Random thoughts and questions

Go to bed with pleasant feelings.
Promptly woken by mother because she wants me to go into work and help her.

On the one hand, why should I help you? On the other hand, I don't want all of those students to suffer because she's stressed; she has all 36 of them at once as opposed to 18 at a time. If it means that I can sneak in a little bit of extra kindness and happiness into their days, it's well worth it.

TOOOOO THE CAAARRRR

TL2 isn't much more RPG than Borderlands, really. Same basic ideas - you have a character with stats that you increase as you progress, you allocate skill points on level-up, you get quests to kill bad guys and get loot and XP from those bad guys, fight the occasional boss, buy/sell gear at vendors, etc. There's also fishing. And you can be female character for any class - Engineer, Mage, Outlander or Berzerker. Everyone gets a pet! If you don't like the papillon, you could have a bulldog, a wolf, or something different like a ferret or a even fuckin honey badger.

However, this is on PC, not on Xbox. :)

TL2 isn't an RPG.

Yeah, that would make it a no-go for me. My laptop doesn't really have a gaming build, so I stick with consoles.

So when it is described on the Runic web site as an "award-winning action RPG," I should take your word for it instead? You are, after all, right about most things.

Just because Runic says it's so doesn't make it so. It's a Diablo clone, and Diablo is no more an RPG than Super Mario Bros is an RPG.

Then may I interest you in a new, specially-built-for-gaming PC rig?

Here ya go, Nute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_burn_centers_in_the_United_States

Let's not even start some idiotic post-war over what a "real RPG" is or is not. My point for you, Jerri, is that I think you'd enjoy some action RPGs (like Torchlight 2, which really is not very different from BL2 in many regards) so I encourage you to keep an open mind about others in the genre, beyond BL2. I know PC is a no-go for you right now, but I think you're more of an action-RPG gamer than you think you are. :)

"Action RPGs" are the Farmville of gaming.

Get your Diablocraft off my lawn, you meddling kids.

But I thought swords + sorcery = RPG.

No, Farmville is the Farmville of gaming. We get it, you don't like them. Nobody cares bro.

Diablo came out in 1997 dude.

And in 2000, and in 2012, and in 2009 (don't pretend Torchlight isn't just Diablo with the serial numbers filed off) and then in 2012 again. It's all the same game.

What does that have to do with anything? ARPG is the accepted label for the genre, what exactly are you arguing against?

And what about those damn man-shooters. First with Wolfenstein 3d and ever since they've been releasing the same game every year.

That the label is wrong. Just because people accept it doesn't mean it's actually correct. As a fan of RPGs, I don't like the association with games like Diablo which involve nothing that sets an RPG apart from other video games, aside from "You have an inventory and skills". By that rubric, the Indiana Jones game for the Atari 2600 was an "action RPG" because you had an inventory that you controlled with the second joystick to equip Indy with different items.

"Action", to me, implies that timing and motion and reaction time are fundamental aspects of the gameplay. Platformers are action games, side-scrollers are action games, etc. Tomb Raider is the archetypical "action" game.

Skyrim is an Action RPG. Mass Effect is an Action RPG. Torchlight is a dungeon crawler.

The advancements between Wolfenstein 3D and, say, CODBLOPS are an order of magnitude greater than the differences between Diablo and Torchlight II. In the way that all FPS games can be based off Wolfenstein 3D, I'd say all Diablo-like dungeon crawlers can basically be considered adaptations of Nethack, just adapted to an isometric viewpoint.

More of Nute's absolutism.

Have you actually played any ARPGs? Because timing, motion and reactions are definitely key aspect of the gameplay. Other than perspective and controls there is little difference between games like Skyrim and Torchlight.

I have played Diablo 1-3 and Torchlight. I don't dispute the "Action" nomenclature, I dispute calling them RPGs.

So what makes Skrim an RPG and Diablo not?

RPG is an awful descriptor for any game. No computer game that has ever been called an RPG contains any role-playing, so the words themselves dont have much meaning or relevance. It just indicates something that is descended from tabletop role-playing games, which is a very broad category. It gets used for games that have nothing but incrementally improving numbers, and for games with nothing but interactive stories.

Thus my plea to everyone to stop calling their games RPGs and use something more descriptive.

Diablo is just a reskinned Gauntlet, anyway.

For me, if you ask ten players of a game "Who is your character and why are they doing what they do?" and they all come up with the same answer, you're not playing an RPG. In Skyrim, for instance, your character is the Dragonborn, you start out with the whole wrongful-imprisonment thing - but why you're there and the backstory is up to you to decide and how you play based on that has both mechanical and narrative effects. In Diablo, the effects are purely mechanical - get X weapon, upgrade it to X+1 weapon. It's a hack-and-slash game, and the reason I dislike it being given the RPG moniker is because it disassociates the term with the more cerebral narratives that should be identified that way.

So vague or no back story and gameplay options that affect the narrative. While I get where you're going with that I think it's too specific and leaves you excluding a good number of games. The term RPG in the context of video games has transcended from its source and now indicates gameplay mechanics, not necessarily any role playing elements. By your definition most RPGs wouldn't be labelled as such. For the last 20 years or so RPG in the context of video games has basically meant statistic based or influenced interactions. You can rage against this all you like but it's the accepted term now, for better or for worse.

It's used in both ways. Both Nute's definition and yours, because both are elements that descend from D&D, but they don't depend on each other at all, which has allowed them to diverge. Which is why this argument gets repeated all over the internet every day.

I'm not aware of any games that fit the no back story and player influenced narrative that don't have other typical RPG elements (stats, inventory, etc.) and are still called RPGs, do you have any examples?

AND RAGE I SHALL!

The bit that irks me as a tabletop gamer is when someone explains that Dungeons and Dragons is an RPG and someone will say "Oh, like Diablo?" and I want to stab them in the face with a pencil.

Are there any video games they could have said that really would have conveyed what Dungeons and Dragons is like?

Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, the Elder Scrolls series, the Ultima series, the Mass Effect series (as much as I criticize the writing, it's not a horrible misrepresentation of roleplaying).

I can give you tabletop role-playing games that don't involve stats and inventory.
Having any numbers or record-keeping is an optional addition that was made to non-computer role-playing games, and there are still people who regard it as an addon to the core experience in computer role-playing games too. But you're right that for most of computer-land, character levels and shit is what RPG has mostly come to mean. So a lot of confusion arises because of these two definitions, one more widespread, but the other older and more closely matching the name.

I hate when I get these... random spaz attacks? Panic attacks? Idfk.

"Oh, I have an interview today OMG WHAT TIME IS IT oh it's still not for another hour."

Somewhere between "today" and "OMG" my body does something and it makes my chest ache for hours afterwards. Augh.

I ate too many cookies.

Really cause few of those are all that similar to D&D outside of combat mechanics and some (NN) are incredibly similar to Diablo.

The only way I would consider NWN even remotely reminiscent of Diablo would be the semi-realtime combat. Which is probably the major dislike I have for the game.

I agree with Nute, I've come to just accept it as something that won't change, but somewhere along the way, RPG, when it comes to videogames, has turned into, "It has stats that can go up".

My local grocery store has a big sign announcing that their liquor department now opens at 6:00 AM. I'm not sure if this means they've moved the time earlier or later, but I am relieved to know that there is only a 210 minute window in which I can't buy alcohol.

It wasn't just somewhere along the way it was decades ago, almost since the inception. Few also had any branching stories that the player could influence.

Me too :(

I have been sick as all get-out this week and cookies were my one solace. Well, cookies and the delicious elixir known as NyQuil. But yeah, I definitely overdid it today. I shall make penance when I have more energy.

My other random thought: persistent uber-colds are most unwelcome.

When you're sick you need extra cookies to boost your immune system. I'm sure I read that somewhere...

Someone on my Facebook friendlist posted "God, give me strength" and I had to really fight to stop from replying "Give Him an hour, then try protein powder".

Posting here is part of my restraint strategy.

Being in Alabama, I so wanted to go straight to Facebook the other day after that poor boy was released and his kidnapper killed and state that, "They play Fox News on the treadmill at the gym and their lead story out of Alabama was about the resolution of the kidnapping and it led with 'Fox loses more viewership'". I chickened out.