Roleplaying: Evolved
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The modern roleplaying game grew out of the older, more competitive style at some point between H.G. Wells' Little Wars, which many consider to be the first modern tabletop war game, and Jeff Perren and Gary Gygax's Chainmail, the precursor to Dungeons & Dragons. While roleplaying became its own concrete genre with D&D, its players still carried out a lot of the action by moving painted lead figures around on dry-erase battlemats and felt like they had won when they killed the level boss. A lot of people still play D&D that way today.
But even then, the roleplaying game was moving away from its roots as a competitive game. For one thing, the opposing sides were no longer symmetrical. Roleplaying games divided participants into a group of players in one camp and a Game Master (or, in D&D's case, a "Dungeon Master") in the other. The Game Master was more a referee than a contestant. As time passed, pen-and-paper RPGs instructed their Game Masters more and more strenuously that their proper role was to provide a challenge and tell a story, not to win. The 1984 tabletop RPG Justice, Inc., for example, has as its first rule "a Game Master is an entertainer." It goes on to instruct the Game Master that "you will find much more satisfaction in the thanks [the players] give you for an enjoyable evening of gaming than you will in killing off all of their characters."
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Consider this: Back in the day, Dungeons & Dragons gave us six primary characteristics - Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution and Charisma. Each was represented by a number on a scale, but the most important statistic for determining a character's overall effectiveness was its level. Fallout 3, the game of the year in 2008, has seven primary characteristics represented by numbers on a scale, including Strength, Intelligence and Charisma. Agility stands in for Dexterity and Endurance for Constitution. Levels? Check, and now as then, they boil down a character's overall potency to a single number.
Fallout 3 isn't a bad game, and it doesn't stand alone in committing this particular failure of imagination. A determined ludo-archaeologist could unearth Strength and Levels in the many progeny of D&D from one end of GameStop to the other. But it's a perfect example of how far roleplaying hasn't managed to come in 35 years. For everything that Fallout 3, Mass Effect and the others bring to the table, what's the point of the Strength and Levels, for crying out loud?
