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An editorial at Next Gen called Adventureland challenges the idea that CRPGs developed from PnP roots and suggests that CRPGs should escape PnP conventions to evolve. Ed de Castillo from Liquid, Pete Hines and J.E. Sawyer are quoted at various points - here are some clips from the end of the article:
More information.The RPG is increasingly becoming a paradox – more progressive in its mechanics, and ever more pure in its attempts to make the role you play a persuasive, transparent experience. Although there is justifiable nostalgia for games like Fallout, Planescape: Torment and their predecessors, persisting in the use of tabletop gaming mechanics is in some ways a backwards perspective. Alongside gaming’s infatuation with cinema, the reliance on tabletop mechanics is the result of a fledgling medium attempting to ground itself within the familiar. Such structures are used in the PnP world to lend solidity to what can otherwise be difficult to grasp, difficult to control. The digital medium has other problems, but a lack of restriction is rarely one of them. [...]
Increasingly, the dependence upon statistics and other abstracted means of representation is becoming an albatross, insofar as singleplayer videogames are concerned – strangely so, for a medium whose strengths are in direct interactivity and immediate visual feedback. In fact, games that make the best of these qualities have a better chance of truly fulfilling the only important goal of those tabletop games: the ability to imagine yourself in another’s shoes – the freedom to choose a role.