I’ve been playing role-playing games for nearly as long as I can remember. I played The Bard’s Tale on my father’s knee, learning to map a dungeon on graph paper. I stayed late after school playing Star Wars d6 and Shadowrun with classmates. I explored countless JRPGs from Square’s experimental eras on SNES and PlayStation. I was playing and running Camarilla LARPs in college. And for the last couple decades, of course, I’ve been building open-world RPGs.
So as a subject near and dear to my heart, I’m always on the lookout for new role-playing games to delve into. But when I recently looked at games tagged as “Role-Playing” on Steam, I was surprised by the results. Such as the above primary recommendation from Steam: Street Fighter 6.
But is it so ridiculous? You can build your character, you can level them up, explore a variety of streets, pursuing various quests from mentors. So many trappings of RPGs are there, but it still feels wrong. Why?
Classic role-playing games have many different mechanics that go into their gameplay, and many of those have been adopted widely by games of other genres. As games become more complex and combine more systems, what experiences distinguish what we think of as a role-playing game, and what experiences are merely traits that can be borrowed from them?
Gameplay elements of an RPG
The evolution of role-playing games is a fascinating history, and I’ll have to do a whole separate post about it later. But for now, we’ll just focus on some core gameplay elements that have arisen as major traits of computer role-playing games over the years.
Tactical combat — turn-based or otherwise, combat is largely about planning and resource management
Creating your character — defining your role, mechanically and/or dramatically
Character progression — mechanical growth in the player’s power over time
Quests — guided challenges for the player, often serving as major vehicles for plot
Open world — a non-linear setting the player explores at their own pace
Reactive narrative — storytelling that responds to the player’s decisions
I’ve ordered these elements in increasing complexity and roughly when they developed in the genre. I could probably do a column on the design and storytelling details of each one.
And, spoiler, I’d argue that these are ordered in increasing complexity and centrality to what we think of as role-playing games.
Not every RPG uses every one of these, mind you — Japanese RPGs often use pre-set characters and a more linear world, while modern RPGs increasingly move towards more active combat elements. But largely, these are the gameplay elements that most people mean when they talk about role-playing games.
But what’s interesting is that every single element here has shown itself to be so popular with players and useful for designers that it has been adopted into other genres of games.
Tactical combat: playing your role
The simplest and most obvious element of RPGs is the tactical combat that lies at the beginning of their history.
The original Dungeons and Dragons system was a modification of a wargaming miniatures system called Chainmail — with the idea that it might be interesting to focus on just one individual unit in an army and follow them across multiple battles — and so that tactical, turn-based combat has always been a celebrated part of the franchise’s DNA. In a way, it’s more fair to describe this as an element of wargaming that RPGs inherited, rather than one they originated.
In those early days when controlling a single model on a wargaming board was novel, the primary distinguishing feature of an individual character was what weapon they were wielding, which largely defined their class and abilities.
Were they a soldier with a rifle and bayonet? A lineman with a pike? A dwarf with an axe? That’s the role they play in the game.
Early in Games Workshop’s history, their model sculptors embraced this idea with a brand-wide art rule that whatever weapon a model was using should be sculpted at roughly three times the size it would realistically be: partially for increased detail for painting/sculpting, but mostly so that the model’s weaponry (and thus, their role) was clearly visible from across the gaming table.
This led to the comically-oversized weapons that have become a hallmark for Warhammer characters ever since — and, arguably, an industry standard in much of the rest of the field.
Knowing your character’s role in tactical battle would remain a major element for RPGs, but it also quickly came to include being able to define that role for yourself.
Defining your role, Defining yourself
Building your character would remain an important part of role-playing games, but it would split into two dimensions: the strategic sense of what role you played in a battle, and the storytelling sense of who your character was and what choices they made.
For much of early computer RPGs, this sense of “building your character(s)” was solely a matter of building a tactically sound combat group. Games like The Bard’s Tale or Might & Magic allowed for parties of 6 player-created characters, across a variety of options, and much of the gameplay was about forming a cohesive party that could handle a variety of challenges as they delved through dungeons.
This sense of “RPG as strategic simulation” is still a major feature in the genre, but slowly there was a growth towards more storytelling choices and challenges that dealt with individual choices and personalities beyond mere combat. The character you built went beyond mere equipment and skills, and included personality and motivations that you brought to them — which could cause problems if your character’s goals didn’t mesh with those of the rest of the party or the story as a whole.
This degree of self-determination has proven an effective way to get players to connect with their characters, and has been very popular outside of RPGs. Today, players like me can spend hours making our characters, obsessing over minor details of their appearance until we’ve decided who we want to inhabit over the next dozen or hundred hours of gameplay — whether that’s for our own enjoyment or for the delight and horror of an audience. As much as our focus on character customization may jokingly be called “Barbie dress-up”, never underestimate the sincere joy we take in decorating the things we love and making them unique to us.
(This is an especially good value prospect for designers, as this character creation is usually done using some polished version of the tools and assets they’ve already developed for creating the copious volume of NPCs in the game world. If you’ve already built a good editing tool for devs, why not let the players enjoy it every once in a while?)
And even in games where your character’s story, appearance, and personality are predetermined, the ability to choose their abilities and general focus still lets players feel invested in who they’ll embody. Plus, it entices players by hinting at the options they can build towards as their character progresses.
Levelling up — gameplay’s artificial sweetener
Ah yes, the joys of leveling up, picking new skills and abilities, and further customizing your character along a path you’ve been dreaming of since creating them. In some tabletop games, the leveling up process is as complicated (and at least as enjoyable) as a good combat.
For a long time, this was the single element that seemed to define whether or not a game was described as having “RPG elements”. It just meant “your character’s stats will go up.”
And never underestimate the simple human delight in seeing numbers go up.
But there’s a more subtle reason why character progression like this has become ubiquitous in gaming. That’s because leveling up simply makes players feel better.
To designers and psychologists, much of the joy of playing games comes down to a sense of “developing mastery”. You’ve fought this enemy so often you know their attack patterns and how to defeat them without a hit. You’ve learned all the little secret tricks in this level, and now you can run across it faster than ever. After hours of practice, you’ve mastered this situation, and every time you perform it well, you remind yourself of how far you’ve come.
Now, add in a leveling system where the stats of the player’s character slowly improve as well, allowing them to do all of those things faster and better than they could with a new character. Not only is the player naturally developing mastery of the game, their character is also improving such that these challenges really are easier to overcome.
And so, the player feels like they’ve developed that much more mastery, even if they haven’t improved. In fact, they may have gotten sloppier, because their higher stats mean they can afford to be careless. Leveling up is the artificial sweetener of gameplay.
As you can guess, this can come with a lot of downsides as well. To continue to provide a challenge for players with stronger characters, you have to have a steeper challenge curve. But making it too steep means that players may have to spend time building up levels to get their character strong enough to meet those challenges. JRPGs were especially notorious for this sort of grind, to the point where it felt like Final Fantasy 8’s “draw system” was built not to test a player’s skill, but their patience.
But still, practically every game genre out there now has some form of leveling system. For many designers, it’s simply too effective a gameplay ingredient to leave on the shelf. Even games that put tremendous emphasis on developing mastery, like Elden Ring, still include leveling systems — even if their most dedicated players find ways to complete the game without it.
Quests, the developer’s lure
Ah, here we go. Nothing captures the tradition of role-playing games quite like going on a quest. And whether you’re getting a quest from a wizard in a bar, or a mission from a briefing commander, or the details of a job from a shadowy Mr Johnson, they’re all the same promise from a storyteller: “do this thing and you’ll get a story.”
Games have had implicit quests since their start, even if it’s just “get the most points and you’ll be the winner”. It’s an invitation from the designer to eagerly participate in the premise of the game.
In my profession, I’ve built a lot of quests, and I often compare the experience to being a con man; through a combination of promise of rewards and compelling storytelling, you get the marks (err, players) to buy into your risky offering, because they’re sure they’ll be able to triumph against all odds. And once they’re invested, they’ll fill in the gaps in your story to match what they want to get out of it.
As a designer, it’s a fantastic way to motivate players. In modern RPGs, the quest is a fundamental structure for storytelling, acting as a container for dialogue lines, scenes, and scripting that all serve a particular storyline. Quests can be highly-branching narratives that go in many directions (more on that below), or they can be a simple laundry list of the linear steps to the next part of the story.
Add in more modern additions, like a quest log that tracks progress, reminds players of details they may have forgotten, and includes guidance for how to progress the quest, and you’ve got a gameplay tool that’s so convenient for keeping players engaged that it’s hard to go back to a time without them.
In race to always offer larger games, there’s even been an embrace of a variety of forms of systemic storytelling to procedurally generate quests for players to pursue. Whether that’s Skyrim’s generated mini-quests between NPCs, or more robust frameworks for arching stories in Wildermyth, or even complex interlocking simulation systems that can generate stories like Dwarf Fortress, designers are looking at how to build a world that can provide quests to players in nearly limitless permutations.
So modern games use some version of quests constantly. Even completely linear stories can still use them to guide players through the steps of a tutorial, or simply to keep track of major characters and plot points.
In fact, if a designer relies on quests too much, this kind of artificial guidance can lead to the same sloppiness that leveling can induce in players. Why bother with clever level design and guidance if the player’s just following a quest marker on their HUD? Why bother with clear dialogue or scenes if we can just explain what just happened in the quest update text? Quests should supplement the guidance of your game’s design, not replace it.
Still, for many players, just the seeing a quest update gives the same sort of dopamine hit as seeing their character level up. It gives a sense of progress, mastery, and an illusion of control, even if they’re just progressing through a completely scripted level. And that’s why this RPG convention has spread to every other genre of game.
Living in an open world
In tabletop RPGs, where you have a constant dialog between players and storyteller, there is an explicit promise of open world. So much so, that it’s a cliche that any group of players will gleefully ignore the storyteller’s planned adventure in favor of following the strange little goblin who caught their interest because she was wearing a squirrel as a hat. And the storyteller just has to adapt on the fly.
In the computer RPG era, the smartest minds of a generation of developers worked to be able to recreate that sort of player freedom to frustrate designers.
Players may take it for granted, but having the freedom to explore wherever they like in an open world presents tremendous challenges for designers. There’s a reason early games just let you walk forward and never back. When players can choose where to go (or avoid), it means designers have to give them motivations to entice them. Quests are just one option in the bag of tricks of ways to entice players towards points of interest, activities, and the rest of the carefully created content for them to find.
But when handled well, an open world provides an unparalleled sense of freedom for players, as well as a deeper investment in the world. It lets them take their time in areas they enjoy, return to characters they connect with, and really develop a sense of ownership of their explorations in a way that makes them feel that they’re creating a story that is uniquely their own.
Now, there are degrees of open-ness for a world to have. Not every game has the “pick a spot on the horizon and you can go there” freedom that Skyrim promised. Some have delineated spaces that the player can explore in whatever order they want. Even more games will just have a central hub area that the player returns to before picking their next linear level. The more open a game is, the more work it is for the designers, after all.
All of these offer the player some sense of freedom, but they don’t always offer the same sense of connection to the world. For best results, it’s important that when a player does have a chance to return to an area, they can see them through a new light.
This can mean they have new traversal abilities to move through the space, in the classic Metroidvania fashion. Or this can be a more esoteric change regarding the world, like having new relationship with the location or characters in that space. It can mean returning to the scene of meaningful moments and reflecting on how much things have changed, or it can even mean giving the player spaces where they can just enjoy mundane moments of inhabiting the world.
But in any of these cases, it gives players a new dimension of connecting with the world of your game. So despite all the extra work it adds
Reactive storytelling: choice and consequence
Tabletop roleplaying games, at their core, are conversations between the player and the storyteller. Even with all the other game mechanics stripped away, you’d have a collaborative storytelling session between people sitting together. I tell you part of the story, you tell me another part, and we take turns reacting and responding to build something together. That’s been pretty popular game for humans across all of recorded history.
Computer roleplaying games have one major problem with recreating that gold standard: because we can’t package a human storyteller in every game, we can’t perfectly react to everything the players may put forth. We’ve been trying to build systems that can react like this since the days of Eliza, and people keep thinking we’ll get there with just one more generation of AI.
But for the foreseeable future, it’s up to us designers to understand what our players might do and to plan ahead to create responses to those actions.
Whether it’s a big reaction like a branching quest that can be completed in different ways (or even go in wildly different directions), or as tiny as a dialogue bark that acknowledges something the player does, there’s a connection that comes from the player recognizing that their action has been noticed and reacted to.
In fact, the more unique the player’s circumstances are, and the more specific your reaction to it, the more the player will appreciate it because it feels so custom-tuned to them. Whether that means dialogue that calls out the player for dawdling, or adding a meta conversation about their gameplay behavior, this can lead to amazing moments of connection with the game. When a player finds a storyline that remembers what they did twenty hours ago and has the repercussions come back to bite them, even the most punishing storyline feels at least a little satisfying.
In UX terms, it’s simple: any action by a user should give some response, even if it’s a clear failure. In psychological terms, it’s just a basic humanity: the need to feel seen and recognized.
And for game designers, it’s one of the most important skills we can develop: the ability to understand our players and predictively respond to how they may want to play. It’s like asynchronous, cooperative storytelling.
Building reactive storytelling is one of the most difficult elements of role-playing games to implement. And if you’re doing anything more than varieties of barks, it can quickly become one of the most expensive elements, as well.
And ultimately, that may be why it feels the most unique to role-playing games. Any game willing enough to commit to large-scale story changes based on player’s behavior is arguably entering roleplaying game territory, more than just adopting some of the genre’s gameplay.
An RPG Designer’s Priority
You may have noticed a theme in these last three entries. While the earlier elements of RPGs were all strictly mechanical elements of gameplay, the quests, open worlds, and reactivity are all much more story-heavy elements. But a focus on story alone isn’t what makes an RPG.
As tabletop RPGs have developed, there’s been a broad shift from old wargaming days of the players and storyteller being antagonists, to them being collaborators in creating a satisfying story. Computer RPGs have taken a similar turn, even if that collaboration takes a little more pre-planning and a lot more development resources.
A lot of games have grand stories to tell. Every big, blockbuster FPS with an auteur’s name above the title will trumpet what an important story it has to tell the player. But it’s not the player’s story.
The real essence of a roleplaying game is that the players build the story within the world that the developers build. It’s collaboration to build something uniquely personal.
And that’s why I love them.