Action/Adventure or RPG? What's the difference?

[Ffordesoon]

@Mcmanusaur:

 

I didn't say The Sims was the perfect Simulationist RPG. My point was that it could be considered an example of a true "Simulationist RPG," at least provisionally.

 

If I were to look at it as a Simulationist RPG, I would call it heavily flawed, if for no other reason than the fact that it is impossible to play as a truly despicable character. Sure, you can play as a heavily sanitized version of a vampire or a burglar, but there is an ethical boundary implicit in the choice of actions presented to the player. There are mods which give the player some more power in that regard, but there's not, for example, a human trafficking mod.

 

Which is fine, as it is ultimately intended as a family-friendly simulation of everyday life rather than as an RPG. Its RPGness is accidental. My real point (which I failed to elucidate in my previous post, due to being in a tired haze) was that a true Simulationist RPG of the sort you describe would do well to take as many lessons from The Sims as from Fallout or the IE titles.

 

As for your worry about the lack of a definite setting, I can see your point, but Sims 3 in particular actually does a pretty good job with that. Its accidental-RPG status prcludes the sort of solid world-building you see in, say, Torment, but there are plenty of defined locations peopled with all manner of randomly generated Sims. You can go to the library and hit on the movie star who lives three doors down from you, then go back to her place, for example, or go to a house party and mingle. Neither of which indicates the setting is particularly believable, I admit, but again, accidental RPG.

 

You might also find Space Rangers 2 worth a play, while I'm recommending things. Its generic name is a turnoff, and the graphics are kind of meh, but it is an inspired piece of Russian lunacy that defies genre classification. There is a real-time strategy game in there, and a space sim, and a text adventure, and an RPG, and a turn-based strategy game, and a third-person shooter, and and and. I believe them what made King's Bounty did Space Rangers first, and SR is by far the more ambitious game (SR2 is actually a remake of the first one, so it's not necessary to play the first, um, first). Kind of broken, but really interesting nonetheless.

 

Ultma VII, Divine Divinity, and the upcoming Divinity: Original Sin also carry the Simulationist torch to an extent, as does Darklands. You probably know about all of those already, but I feel I should mention them anyway. Oh, and Fable II had some intriguing - if half-formed - Simulationist elements. They all do the hero's-journey bit to some extent, and Fable II is basically nothing but ego-stroking, but they're interesting games to study.

 

Unrest also popped up on my radar just today, and it strikes me as intensely fascinating, if not necessarily your particular cup of tea. Certainly, the heavy focus on non-combat mechanics and the player characters who are simply a part of the setting rather than being Epic Hroes Of Destiny sounds like it might scratch an itch or two of yours. It scratches the hell out of mine.

[JFSOCC]

How about minecraft? Everything you do there is your decision. It's lots of agency, if not reactivity.

[mcmanusaur]

How about minecraft? Everything you do there is your decision. It's lots of agency, if not reactivity.

 

Sadly enough I've spent a fair share of time on Minecraft attempting to tailor it to an RPG, and while it has some positive characteristics, there are definitely a few disadvantages as well. One, the character of the setting is childish and generally terrible (ex. Villagers, Nether dimension, Ender dimension)- and all of the effort the development team puts into such features is wasted. Two, many of the so-called "RPG elements" of Minecraft are rather poorly implemented (leveling, alchemy, etc.), and don't provide a satisfying gameplay experience to someone who has played legitimate RPGs. Three, the world is bare and empty save for the occasional procedurally-generated structure, and thus there's no sense of immersion in a larger world or society (you have to work really, really hard to get anywhere close to this even on a custom map). This in turn hinders the reactivity as you point out, even if there's an immense amount of freedom. I've given up MC, but if you could have all the sandbox aspects together with a properly designed world/setting and legitimate gameplay mechanics (and slightly better graphics I would optimistically hope), that wouldn't be too bad in my opinion.

[JFSOCC]

you're telling someone who has discovered minecraft last week and has been totally addicted to it, how crap it is. I have to disagree. it's very immersive, the nether is scary, you make your own challenges (quest) you have total decision power what you'll do next. And it's constantly getting updates with new features.

Edited May 30, 2013 by JFSOCC

[mcmanusaur]

you're telling someone who has discovered minecraft last week and has been totally addicted to it, how crap it is. I have to disagree. it's very immersive, the nether is scary, you make your own challenges (quest) you have total decision power what you'll do next. And it's constantly getting updates with new features.

 

Lol, then wait and come back after you've played it for two years... Nah, but it's good at being a more or less "pure" sandbox game; I just find its stated "RPG elements" to be a bit underwhelming. That and most of the new features added are slightly watered down versions of popular mods, which have yet to be properly supported by the developer. I have spent far too much time playing it to call it crap, but at some point you become eager for something more.

Edited May 30, 2013 by mcmanusaur

[Lephys]

I never really even got started on Minecraft. It's too... Sims-y to me, but without even the Sims progression and such. It feels like too technical of a game. Like most of the focus is just on sandbox for the sake of sandbox.

 

Granted, I've never actually PLAYED it, so I reserve full and complete judgement on it for such an occasion. However, I am currently rather enjoying Terraria. It's still sandboxy, with the focus mainly on exploration, progression, and pure gameplay... er... action, for lack of a better word.

 

But, yeah, if you've never played Terraria, and just for extra context on this particular topic, I highly recommend it. I started getting a little bored with it when I had done almost everything there was to do in the first "half" of the game. I had one boss left to tackle (The Keeper of the Underworld), and I finally tackled that boss, which queues "hardmode" (which is ill-named, since it makes it sound more like a difficulty, when it's more like the 2nd tier of gameplay that washes over the world). Now, I'm pretty hooked again. Of course, I'm playing on Difficult instead of Normal, so I drop all my stuff every time I die, and things in hardmode are QUITE THREATENING. 8P

 

I digress.

[mcmanusaur]

I'm not intending to plug anything, as I just stumbled upon this today, but this seems to hit on a lot of the things discussed in this thread (and has some similarities to Minecraft in terms of being voxel-based and procedurally generated). That said I'm a bit skeptical about their answer to the "narrative vs. freedom" question and unfortunately the general character of the game seems a bit juvenile. Even so it's reassuring to see some developers taking the risks of infusing sandbox and RPG elements, even if we have yet to see this is in a convincingly mature context.

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nerdkingdom/tug-1

 

I guess it ultimately begs the need to distinguish between what might be called "empty" or true sandboxes a la Minecraft/Terraria and clones (where the emphasis is on the PC forging new civilization in a more or less empty and usually procedurally generated world) and "full"/"social" sandbox games (which still allow roughly the same degree of interactivity but there is a functioning society that exists before the PCs arrive). And then both of those could in turn be contrasted with open world games like TES or to a lesser extent GTA, which don't have too much interactive dynamism. It is the setting and context that the former empty kind of sandbox games lack to me, and which I think could work as a substitute for the traditional story-based narrative. I guess ideally what I'm looking for is not strictly a "story" or a "sandbox", but a "situation".

Edited May 30, 2013 by mcmanusaur

[JFSOCC]

 

you're telling someone who has discovered minecraft last week and has been totally addicted to it, how crap it is. I have to disagree. it's very immersive, the nether is scary, you make your own challenges (quest) you have total decision power what you'll do next. And it's constantly getting updates with new features.

 

Lol, then wait and come back after you've played it for two years...

 

I have spent far too much time playing it to call it crap, but at some point you become eager for something more.

2 years is a lot of value for money TBH I don't expect to be playing Project Eternity for that long.

[mcmanusaur]

 

 

you're telling someone who has discovered minecraft last week and has been totally addicted to it, how crap it is. I have to disagree. it's very immersive, the nether is scary, you make your own challenges (quest) you have total decision power what you'll do next. And it's constantly getting updates with new features.

 

Lol, then wait and come back after you've played it for two years...

 

I have spent far too much time playing it to call it crap, but at some point you become eager for something more.

2 years is a lot of value for money TBH I don't expect to be playing Project Eternity for that long.

 

 

Fair enough. As I said there's little arguing that Minecraft is pretty good at what it was originally meant to be, but for me the "RPG elements" are lacking or a bit out of place at best.

[JFSOCC]

I never really even got started on Minecraft. It's too... Sims-y to me, but without even the Sims progression and such. It feels like too technical of a game. Like most of the focus is just on sandbox for the sake of sandbox.

 

Granted, I've never actually PLAYED it, so I reserve full and complete judgement on it for such an occasion. However, I am currently rather enjoying Terraria. It's still sandboxy, with the focus mainly on exploration, progression, and pure gameplay... er... action, for lack of a better word.

Minecraft is 3d Terraria, which also a cool game.

I tend to play these games intensively for a while and then not ever touch them again.

[Lephys]

Minecraft is 3d Terraria, which also a cool game.

I tend to play these games intensively for a while and then not ever touch them again.

Yeah... just, something about the simple shift of the almost-the-same gameplay into 3D rather than having it in 2D seems to drastically affect the technicality-to-gameplay ratio. I mean, in Terraria, I can only spend SO MUCH effort and focus on creatively (and almost arbitrarily) designing and building things. Whereas, in Minecraft, I'd have to worry about 90% more space, just to build a basic house.

 

Even though Terraria still lacks the real hard-hitting RPG elements of whence McManusaur speaks, it's interesting to me the effects of the sandboxy creativity sort of taking a step out of the spotlight in Terraria.

 

Not to mention the 16-bit 2D sprite-style fluid animation just sort of uppercuts me right in the pleasant nostalgia bits. But, I don't know that there's really anything objective there.

[Ffordesoon]

Minecraft is a sandbox first, and a game second. Terraria is a game first, and a sandbox second. Neither is, in my estimation, an RPG, though both have RPG elements and could concievably be roleplayed, and Terraria is closer than Minecraft to it. It's hard to articulate the difference between those games and RPGs, but I think the key to discerning said difference is that there is no larger context to your actions in Minecraft or Terraria than what's happening on the screen at any given moment. Even the most basic dungeon crawler has a bit of flavor text to contextualize your actions. There is usually no GM in a computer RPG, but the GM is at the core of all computer RPGs, if you see what I mean.

 

Which you may not. I'm not sure I do, to be honest.

 

But I think there's something there.

[mcmanusaur]

In light of the poll results for the first question, this thread is now more relevant than ever.

[alanschu]

 

 

I dunno, man. I think roleplaying depends as much on the player as the system.

 

This is the way I see it too.  At the risk of being a buzzkill (not that my opinion would stop the discussion), I find RPG to be a rather large catch all bucket, and I'm okay with that.

 

For some, RPGs are about the gameplay mechanics.  For others, stories, choice, and reactivity.  RPG elements usually involve some level of character progression elements and the like.

 

But I have come to loathe the "nuh uh, that's not really an RPG" types of discussions that come up, because it's a lot like console wars.  People that identify as RPG fans will have a predisposition to consider the elements they like to be vital to an RPG experience.  The arguments go in circles and ultimately I have come to the conclusion that "RPG" can be a very personal thing.  I think there's enough consistencies that people will usually be able to understand a game that has been labeled as an "RPG" and what some common aspects of those games may be.

[rjshae]

It can probably all be boiled down to one word: choice. The more freedom you have to choose your character and decide how he makes his way through the game world, the closer it is to being a role-playing game. Character progression, interaction, story, reactivity, and game play mechanics are all just the means to implement player choices.

[Lephys]

Minecraft is a sandbox first, and a game second. Terraria is a game first, and a sandbox second. Neither is, in my estimation, an RPG, though both have RPG elements and could concievably be roleplayed, and Terraria is closer than Minecraft to it. It's hard to articulate the difference between those games and RPGs, but I think the key to discerning said difference is that there is no larger context to your actions in Minecraft or Terraria than what's happening on the screen at any given moment. Even the most basic dungeon crawler has a bit of flavor text to contextualize your actions. There is usually no GM in a computer RPG, but the GM is at the core of all computer RPGs, if you see what I mean.

 

Which you may not. I'm not sure I do, to be honest.

 

But I think there's something there.

 

 

They're both most certainly far from what we want in P:E. That RPGness, with a world that seems to exist and fluctuate without even any player input, to keep the player on his toes. I just thought it was an interesting comparison, as they still possess the same freedom-to-limitation spectrum.

 

Regarding the urgency/situation matter, I think even Skyrim is a good thing to observe. It has plenty in it that is pleasant (progression system, full open world exploration, etc.), but it all just seems to center so much around the player that it just feels like a 1 million ft² playground. You know? How many different sets of swings can you try out (no matter how cool they are) before you just don't see the point in trying out swingsets anymore? You want something beyond that. Someone comes in and says "I'm tearing down this portion of the playground today, and putting up my own personal tower." Cool. Something's going on that you didn't have to invent or create. YOU get to react to THE GAME, all while it reacts to you, as well. Do you stop them from tearing it down? Maybe you find out what that tower's all about. Maybe you try to take over the project, and put up something different? Maybe you didn't get to check out that section of the playground yet, and you now feel the urge to go see if you would miss anything if they tore it down.

 

I think that's the thing with freedom. If you have too much freedom, then you're not even required to react to the game. It's reacting to you, and that's it. I think we want things to have to react to. We want decision-stimulus.

 

Again, not that Minecraft or Terraria are bad. They're good for what they are. Just like a linear shooter is good for what it is. You can't really compare it directly to an RPG like P:E, because it's not really even going for the same goals. Just like a puzzle game is completely different from either. But, they all need a balance of reactivity to you and bits that force YOU to react, with some degree of urgency.

[Eiphel]

This is an interesting question that I've thought about quite a lot. Especially in regard to the ubiquitous 'RPG elements' we see as a feature of games now. My position is something like this:

 

If you go back to early classic and traditional RPGs, and trace the evolution of the genre, there's really not one single defining element which is the 'RPG' element. Instead RPGs really evolved as a set of interrelated systems which for a long time were all very much part and parcel with one another. Those systems, however, are not mutually inclusive, and over time - especially over the last generation or so of games - we've seen an unpacking of those various elements, going in both directions: RPGs which exclude or replace certain of the typical systems as not a part of their whole, and other games which season themselves with one or two of these elements integrated with their whole of very different systems.

 

So the phrase 'RPG elements' seems very apposite to me, as I don't think it's a genre defined by a single aspect, but rather it's a bunch of discrete aspects whcih can be mixed and matched with elements from anywhere else in gaming.

 

On top of that, there's a distinction to be drawn between a game with 'roleplaying elements': a game with elements of playing a role - and 'RPG elements': genre tropes which are frequently mechanical in nature.

 

Now, the IE games are pretty traditional and ancestral to the genre, so they all feature a fairly classic and all-encompassing conjunction of RPG elements, and include few elements from elsewhere. That said, Icewind Dale skews hack-and-slash heavy, and has the fewest roleplaying (playing-of-role) systems, whilst Torment is heavy on the roleplaying and is light on a few of the archetypal mechanical elements (combat is underdeveloped and there's no character customisation, picking of feats and skills and suchlike).

 

So I view the RPG genre as being somewhat modular in nature - whilst we typically see genres as a classification system, and thus all about delineating characteristics, I don't think the RPG genre works this way. It's more like a collection of interrelated systems/tropes/elements which can be mix and matched with other elements from outside itself - in configurations which are predominately RPG, or which are a seasoning over a game of a different nature, and in balances which are purely mechanic to purely playing-of-role.

 

Defining something as an RPG, then, ends up being pretty contextual. It depends what the specific topic of discussion is, and if the game in question holds those specific RPG elements which bear relation to that topic. The same game may bring a lot to one discussion of RPGs and be irrelevant elsewhere.

 

For me personally, true roleplaying is about shaping a character. Sculpting a specific identity and pursuing that identity through the world. So, for example, the Walking Dead is an RPG for me in that sense - It's a game that affords me an experience of playing a role. But its mechanical identity is far more heavily descended from point-and-click adventure games. So in a discussion of point-and-click games, I'd bring it up. In a discussion of playing-a-role in games, I'd bring it up. But in an RPG discussion focussed on level ups and combat systems, no, of course it wouldn't fit the active definition, and wouldn't make sense to bring it up, regardless of it personally being an 'RPG' to me for what it fulfils.

 

Now, as a heritor of the IE games and based on everything we've seen so far, I'd say PE undoubtedly will feature a very large swathe of the classic RPG elements, and it'll be hitting up both the aspects of mechanical and playing-of-role identity, so defining it as an RPG should be pretty uncontroversial and universally applicable anyway.

 

Did that make any sense?

[Ffordesoon]

That made a lot of sense, in addition to being excellently written.

 

Kudos!

[mcmanusaur]

 

Minecraft is a sandbox first, and a game second. Terraria is a game first, and a sandbox second. Neither is, in my estimation, an RPG, though both have RPG elements and could concievably be roleplayed, and Terraria is closer than Minecraft to it. It's hard to articulate the difference between those games and RPGs, but I think the key to discerning said difference is that there is no larger context to your actions in Minecraft or Terraria than what's happening on the screen at any given moment. Even the most basic dungeon crawler has a bit of flavor text to contextualize your actions. There is usually no GM in a computer RPG, but the GM is at the core of all computer RPGs, if you see what I mean.

 

Which you may not. I'm not sure I do, to be honest.

 

But I think there's something there.

 

 

They're both most certainly far from what we want in P:E. That RPGness, with a world that seems to exist and fluctuate without even any player input, to keep the player on his toes. I just thought it was an interesting comparison, as they still possess the same freedom-to-limitation spectrum.

 

Regarding the urgency/situation matter, I think even Skyrim is a good thing to observe. It has plenty in it that is pleasant (progression system, full open world exploration, etc.), but it all just seems to center so much around the player that it just feels like a 1 million ft² playground. You know? How many different sets of swings can you try out (no matter how cool they are) before you just don't see the point in trying out swingsets anymore? You want something beyond that. Someone comes in and says "I'm tearing down this portion of the playground today, and putting up my own personal tower." Cool. Something's going on that you didn't have to invent or create. YOU get to react to THE GAME, all while it reacts to you, as well. Do you stop them from tearing it down? Maybe you find out what that tower's all about. Maybe you try to take over the project, and put up something different? Maybe you didn't get to check out that section of the playground yet, and you now feel the urge to go see if you would miss anything if they tore it down.

 

I think that's the thing with freedom. If you have too much freedom, then you're not even required to react to the game. It's reacting to you, and that's it. I think we want things to have to react to. We want decision-stimulus.

 

Again, not that Minecraft or Terraria are bad. They're good for what they are. Just like a linear shooter is good for what it is. You can't really compare it directly to an RPG like P:E, because it's not really even going for the same goals. Just like a puzzle game is completely different from either. But, they all need a balance of reactivity to you and bits that force YOU to react, with some degree of urgency.

 

 

You bring up another important distinction here which is the difference between a reactive/passive sandbox and an active/dynamic sandbox. As much as I probably demand far too much, I find the former leans too much toward stroking my character's ego and I'm not really interested in that. A scripted narrative is one way you could give the world that agency, but ultimately in my dreams what I'd like to see is a world that simulates the changes in society, ranging from demographic shifts to economic trends to natural disasters to military conflicts to technological progression, etc. Imagine an RPG where families of NPCs age, procreate, and migrate over time; with enough imagination this could produce narrative in and of itself. Obviously this would require very robust algorithms (and is very far off from the current reaches of the genre), and some randomness could be mixed in to ensure unique playthroughs, but these are the forces that have generated what I consider the greatest narrative known to man, which is the narrative of our own species' history. Just like acting and being told what to do are different, being forced to react and being told what you must react to are two different things. I guess that's why I don't consider urgency and freedom to be a tradeoff.

Edited June 1, 2013 by mcmanusaur

[mcmanusaur]

This is an interesting question that I've thought about quite a lot. Especially in regard to the ubiquitous 'RPG elements' we see as a feature of games now. My position is something like this:

 

If you go back to early classic and traditional RPGs, and trace the evolution of the genre, there's really not one single defining element which is the 'RPG' element. Instead RPGs really evolved as a set of interrelated systems which for a long time were all very much part and parcel with one another. Those systems, however, are not mutually inclusive, and over time - especially over the last generation or so of games - we've seen an unpacking of those various elements, going in both directions: RPGs which exclude or replace certain of the typical systems as not a part of their whole, and other games which season themselves with one or two of these elements integrated with their whole of very different systems.

 

So the phrase 'RPG elements' seems very apposite to me, as I don't think it's a genre defined by a single aspect, but rather it's a bunch of discrete aspects whcih can be mixed and matched with elements from anywhere else in gaming.

 

On top of that, there's a distinction to be drawn between a game with 'roleplaying elements': a game with elements of playing a role - and 'RPG elements': genre tropes which are frequently mechanical in nature.

 

Now, the IE games are pretty traditional and ancestral to the genre, so they all feature a fairly classic and all-encompassing conjunction of RPG elements, and include few elements from elsewhere. That said, Icewind Dale skews hack-and-slash heavy, and has the fewest roleplaying (playing-of-role) systems, whilst Torment is heavy on the roleplaying and is light on a few of the archetypal mechanical elements (combat is underdeveloped and there's no character customisation, picking of feats and skills and suchlike).

 

So I view the RPG genre as being somewhat modular in nature - whilst we typically see genres as a classification system, and thus all about delineating characteristics, I don't think the RPG genre works this way. It's more like a collection of interrelated systems/tropes/elements which can be mix and matched with other elements from outside itself - in configurations which are predominately RPG, or which are a seasoning over a game of a different nature, and in balances which are purely mechanic to purely playing-of-role.

 

Defining something as an RPG, then, ends up being pretty contextual. It depends what the specific topic of discussion is, and if the game in question holds those specific RPG elements which bear relation to that topic. The same game may bring a lot to one discussion of RPGs and be irrelevant elsewhere.

 

For me personally, true roleplaying is about shaping a character. Sculpting a specific identity and pursuing that identity through the world. So, for example, the Walking Dead is an RPG for me in that sense - It's a game that affords me an experience of playing a role. But its mechanical identity is far more heavily descended from point-and-click adventure games. So in a discussion of point-and-click games, I'd bring it up. In a discussion of playing-a-role in games, I'd bring it up. But in an RPG discussion focussed on level ups and combat systems, no, of course it wouldn't fit the active definition, and wouldn't make sense to bring it up, regardless of it personally being an 'RPG' to me for what it fulfils.

 

Now, as a heritor of the IE games and based on everything we've seen so far, I'd say PE undoubtedly will feature a very large swathe of the classic RPG elements, and it'll be hitting up both the aspects of mechanical and playing-of-role identity, so defining it as an RPG should be pretty uncontroversial and universally applicable anyway.

 

Did that make any sense?

 

 

No, but I can agree with that synopsis. However, if the drawbacks of the "RPG" label prevent it from serving a meaningful and cohesive purpose, I say that there should be a new system of labels that do so, either to replace current terminology for the genre altogether or to introduce names for more specific subgenres. I for one can say I've seen an awful lot of frustration, misunderstanding, and animosity over the years due to this communicative deficiency, and I think it would benefit everyone to have a better-fitting word for their preferences beyond the ineffective term "RPG".

[Odd Hermit]

All characters will be influenced by my personality, but can't truly put even an idealized version of myself in most games since the characters are coming from and interacting with vastly different environments and of course have power that I've never experienced before.

 

I'll generally adjust based on the nature of the game. Some games it's very hard not to be a simplistic heroic character - you can either be suicidally altruistic or a complete sadist, but I prefer the ability to exercise some utilitarianism and self preservation. Also, in some games your character is automatically the leader of a group, whereas only in extreme circumstances(granted, that's the case in many games) would I lead anything. In Project Eternity those won't be barriers from the sound of it, I'll have a party leader with a much more fitting personality for the part and still be able to have a character I fashion after myself in the party.