D&D's Lineage: The Top 100 RPGs

Game Informer's recent issue featured a new ranking, the Top 100 RPGs, but the list was really about role-playing video games. Tabletop gamers know that there's at least one game that should be #1.

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[h=3]The Family Tree[/h]Dungeons & Dragons has been strongly influential in a wide variety of gaming mediums, from gamebooks to live action role-playing games to video games. Despite their shared ancestry, video games' popularity has largely eclipsed the tabletop industry, such that they are often cited as a "role-playing game" -- even though at this point, being a computer or console RPG (CRPG) doesn't necessarily have a player actually roleplay. Phil Hartup explains on NewsStatesman:

The difference is such now that when people talk about a video game having RPG elements they will typically be referring to persistent stats and the gradual improvement of abilities and items for the character. This speaks to how distant video game and table top philosophies have become - you could easily have a table top RPG with none of those elements yet be in no doubt it was an RPG. In video games the sine qua non of the role-playing game - taking on the role of a character who is not you - is such a given that it no longer defines the genre.
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So what exactly did tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons bequeath upon its video game descendants?
[h=3]What Makes a RPG a RPG?[/h]Dungeons & Dragons codified fantasy into a system and hierarchy that lends itself to programming. Jon Peterson laid out the three mini-games that make up D&D in Playing at the World:

Another key ingredient in Dungeons & Dragons is dramatic pacing, achieved by transitioning between three different game modes: a mode of exploration, a mode of combat and a mode of logistics. Time flows differently in each of these modes, and by rationing the modes carefully a referee guides the players through satisfying cycles of tension, catharsis and banality that mimic the ebb and flow of powerful events.
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Wikipedia breaks down just what distinguishes video game RPGs from other types of games: story & setting, exploration & quests, items & inventory, character actions & abilities, experience & levels, combat, and interface & graphics. Aligning these with what constitutes the core of D&D play, they can be categorized as exploration (story & setting, exploration & quests, interface & graphics), combat (combat), and logistics (items & inventory, character actions & abilities, experience & levels).

Hexcrawl-style tabletop exploration has come back into fashion, but only recently has computing power reached a point where the illusion of limitless exploration can be feasibly portrayed. Prior to that, storytelling in a walled-off setting discouraged too much exploration, a challenge massive multi-players face even today.

Combat has always been part of D&D, going back to its wargaming roots. As such, this is perhaps the easiest to simulate with CRPGs but at times the least creative. Players are hedged in by what the game allows; admittedly, those choices have expanded exponentially as CRPGs have become more complex.

Logistics in particular is where video games excel, managing inventory, magic items, and character advancement so that players don't have to (or, as can sometimes happen in tabletop play, they forget). This shift tends to emphasize certain aspects of tabletop play over others. In a theater of the mind style game, where imagination takes precedence, onerous tasks like inventory management and mapping a dungeon are de-emphasized. In a video game, these elements can be automated and much more accessible. In fact, character advancement and customization has come to define what constitutes a RPG in the video game medium.

Additionally, CRPGs have been strongly influenced by two divergent styles:

Though sharing fundamental premises, Western RPGs tend to feature darker graphics, older characters, and a greater focus on roaming freedom, realism, and the underlying game mechanics (e.g. "rules-based" or "system-based"); whereas Eastern RPGs tend to feature brighter, anime-like or chibi graphics, younger characters, turn-based or faster-paced action gameplay, and a greater focus on tightly-orchestrated, linear storylines with intricate plots (e.g. "action-based" or "story-based"). Further, Western RPGs are more likely to allow players to create and customize characters from scratch, and since the late 1990s have had a stronger focus on extensive dialog tree systems (e.g. Planescape: Torment). On the other hand, Japanese RPGs tend to limit players to developing pre-defined player characters, and often do not allow the option to create or choose one's own playable characters or make decisions that alter the plot.
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There are other differences too, like the design of characters and the relative seriousness of the character ( Japanese RPGs sometimes have "kawaisa" or "cute" characters). The distinction is largely artificial at this point, as both genres have borrowed from each other, with Western RPGs using more linear plots and JRPGs becoming more cinematic like their Western counterparts.

The one thing both of these classifications lack is a player's limitless imagination in which "anything can be attempted." CRPGs still can't reach that level of immersion, which brings us back to Game Informer's Top 100 list.
[h=3]Get Off My Lawn![/h]So what game claimed the title of "#1 RPG"? Skyrim. But Game Informer had one more surprise in store.

There was an additional entry, #0 -- Dungeons & Dragons:

The gaming world owes a great debt to Dungeons & Dragons, from the character-driven video games of the last four decades to the countless sprawling tabletop role-playing games it spawned. Co-created by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, this seminal game was born from the miniatures wargaming scene, but introduced the idea of singular characters that moved through a dangerous world while a dungeon master controlled the flow of action, giving structure to imaginative narrative play in a brand-new way. The game captured the imaginations of player around the world. Its many subsequent editions, offshoots, and descendants continue to do to this day. Dungeons & Dragons' influence and impact is hard to overstate. Most early video game RPGs were direct attempts to emulate the D&D concept in digital form. The fantasy milieu of D&D, itself inspired by works like J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Robert E. Howard's Conan tales, practically defined computer RPGs in the early years. Character leveling and progression, exploration and questing, a defined statistical ruleset, randomness through dice rolls or number generation, and narrative player choice all trace their roots here. Our ranking of RPG is focused on video games, but it's impossible to know if any of these games would exist without the root experience that D&D introduced: friends gathered around a table, laughing, and sharing in an adventure.
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D&D has finally gotten a respectful nod from the grandchildren it sired. You could easily write an entire book about this topic -- so I did: The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.

 

[Mallus]

This is one of my pet peeves, the lazy dropping of the "C" from CRPG and how in the last 7 years "TT" has been bolted on to RPGs.

What rubs me even more raw is when I offer up a correction, I only get a shrug .

Dropping the "C" doesn't surprise me. More people are familiar with digital RPGs of some sort or other. Thus those become the default and tabletop games get the qualifier.

FYI, both Steam and the Playstation Store just list the category as "RPG". I usually only see the finer-grained breakdown of CRPG/JRPG/TTRPG in online discussions (with MMOs getting their own distinct category).

 

[dunlin]

As much as I dislike the fact that people hear RPG and think World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy, and not D&D, I can get behind why they dropped the C. For other genres, it's not Computer Strategy Games, Computer Adventure Games, and so on. Writing "computer" all the time is redundant.

 

[Celebrim]

The modern cRPG, such as Skyrim or Witcher III, no longer fits neatly into any one of the traditional video game categories. As AAA titles have become increasingly expensive to produce, they've had to evolve away from the narrowness of traditional platformer, adventure, shooter, and cRPG gaming category, and embrace as wide of audience as possible. The resulting hybrid tends to scare away purists for play, such as my wife, but offers at least something to a wider audience of gamers. Or in other words, the modern cRPG explicitly has moved away from attempting to embrace any one single aesthetic of play, and instead is openly and shamelessly catering to challenge, narrative, and exploration aesthetics at the same time.

In this, the cRPG movement is moving in the exact opposite direction of the Indy Gaming movement in table top games, which has largely encouraged the development of more and more niche gaming experiences catering to a single aesthetic of play. One would suppose that by the same standard that claimed D&D was incoherent for trying to cater to multiple aesthetics of play, that a game like Skyrim was also incoherent. But darn it, the public just doesn't stop loving and acclaiming those incoherent designs.

 

[Gradine]

Well, here's the thing. The reason these games were called "RPGs" in the first place is because that's what D&D was and the bulk of these games were either deliberately ripping D&D off (Wizardry, Ultima, Final Fantasy I) or deliberately ripping Wizardry off (Dragon Quest, for a start). The DQ series in particular codified a lot of the gameplay tropes that would become what one defines as an "RPG" in the context of video games; experience & levels, equipment management, open worlds to explore, sprawling dungeons, random encounters, turn-based battles etc. Over the years several of these elements were tweaked (random encounters were being phased out as early as some SNES games like Lufia 2 & Chrono Trigger, turn-based battles didn't really survive the PS2-era, both are now completely passé; worlds & dungeons also shrank as production costs ballooned), but the two key gameplay tropes (experience and equipment) stuck around to continue to define the genre, even as they were cannibalized by other genres. Now, as Celebrim states, RPGs barely resemble the genre it began as, let alone anything close to the tabletop medium that spawned it in the first place.

The basic point is that computer and video game RPGs were called as such because they were cribbing gameplay elements from tabletop RPGs, not because you were "playing a role" (which you could argue every game is, depending on how strict and immersive your definition of "role-playing" is). RPGs at the time probably did more than any other video game genre besides maybe Visual Novels (which were hardly games) to provide as much as interactivity as possible regarding "role-playing". Ultima IV, for instance, may not hold up much any more, but you couldn't argue that that wasn't a game with actual role-playing involved.

Of course, the actual Tabletop RPG scene has evolved way beyond those gameplay elements and encompasses experiences that are practically impossible to put into a computer or video game, no matter how advanced your AI or complicated your branching narratives are. On the other hand, AAA computer and video game production has gotten so expensive and so high-stakes that it's basically impossible for these companies to take risks or experiment with genre or mechanics so literally every game is an open-world sandbox action-adventure with "RPG elements" (read: character advancement and maybe some equipment slots beyond weapon selection). Fortunately, it's never been easier for indie and small developers to jump in and start making weird or experimental games, so they've filled in the gaps, and you can argue that the indie video game scene is thriving at least to the same extent as the indie tabletop RPG scene. Games like Undertale and Legend of Grimrock have brought back old genres like the old-school JRPG and Eye-of-the-Beholder-esque dungeon crawler.

I'm rambling. Basically, the RPG genre of computer & video games essentially stole its name while it was stealing mechanics from D&D, but it's understandable why they went with it and how it ended up sticking to those specific mechanics over the years, regardless of whether the name still or ever really applied to what it was describing in the first place. Genre labels are weird like that, especially the more generic and less specific they get. Roguelikes are, by and large, a subgenre of RPG named after one game, and most modern Roguelikes have very little in common with the original Rogue anymore. There's even something of a "Souls-like" subgenre that's been riffing off of the Dark Souls formula with various degrees of mechanical tweaks (mostly playing with perspective, such top-down or 2d side-scroller).

 

[Doctor Futurity]

I've always thought the terminology of "RPG" gets confusing when moved to computer gaming. I personally think that games like Gears of War and Halo count as RPGs, because I find the single player experience an immersive "role" in which you are now playing Marcus Phoenix or Master Chief.....and this immersion feels to me like "playing a role." It's not an open ended or mechanically robust system in games like this....but you are still experiencing a story from one person's perspective, making decisions based on that person's goals (even if they are very straight forward). But just as many (most?) play these as straight shooters and don't fret that story stuff, plenty of people play CRPGs (sorry, it's the term I use) like they are mechanical/tactical experiences and not really "role playing" so I suppose the deal with computer games is that you can play them both ways if you so desire.

These terms just get confusing when you conflate them with paper and pencil gaming. Once you do that, you move to a genre of gaming that is exponentially more open-ended and creative in a way CRPGs still haven't come close to. But FWIW I've been playing CRPGs almost as long as I've been playing paper and pencil gaming (since about 1981; I don't like the "TT" terminology....damned computer is on a table too, right?) and have watched both grow in strange directions even as they eventually turn back on themselves and go back to roots at times (i.e. Pillars of Eternity for CRPGs and the OSR movement for paper and pencil).

It's almost like game design is a radiant spectra of types and preferences, with few absolute qualifiers for "what is best" rather than a linear progression. Hmmm.

 

[Von Ether]

As much as I dislike the fact that people hear RPG and think World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy, and not D&D, I can get behind why they dropped the C. For other genres, it's not Computer Strategy Games, Computer Adventure Games, and so on. Writing "computer" all the time is redundant.

But it's also redundant to right TT all the time as well. (Though I guess future newcomers to RPGs will out themselves here on ENWorlds by typing TTRPG.)

It's less about why the C got dropped in a relevant pub or website, but more about who gets the prefix in convos outside of video games related places.

*puffs out chest* Shall we let the C go out quietly in the night! No. I say we, the purveyors of the original hobby, upon all which these others are based, go NOT quietly in the night! Shall we NOT take on branding of the TT simply because we are outnumbered by the ignorant masses!

Nay! I say, nay!

We shall make our stand in every (non-video game) space and throw down the yoke of the TT.

And when they ask, and they will, "So what shall we call your hobby of rolling dice at the table!"

And we shall answer, "The original!"

 

[Celebrim]

Ultima IV, for instance, may not hold up much any more...

I wouldn't concede that. 'Ultima IV' remains a great game. And really, IMO the only thing keeping Ultima IV or tribute games like 'Exile III' from wider exposure is the limitations of the size of the displayed playing area, not the graphics or the gameplay.

And one area that bothers me about the evolution of video games, is that the vast majority of titles are geared to people like me. And while many of those games are quite enjoyable, they are overly complex and unapproachable for young gamers. Back when I was a child, almost all games were approachable for a precocious 8 or 12 year old. Moreover, even game that was too difficult for a younger player, had controls that could be grasped and understood by a younger player, so basically nothing could not be attempted.

I feel the modern gaming industry is robbing my children of the sort of video game experience I had as a child, and I wonder about the long term consequences of that for the industry.

On a similar vein, Nethack remains in my opinion the most sophisticated Rogue-like ever made, and virtually all of its various progeny - from Dwarf Fortress to Diablo III to No Man's Sky - could use to step back and consider again why it works. While aspects of those games is more sophisticated that Nethack in such areas as graphics and scale, the gameplay itself has IMO largely devolved.