Warren Spector on “Roles vs Rolls”

Felipe Pepe has published an excerpt of the CRPG history book project he’s working on (with an impressive army of volunteers and a number of “celebrity” contributions, including Tim Cain and Chris Avellone), which just so happens to be a brief interview with Warren Spector. The Deus Ex director gives his opinion on what RPGs should actually strive to be, and explains why he is not a fan of their reliance on D&D trappings:

Mr. Warren, in 1998 you wrote an article for Game Developer magazine, where you argued that RPGs were betraying their role-playing roots by focusing only on (statistics or exploring randomly generated worlds of crate-filled buildings). That was sixteen years ago, do you think things have changed since? Has any recent game impressed you in that regard?

WS: I think things have changed some, but not enough. We’re still stuck in a world of character classes and traditional RPG statistics. I like to think that games like Deus Ex made a bit of a difference, changing the way people think about RPG’s but maybe I’m fooling myself.

To my mind, the Thief games from Looking Glass did a great job of putting players in the role of an intriguing character without any of the classic RPG tropes. More recently, I thought Deus Ex: Human Revolution did a pretty good job.

One of the biggest challenges in editing this book has been deciding what games to include. Over the years the (RPG) term seems to be more and more used as synonym precisely to those (statistics), with even games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield claiming to have (RPG-elements) in the form level-ups. As a side-effect, this led to games with no stats, such as Thief and the first System Shock, to not be considered RPGs. What are your thoughts on that?

WS: I don’t think I’d include Call of Duty or Battlefield as RPGs. However, that isn’t because they lack stats. I think games that have no stats can be the ultimate roleplaying games. They force players to adopt a role instead of depending upon rolls (if you see what I mean).

RPG’s should be defined by character and interactions, not by levels and stats.