A few years ago I was all up in arms over the definition of role-playing. My pen&paper-gamer side was at odds with my video gamer side when I was confronted with it, so I gave the whole thing a lot of thought. As Gary Gygax said once when asked what he thought of video role-playing games "It's not really role-playing it is? I mean, who are you role-playing too?"
Final Fantasy was definitely a ground-breaker for its' genre. We called it role-playing, why? Because you create a party of characters, name them, level them by killing monsters and rescuing princesses in a fantasy world and earning experience points. In essence, you virtually recreate what pen&paper players have already been doing for years at that point. Going a little farther back, SSI's tellings of Forgotten Realms stories, a setting of Dungeons & Dragons still immensely popular and well-known today, did exactly what a D&D module does. It creates a plot line, pre-made dungeons and antagonists, and releases a group of player characters into the setting. To the naked eye, those are all the elements of a role-playing game. When these games first surfaced, did someone, perhaps at SSI, make a mistake in naming the new genre RPG? Yes and no.
To me, role-playing means freedom of choice, it means altering the course of the story with my actions, creating new outcomes by the way I play or my character behaves. But this is only a player's perspective, I didn't take into account the role of the Dungeon Master, odd because I pride myself on my DM abilities. What does a Dungeon Master do? Of course, it is possible to wing a story based purely on the initiative of the players. This requires imaginative and inventive players capable of playing the role of their character without an obvious plot line prodding them along, and a DM who can roll with the punches and make things up quickly on the go. This type of RPG session can be a lot of fun and I often used them for fillers between adventures or spur-of-the-moment sessions.
But I do love a good module, whether it is purchased or home-brewed prior to the gaming session. An adventure module already has a pre-set course. It has a developed plot line, and in many cases the DM has already determined what the outcome will be, provided the player characters manage not to get killed before the end. So why did I so determinedly hang on to my standpoint that video games did not deserve to be refer to themselves as RPG? It comes down to a single term: Railroading.
A DM who railroads his players takes away their feeling of being an active part of the story. When you have no say over your involvement in a story, you feel more like an observer, with the DM being the only one telling the story. I love the Final Fantasy series, because the stories are compelling, detailed and draw emotional response. Can you influence the story? Not really, not in enough detail to make a difference. You take turns beating up monsters and watching the story happening to you. This is railroading, it's not even making a decent attempt to mask it. It's a little like watching a movie while pushing some buttons. I don't play a role here.
When Bioware's Neverwinter Nights was nearing release, the D&D community, myself included, was immensely excited. Finally here is a computer RPG with a module-development tool set and the ability to play the game as a DM who can shape the story as it develops. While NWN was an exceptional game that gave me many months of fun both playing and developing modules, I was disappointed with the amount of active story-shaping a DM could really do. The concept of "winging it" was never an option. I remained convinced that there was no such thing as a digital RPG.
The coming of MMOs did their part in blurring the line. Gary Gygax's question, at least, was finally answered, because players could now role-play to each other. Today's MMOs still don't provide a platform that encourages or makes role-playing easy, you get too drawn in to the mechanics, the hack-n-slashing and power leveling to focus on personal character growth. But that is a story for another time.
I was talking about railroading and how it relates to both computer games and tabletop RPGs. Something very important finally hit me, probably not at first because digital role-playing was still in its toddler stages. Yes, you can wing it when DMing an RPG, and that is one of the marks of a good Dungeon Master. But it isn't the only thing. A truly good DM doesn't railroad, he creates the illusion of choice. What good is all that work you did on the story if your players run it in an entirely different direction? You have to keep their actions in line without letting them know they are being guided towards your pre-determined outcome. This isn't easy, and kudos to the DMs who can pull it off. A massive amount of my respect, however, to digital game designers who can also pull it off. DMs can always be inventive on the spur of the moment and adjust to player action. A game designer doesn't have this option. He often isn't present when his game is being played, and he certainly doesn't have a team of programmers with him, giving him the ability to say "Ok wait 15 minutes while we explain to our world how to react to what you are trying to do". It's a ridiculous prospect.
A game designer has to, or at least should, work very hard to anticipate player action. The story he crafts must be so very detailed that this world written in unbending code appears to be flexible to the whim of the player. The NPCs must have life, a convincing personality, and the ability to react to the player based on his actions. The story must have multiple endings, some of which a player may never see, which might put the designer in danger of feeling a little under appreciated. In essence, the player of a PC RPG is still being railroaded. The trick is making it look like he isn't. When it comes down to it, that is what a good DM does at the table. In game design, we call this multi-linear narrative.
So yes, the guys at SSI were mistaken in using the term RPG, but only because I can't imagine they had the foresight to know what is now possible 30 years later. And yes, there is such a thing as a role-playing PC game, although at current I limit that definition to only a handful of games, all of them single-player. We've come a long way, and we might never get where we're going, but if you look at how far we've come since the 1980s, the potential is without limits. In any story, role-playing is an illusion to at least some extent, and creative minds are always coming up with new ways to hide the railroad tracks. RPGamers have a lot to look forward to.
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