>>15067239
I knew the discussion was going to reach this point, the difference are in the stats and abstraction of action. In Doom, depending on how well you aim, jump, run you either win or die, in DnD you don't literally wing a sword at an oponnent, or do a physical test to determine if you can kill a dragon(the DM asks to perform 10 pushups to validate the attack), you roll the dice, add the value to your stats, and then the DM rolls his dice, adds the value to the monsters stats, and then he determines if you hit it or not. If there were no stats and dice in D&D, then it would be just as much of a roleplaying game, as kids playing superhero, and one of them declaring that he is invincible and kills all the other kids.
Modern JPGS have evolved from the classic dungeon crawler games, where sure, in the west you could create a character, but it had no impact on the story, the only difference between a lawful good human paladin, or a chaotic neutral elf mage, were the skills you had access to, that's it, there were no choices in the story, no branching side-quests, you went to the dungeon, killed the monsters and that was the "roleplaying" game from the late 80s, early 90s on PCs. The Japanese just took that, and gave you a pre-determined character, something that WRPGs also gave the choice of, if you didn't want to create a character. Hell even D&D gives you pre-detmined characters for new players, that don't want to bother creating their characters, there are people who play it just for the gameplay, and they come with a stack of characters, pick the first one, they go to a dungeon, when one dies, he replaces him with the next character from the stack, and they are not roleplaying as Crogar the Barbarian or Merlin the Wizard, but rather playing dunegon crawler with the D&D ruleset, but it's still an RPG, because of it's stats and abstraction of gameplay.
And now I can hear anons screaming, but San Andreas and Call of Duty, also have stats, are they now RPGs as well? The answer is no, they are not, because the RPG elements aren't an integral part of the games. New Vegas, on the other hand, is much closer to being an RPG, that CoD, because there the stats have a much greater impact, and there are also abstraction like Persuasion, because when you talk to someone, you can pick the persuasion option, and it doesn't matter how persuasive is the player IRL, in the game if the stats are good he can have Tod Howard levels of persuasion.
Finally I need to ask the anon if Diablo, Dragon's Dogma and Dark Souls are RPGs (whether western or not)? Because you don't really roleplay in those games, you just go and kill stuff.