Fair enough. By "traditional" standards, it is a watered-down RPG. But that's a big step from it being a "watered-down RPG", period. To me, it fills the true meaning of RPG and I know there are loads of people that agree with me on that (and ironically, this group is heavily populated with pen-and-paper traditionalists). To us, "role-playing" is about your character and his/her choices within a game realm. It's not about inventory, loot, or gear, which my friends and I find to be an evil necessity of pen-and-paper gaming, not its pinnacle. The meat of role-playing to us is interaction, decision-making, and choice, three things Mass Effect does better than any other game I've played. In that regard, it's actually CLOSER to pen-and-paper RPGs than anything else on the market.
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