The 26 Best RPGs according to Gamepro

[Comrade Tovya]

triplebph said:
"I always thought that the term RPG was being misused when it was applied to JRPGs. I never uderstood how they were labeled as such considering the almost complete lack of any similarities to D&D."

I think that is true to an extent if you're talking about old school D & D. However, I think a shift happened with D & D in the mid to late eighties with the Dragon Lance modules and books where the characters in those modules and the story of the world of Krynn became more important than the game rules themselves. This was also carried on into the Forgotten Realms and Ravencroft ( I think that's what it was called) worlds.

Certainly traditional jrpgs like Final Fantasy and a game like Bioware's Baldur's Gate seem to have a much closer connection to the original SSI D & D computer rpgs like Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Death Knights of Krynn to me than do games like Oblivion and Fable which seem more closely related to Akalabeth and Might and Magic and Zelda respectively.

Now that opens a whole 'nother can of worms. 

Since we all agree that TSR pretty much wrote the book on what an RPG is (literally actually)... then we certainly can't call their console or PC AD&D games RPGs either.

So, it seems to me that the definition of an RPG for a gaming machine and for a group of people getting together with some books and notebook paper are completely different?  Right?