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Role Playing Game

redirected from Main.JRPG

alt title(s): RPG; Roleplaying Games; RP Gs; Role Play
"RPG is a game in which you fight with swords."
— Some RPG Codex member

JRPG = an angsty teenager with god awful hair stuggling with groundless and poorly defined emotional problems through chapters of text boxes.
WRPG = three hours of beating wolves to death in the rain in order to grab a handful of low-grade magical crap that you'll only sell a few minutes later.
-"generic gamer" on The Escapist Magazine

A type of game in which the player controls a character or party of characters in a statistically abstracted way. Most are based around one or more quests, items, stats, Character Customization, and experience points, as characters grow in power over time.

The original roleplaying games (commonly abbreviated to "RPG") aren't video games at all, but pencil-and-paper systems with dice-based combat and character generation, descended from a combination of tabletop wargaming and collaborative theater. Dungeons And Dragons was among the first such system to be sold, followed by other early systems such as Traveller and Tunnels And Trolls. These are all known as Tabletop RPGs.

The early video game RPGs focused mostly on simulating the combat aspects of these, with other aspects following after.

Video game RPGs can be divided in a number of ways, most prominently into what are often known as Western (or PC) RPGs, and Eastern (or console) RPGs.

Western RPGs often focus on greater character customization, deeper tactical combat systems, and free-roaming gameplay, but sometimes include less coherent narratives and weaker characterizations then Eastern RPGs. Western RPGs tend to bear a great resemblance to Tabletop RPGs.

Eastern RPGs often focus on cinematic narratives and memorable characters, with more linear gameplay, less customization, and shallower combat systems than Western RPGs; Eastern RPGs typically feel like movies and anime. Until recently, most such games came from Japan, and are thus nicknamed JRPGs.

Many other genres are starting to use RPG Elements like statistical abstraction and character-building in their own domains.

Action RPGs use the combat interface of a Fighting Game or Third Person Shooter, incorporating the experience and item systems of a traditional RPG. Western RPGs are also the king of the MMOG genre, to the detriment of campaign-based western RPGs in the opinion of many.

A subset of the Eastern RPG is the "Tactical RPG" (often noted by putting the word "Tactics" into the title) which functions like a normal RPG but with a high focus on moving around a gridlike system, often with abilities that take advantage of this to attack multiple people at once, or to fight from a distance. In Western RPGs this type of tactical combat is typical, due to their descent from Wargaming. In TV Tropes this type of game is lumped in with Turn Based Strategy, as the two genres are very close.

Another subgenre is the "Roguelike" game, which takes its name from the early 1980s ASCII graphics game Rogue. The best known example is Nethack, an open source game widely regarded as one of the best games ever made. Interestingly, these can be both Eastern or Western in origin.

Whether any actual "Role Playing" is involved in many video game RPGs is often debatable.

This genre is home to many specific tropes.

For Dungeons And Dragons etc. see:

Official list of subgenres:

Tropes that are commonly found in Role Playing Games:

RoguelikeIndex IndexRomance Arc
Programming GameVideo Game GenresWestern RPG
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