so I haven’t really understood the connection between roleplaying (pretending that you’re someone else and immersing yourself in a fictional scenario) and RPG elements (stat points, progression mechanics, and character optimization) but one of my partners sent me a video that might have helped me understand it a bit better

this was the video (the important part is here, at 3:23)

essentially at that point of the video, he says that different people will engage with different parts of Elden Ring’s systems based on what kind of character fantasy they want to have (two of the examples he gives are the fantasies of being a determined warrior or a clever mage) and he paints a fairly vivid picture of how you can roleplay as a mage during the combat of Elden Ring

and I found that fascinating because:

• it would never have occurred to me to roleplay in a FromSoft game
• it would never have occurred to me to create a character who I would want to roleplay as in a FromSoft game (I’m not sure if I could, but that’s another story)
• the way he described it, it almost sounded like the RPG systems were kinda helping with the roleplaying?

I’ve always seen RPG systems in games like Dark Souls as a complex series of arbitrary limitations that I have to navigate in order to get to the fun part of the game (the combat). If it were up to me, I’d want to be able to use every tool that you can get in the game (bows, swords, miracles, sorceries, pyromancies, etc.) without any of them being gated off or heavily nerfed based on my stat points

but I wonder if part of the point of RPG mechanics in FromSoft games is to let players look at their stat points and say “my character is a wizard” (because they have a high intelligence) or “my character is a knight” (because they have a high strength), and to have the game force them to play in a way that a knight or a wizard would play, because their stat points are allocated in such a way that they can’t play in any other way. like I wonder if those limitations actually add something to the roleplaying for those players

if so, that has a lot of implications for my understanding of other RPGs, and even why the acronym RPG stands for “roleplaying game”

@kasdeya Yeah, I tend to look at stat points kinda like, I'm getting better at being a wizard, or a fighter, or whatever. So "I gave up on magic so I could be a better fighter", or whatever, I do feel like it adds some elements.

But I also have not gotten very far into any FromSoft game, and I would want to experiment with all sorts of different stuff if I did, so not entirely a fan, but the limitations do have some roleplaying aspects for sure. It is like, you can only be one thing, so what do you want to be?

@Shivaekul

you can only be one thing, so what do you want to be?

that’s a really good way to put it - I think that helped me conceptualize it a little better. yeah I think this is definitely making more sense to me!