The line between IF and text-based RPGs

I’m interested in people’s opinions. What separates IF from RPGs for you? Or is there no line, and one is a subset of the other?

Personally I’d say if the focus is not the story but on gameplay, then it’s not really normal fiction anymore, but just a video game. So typical open-world games like the Elder Scrolls series (if it was text-based) wouldn’t count for me.

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A lot of the classics of interactive fiction had more gameplay than story. “You’re in a front of a white house and you’re going to get some treasures!” So I don’t think that really works as a criterion.

I’m tempted to say that these are orthogonal categories. RPG is a genre, Interactive Fiction is a medium. You can have IF RPG (Kerkerkruip), IF non-RPG (Anchorhead), non-IF RPG (Morrowind), and non-IF non-RPG (Quake).

The boundaries between genre and medium are not strict, and there are certainly cases where it’s hard to make these judgements. (Planescape: Torment has so much text that it makes sense to call it IF, perhaps?)

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I think IF is a discourse community rather than a strict taxonomical thing. So we have shared craft language, we have venues for discussing and publishing work. We have events that feature varied works, authors, and platforms.

And it usually makes a kind of intuitive sense, we seldom debate what “belongs” on IFDB for instance. At least, not here.

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Interesting question! I think there’s probably as many definitions of what constitutes IF as there are people who play it. I personally wouldn’t make that specific distinction (i.e. if the TES games were text based I’d definitely consider them to be IF), but I can understand your perspective.

A while ago I tried to come up with my own working definition of IF for when I was teaching (though I stress to students that this is a personal slant and not an objective definition), as I found a lot of extant ones quite unsatisfying.

I landed on: “Any primarily text-based digital narrative where the player takes an active role in exploring, progressing and/or affecting the story.”

It’s far from perfect, but I find it helpful as it covers games like Orteil’s Nested which (to my mind at least) create a text-based narrative in an unconventional way. I also don’t really think of story and gameplay as wholly separate entities in IF - they work together and enhance each other, and that to me is what makes the form so compelling.

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I think there is line between them. But it is blurry.

On the more IF side you have a text adventure that has some mechanisms like RPG (could be fights, random NPCs, stats of the player character).

On the more RPG side you have a RPG that has no graphics (and no vga graphics, too).

And in between you can have many variants. For example a command prompt but a RPG style (Rogue-like style) map.

As a former tabletop RPGer I watch any development of an text RPG with interest.

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Statistics that affect gameplay, is where the line starts.

Evolving abilities based on those statistics is where the RPG line is crossed.

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I have been working on a hybrid game, so here are some thoughts I have collected along the way on what makes something (parser) IF as opposed to an RPG or CRPG.

  • A CRPG like Wizardry doesn’t really have descriptions of each individual room, or cell, on a level. Whereas I think the expectation for a text adventure is that most rooms have some kind of handcrafted text to them. (Exceptions like Snowball, exist, I’m just saying mostly.)

  • I think a CRPG has a known, limited set of “verbs” or actions. Whereas the magic of the text adventure is that you can type anything into the prompt. Because I am working in Hugo, my WIP is going to default to a lot of things being text adventurey, but one thing I wanted to do is present the player with a static list of words they can type into the prompt. A puzzle can be presented that uses one of those verbs in an offbeat way, but I think RPG mostly avoid actions that the player thought of themselves and isn’t written down in the manual. Ultima III (RPG) is a good example of this: virtually all 26 letters are used as actions, but the game tells you what each one does.

  • When it comes to character advancement through statistics: if this were a spectrum, I’d have it weighted to like 90% RPGs. If I remember right, the more points you have in something like Zork, the better you are at combat. But I don’t think you get “better” at accusing people in Deadline via a random dice roll the farther you get in the game. But you definitely have a better shot with the end bosses in The Bard’s Tale the more you level up your characters through fighting.

Anyway, just some random thoughts on the subject!

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In my opinion, one is a subset of the other.

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As a regular participant in tabletop role-playing games, murder mysteries, and megagames, I believe that roleplaying is about a group of players (ranging from two to several dozen) agreeing on a shared fictional universe, a set of rules, and a very broad, theoretically limitless, freedom to interpret a character. This interpretation is resolved through arbitration systems involving discernment, logic, negotiation among individuals, and sometimes even collective interest, though it does not claim to be perfect. Therefore, the possibility of roleplaying leads not only to emergent storytelling but also to emergent gameplay.

With this in mind, it seems difficult to me to call a video game an “RPG video game.” I love video games and greatly appreciate the development teams behind them. I know that “RPG” is a subgenre within video games, which I respect and even enjoy. Perhaps I lack experience with online video games, but it seems to me that the freedom of emotional, gestural, linguistic, and psychological interpretation of a video game character is restricted by the gameplay itself, rather than the other way around.

Therefore, from my perspective (a radical point of view that I do not claim to be an absolute truth, don’t throw vegetables at me please), there is no such thing as a text-based RPG. It just cannot exist. Instead, there are text-based IF where the gameplay mechanics are shown and draw from the conventions of role-playing game mechanics. However, in “true” (sorry, forgive the old guy) role-playing games, these mechanics are tools that serve the interpretation, not the other way around. Additionally, there are text-based RPGs that present a more literary interface with discreet, or even very simple, gameplay. Both approaches are entirely valid and should largely depend on the perspective the author wishes to convey.

For example, in a romance-themed IF, it wouldn’t be very glamorous to have a seduction score or an affection counter—these are elements that are better kept in the gameplay’s back-office. Displaying such statistics could create a humorous and self-deprecating narrative, provided the author is skilled. In a military campaign-themed IF with tactical challenges, giving the player a clear view of character stats and how they impact the world model allows them to exercise tactical command with informed decision-making. On the other hand, downplaying or hiding this information can emphasize the epic nature of the story and the sense of an uncontrollable fate impacting the characters. Among these -very pleasant- experiences, I see no roleplay. I notice varying degrees of gameplay transparency.

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@Monsieur.HUT

There are specific role-play servers available for practically every online RPG where players stay in-character. This supports your understanding of “true role-playing” games just by their existence. For the purist role-players, if you don’t mind the phrase.

I’m curious though, just for argument’s sake. If you had a Dungeon Master and just one Player, would that still be a true role-playing game? If the DM was replaced by a Computer and the Player had to make up their character’s purpose and motivations (like they do anyway in RP), would that not be a true role-playing game? Is it the lack of a social setting? Is that the determining factor? It’s basically a shared performance?

Like, I could call myself an actor, but without an audience or a camera, I’d just be pretending (or practising acting), not actually acting… does that make sense?

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I know that well, but does the interaction between players allow for emergent gameplay when characters act in ways not anticipated by the algorithms?

According to me, yes.

(only my point of view below, of course)

When, philosophically speaking, one is a consistent materialist, as I strive to be, I think the answer is theoretically yes it is a true RPG. To say no would be to ignore the determinism inherent in our biological condition and to imagine that, simply because we are not machines, we can create imaginary situations entirely free from influence.

However, there is, I believe, a significant degree of difference between the sophistication of our cerebral imagination and that simulated by a computer. Making another human being dream, transporting them to another realm, or engaging them in a fictional dialogue is not merely a matter of data accumulation, abstraction capabilities, information synthesis, or statistical choices. It is the art of encapsulating a subjectivity, which presupposes being one oneself (at least, given the current stage of our technological advancement). Because the subjectivity implies the body.

Of course, one can engage in “true” role-playing even solo; there are systems and methods for this, based on oracles. These oracles act as imagination boosters that impose random constraints, from which the player defines coherent events and resolves them using a set of rules. Therefore, it’s not strictly a matter of social interaction. But upon reflection, do the imaginary worlds, characters, and situations we invent for ourselves emerge from nothingness? No, they are both the product of the influence of others’ imaginations, elsewhere and before us, and of our own organic experience of the world—of the body that we are, which allows us to live the life we live. It is precisely this biological, organic, physiological body and its tangible relationship with the matter of the world that enables subjectivity, perspective, psyche, and imagination.

I absolutely love RPG video games; they’re a lot of fun, and I play them regularly, so I do not look down on the genre. I even find that some are stunning, intelligent masterpieces whose full depth can only be appreciated after certain real-life experiences. Still, in role-playing between human beings, which involves the body, there remains an intensity of life that technology has not yet been able to replace.

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Not by the software, in most cases. Most role-playing in online RPGs looks like two avatars standing in proximity… and nothing else. Listening in on the chat window reveals an interaction that no videogame could ever be expected to portray or remotely appreciate.


I’ve always thought that LLMs and text-based gameplay/presentation might produce a very close approximation of role-play… as long as a participant accepts the absence of body language and tone; the nuance it brings to role-play. Sadly, we are limited to only a transcript of role-play performances when using computers. Still, better than nothing, I suppose. :wink:

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@Monsieur.HUT

You may know of this system, but I found it encourages actual role-play beyond most RPG systems. It uses dice and has rules for varying degrees of success and failure, but you earn momentum from risky actions which can be used as an advantage in future actions. It really seems like a purist’s role-playing system in that story is everything. Combat rules systems are so yesterday. :wink:

https://fari.community/

Charge (and Dash, a simplified version of Charge) is what I’m talking about. If you have questions about the system, their Discord channel is the place to ask.


Sorry for derailing this topic! :smile:

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I’m having trouble understanding the original question. It seems to be asking something like - there is a platonic ideal of a narrative game, but as you add more game-like mechanics to it it moves away from being that pure narrative game, so where exactly does it stop being a narrative game. This is still too vague a question to answer. Which mechanics aid vs hinder the narrative side of the game? Why does the narrative and the mechanical side need to be separate and in conflict? What is the point of creating a demarcation between a narrative and a non-narrative game?

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Those questions might be the best answer so far. :wink:

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Do not be sorry, it is probably my fault, I am an off-topic specialist!

When I said I’m not in the game anymore… thanks a lot, I will explore this very soon :slight_smile:

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Sunless Sea is a good example to look at because it’s widely considered IF in this community (I think) but labelled an RPG on other sites (including Wikipedia). I haven’t played it, but it obviously has both exploration/combat/levelling and interaction with the text.

I’d consider it a hybrid of genres and I’m happy to put any genre tag on anything.

I’d even say that many RPGs have elements of interactive fiction, such as dialogue branching, a choice of who to talk to, and, sometimes, direct influence over story events.

It’s just a question of when something’s such a small part of the game that you wouldn’t recommend it to someone on those grounds.

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Honestly, I think it’s fair to say “Interactive Fiction” and “Role Playing Game” are counter intuitive labels for the kinds of computer games they are typically applied to. On the one hand, nearly any game with a story where player actions alter the flow of events fits the literal description of being fiction that is interactive, while many games beyond the RPG genre have one playing a role. On the other hand, many games commonly considered Interactive Fiction have essentially no story and most computer RPGs have little of the create your own character, improvisational role-playing that gave the TTRPGs that inspired the mechanics of the computer RPG their name. So the terms are both ones where the description fits games beyond the genre and doesn’t fit games within the genre. Of course, computer RPGs get their name from the fact they share the same mechanical framework of their TTRPG counterparts even if that mechanical framework isn’t why the table top games are called role-playing games, and I don’t know enough about the history of the term Interactive Fiction to comment.

That said, even purely within video games, the line between adventure games(though perhaps I should say action adventure to distinguish what I’m talking about from point-and-click type games) and RPGs is a blurry one, especially with the Action RPG existing as a hybrid, and there is plenty of other blurry genre lines, especially in the realm of 3-D games(at least, I feel like, in the 2-d realm, many video game genres are tied to whether they are side-scrolling or top down, a distinction that is lost when moving into 3-D(e.g. Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time have more similarity to each other thand Super Mario Bros. and Zelda I and while SM64 Mario and OoT Link are very different characters to play with, you could at least imagine dropping them ‘as is’ into each other’s game while their 8-bit counterparts would need to be completely overhaulled to make sense in the world of the other’s game).

Of course, genre blurriness is hardly exclusive to video games. I have an intuitive sense that Pop and country(specifically the Nashville sound of the 90s) are on the opposite side of rock from metal, but I’m still clueless as to where the boundary between Rock and Pop, Rock and Country, or Rock and metal is, and genre fiction is less a bunch of neat buckets and more a horrendously hard to parse venn diagram.

All that said, a game that combines parser text adventure style exploration and puzzle solving with JRPG-style turn-based combat is something I’ve wanted to play for a while, but am not sure how to find, assuming such games exist.

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(C)RPG and adventure share a common root, that is, D&D and early TTRPG in general. there was a definite hybrid subgenre, named “text RPG”, e.g. Bannockbury legacy or Citadel Pershu (cfr. also late Panks’s works) and this is where I draw the line between IF and text RPG, the presence of PC statistics and/or a combat system (heck, in debugging my works I have created a “variable/flag sheet”, and ßtesters liked that RPG-inspired debug tool; I have even published its source in this forum, IIRC)

There’s, of course, borrows between the two broad genres, (C/C)RPG and IF: IF style puzzles is increasingly present in CRPGs, and I’m working around borrowing the choice-based NPC convo from recent CRPG (e.g. Dragon Age) and starting the designing what I think will become the very first “party banter” in IF. But remain what is, an parser IF.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Seeing how the Zelda games are widely considered to be RPGs despite them famously relying on player skill, I’d say what makes an RPG in the context of videogames goes beyond gameplay. That’s only one, technical aspect. Conversely, Zork isn’t considered an RPG despite infamously having randomized combat reliant on character skill. While on the other hand Planescape: Torment isn’t considered an adventure game, despite being heavily narrative, with lots of puzzles, and (at least in theory) making it possible to win without (much) fighting. So the line is blurry at best, reliant on setting, conventions and player expectations more than ticking any checkboxes off a marketing department’s list.

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