What Is An RPG?

The Checklist

Tim Cain presents a checklist of features. The more a game has, the more he considers it an RPG:

Character Creation That Matters

The player should be able to create their own character, including naming them. Crucially, character creation choices must matter — class, race, gender, attributes, background, and skills should all be reflected somewhere in the game. A gender choice might be as simple as how NPCs address you, or as significant as starting attribute bonuses.

Tim is notably uninterested in appearance customization that has no gameplay impact — spending an hour on a face you'll never see is wasted effort if it doesn't affect anything.

Player Choice During Gameplay

Once created, the player character should have meaningful choices about how to act: combat vs. stealth vs. dialogue, companions vs. solo play, being nice vs. being rude. The game should recognize and react to these choices moment to moment.

Story Reactivity

The story should react to both character creation choices and in-game actions. If you took thief skills and steal things, people should be mad. Players must accept responsibility for their choices — even ones made during creation before they fully understood the consequences.

Nonlinear Story

Tim prefers a player-driven story over a story-driven game. Rather than a narrative designer dictating how the story unfolds, story elements should be "out there ready to be activated" by the player's actions, in whatever order they choose.

Multiple Endings

If the game reacts to player choices and allows nonlinear play, it should naturally produce different endings — not necessarily dramatically different ("you saved the town" vs. "the world blew up"), but endings that reflect what the player actually did, including companion outcomes.

Character-Based Gating, Not Designer-Based Gating

This applies to areas, story progression, and character advancement alike. Tim draws a sharp distinction:

• Good gating: A dungeon requires a key, a passphrase, or an item to enter. The NPC with the key might not appear until later. Perks require prerequisite skills or previous perks.
• Bad gating: "You cannot enter here until Act 3." "You must be level 10 to open this door." "This perk is locked until level 10."

The difference: one is the player seeing their choices open up options; the other is the designer slapping the player in the face. Even level-gating perks can be done elegantly — require three previous perk picks instead of a level number, and the effect is the same without breaking immersion.

A Big, Explorable World

The world needs to be large enough to support exploration, player choice, and side quests. Some quests might be gated by earlier choices, or available but reactive to them. A small, narrow world can't support this kind of freedom.

Systems, Story, Setting — The Reverse Order

Tim notes that his checklist follows the order systems → story → setting, which is exactly the opposite of how he tells designers to build games (setting → story → systems). The reason: this is the order in which players encounter these elements. Character creation and systems hit first, then the story reveals itself, then the setting unfolds as you play.

The Continuum, Not a Line

People disagree on RPG definitions in predictable ways:

• Maximalists require all checklist items — missing one disqualifies a game
• Selectivists require specific items (e.g., "you must have #1, #2, and #5")
• Continuists (Tim's camp) see it as a sliding scale with different weightings

Some people also have features not on Tim's list that they consider essential. Tim's position: don't get too hung up on drawing a hard line. Like all continuums, the dividing line you think is set in stone isn't as firm as you believe.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSKxD6v06P4