Common RPG Misconceptions

By Thomas Manson 

NOTE: I am wont to go into states of digression in my editorials, so please bear with me. My point will be made well enough, hopefully.

Have you ever asked yourself "What is a Role-playing Game"? The term "RPG" usually conjures some similar idea in one's head concerning this much-used acronym. When not bringing forth thoughts of grenade launchers, it usually brings forth thoughts of knights and of dragons, of magic and high fantasy. You see, that's the misconception. None of those things make a Role-playing Game.

Rest assured, any Role-playing Game must have some fantastic element to be exciting and thus worth playing, but by no means does it have to be magic and monsters. The fantastic element could be cybernetically-enhanced battle warriors, wizards and dragons, freaks of science, superheroes, or awesome mech combat. However, none of these genres alone have what it takes to make a playable RPG. Other elements often missing in console RPGs are necessary to give the game its "Roleplaying" edge.

Some people also seem to think (especially the bigwigs at Square, or at least the people that wrote them in to go back to "their roots") that RPGs must have super-deformed heroes and such, and that the setting must be Japanese or Animelike in some manner. These are the same people that contend that Americans can not make (pr haven't yet made) a good Role-playing Game. I wonder if these people realize that the original RPG was made in Wisconsin. If this is a real misconception (which I hope it isn't), then if Gary Gygax (creator of that first RPG, a little-known game called Dungeons & Dragons) was dead, he'd be turning in his grave. Since he's not, I assume he's just ignorant of the whole affair.

Another RPG misconception is the whole aeons and aeons of menus thing. It is not an RPG fundamental to have menu-based combat. It just so happened that menu-based combats were used because they fit well with the "round-by-round" format of tabletop RPGs. Active Time Battle is not especially necessary to be a "good" RPG. Indeed, ATB is almost more illogical than round-by-round, for reasons I don't care to touch on now.

I believe it was a book called Heroic Worlds (a RPGer's buyers' guide) that deemed a RPG "quantified interactive storytelling". All characters in the game have statistics which are represented in numbers, or quantified. The Player Characters (i.e.: characters controlled by a human player) interacted with their surroundings as vessels in the fantasy world. The game's Referee (at this point I request console players to bear with me, I'm sure this is an alien concept for you) creates a (not necessarily) simple background scenario to give the players a reason for performing dangerous acts of heroism (which in "heroic" fantasy, consists of going into monsters' lairs, killing them, and stealing their treasure). Creating a simple background scenario keeps the Referee from having a well-thought out story become ruined by the Player Characte! rs' whims, since, in a true RPG, players have autonomic control over their characters, unless the characters are charmed or under some other duress. And not even the most imaginative Referee is prepared for every contingency. These, and only these, are the necessary elements for a Role-playing Game.

Sure, video games are fun, but as long as computers can only process information in strings and bytes, and not possess the ability to think and create on its own like a human (and God help us all if that happens), a computer can not run a true RPG (and this includes even the Playstation 2's God-like "Emotion Engine" (which is very much a joke, it just goes to show that Japanese developers will put any two English words together to make it sound interesting, not to mention fooling even the Americans who speak it natively, but I digress again)). There is no substitute for the human imagination. At least not yet.