Eyenixon said:
Strategy my ass, as a PC game RPGs are their own individual creation. It is impossible for them to work as they did in a tabletop format and thus they took on their own personality.
That is a compromise that is widely accepted, if it was not possible to maintain the same level of involvement then the game's developer would see to it that the video game incarnation had a suitable amount of the old formula in order to develop the roots of the genre.
You can't put a PnP game into a videogame as it is, no one meant for it to be that way, they attempted to transfer it of course, but in the assumption that the DM was an unnecessary package for the digital version. The entire point of PC RPGs is to throw a player into a world without an individual calling all the shots, rather it's done by a fair and unbiased system that just dictates the content of the world without having a third party input.
Besides, you're telling me most PnP games were anything other than bashing monsters with the occasional douche bag DM? That's all they were, the player involvement made the experience, but its transition merely lost the element of additional players.
A cRPG is different from a PnP RPG, don't tell me about the roots of the genre beyond its inception as a digital alternative, because that's merely the inspiration, not the definable roots. The genre on the PC took on a far different role than the PnP one, that argument is irrelevant.
Choice and consequence was always arbitrary for the videogame equivalent of RPGs. If you want to draw parallels between the ultimate creation of PnP games and the emergence of their digital equivalent, go ahead, but that touches upon philosophical musings, not technical, and as far as this genre goes, it's a fact that the PC RPG's roots came from a highly developed combat system.
The tabletop wargame-ruleset/format isn't the point/defining feature of a true RPG, as the feeling of immersion, the flexibility and the decisions/consequences the player is called to make.
The wargame-ruleset/format preceded Dave Arneson's and E. Gary Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons.
D&D was about far more than stats and turn-based battles -- it was about characters, choices, and stories; it was about experiencing fantastical adventures through a brand-new kind of collaborative, improvisational storytelling. Players became at the same time script-writers and actors of their own roles; whereas a reader of a book or a viewer of a movie always remained a passive observer, a player at a D&D game was constantly called upon to make choices that propelled the action. Compared to the role-playing dimension of D&D, the stats and battles were only minor aspects.
Or at least they were supposed to be. Since TSR's writers and most of their initial customers came from a wargaming background, official D&D modules (i.e. ready-made adventures) tended to focus on dungeon crawling and excessively time-consuming combat.
The point of RPGs was never the tedious stat-recording and incessant battles -- indeed, the more creative gamemasters quickly discovered that all the calculations and dice-rolling often got in the way of the story, and acted accordingly to minimize it.
Yet from the very beginning of computer role-playing games (CRPGs) it was clear that the stat-recording and incessant battles were the only things that could possibly survive the transition to the electronic medium, and that nothing short of the invention of human-level artificial intelligence could change that. Because what could possibly be left of the idea of role-playing without an intelligent gamemaster to breathe life into the world surrounding the players? What chance would the players have to make decisions and act them out -- in other words, to role-play -- if they were denied the ability to express themselves, and if their actions were limited to inventory-management, battle tactics, and wandering around static maps? The quality of the RPG experience had from the very first depended on the ability, talent and dedication of the gamemaster, and some dumb computer program was indeed a pitiful substitute for a Gary Gygax or an Ed Greenwood.
All this was of course instantly recognized by the pioneers of CRPGs, who, as programmers, were well aware of the limitations of the primitive software engineering techniques available to them.
And so they focused on the stats and battles.
But since early D&D modules themselves consisted of little more besides dungeon crawling, the pioneers of CRPGs could at least claim that their games managed to capture to a degree the spirit of those early modules. The computer gaming world -- such as it was at the time -- could hardly be blamed for praising their efforts.
Unfortunately, those early efforts would end up setting the tone for all subsequent ones.
Before long, CRPGs had become something of a joke in the role-playing community, whereas in computer gaming circles the term 'RPG' had been debased to a euphemism for a genre that contained a varying mixture of strategy, action, and adventure elements -- everything, that is to say, except role-playing. That's because Ultima, Wizardry, Eye of the Beholder, FF and Co all had as much role playing as Super Mario or Duck Hunt.
CRPG-wRPGs and jRPGs are "different" because ultimately they're not true/real RPGs, though they may have some RPG elemets (little/less so in jRPGs).
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