What is the appeal behind JRPGs

[WereKitten]

Khuutra said:

WereKitten said:

Pencil-and-paper role playing basically brought both the concept of impersonation into an interactive narrative and a whole bunch of conventions about the mechanics.

Levels, stat profiles, saving throws, bonus and malus, ailments, turns of combat do not make "role playing" in the literal sense, but they certainly do historically.

Yes, but all of those things are holdovers from the strategy games that preceded P&P RPGs - they only provided the system in which roleplaying actually occurred. The system itself is from strategy games - roleplaying happens quite independent of that, and taken in a literal way it could be argued that what we think of as "JRPGs" are actually strategy games with structured narratives.

This is quite open to interpretation, I think. Pencil-and-paper role playing certainly used tools that were already present in wargames and strategy games. And yet their use to describe a character and his/her interaction with the world in a not completely arbitrary way is part of what makes them new over, say, an unstructured social game of storytelling and acting.

I think we can really defend both sides when it comes to debating if you've inherited your blue eyes from your father or your grandfather. The strictest causal relation is to your father, but it traces back before him.