What aspect of rpg do you think video game can't or don't render properly ?

what aspect of rpg do you think video game can't or don't render properly ?

Descriptions. Admittedly, Planescape was really good about this.

If I'm going through a bazaar I want deafening cacophony or merchants and peddlers and the smell of exotic spices on the air, or in a dungeon I want a clue to be given based on a sudden thud, or the smell of decay.

Other than that, I wish exploration, open ended quests with consequences, and proper faction systems were in more games.

Choices. Especially stupid choices. Okay, my GM might tell me that spitting into the kings face and groping his daughter in front of his eyes might be a really bad idea and will ask me if I really want to do that. But if I wanted to, I could. That might be a bad example, but doing stupid shit that somehow worked out is one of the best things about rpgs. Video games will always be far too limited to let me do whatever.

Also: improvisation. Especially for the GM. The ability to create landscapes, nations and characters on the fly.

Freedom. A video game will never have the freedom that comes with roleplaying.

Player driven aspects.

Say you are in a dungeon and find a sword. RPG Player sometime do bizzarely left-field things such as:
"Hey, this a really go sword. I'm going to go find the smith that made this."
Prior to you- user- reading that I doubt many if any people had the same thought.

Ok it's limited...but dwarf fortress does allow to do loads of stupid shit and making shit on the play is best part of the game.
DF hand you a world and says - have "Fun"

did you try a stupid character in both of the original game? they were pretty great about that.

Freedom of choice is the thing vidya inherently can't replicate. At least until a point at which you'd have an actual AI generating an entire world and every character in it, at which point you've basically just invented an artificial GM.

Exploration. More specifically, meaningful exploration. Plenty of games have large open worlds, but in many of them the majority of the map is flyover country speckled with points of interest. There's nowhere to go and do things except where the developers put things to do. On the table, the DM can invent and adapt encounters based on where the party wants to go.

As an example: let's say the party needs to be on the other side of the mountain. Most video games will send you through a pass or a tunnel, both of which will usually collapse conveniently behind you. Some games might give you a choice between the two.
On the table, I could consider the pass, the tunnel, going around completely, scaling the peak, or any number of setting specific options like bargaining with earth elementals for easy passage, acquiring the means to teleport, or perhaps taming and riding a roc. Moreover, I'm not locked into my choice once it's made, whereas in a video game once you're in the tunnel, the only was out is the other end.

Character creation as well, which i'm including Class, archtypes and look.

Mortality. The fact that you can just reboot whatever character you're playing over and over until you figure the challenge or puzzle in question is what separates vidya from RPGs.

I'm not saying it's "bad" because it isn't. I am saying it's different, makes for a different play style, and makes for a different game.

That doesn't seem inherent at all, though. There are vidya where you get one playthrough and if you die that's it, game over, start again, and there are roleplaying games where death isn't the end and resurrection is relatively easy.

There isn't really a good word for it, but I guess "looseness" will do

In a video game, even one as open as a bethesda game, you can only do what the developer thought to put in or was able to put in. For example, I can't make my character do cartwheels while singing in a video game

shit I mean the fallout game.

NPCs.

With a good GM, NPCs feel and act like real people, they remember stuff, run away from unfavorable battle, make plans, have their own agendas, etc.

None of this is yet possible in video games. Bethesda RPGs are a prime example of this, you can go around slaying demons and giants, walking around in your spiky, otherwordly armor and some bandits will still try to shake you down for coin. You can get to be the archmage, and people in your very own mage guild will sometimes act as if you're a novice mage. They also can't adapt if you do quests out of order or if you're doing side quests after finishing the main storyline and becoming the savior of the world or whatever.

Games like Fable tried and failed miserably at this. I haven't yet seen a game that was even half way convincing.

Variety
Nuance
Quests
Wild player tangents

The role-playing part, first and foremost, along with any sort of improv.
Vidya also reduces the whole experience to skill checks to claim "RPG" and character progression to claim "RPG-like", with (even if numerous) limited set of pre-defined options based on skills or not even that, just a handful of options to pick regardless of anything.
And the more advanced the graphics, the more limiting the game is. Simple example - Wasteland was pretty much "Pokemon: Adult-Only Post-Apo Edition" never mind it predated Pokemon by couple of years, but because graphics and most of the actions were so extremely limited, you had to imagine a lot of things along the sparse descriptions. Wasteland 2 has well-defined places, well-defined objects, well-defined locations, well-defined positions of enemies and everything is just there to see - and nothing left for imagination.

>That doesn't seem inherent at all, though.

It is. You just haven't thought completely it through yet.

>>There are vidya where you get one playthrough and if you die that's it, game over

Yes, there are games which make you start again while others make you start from a save point. It doesn't matter where you start because you're going to pass through pretty much the same events and challenges until you get to the point where you "died". Then, you'll either succeed or die and start again. The game only has so many variables.

Now, this is not as blatant as good old Super Mario Brothers where you keep dying and returning until you can pass some silly obstacle, but idea is much the same.

>>start again, and there are roleplaying games where death isn't the end and resurrection is relatively easy.

True, but after that resurrection you don't awake sometime in the past and then start passing through the same groups of challenges and obstacles you did before. Sure, you can return to the same room in the same dungeon and face the same whatever that killed you last time but you're not "replaying" the past.

Again, I'm not saying this is bad because it isn't. I'm just saying it's different because it is.

That's a good point too. It's a relative lack of variables or, as you put it, "looseness".

You can tell how important descriptions are by just how easily I could imagine myself in both of those places as soon as I read them.

Choices, consequences, emergent story

I unironically think Expeditions: Conquistador was the closest video games ever get to tabletop RPG experience, with a low-power party in a high-stakes scenario and a bit of railroading.

But a GM could literally do that. You could run an RPG with save points and have people reload and try again. I'm not sure why you would, but there's nothing actually stopping you. It's a cultural difference, not something inherent to the genre.

Also, there are games which lock you out of playing them after one death. They're weird indie things that can be easily circumvented, but they do theoretically exist.

The DM. The fact that the creator of the adventure can actually interact with the players, stitch together something to suit them and improvise when needed. There's no technology that can make up for that.

The part where people fuck it up.

>Implying you can't fuck things up while playing cRPG

I think I would want you to DM a campaign for me based on those excellent descriptions alone.

>But a GM could literally do that.

But they don't.

>>You could run an RPG with save points and have people reload and try again.

But no one does.

>>I'm not sure why you would

Because that's not what you do in RPGs

>>but there's nothing actually stopping you.

True, but the choice of doing it or not in your RPG session doesn't even exist in vidya games.

>>It's a cultural difference, not something inherent to the genre.

It's inherent in the coding, user. You seem to think I'm suggesting this make vidya "bad" or "wrong" so I'll say for the third time it does not. It' make vidya different from RPGs and that is what the OP's question was about.

>> Implying I never admitted to fucking things up.
>> We have all done at least one fuck up.

It just doesn't feel like a significant difference, to me. It's not inherent to either, it's just how things tend to be, but there are differences which are inherent. Good or bad isn't really a factor.

This. If you fuck up in a video game, by say killing an important NPC, you get a bad end screen and start at your last save.

If you fuck up in an RPG, things play out and you have to deal with your failings.

Sup reddit. Why not making yourself more obvious with the way how you post? Not just going to add "Quote"?

>It just doesn't feel like a significant difference

So it is a difference, just not a significant one?

The OP asked about those aspects of RPGs video games can't or don't render properly. He didn't ask about significant aspects.

>It's not inherent to either
>it's just how things tend to be

What do you think the word inherent means?

That's more about multiplayer vs single player.

>he hasn't played Morrowind
Neither have I, but I at least know some video games allow you to keep playing after breaking the story.

play morrowind

Inherent. That it could not exist without it. That it is an integral part of it. Things like freedom of choice and improvisation are an inherent difference between the two, because changing it would change the kind of game it was. Running an RPG with savepoints, or creating a vidya you can only play once, wouldn't stop the RPG being an RPG or the vidya being a vidya.

>Sup reddit.

Sup channer.

>>Why not making yourself more obvious with the way how you post?

I know you've all got sand in your collective vagina about post spacing, but I haven't been on Reddit since "Fat People Hate" got purged. Besides, I learned to type before there was an internet and I'm not going to change now.

Truthfully, just be 100% player choice driven. I mean fuck unless the writer and programmer directs it, you'll never get something like Noh in a game and have it actually worm itself into storylines.

>but I haven't been on Reddit since "Fat People Hate" got purged

So you're the worst type of redditor

You know you're anonymous, right?

If somebody calls you a redditor, you don't need to defend yourself. You can just ignore them

>"Fat People Hate" got purged
That's sad.
Not that I ever went to reddit. I got all my fat people hate from Veeky Forums

Come one, man. FPH was the gold standard and had hamplanets reeeeing 24/7. The dipshits running reddit even shut down FPH while letting something called "coontown" stay up.

A friend sent me the link and I was hooked from the first. There's was no need to join because I never wanted to post, so I don't think I was an actual "redditor" not that it matters. It's on voat now but not as good.

Meh.
Like most of reddit, I assume it's just stale Veeky Forums stuff regurgitated.

>Like most of reddit, I assume it's just stale Veeky Forums stuff regurgitated.

Beats me. I only went to FPH and haven't seen much of that here even on Veeky Forums. The shit that got them shut down over there was classic though.

They realized that the image hosting site most members were using was deleting any image which linked back to FPH. Someone went to that site and found a picture collage of the entire staff plus their dog. Naturally, most of the staff was fat. Better yet, the dog was fat too. So they posted the staff picture with the title "Even their dog is fat".

That was it. I think the hammer dropped less than 24 hours later.

Vidya can tell a story very well. Provided it, and the rest of the game, is competently crafted.
They're shit at creating stories. The only things I can do in a videogame are the ones the developers thought of and could be bothered to put in. I can't really imagine in the blanks. If I do anything not covered by script it will invariably be a waste of time. Even a crap GM can improvise.

>I can't really imagine in the blanks. If I do anything not covered by script it will invariably be a waste of time.
Try Wasteland. The original one. You are going to have fun with it. Lots of fun.

I would love to DM for you, but I've never done it online or in person.

I did get Curse of Strahd recently, so it's gonna be fun playing some gothic horror with my friends. Descriptions are vital to horror.