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[DavionFuxa]

e: If you had to ask me, I'd answer that what defines a roguelike as a roguelike isn't the features it has, but the question of whether and how those features are central to it. Let's take one of the most oft-cited ones. Games can have permadeath without being roguelikes, and games can be roguelikes without having absolute permadeath. Why? Because it isn't the fact of permadeath that makes a game a roguelike, but rather how the existence of permadeath affects gameplay and player behavior. Go through that same process for each of the traits commonly attributed to roguelikes and you have a good understanding of why those features generally define the genre, why games which possess them can nevertheless not be roguelikes, and why games without one or even several of them can still count as roguelikes to most players.

To try and make a couple shorten point based sentences on what I wrote in relation to your example written:

"There is a heavy emphasis on decision making on the part of the player that is sizable important for the game"
"Derived from decision making, there is also an emphasis on the consequences for the actions the player makes"

I could write up the paragraphs about Pacing & Thinking I wrote but at some point I'm thinking I should include a short point form summary of what I wrote. In any case, in general, how well does what I wrote hold up against what you think a Rogue-like is?

For the most part, a lot of what I'm describing just pertains to the 'broad points' like this that I try and use for summing up Roguelikes.

[Flying Dice]

That's pretty spot on, yes. The defining characteristics of the genre don't exist in a vacuum, but rather in terms of their relationship to the player. The ones we typically associate with roguelikes (permadeath, procedural generation, single-player-character, and perhaps even simple graphics) have that association because they were present in the Ur-example of the genre and the vast majority of its successors and are thus closely linked with the ways in which roguelikes stimulate players.

I'd point to four main things, two of which you already mentioned:

1. Critical-thinking and good decision-making.

2. Lasting and meaningful consequences for player actions.

3. Inability to perfectly plan and anticipate what the game will present the player with (this is a big part of why procedural generation and the RNG are so central to the genre).

4. A system which simultaneously invests the player in their character but also makes it relatively simple to begin anew.

In some respects roguelikes are actually quite similar to old-school Nintendo-hard platformers, albeit with the rather large difference in how a player becomes better at them, as they tend to emphasize (as above) critical thinking &c. rather than memorizing sequences of actions.

[DavionFuxa]

The other two points you mention are interesting. I'd note though that the first paragraph I included under 'Gameplay' was as typed:

"Progression in the game is randomized with non-static levels via random map generation/world generation and enemy placement. This doesn't mean however that the game can't include static elements (in-game vaults), and it is possible to have a roguelike consisting primarily of many static elements with a minimal amount of random elements connected them or altering them - the key thing is that the game is random enough to change when and where the player experiences the games levels so that they can't necessarily predict how their run will unfold from the start of the game to the end of the game."

The above seems to tie in well with your third point.

To your forth point I'm not sure I really made any concrete write up that sort of coincides with that. I'm note entirely sure what the forth point gets at either; it may be more of an issue that I did write something that connects with that point but I'm just not recognizing it.

The closest things I wrote that I think might relate to it would be this paragraph from Gameplay:

"As the character progresses through the game, the character progressively gets stronger. This can be through the character gaining experience, items and equipment, mutations, traits, and whatever else the game might do to advance the character or give it further resources to improve its strengths and abilities. The game may assign how the character gets progressively stronger, but usually the player is given the option of deciding how their character changes as it progresses through the game."

And beyond the above paragraph, the fact that I included an entire section titled 'Replayability'.

[Frumple]

... of course, the fun thing is there's a couple, mostly the 7drl stuff, that actually have you get progressively weaker as time goes on. There was one of the earliest RLs -- I almost want to say it was Rogue itself, but I don't quite recall -- that did something very similar to that, as well, with player progression being incapable of keeping up with monster progression and resources more or less constantly becoming more scarce. While the character was sort of progressing, it was actually constantly becoming weaker relative to the dungeon.

There's also a few (the first ADOM did this, iirc) that have a sort of curve where you get stronger to a point, and then bad things start happening and you mutate into a horrible ball of dead player or whatev'. And then there's a small few that are outright static in terms of character progression -- the tools you have to start are what you have for the whole thing.

Basically, character progression isn't always linear and isn't always forward in RLs -- most work like that, but there's definitely a few notables where that's not what's going on at all.

[Reelya]

Diablo 1 (more than diablo 2) could be considered a roguelike. Diablo 1 had the town level as your base, and descending into a random dungeon to find a great treasure in the hell level. It's clearly influenced by the classic roguelikes like Moria and Nethack.

The main objections are that it has graphics, and it's realtime. Some people complain that it doesn't have grid-based movement, but this is not true: In Diablo 1 you can only move in 8 directions, and only from tile to tile. It's animated in real-time, but the movement is still restricted to moving from tile to tile, for all entities. I'm not sure, but I think in Diablo 2 they allow movements "off the grid".

So, would graphical real-time nethack still be a roguelike? If so, then that's basically describing Diablo 1.

[Flying Dice]

The other two points you mention are interesting. I'd note though that the first paragraph I included under 'Gameplay' was as typed:

"Progression in the game is randomized with non-static levels via random map generation/world generation and enemy placement. This doesn't mean however that the game can't include static elements (in-game vaults), and it is possible to have a roguelike consisting primarily of many static elements with a minimal amount of random elements connected them or altering them - the key thing is that the game is random enough to change when and where the player experiences the games levels so that they can't necessarily predict how their run will unfold from the start of the game to the end of the game."

The above seems to tie in well with your third point.

To your forth point I'm not sure I really made any concrete write up that sort of coincides with that. I'm note entirely sure what the forth point gets at either; it may be more of an issue that I did write something that connects with that point but I'm just not recognizing it.

The closest things I wrote that I think might relate to it would be this paragraph from Gameplay:

"As the character progresses through the game, the character progressively gets stronger. This can be through the character gaining experience, items and equipment, mutations, traits, and whatever else the game might do to advance the character or give it further resources to improve its strengths and abilities. The game may assign how the character gets progressively stronger, but usually the player is given the option of deciding how their character changes as it progresses through the game."

And beyond the above paragraph, the fact that I included an entire section titled 'Replayability'.

Yeah, the fourth is a bit too vague, as it's mostly based on a general feeling I have when people discuss RLs; the people who play them are generally quite accepting of losing everything they've built in an instant, often in ways that are almost entirely out of their control. Y'know, you're diving a dungeon and the RNG tosses a miniboss your way that happens to perfectly counter what your character can do, and bam-dead! It's... the games are sort of set up to facilitate that sort of attitude, where you care about your character and what you've accomplished but at the same time accept that it's ultimately fleeting and don't mourn overmuch when it inevitably dies.

So instead of the more traditional RPG dynamic where it's all about "Look what I've spent XXXX hours building up!" it's more "That was fun, time to have another go!" In some respects I suppose it fits better as a description of the coalescing of the other three into an innate acceptance of the ephemeral nature of RL characters and the idea that you can have just as much fun running a bunch of different characters until they die just to see what happens as you can building a single one up.

[DavionFuxa]

... of course, the fun thing is there's a couple, mostly the 7drl stuff, that actually have you get progressively weaker as time goes on. There was one of the earliest RLs -- I almost want to say it was Rogue itself, but I don't quite recall -- that did something very similar to that, as well, with player progression being incapable of keeping up with monster progression and resources more or less constantly becoming more scarce. While the character was sort of progressing, it was actually constantly becoming weaker relative to the dungeon.

There's also a few (the first ADOM did this, iirc) that have a sort of curve where you get stronger to a point, and then bad things start happening and you mutate into a horrible ball of dead player or whatev'. And then there's a small few that are outright static in terms of character progression -- the tools you have to start are what you have for the whole thing.

Basically, character progression isn't always linear and isn't always forward in RLs -- most work like that, but there's definitely a few notables where that's not what's going on at all.

I suppose I have to ask is it the character progressively getting weaker, or is it the dungeon progressively getting stronger. Though I suppose it wouldn't matter - there could be a game that sort of acts like the end game of Warcraft III: Frozen Throne for example where your hero character is progressively getting weaker as you run through the game.

Still, is there any examples of Rogue-likes where the player doesn't get stronger or weaker necessarily?

Diablo 1 (more than diablo 2) could be considered a roguelike. Diablo 1 had the town level as your base, and descending into a random dungeon to find a great treasure in the hell level. It's clearly influenced by the classic roguelikes like Moria and Nethack.

The main objections are that it has graphics, and it's realtime. Some people complain that it doesn't have grid-based movement, but this is not true: In Diablo 1 you can only move in 8 directions, and only from tile to tile. It's animated in real-time, but the movement is still restricted to moving from tile to tile, for all entities. I'm not sure, but I think in Diablo 2 they allow movements "off the grid".

So, would graphical real-time nethack still be a roguelike? If so, then that's basically describing Diablo 1.

I'd consider both Diablo I and Diablo II to be Rogue-likes myself. Personally, I don't see Rogue-likes running in Real-Time necessarily taking away from the games being Rogue-likes; so long as the emphasis on decision making and consequences are still in there.

To throw in another one that was mentioned - Spelunky. That game also runs in Real-Time, but I doubt anyone could deny that there is some thinking involved; let alone failing.

[Frumple]

I suppose I have to ask is it the character progressively getting weaker, or is it the dungeon progressively getting stronger.

Here's one where the character is specifically getting weaker as the game progresses. There's more than that one, iirc, but it's the one I remembered off the top of my head.

Still, is there any examples of Rogue-likes where the player doesn't get stronger or weaker necessarily?

Sure. Here's another one that has a lack of character advancement specifically as a feature. There's a good handful of the more puzzle-like RLs that has a static character and unchanging enemies (the difficulty coming from different arrangements rather than stronger foes), as well, and there's a fair number of ones designed to be played through quickly that don't have advancement, sometimes for neither the player or opponents.

That sort of thing is definitely a niche within the RL stuff, but it's also a definitely existent one. People like playing with character advancement (or the lack thereof), yeah.

[Zrk2]

"Roguelike" is just a name for an implicitly defined subcategory of the "game" category. Calling something a "roguelike" gives new people a hint of what to expect when they give it a closer look. It is useless for any other discussion. The classification of a game as "roguelike" or not is perfectly unimportant to people who already know the game. Trying to formulate an explicit definition is therefore useless for any further discussion, since you are always discussing only one or two games at a time.

Let's say you had a definition of "roguelike", say "an RPG with permadeath and randomly generated terrain", and there is this game you're talking about. Looking at this game, you see that it is an RPG, it has permadeath, and it has randomly generated terrain. Now why would it be necessary to state that the game is a roguelike because it has these properties? By your definition of "roguelike", you just stated a perfect tautology, congratulations.

You have made an abstract category, and it is impossible to classify a thing as belonging to this category or not without knowing at least as much information about the thing as you would know after you'd just been told whether the thing is in the category or not. Your category is such that you cannot categorize with partial information, hence your category is perfectly redundant and serves as an abbreviation at best. The same logic applies to every possible explicit definition of "roguelike" that keeps close to the perfectly usable implicit definition that is already in common usage.

Sounds like someone needs to break out the Unidan copypasta again.

That's sort of the point I was making, though. Metal is clearly distinct from country or rap and you can immediately tell which is which, even if you can't explain why. What I'm saying, to continue the analogy, is that it's rather pointless to argue about whether a given subgenre of metal is actually metal. For example, the people who whine about ToME not being a roguelike because it uses tiles and has non-permadeath modes and features.

Your first point here is good. Games exist on a continuum, rather like, well, everything else, so towards the edges of a genre there will be some that people don't agree on. Oh well, it's hardly the end of the world.

I unfortunately don't have time to read that whole thing right now, but I'll take a look later.

[Flying Dice]

No worries about that, Zrk, it's mostly aimless rambling as per usual for me. 

[Zrk2]

No worries about that, Zrk, it's mostly aimless rambling as per usual for me. 

I meant the google doc, not your post. I did read yours, IIRC.

[Flying Dice]

That makes more sense, hah.

[DavionFuxa]

Just adding a note that I changed the Gameplay section a bit, based on the feedback provided by Frumple.