What is Role Playing

I was reading a series of older articles at the Game Design Novice that did it's best to convince people that Zelda is NOT an RPG, and found myself searching for what really makes a game an RPG.

Typical gamers will say that any game that lets you progress a character's abilities is an RPG. Well, by that definition, there are a lot of sport games that could now hang the RPG tag to their title. For example, Madden NFL games (and other sports titles) have added the feature of creating your own NFL personality and play through the game as that player. You even get to increase his stats to improve it's abilities for the team position you choose to play. You can also hire a manager (NPC) to help negotiate a contract with a new team, so you're not just stuck with one team for your NFL career. It doesn't stop there; you can also equip your character with different outfits and other "bling", just like a character from an RPG. With all that, the game is now an RPG by the standards of most video gamers.

However, a role playing game is much more than taking on the role of a character and improving that characters skills and/or stats. That difference is linearity. Video games are very linear in their score and really don't allow you to improvise. And improvisation is the true hallmark of a role playing game.

The best parallel I can make for Role Playing is improvisational theatre. Everyone takes on a role (a character) and is given the basis of a situation (a quest) which they then get to interact with other characters to resolve. The main difference is that in table-top RPGs, you have a story teller (aka game master, dungeon master, or referee) who helps the game along by taking on the role of every non-player character the player interact with through their characters.

Another thing to keep in mind is that role playing really has nothing to do with dice. Though many role playing game systems use dice roles to determine the outcome of a situation, they are not necessary to the act of role playing. There are game systems that use points, karma, and/or cards to decide the outcome of player character actions, while others that use nothing but the discretion of the story teller.

So really, role playing is best described as a form of theatre often wrapped around (but not requiring) a system of event resolution mechanics. Anything that calls it self an RPG just because you take on the persona of a character without allowing you the free reign of self determination or choice is really nothing more than a scripted story that gives you few choices, limited by it's author, to reach a predetermined ending.

If that's all you want, you may as well go buy a book.