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<blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5018470" data-attributes="member: 80487">Yeah, Dannyalacatraz's &quot;name tag&quot; quip suggests to me the snobbery of folks who came along and started to dismiss what someone (Lew Pulsipher?) way back termed &quot;vicarious participation&quot; -- what seems to have been the primary mode of role-playing among the hobby's earliest pioneers.At the same time, I don't think it was (or is) for nothing that RPGs got distinguished even from individual-scale war games. Part of the significant something, I think, is their open-ended nature. The player is not limited to any particular scenario, and can try absolutely anything the role might reasonably allow to be tried.Are &quot;first-person shooter&quot; (FPS) games a subtype of &quot;computer role playing game&quot; (CRPG)? It seems to me they have a lot more to do with the role-identification aspect of a p&amp;p RPG, and the mainly text-based &quot;adventure games&quot; -- even the Rogue-like graphical games -- as well.By contrast, the key point of similarity to p&amp;p RPGs that stands out in my experience among computer programs explicitly distinguished as &quot;RPGs&quot; is in the number-crunching factors of &quot;ability scores&quot; and &quot;character class levels&quot; and so on. Most in fact seem to put the player by default &quot;in the role&quot; not of any one character but of a whole party! (I think the MMO games tend to get back mainly to the individual level, but they might also tend to get back more to the war-game scope of activities.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ariosto, post: 5018470, member: 80487"] Yeah, Dannyalacatraz's "name tag" quip suggests to me the snobbery of folks who came along and started to dismiss what someone (Lew Pulsipher?) way back termed "vicarious participation" -- what seems to have been the primary mode of role-playing among the hobby's earliest pioneers. At the same time, I don't think it was (or is) for nothing that RPGs got distinguished even from individual-scale war games. Part of the significant something, I think, is their open-ended nature. The player is not limited to any particular scenario, and can try [I]absolutely anything[/I] the role might reasonably allow to be tried. Are [B]"first-person shooter"[/B] (FPS) games a subtype of "computer role playing game" (CRPG)? It seems to me they have a lot more to do with the role-identification aspect of a p&p RPG, and the mainly text-based [B]"adventure games"[/B] -- even the [B][I]Rogue[/I]-like[/B] graphical games -- as well. By contrast, the key point of similarity to p&p RPGs that stands out in my experience among computer programs explicitly distinguished as "RPGs" is in the number-crunching factors of "ability scores" and "character class levels" and so on. Most in fact seem to put the player by default "in the role" not of any one character but of [b]a whole party[/b]! (I think the MMO games tend to get back mainly to the individual level, but they might also tend to get back more to the war-game scope of activities.) [/QUOTE]

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