This is How to Come at Me Bro: Making What Games Offer Clearer

[News Portal]

One of the reasons that many fans are upset with the Mass Effect 3 ending is that people didn't get what they expected. In this article, Adrian Forest explains how we can learn from tabletop and pen-and-paper games to create a clearer idea of what a game offers and how a player can relate to it.

Read full article by Adrian Forest

[Mekon]

That article confused me... since when is Chess an RPG?

Referring to video game RTSes in connection with tabletop/P&P RPG is also fairly obtuse - wouldn't it make more sense to compare them to tabletop wargaming, which they clearly emulate?

Felt very much a case of square peg, round hole to me... combined with liberal application of a mallet.

edit: Had you left the term RPG out, it might have made more sense, albeit a fairly obvious comparison (it's no surprise that many video games take their cues from tabletop gaming).

[TRB]

My knight has +4 armour and a +6 long sword and is having a relationship with the queen, on the side.
and if it comes to saving the rook or the bishop, rook wins every time.

I did lose a bunch of pawns though, because I took too long to save them while I gained the loyalty of the important named pieces.




fun aside, I don't see it saying chess is an RPG.
I did see it being compared to an RTS though.

[Marius]

I did lose a bunch of pawns though, because I took too long to save them while I gained the loyalty of the important named pieces.

Pawns can turn into queens.

[TRB]

I did lose a bunch of pawns though, because I took too long to save them while I gained the loyalty of the important named pieces.

Pawns can turn into queens.

only on mufti day.

[Mekon]

fun aside, I don't see it saying chess is an RPG.
I did see it being compared to an RTS though.

The article wasn't particularly consistent.

It started off distinguishing between tabletop or PnP RPGs... although the sentence structure wasn't clear - was it "tabletop or PnP RPG" (as in interchangeable words) or "tabletop or PnP RPG" (different genres), then quickly got messy.

Even in games like StarCraft where there’s no “you” on the screen, you have a “role”: you’re the commander of an army, or the mayor of a city, or the leader of a civilisation. There’s a bunch of people who’ve done a lot of thinking about how all of this works in tabletop RPGs, and I think some of the ideas they’ve had can be useful in talking about video games.

That is clearly trying to connect Starcraft with RPG ideals, when I see it as based on a tabletop wargame (of the Avalon Hill variety).

Followed up with...

But how I think about my marines in StarCraft is obviously completely different to how I think about Shepard in Mass Effect. This is where another tabletop RPG idea comes in, and that’s the idea of what position you, the player, take in relation to the character you’re controlling: your stance. This is (again, simplifying) the idea that you relate to characters you control in one of four ways: Pawn, Actor, Author or Director. In StarCraft my little marines are like the pawns in chess, and that’s pretty much what Pawn stance is about.

Perhaps it's just sloppy writing, but in no way have I ever personally equated RPGs with wargames (or RTSes in video game parlance). I certainly didn't find that the obfuscated re-partitioning of "roles" (aka genres) made anything any "clearer".