Other "races" exist as comparisons for humanity, like wise and magical elves compared to impatient humans. Complex concepts like "good and evil" are literally true, though sometimes muddled. The sort of fantasy and science fiction settings used in RPGs also uses similar forms of abstraction as the games do. This helps explain the rarity of real-world settings for RPGs outside of a few tactics games, like Jagged Alliance and Silent Storm.įantasy and role-playing support each other in both directions. Want to say that a certain clan of vampires are all ugly and have certain rules applied only to them? You can do that in speculative fiction. By moving outside of real-world rules, a game can be transparent and abstract without being ridiculous. This is part of why RPGs go so well with fantasy specifically, and speculative fiction generally. That is, it's normal for games to treat Elves as faster and smarter than Humans, but just imagine the deserved outcry if a real-world RPG said that some races were smarter or faster than others. Perhaps to you this seems appropriate in those circumstances, but RPGs also tend to give the same transparent abstraction to things like race without corresponding to the real world. For example, many older RPGs give female characters slightly different base attributes, like Wizardry VII bumping women's strength down and charisma up. When RPGs take a vague concept and give it concrete meaning, it can end up corresponding to the real world in surprising or unfortunate ways. Transparent abstraction is part of what gives role-playing games their charm, which is why fans dislike it when it's removed but it also leads to weirdness. Mass Effect is transparent in how its conversation and reputation system combines, even as its combat sections seem more similar to a Gears of War than a Baldur's Gate. For example, Skyrim's combat may lack transparency, but its practice-improves-skills approach, without experience points, ends up being quite transparent about what your character does. Interestingly, the RPGs that cause the most arguments tend to be transparent outside of combat, the most traditionally common mechanic.
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But it's under the hood, not transparent, and that sets it aside from even other RPG/shooter franchises like Borderlands, a series that delights in bombarding the player with numbers and statistics. The guns in Mass Effect have statistics, and the enemies have health bars that must correspond to hit point-style numbers somewhere under the hood. But critically, even though those mechanics could have been masked, RPGs generally kept the numbers transparent and public.Īction-oriented RPGs often limit the way that their mechanics are published, however. Shifting to the computer may have allowed these mechanics to be calculated faster as well as potentially more complex.
So you have things like 'strength statistics,' 'unarmed damage skills,' 'orc hit points,' 'dexterity rolls,' and so on. Players need to know what the numbers are in order to make informed decisions. You want to punch an orc? You can punch that orc, but game rules simple enough to work with a couple of die need to exist in order to make that orc-punching workable for a group of people playing a game. What separates RPGs from most other genres in terms of abstraction is the style's origins in pencil-and-paper games. Even those aspects that aren't real, like casting magical spells, have consistent in-game rules, which often abstract other concepts, like a mage theoretically chanting magical words in a way irrelevant to the player. Press the jump button in a game that allows it, and it'll make your character leap into the air in an animated approximation of how humans jump, but that's usually it – the rest of the jump has more to do with the needs of the game's level design than anything else. Most all games abstract some manner of real-world behavior. How role-playing games have dealt with and continue to deal with transparent abstraction defines the genre in many ways. Turned on their side slightly, though, I think these arguments reveal a core value of the genre: RPGs are built on transparent, simplified abstractions of complex real-world concepts. The arguments about these games tend to hinge on them being too action-oriented, or not offering enough customization.
The debate about what makes a "real" role-playing game flares up from time to time, with articles, comment threads, or message boards torn up about whether a Mass Effect or a Skyrim deserves to be treated as a true RPG.
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