Everyone has their taste in games. I developed mine in my early childhood like many others, and I’m not ashamed to tell you that it didn’t change that much since. My heart was always with RPGs.
Let’s take a step back and look at what we are talking about: What is an RPG?
Acronym of the role-playing game, RPG is a game genre in which players act as characters in a fictional setting. Players are expected to be their characters and play accordingly, carrying their character development through maintaining their roles. Character development is often in tune with the story’s progress. All in all, an RPG is about actively partaking in storytelling.
Given its definition, it may seem like many modern games fall into this genre. And they do, to some extent, but before exploring what makes a game RPG —I promise we’ll do that—, allow me to tell you the history of RPGs so that you can get a better sense of the RPG game elements that defined the genre throughout its history.
History of RPGs
Okay, we can’t pinpoint the exact moment when people first played a role-playing game since pretending to be somebody else and telling believable lies for fun is probably as old as humankind. We know that storytellers have existed for almost the entire history of humanity. If the purpose is entertainment, something as simple as mimicking an animal or doing a historical re-enactment could be subject to the role-playing game. You see, all the confusion about what is RPG and what is not is that the definition of RPG is relatively broad—man, trying to break down and define a concept that evolves and alters over time… I hate metaphysics.
And I’m probably getting ahead of myself. For the sake of this article, we’ll go for the next best option, that being what is considered the ancestor of role-playing games in the current sense: Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Derived from wargames —nope, I’m not going into that hole— D&D was published in 1974 by Gygax’s TSR.
Even though TSR aimed at a niche audience, the table top RPG (TTRPG) craze spread like wildfire. Inspired by the success of D&D, new TTRPGs have been released. Some of the notable titles are Tunnels and Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne (1974/75), Chivalry & Sorcery (1977), RuneQuest (1978), Metamorphosis Alpha (1976), Superhero: 2044 (1977). Empire of the Petal Throne and City State of the Invincible Overlord.
With pc/console gaming going mainstream, the community of TTRPGs shrank. As a fan of both TTRPG and role-playing video games, even though the genre has changed as a whole with time, we were introduced to new types of RPG games.
