I do get your point and sounds reasonable, and I am curious as to which crpgs you consider as decent p&p translations?
This is an honest question by the way so please don't take it the wrong way.
Of course I won't take it the wrong way! But I'm expecting to be stabbed right away by a dozen of forum users
Well, as a friend of mine usually says, the ONE AND TRUE translation of a pen & paper RPG is… The Sims. Specially if you have a lot of expansions and mods instaled. I kind of agree with him, though I don't really like the Sims. Of course in this case we have to look at the translation of a modern RPG and not a traditional one. The player sometimes is the game master, other times the game master is the AI, sometimes the player is just a player, other times he is God. And sometimes he is just the guy who isn'r really playing but is watching the game session… Other than that it's the game where character's always have purposes, they can change over time, their story lines don't exist until you create them, the world is as much defined by the devs as it is created and modified by the player… Well a lot of things that I can relate easily to a true pen & paper RPG. The only problem is that The Sims is a real life RPG as seen by the eyes of a nortern american teenager. It's not perfect, but it is what it is. And it is an RPG.
Others that I have accomodated in my mind as great translations of p&p RPGs (though they are not even labeled as such) are the latest works of Telltale Games, The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. True you can't choose your character and you can't even modify them. But the choices you make are as meaningful as they come and the relation between characters and NPCs have an impact in the narratory evolution - well, I'm not naïve, they are made to look much more meaningful than they really are, but if you don't replay the games more than twice it does look that most choices you make a difference. But, again this is not perfect, and again it relates mostly to recent p&p RPGs where mechanics don't play a rule as important as in more traditional titles (I'm thinking about Primetime Adventures, of course, as it depicts TV series, the same as Telltale is trying to do).
Now for more traditional experiences of pen & paper turned to cRPGs. I find that open worlds, with 1st person view, character customization and evolution, with skills and other characteristics available and open choices of dialogue that lead into different paths are the most adequate translations. All this served with graphics that are realistic enough and voice acting (I find the voice acting the most important, even more than graphics as artistic choices sometimes don't obligate to realism, but good acting is essential for immersion in a fictional work). As such, games like Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas are among my preferences. Though not open world, Deus Ex: Human Evolution has a lot of potential to it.
But, and this is an important but, sometimes the open world is not that important. BioWare is not keen to open worlds, but they managed to create apparently meaningful relations among PCs and NPCs and even among NPCs themselves. It works nice when companions make remarks about each other, the places you visit and the character's actions. And when this relations change because of player's choices. Because of that I add to the group of games I admire Knights of the Old Republic and the sequel, the Mass Effect Trilogy and the not-yet-but-soon-to-be Dragon Age Trilogy (though I must admit that the action bits turn to be repetitive after some time).
Of course that there are many other games I enjoyed over the time, some of them are closer than other to what I consider a proper translation of a role playing pen & paper game to a video game. The Risen trilogy does it, but I I'm not a big fan of it's humorous side. Rckstars games are great on immersion, and their open worlds are excelente setting, but they lack a lot of characteristics to make them RPGs.
And despite all of it's flaws and bugs, Vampire the Masquerade Bloolines is (probably) the best adaptation of a pen & paper to a video game, not only because it does it very good, but specialy because it was in fact a real adaptation of an existent game by White Wolf.
I'm sure I forgot a lot of examples here, but I think that this is enough (and too extense, really) to explain my point of view. In fact, I should copy the contents of this reply when there is another disagreament about my point of view
