Skyrim is shit btw. Oblivion forever (oblivion is worse than Morrowind, but Oblivion was my entrance to the games so I love it)
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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To be entirely fair, you can do this kind of roleplaying in any video game. You don't have to be Gordon Freeman in Half-Life 2. You could be a civilian imposter that just looks like him.
Roleplaying in RPGs should intersect with the mechanics of the game, usually limiting you via stats and gameplay options. So, if your character is a vampire hunter, for example they should be more specialized in weapons that vampire hunters use. Your character's dedication to weaponry would mean they're less, idk, charismatic or whatever. That creates interesting gameplay scenarios, connects you to your character more and encourages you to replay the game to experience what you traded off in one playthrough.
Since Skyrim, Bethesda has started to lean into 'infinite leveling,' which means every character will eventually become the same ultra-competent bandit slayer. They also very rarely restrict content depending on your characters choices.
Funnily enough this is precisely how I play the character, in the most common iterations the Vampire Hunter starts out naive and stubborn; he wants to get into the meat of the fight and trade blows with the Vampires, but as he matures (and heals constantly), he learns his skills aren't in hand-to-hand combat, the Vampires are simply too strong
So he's forced to adapt, slowly trading a sword for a bow (which plays into infamous combat mechanics of Skyrim)
Instead of becoming an all-powerful hypermage, he finds he only has magical talent in casting Runes, Vampires are fast after all, and laying down a Rune trap while he pulls out his bow or crossbow is simply good sense learned through experience.
In some iterations after learning he's not as physically adept as he wished, he becomes a master of alchemy, rendering the Vampires helpless through ingenious poisons that rob them of their speed
It takes a degree of restraint to play this way, but for me overcoming the limitations of the vanilla game is simply part of the fun
You're imagining your own limitations that the game doesn't want to impose. That's the sort of roleplaying you can do in any game. I used to do it all the time when I had run a game dry, but it's a poor measure of how good a game is as an 'RPG.'
I guess it depends on what qualities one believes a 'good' RPG should possess; for me personally, the lore and how it inspires character versatility and diversity of themes are more important for what I consider a 'good' RPG, most games never come close to accomplishing that. If limitations aid those qualities, I'll take them or make them up as long as they gel with the lore; if not I'll ignore them until the game breaks my patience or suspension of disbelief
the thing that makes an RPG and not some other kind of games is the systems, and when people evaluate the RPG quality of RPGs they're generally looking at the interactions with what the game systematizes and not some media studies deconstruction where some movie and a deck of cards is your favorite rpg because you can watch the scenes out of order.
I don't know; I've tolerated god-awful gameplay mechanics and systems for the sake of the lore and storytelling, Dragon Age: Origins and KOTOR come to mind readily
origins has excellent mechanics if you dig into the companion programming, and kotor is just d20 which is fine but not horrible
I like DaO but it absolutely does not have excellent mechanics or anything approaching balance. The companion decision/behavior tree was interesting and well executed but most abilities and most character classes were absolute dogshit. Shale was the only remotely viable melee, you could win nearly every encounter by chaining fireball since it had a huge aoe, did a lot of damage and did knock down keeping melee from closing, also if I recall correctly there may not have been a save against stasis so you could just drop whoever you wanted out of a fight.
Definitely right that Kotor was just d20 modern, I think it comes across a little extra janky cause the real time overlay over turn base mechanics.
i may have rose-tinted glasses because DA2 and Inquisition are so, so much worse all MMOy and depth sacrificed for console sales.
fair