Found here. Short version: a computer RPG is related to, but not really analogous with, a pen-and-paper RPG. on the plus side: computer RPGs make it much easier to see and hear the orc bandit that’s charging you.
9 thoughts on “My PJ Lifestyle piece on computer RPGs is up.”
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don’t you mean *six* origin stories in Dragon Age: Origins? Human noble, Dalish elf, City elf, Mage, Dwarf commoner, Dwarf noble 🙂
Yes, dagnabbit.
Link no worky for meh.
I have an easy rule of thumb as to whether a computer game is an RPG or not.
Can you name your character? If yes, yes. If no, no.
Sure, I could add complexity. But then the rule wouldn’t be nearly as useful.
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😀 I’m still obligated to protest that the ME3 ending was thematically inappropriate with the story up to that point.
I blame it on corporate meddling. Shepard and Anderson on the Citadel, bleeding out, and watching the world burn would have been pitch-perfect as an ending. But can you imagine what would have happened to the zek who signed off on killing their company’s most valuable piece of Intellectual Property? (And now I want to run a cyberpunk campaign on the premise. Great.)
See, I can’t buy that. These kind of space opera epics ALWAYS ends with you talking to a guy in a white room somewhere. 🙂
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a story.
The ones that I can think of featuring the white room start there in media res (or arrive there shortly after the start), the story happens in flashback, and you catch up to the white room. Either judgement or escape happens, followed by the climax. (In computer games, Alpha Protocol is a great example of this.)
But I’m completely drawing a blank on any stories that feature the white room as a denouement.
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I’m tempted to go over to tvtropes.org and poke around a bit, but I don’t have a couple of spare hours at the moment.
At least one of the crux points of Babylon 5 pops into mind, and they had a variant at the end of Star Trek: The Next Generation TV show. I hear that the Matrix series kind of ended that way, but that probably doesn’t count. And…
:click click click:
Look, never mind. I found this when I was looking for more examples, and that’s just better than it has any right to be.
Which means that I guess you win? 🙂
I don’t think there’s a winning condition on this one (other than learning stuff).
But Trek being the main source of the trope explains why I was unfamiliar with it. I wasn’t all that interested in the franchise in the first place, but after Spock not staying dead, something about whales, and TNG taking about their feelings until being saved by Wesley…