What is an RPG and is it still a genre?

What is an RPG and is it still a genre? Are JRPG, CRPG, ARPG, the real genre?
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[darkengine]

From my purist perspective, it helps to look at D&D as the ultimate game that invented the concept of "RPG" and see how it differed from its tabletop predecessors.

1. Human dungeon master. This is the most immediately discernable difference to me that radically set D&D apart from its TT predecessors. The introduction and requirement of the human DM enabled an unprecedented level of player participation and branching in the interactive storytelling, with player choices able to have both the biggest and most nuanced impact on how the story unfolds.

2. Single obstacle, multiple solutions. While previous TTs sometimes allowed this on a small scale like choosing route A or route B to solve a mission, the introduction of #1 allowed this on a whole new scale. An RPG might allow a player, when presented with guards defending a fortress, to disguise themselves, to sneak in through the underground sewers, to sweet talk their way in, to wait until night time and scale the walls, to go in guns blazing, to charm the guards with a spell, etc.

3. Dilemmas, not merely missions/quests. Again thanks to the human DM, RPGs can present situations that resemble more a dilemma rather than a black and white, "solve this or don't solve it" side mission/quest. They can be very nuanced types of dilemmas, including ones for which there is no clear "right" or "wrong" answer, just different answers with different consequences.

4. Personalization. While previous TTs often allowed for a degree of character customization and progression, including sometimes being able to create and customize a new character or even entire squad, the customization options were largely tied to game mechanics and not to the storytelling. What I call "personalization" is something that doesn't tie in to mechanics but to the story of our characters, such as providing them a custom name and background which players role-play and human DMs acknowledge and weave into their storytelling. Even the choice of a name is something that tends to have a deep personal meaning in an RPG, as the name will tend to be acknowledged repeatedly by the DM and any other players.

5. Emphasis on non-combat/"non-work". Previous TTs focused on controlling one character or a squad such as TT wargames usually placed most of their emphasis on combat and/or war (or perhaps something like running a business). After all, there isn't much interesting that can come about from doing things like exploring what to do on the side and talking to NPCs if that's just reduced to predefined content generated through a rulebook, board, dice rolls, and/or cards to draw. With an RPG, exploration and discovering new areas and things to do can become far more engaging, and NPC interactions can even start to resemble full-blown conversations.

The reason I think it's more difficult to define what an "RPG" is for video games is that they are generally lacking #1 (human DM), and most of what set D&D apart is in #1. Yet some RP video games attempt their best to emulate the equivalent of a human DM by trying to anticipate as many things the players will do as possible (Fallout 1, e.g.), or by generating the context on the fly with a deeper simulation (Mount & Blade, e.g.).

Typically I think any video game calling itself an "RPG" will tend to focus on at least one of these above. For example, even the earliest Western RPGs like first Wizardry and the earliest Ultima games -- along with the JRPGs inspired by them -- focused at least quite a bit more on #5 and at least somewhat on #4 compared to other video games, e.g.

[capp]

Final Fantasy for me too.
Grew up playing FF, Shining Force and DragonQuest, so to me, that is what an RPG is supposed to look like.

[SheonEver]

An RPG is a game with:
-strategic combat based off numbers and rolls rather than reflexes (ie. based off pen and paper roleplaying game combat systems, which is where the name comes from)
-character progression
-a clear transition between the in battle and out of battle state
-an individual or party focus

Just because people (including developers) use the term wrong, it doesn't matter since they can't come up with a valid set of criteria for what constitutes an RPG, even though these same people will be able to define what any other genre is, and a genre is meaningless without a clear set of criteria to define it - it's what you expect to be doing in the game.

Action games with some of the above criteria are action RPGs; an action game with _some_ RPG elements added for depth, usually just progression systems, and distinctly fall into the action game genre, and as such will resemble other action games much more closely than a real RPG, which they will hardly resemble at all. SRPGs, JRPGs, WRPGs, CRPGs and traditional roguelikes are all subgenres of RPG, and decisively fit within the RPG genre for all having the above listed qualities, unlike an action RPG or other games mislabeled as RPGs which won't.

[GamingEthos]

Very great video and breakdown. I usually fall down the hole of should rpg be a game where I'm roleplaying as the character playing a bit or is it just a game with a bunch of stats and customization knobs I can manipulate for my character. Or is it a form of combat system. This doesn't even start with all these action games that have shoehorned rpg elements into their features.

[blightwolf]

The term RPG, like any other descriptive name for a specific genre, is simply use to imply what the core game play is based around.

A RPG is going to have character/characters that the player controls and they will level these character/s up through experience as they play through the game.

The first descriptive word of any game sets the foundation and is the most important description. All the others descriptive words coming afterwards begin to narrow down what other general game play mechanics/physics will be used the player can expect.

You can have action rpg and jrpg instead of just rpg which gives even a more information about core game play mechanics.

RPG= explain at the beginning.

JRPG= Tails series, final fantasy etc (A rpg game that focuses on plot, character and story development.)

Action RPG= Dark Souls, Zelda etc ( game play mechanics featuring a single character that the player controls based around rts fighting mechanics, leaving system can very in these types of rpgs)

And so on.

[Ahov]

I care most about choices in a roleplaying game, choices which have meaningful consequences. Obviously that is subjective; I'm fine with many of the consequences occurring at the very end of the game; it can be interesting to experiment and see how your collective actions influenced final outcomes. Different outcomes in early and mid-game, too? Wonderful. The more interesting ways the writers can work in different choices and outcomes in random quests, the better. Different players should be able to have dramatically different experiences in an RPG. While true that players can approach Skyrim quite differently and have different experiences, there really aren't meaningful choices throughout the story. At best you influence the civil war victor, but so what? What have you *really* changed?