So, do you think most RPGs have real roleplay?

[mobiusclimber]

There really isn't any game that is an actual "role playing game" if you try to compare it to playing D&D or any of the other pen and paper games. That's b/c there's only so many options you can possible have in a game due to space limitations and player imagination. The focus of console RPGs (and hell even computer RPGs) has never actually been on giving you choice of playing whatever role you like. While computer RPGs have always tried to do that, they, just like their console counterparts, are all about stat building, collecting things and advancing the plot. It's true that some western RPGs have gotten to the point where you can choose to not even follow the story if you like and give you a ton of other things to do, but honestly if you don't want to follow the plot you can do that in most RPGs. It's just going to get boring after awhile talking to the same townspeople who say the same thing and just standing around doing nothing.

I would say that most RPGs aren't non-linear, and the experience of playing one of these games would be ruined if they truly were. (Most games aren't non-linear, even so called "sandbox" games, since once you're done blowing things up or beating up hookers the story is still sitting there waiting for to continue right along the same on-rails path that it was before you decided to go screw off for awhile.) For instance, the village that gets torched as soon as you arrive is always going to wait for to arrive, no matter how slowly you get there, or how many flowers you pick along the way. You'll never arrive "too late." You can say "no" all you like, but the world NEVER moves on without you. So in the end, your choices are still just another rail for you to travel down. What game lets you do something illegal so that you get arrested and spend years in the game sitting in prison? If you can't do that, then you can't actually "play a role" and I can guarantee you there's no game like that, RPG or otherwise.

The console RPG developers realized early on that they really couldn't let the player choose a role to play and give them every decision they could possibly come up with. We still don't have a console (or a computer) powerful enough for that. What they decided to do instead was thrust the player into the role of a specific character. You could only make the decisions that that character would logically make. This is why many of these early characters are silent. You're meant to fill in their dialogue, but you're always going to BE that character and thus will always make the decisions that that character would make. Developers realized after awhile that telling a story and showing what the characters are like and how they interact with each other was more important than letting the player fill in the dialogue for themselves, so the 'silent protagonist" started to fall out of favor. RPGs eventually found a focus that worked and stuck to it, being more about story, a battle engine, character interaction, and stat building.

So no, the only RPGs you're going to find with "real roleplay" are pen and paper ones.

[Lord_Santa]

So no, the only RPGs you're going to find with "real roleplay" are pen and paper ones.

I beg to differ

Dwarf Fortress - Adventure mode, has no story, no repeating characters and always a unique world

the worlds are hundreds of times larger than anything Ultima can throw at us and you are free to do whatever you can think of within the limits of the engine

and considering that Dwarf Fortress is still in Alpha and that he's working on the Adventure mode, as we speak

I dare say that soon we will be able to do the most outrageous things we can think of in Computer RPG's

of course, it's got ASCII graphics, but there are texture-packs available

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

:edit

these are things he's looking to implement:

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

[ns12123]

WRPGs are much closer to roleplaying than jRPGs. In most jRPGs, the character simply isn't yours. You're often given a whiney, cross dressing, anime styled male character with which you have little control over their development. It's like someone's renting their character out to you. It's not your own creation. WRPGs let you create the character, choose its combat/development styles, change how they look, and in some games, even choose which voice you'd like them to have. These features are rarely, if ever, seen in jRPGs. And let's not forget moral choices that actually have a bearing on how the game plays out.

[mobiusclimber]

WRPGs are much closer to roleplaying than jRPGs. In most jRPGs, the character simply isn't yours. You're often given a whiney, cross dressing, anime styled male character with which you have little control over their development. It's like someone's renting their character out to you. It's not your own creation. WRPGs let you create the character, choose its combat/development styles, change how they look, and in some games, even choose which voice you'd like them to have. These features are rarely, if ever, seen in jRPGs. And let's not forget moral choices that actually have a bearing on how the game plays out.

I think you're mostly basing this on the current gen of JRPGs, which is a shame. Really, it comes down to how you define "playing a role." When I used to play pen & paper AD&D, I'd give myself a character that was quite different from who I actually am and try to stay in character the whole time. That was kind of the point. I think JRPGs focus on this aspect of "role playing" rather than letting you make the character after yourself (or John Cena, or Spider-Man, or whomever). They give you a role and you basically play as that role. This allows for a much more tightly scripted storyline, and a lot of the great RPG stories are only able to be told in this manner. I realize there are plenty of great WRPG storylines, but I think some stories just don't work one way and some don't work the other. That doesn't mean that you aren't role-playing, just because it isn't a role that you yourself chose. The best ones have a lot of leeway as to how you play the character while still keeping you in that character.

I'd also argue that there are plenty of JRPGs that allow you to make decisions that affect how the game continues, but since most of these are on older consoles, they don't have quite as many choices as a PC WRPG would.