RPG vs Adventure Game

General GTG Off Topic
1

IGN has some nice articles about the '80's adventure games, and this one is talking about the history of Quest for Glory. The bulk of the discussion is about how Sierra wanted to infuse some RPG elements into their adventure game, and there is an interesting idea on page 2:

Unfortunately, this sense of building up your character tends to detract from the overall story, even if it does provide a respite from getting stuck at a particular puzzle or point in the game. Without a leveling system in place, skills improve the more they are used. In an RPG this makes sense but feels weird and out of place in an adventure game.

Take, for example, a puzzle you come across where a local potion lady has lost a valuable possession that you can see sparkling in a tree outside her hut. The solution here is pretty simple, with various rocks and pebbles adorning the nearby ground, you need to simply pick one up, throw it at the tree, and knock her long lost trinket down onto the ground.

Depending on whether or not your character is a fighter or mage this solution can actually take a few minutes of picking up rocks, throwing them at the tree, missing, and then repeating the whole sequence. And only because your character’s throwing ability was initially too low to hit the target.

This means that it could take at least a dozen tries to get your throw right. Which, as a solution to an adventure game puzzle, makes little sense. With a few moments like this, Quest for Glory is more miss than hit when viewed through an adventure gaming lens. It relies on the sort of repetitious mechanics that are better suited to an RPG, where solutions are usually only attainable well after they’ve been worked out.

I bolded the part the I found particularly interesting. It is one of those points that you always knew, but you didn't realize it until it was pointed out. I have played many RPG video games, and this statement seems to hold true for many of them. Already knowing what you have to do, you just sit there and grind until you can actually do it. 

Anyways, I thought the distinction was actually quite interesting, and wanted to know if other people felt the same way.

 

 

2

That is an interesting distinction and is such an inherent part of the formula that I've also never really considered it.

On the other hand, by putting RPG elements like that in an adventure game, you're appealing to the demographic of gamers who like realism mixed with their escapism. If that makes sense. But it does mean that sometimes you might think you haven't solved the puzzle when the RNG doesn't go your way and give you a success.

That said, I wouldn't mind giving something like that a go. I think it might be an interesting take on the puzzle genre.

3

That is one of the things I dislike about RPG video games.  The world is never dynamic enough to feel real, and the closer they get with the newer games, the more and more the failure stand out.  At least it does to me.

In that way I prefer adventure games because the solution to puzzles is to solve the puzzle, not to go level a skill for a month while the shop keper continues to search for a potion that for some reason I can't just tell her is in a tree so she can get a ladder and go on with her life.

4

They're spot on with their observation. If I'd have picked up some rocks and missed the first few throws, I'd have assumed that was the wrong solution to the puzzle and moved on.