, player choice, and emergent systemic gameplay with an almost natural-language quality.
Saw your comment and Boojum 's, just learned about CRPG, amended my post. Dating sims are not closest but akin in narrative delivery and choice mechanics and micro stat gains influencing options being revealed.
RPGs are Role Playing Games. It's a somewhat loosely defined genre of games where you as the player are given a role in a story to play out.
I'd say RPGs usually have strong coupling between story and gameplay. You might be able to make choices, or influence the world around you and it'll react accordingly.
There's also usually gameplay elements associated with D&D, like skills or other progression systems. Things that further define the character you play. A game like Skyrim let's you lean into various different archetypes; like a thief, warrior, mage or anything in between.
This question reminded me of The CRPG Book (which criminally doesn't seem to have had a topic here of it's own, so I've now made one.)
Anyway, the editor of that project recently posted a very long blog post, "How to define RPGs and CRPGs? And why the title of my book doesn’t make sense anymore :(", which nerds out on exactly this question.
When it comes to video game RPGs, aside from what everyone has already said about it being very much a "you know it when you see it" kind of thing, there are a general few guidelines that a video game RPG adheres to:
A notable emphasis on the narrative/story and how your character influences/is influenced by the events that unfold. Your character/party should be having a real impact on what's happening story-wise, and should also be going through emotional or growth arcs throughout. Even in games where you can create your own character, they should still feel like they have a real place and emotional stake in the setting.
A leveling system with skill choices that allow you some freedom in how you want your character(s) to engage in combat and/or non-combat skill checks, such as dialogue or bypassing obstacles that require a specific skillset. Many other game genres have co-opted skill trees from RPGs but usually purely for combat and not for interaction with the world at large.
Story-gated progression that limits you from skipping important events or going straight to areas you're not meant to be in yet that are likely beyond you or your party's current level. This ensures that you actually experience the full story, or at least enough of it for it to make sense. Open world RPGs like the Bethesda Fallouts and the Switch Legend of Zelda games do ignore this to a degree and sometimes reward players that are up to the challenge, but more often than not you're blocked off and bypassing these gates through not intended means like glitching out of bounds doesn't count.
Or if we're going by a real simple vibes explanation of it, everybody plays generally the same story, maybe with a couple different branching points and endings, but they get to customize their character(s) on how they get through said story.
RPGs put players in the shoes of characters and give them a great degree of freedom in deciding in how to approach problems. Traditionally, role playing games ensure that these choices are grounded in the characters and the world through the use of systems, a game master and an element of random chance.
Systems govern things like how dexterity affects a character's ability to dodge a blow, how much light a light source provides, how a character's intelligence affects their ability to comprehend information, how much a piece of armor protects you, how fast you can move, how the character learns new skills etc. The game master essentially decides what the world is, what's in it and what happens as the player characters interact with it and narrates it to the players, and takes on multiple roles of non-player characters in the game. The element of random chance ensures that neither the game master nor the players are in complete control of the outcomes of player choices. A player bad at throwing things can throw a knife with the likely outcome of failing but still succeeding by chance.
The systems also typically ensure that player characters can develop and change over time, and the players have to adapt their play styles to accommodate this, but typically also has a great degree of freedom in how a character changes: what weapons and armor they use, what skills they should develop and so on. The players themselves are responsible for maintaining the non-systemic aspects of the character's development: their personality, how they should react to the world and so on.
When these concepts eventually became the subject of single-player computer games some changes were necessary. First of all, the game master had to go and be replaced by more systems and random chance. Especially early on, the degree of freedom and level of narration of traditional RPGs was limited by relatively meager computer resources. Where you could ask a good game master to describe anything or make an unconventional but valid use of a skill in a traditional RPG, you were now limited to predefined interactions and overtly fixed, simple and terse narratives and descriptions, and simplified interactions with non-player characters.
If your character was a kind of wizard or conjurer, in a traditional RPG they could for example use magic to create an explosive blast, and use that to cause a cave-in to block off a corridor, extinguish torches, turn water into steam, intimidate a non-player character or whatever they could think of that the game master agreed was a realistic application of the skill, but in early computer RPGs the use of that kind of magic might instead have been limited to just being used as a direct attack against an enemy.
This improved as computers got more powerful and the techniques to design narratives and systems that more closely approached the flexibility and freedom of traditional RPGs were developed. Visual art and animation could do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to descriptions. Narratives and changes in the narratives could be supported by a lot of text, video and voice acting. Useful abstractions that allow a great deal of interaction between different objects and characters were developed.
Second, making everything a system allowed for an entirely different mode of play. Computers can roll millions of dice in a second and resolve the systems checks without player interaction, so RPGs played out in real time were now an option.
It turns out that simpler approaches to computer RPGs are interesting enough in their own right to survive to this day, and that maybe there's a sweet spot between interactivity and narrative that is appealing to a wider audience. So right now there are a lot of different concepts of what an RPG and especially computer RPG is and what it should aspire to be.