I had some time to read your very thoughtful article with more attention today. Impressive stuff. For me, the "perfect" RPG is personified in my first true videogame RPG experience, that of my oft-mentioned "Phantasie" (C-64 version), published by SSI in 1985. It allowed the player to create their own characters from scratch to form parties of up to six from a diverse race and class pool. You could of course create more than six members though, and these would be kept in that particular town's character list. If you wanted to mix and match members in a particular town or for a particular reason, that character would take the requisite amount of time to reach you (say a few months of in-game time) if they were created in another town. Characters' aged, so you did have to be careful that after you did the random rolls for attributes you didn't end up with a character that was too old to start with. Luckily only when the character reached really old age (for humans I think it was the 80's) would you have to worry about the attributes being affected. Nevertheless, the younger, the better (youth had no effect on attributes). Sex was irrelevant and not even an option, but I took care of that by giving the character's male or female names (it wasn't that the game didn't acknowledge it, it just didn't factor directly into play - heck, there were mixed sexes on the awesome cover art).

Now I was coming from a pen and paper D&D (actually TSR, since we didn't just play D&D, there was also Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Top Secret, etc.) background, though of course I played videogames and computer games for many years prior to 1985, and dabbled in some computer and console RPG's and similar games (action adventures for instance) prior to Phantasie. Still, I was looking for that D&D experience on the computer since my friends and I really only got together all day on Saturdays. Phantasie delivered that. You didn't have to worry about food, just party management, combat and exploring. There were simple puzzles and mapping the overworld helped, but was not entirely necessary since the game did a type of auto-mapping by the nature of the game's display. The game was set up in a type of fog-of-war effect where you didn't see anything until your party entered the square, but once you explored a map tile, it didn't go away.

Everything was turn-based, not real-time, which to me is important when one is dealing with the concept of a party versus a single character, since stat and item management becomes much more important.

Anyway, to sum up, I think there are two keys one must keep in mind when discussing electronic RPG's with someone.

1 - What non-electronic RPG background do they have?
2 - What was the first electronic RPG they played?

Those two questions are extremely critical. If you're dealing with someone who has never played a pen and paper RPG, they may not be able to appreciate some of the dynamics and pleasures of more free-form or "sand box" gameplay. They may also not appreciate the concept of adventuring parties. Alternately, if you're dealing with someone whose first RPG was a Japanese videogame RPG, you may as well be talking a different language in my opinion. That's where your narrative becomes all the more important and one of the best starting points for distinction. Frankly if we could separate the distinct elements in Western RPG's from those in more modern Japanese RPG's (which were originally born from Western RPG's and driven on a distinct evolutionary path), I think we'd be much better off. I see two distinct branches of evolution because of that and obviously two very different types of games. Further, I think games like "Phantasie", "Wizard's Crown" and "Gold Box Pool of Radiance" eventually hit an evolutionary dead end and branched off themselves to an entirely different path. Yes, games like "Baldur's Gate" and "The Temple of Elemental Evil" have much in common with their predecessors, but I argue that they were very different games, not the least of which can be tied to their relative complexity. That's something I can certainly appreciate about the classic CRPG's of my youth - the fact that the relatively limited technology made the games more approachable without necessarily making the relative world sizes any smaller than they usually are today.

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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
(A PC Magazine Top 100 Website)
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