RPG Maker MV Adventure?

I was gifted RPG Maker MV while it was on a Steam sale, and I’m enjoying what I’ve seen so far. I have lots of ideas for games that could be made with it.

I’m curious what people would think of IF presented as an RPG. Does the RPG nature disqualify something as IF, even if there were not fighting elements involved? Could a game where you move around a map graphically and have RPG stats even qualify as IF?

What RPG elements would turn off IF players in general? Would a text-heavy RPG with very little fighting be something that could cross over into IF? In general the fighting is skill/turn based, and does not require any quick reflexes.

I understand, of course, that accessibility is an initial problem.

Even Adventure and the mainframe Zork had some elements of RPG-style combat.

Beyond Zork is exactly that. It was unquestionably IF, and yet had some definite pieces of RPG.

Good point. BZ still had a good wall of text as the focus, and the map was merely indicative of location rather than the means of locomotion. I know that many different types of games can have text and have a good story and could be called “interactive” and “fiction”, but I’m wondering where the line is where people go “this is an RPG, not IF”.

Aren’t all games fiction you can interact with? I mean, where’s the line drawn? IF means Interactive Fiction.
If it’s specifically text then it should be indicated, like ITF: interactive text fiction or something. Or just TA. Text Adventure.

Besides, they let Emily Is Away into IFComp and (Wes talks smack for ten minutes).

Is what I think.

Sure, Planescape: Torment is mostly a text adventure with a graphical overlay in the same way as Sunless Sea is a cybertext with graphical ship combat.

I was recently thinking of how a tile-based roguelike could be made and still be IF, like if you encountered passages of text instead of monsters, had adjectives instead of weapons…

And there are already story-based games being made with RPG Maker. “To the Moon” is probably the most well-known, but I imagine there are several others.

Yes! I forgot about PST. That game had fighting but the story was the centerpiece.

There was also a game set in an asylum - it was more a graphic adventure but the PC moved around a top-down map with walls and scenery. (googles) Sanitarium.

My opinion is that a work has to have a goodly amount of text, or be primarily text, in order to qualify as IF. Otherwise, you start defining things like point-and-click adventure games like Monkey Island as IF, or walking simulators like Firewatch as IF, which I think a large portion of the community here would dispute.

Sorcery! and Choice of Games’ catalog are acclaimed examples that make heavy use of mechanical numbers tracking. So including RPG elements in text seems to be fine. But if you have actual graphics on a grid that you traverse with the arrow keys, I would be inclined to call that a work in a different genre entirely.

Cool. That’s what I wanted to know. I’ll find another community to work on these then.

This kind of project seems like the sort of thing I would be interested in, whether or not it counts as IF! I don’t have that much interest in policing the boundary of the genre anyway, and I don’t think traversing a grid with arrows necessarily disqualifies something as IF, but in any case, I’d be interested in it. (But unable to provide any assistance.)