RPG

Role-playing games, or RPGs, are essentially but not exclusively defined by games which the player takes the role of a character (or a team of characters) in a certain fictional setting, what explains the applied term. In video games, the role-playing is performed meeting certain characteristics typical to the original tabletop RPGs. Basically, those characteristics consist of options regarding the character development and build, narrative and story progression, exploration, and decision-making. When the player opts certain choices, incidental restrictions and paths based in such choices are generated as the game proceeds. Such paths could be related to skills, aspects and attributes of the role-playing character, and depending how the player invest (or not) in certain factors, the gameplay gets restricted to what the player selected. Many RPGs have a fixed stat-leveling for the character(s), in these cases the gameplay restricts itself unless the character(s) meet a certain requirement after increasing stats. Those restrictions can, but not always, prevent progression and change the difficulty and approach of the game and how the player should act under certain conditions.

In RPGs, stats are usually, but certainly not exclusively, increased through equipment customization and a leveling system by the earn of experience points, which can be acquired by several methods such as defeating enemies, discovering items, performing specific tasks and exploration, to name some of the most common examples. These skills, aspects and attributes are utilized in the game progression which is influenced by the decisions of the player. The player decisions are very circumstantial, and thus context based, generating the mentioned restrictions in gameplay. For example, a magic user character is very effective against a enemy who is weak to magic damage but extremely resistant to physical attacks. If the player controls a physical attack based character, they will mostly certainly encounter difficulty in the fight with the same enemy.

RPG elements can be present in several other genres, once the character is influenced by the decisions or not of the player, generating circumstantial and restrictive gameplay, as described. Not all RPGs can be considered action games as the player decisions are usually not decided in real-time. The most common example of gameplay decision is execution through menu-driven interfaces, be it for combats, dialogue, exploration, story progression, etc. RPGs with real-time execution fall in the action RPG sub-category.