The Term "RPG" is a Mess, Continued
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But the nature of a specific D&D game can vary a great deal depending on who is running the game and these gameplay aspects will appeal to different types of players. Some people just want to kill stuff and don't care about story. Some want to play characters, etc. But since every game was run by a person, D&D was able to be all things to all people. If the game wasn't giving you what you wanted then it was a problem with your DM, not the game.There's also this article, written by (former?) IGN PC editor Steve Butts, that covers much of the same ground across all of the modern genre conventions.
So then the computer rolled in and people started making videogames out of what they thought were the crucial components of an RPG. Some focused on character building, some on storytelling, some on strategy. And they all called their wildly divergent games "Role Playing Games". That was over twenty years ago, and the problem has only gotten more complex since then. Now we have new ingredients like "action", "character customization", and "massively multiplayer" that further Balkanize the genre. Then on top of that we have all the thematic distinctions like medieval fantasy, cyberpunk, superhero, and so on. Properly labeling a given RPG requires a classification system to rival botany.
As soon as a game creator says "I'm going to make an MMOG," for instance, more than half the design is locked down purely by the expectations that label carries in the market. We see this in BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic. Every time the game is shown, the game's creators say "everything you'd expect from an MMO game" will be present. "Of course it will have crafting," they say as if there was never any doubt. "Of course it will have guilds, of course it will have [insert genre convention]." And while I don't necessarily think that this particular game shouldn't have those particular features, I don't think their inclusion should be justified simply because "it's an MMOG." Just look at the loot system in Champions Online. Super heroes don't beat up villains to take their stuff but because looting is such a powerful part of the MMOG genre, the mechanic is shoehorned into a setting for which it is obviously inappropriate.
