LogFAQs > #937239098

Xiahou Shake posted...

I straight up disagree with this. RPG isn't some vague term that a ton of games can fit - we know exactly what they are. RPGs are all derived mechanically from DnD; you hand-waved strict adherence to mechanical keywords but if they don't have those mechanics then they're actually something else.

I agree with this interpretation although I would add to it that it's not necessarily directly derived from DnD, but rather I call it a "lineage" of sorts - from pen-and-paper RPGs to DnD, to the earliest video game RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima, to the early japanese RPGs like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, and from there you have the most basic mechanical foundations for what makes a video game RPG - almost any video game you'd describe from an RPG found its inspiration in the genre conventions laid down by those early series. Not every RPG follows every rule - I would say there are RPGs where you don't level up, for instance - but it provides a pretty clear picture of what an RPG generally is, mechanically, which is generally what defines whether or not something is an RPG.

People get the etymology of RPG wrong a lot I think - in video games, RPG isn't "a game where you roleplay as something" since that describes a lot of games (or on the other hand, doesn't describe most of them well at all, compared to what a "real" RPG is like), rather, it's "a game that is similar to the mechanics of a pen-and-paper RPG" which is where the term roleplaying game was originally derived from. Video game RPGs don't really have anything to do with narrative content since you can be an RPG with bare minimum story (such as the early games I mentioned before) and you can be a complicated story without being an RPG. It's just something that you expect from the genre as a rule.