I prefer fantasy; orcs, elves, gnomes, magic... that kind. Steampunk is pretty cool as well. One or the other or both.
A Stalin vs. Martians RPG?
Hmm, now we're drifting from my area of preference... but alright, I'm in anyway. I'm thinking we should first get a few placeholders running... a generic humanoid with a weapon, and a piece of armor, in a generic room. Possibly an NPC as well.
How about guns? I'm not sure how well automatics would work in IE... 50 attacks per round while weapon is equipped? Overpowered much? They're almost essential if the setting should be that recent.

I can't do that, I can only tell you my definition of an RPG.
An RPG is a game where you play one or more characters. You will be able to improve their skills and make other choices to evolve their characters, according to your wishes, during the game. Their skills, as well as other variables (equipment, enemy skill levels and a whole bunch of situational or environmental variables), will have an impact on how well they perform the tasks you give them. But as with all games, your skills as a player are also important - the characters are not robots, after all, and they require your constant guidance. In some role-playing games, only mental skills (like tactical skills, puzzle solving skills, planning skills,...) are needed. In others, physical skills (like coordination, aiming, et.c.) are needed as well. There is no difference, in principle, between the two (only an artificial difference made up by people who want to keep certain games from being called RPGs).
There are also a few things I think RPGs should do, but don't have to. They should provide you with freedom to solve situations in many different ways, for instance. They should provide a relatively open world, or at least pretty open environments. They should feature side-quests and a lot of ways to interact with other characters. Et.c.

The problem with that line of thinking is that if we do not justify anything, then we can just keep talking for hours and get nowhere, and that's not really how a good conversation should go. It's good you tried to give a definiton, because not everyone would bother, but there is a problem if you do not explain why you think so, or at least when asked to because it's not like you have to justify anything right anyway.
So here while I agree with some of the stuff you said, I disagree about the player skill being skill, because a skilled player might allow a character to succeed in an area where he is supposed to be very weak and not just by pure luck. Take the lockpick minigame in Oblivion: your skill do not matter at all if you know how to operate the minigame properly, and so you can easily unlock everything while being extremely low in that skill. It can be done in a different way like the stupid dialogs in Fallout or Arcanum: too little intelligence and your dialog options are severely limited, cutting some quests off of you, reducing your rewards and also having people openly take advantage of you. Many people see those as some kind of funny easter egg but it's actually integral to RPG design: in this case you, the player, aren't stupid, but your character is and thus it is expected that he simply doesn't have the skill to follow a normal conversation. In this context it wouldn't make sense to be given the option to oppose a character trying to cheat you. The more importance you give to the player skill, the farther from a RPG you get. Though it's not like it's a bad thing if balanced well, as some games like Gothic or Deus Ex showed, but that's why a game like Bloodlines is more of an RPG than DX — which of the two is the better game is a different matter.
As for your ideas on freedom, well, I'd say that a game doesn't need them to be a RPG. But their presence would help to make a good RPG. If you can create a distinct character but discover that he can basically operate the same way as the others, that'd be a bad RPG, but still an RPG for what it's worth.

I honestly don't know much about Alpha Protocol, should I try it?
Of course, the AD&D ruleset (that's the one I've been in most contact with concerning IE games - D&D3E as well through IWD2, and I haven't played Lionheart yet so I don't know what ruleset it uses - so I'll probably be comparing everything to that) also contains chances to miss (or rather, chances to hit - THAC0), but an automatic still is pretty overpowered compared to how much armor the guys would have (I predict either lots of instakills, or too little difference between a handgun and an automatic rifle, unless the rifles are only high-level items). I don't know how easy it'd be to wedge in another ruleset made for modern-day RPG's into IE, as the only work I've done is item modding and a little fiddling with dialogues (I did once begin work on translating Baldur's Gate to Swedish, but that trickled out in the sand as the friend who needed it learned better English).

True, but it will always be like this.
Imagine a tactical, turn-based role playing game where I have a party of idiots with incredibly low intelligence. But they may still use advanced maneuvers, like flanking, and basically outsmart their enemies, because I as a player is not as stupid as they are. In other words, my tactical skills and my mental abilities decide what happens in the game even though these characters should not be anywhere near intelligent enough to use such advanced tactics.
If we were to take player skills completely out of RPGs, we would eventually end up with games where our only input would be to decide how to level up our characters, and they would be completely computer controlled (with their actions being based on their stats). And while that would undoubtedly be an interesting experiment, I don't think anyone would actually want the genre to be like that.
Maybe. I never got to a point where I could just do that, so to me my character's skills (or lack of them) did influence the game quite a lot. So for me it worked as intended.
Fair enough, though games like Oblivion and Mass Effect are basically on the same level as Gothic and Bloodlines in terms of how much importance they give player skills.
And in my opinion, player skills should play a major role in a CRPG. I don't care much for the dice or the random number generator. The control that in a P&P RPG is given to the dice should in a CRPG be given to me.

That's really not possible... you can open any door in Oblivion with little effort, even if your lockpicking skill is 1 out of 100. You don't see a problem with that? Really?
You can't be serious... they are nowhere near on the same level, at ALL..
The fact that skills, stats and choices are the most important aspects of gameplay is what DEFINES an RPG to most people. Mass Effect is a shooter/RPG hybrid simply because player shooter skill is the most important aspect of the game, rather than stats or character choices.
You honestly sound like you never played a real RPG at all.

To be fair, there aren't any "real RPGs" that can be played with a computer.

You take the exemple of a game where combat is the most important point, which is very different from those where combat is one of the many options you could take. Still even in a combat oriented CRPG, you can imagine having character sacrificing intelligence for more strenght and in turn being denied access to feats that allows more tactical manœuvres but need some intellect requirement. We still assume that your character is stupid but not to the point that he can't even walk, that would be quite pointless. An RPG is all about limiting your options but opening others in return; you still make the decisions but how well they are performed depend on how you build your character.
Just because you did not manage it doesn't mean it isn't possible. You can easily find guides describing how to use only one lockpick in the whole game by being careful, whatever your skill level. I also just remembered that you can get a unbreakable lockpick after doing a quest, effectively making the skill completely useless then.
Not really. On the combat side, Oblivion lets you hit the enemy each time you connect, with no risk of missing, which means that even if you do little damage per hit at low skill level, you can keep hitting until the enemy dies, and a higher skill level basically only reduces the number of hits you need to do to kill the same enemy, but Gothic mixes player skill and character skill, so at basic level your character is simply slow and clumsy with his weapon, and while you might be skilled enough to handle the character in this way and kill some enemies, you are still very vulnerable to stronger enemies or groups of weaker ones in addition to being unable to damage most of the powerful enemies at low skill. Else lockpicking in Gothic can be abused by memorising the combination and reloading, though I think Gothic 2 fixed it by allowing you to enable an option in the ini file that will randomise the combination each time you reload the game.
Bloodlines also uses a combat model where higher skill lets you do more damage, which isn't the most interesting model, but it should be noted that it greatly affect ranged weapons and their accuracy, and you can't really expect to easily kill powerful enemies with a low skill. The meat of the game though isn't the combat, and there you skills simply tell you if you can pick a lock, convince someone, charm him, hack a computer, or not. If your character isn't competent enough, it just won't work, and two different character builds will play differently, unlike Oblivion where basically all classes are equaly competent at everything.
Are you sure you don't want an action game with emphasis on the story instead?
What's a "real RPG"? And what's a "false RPG" then? If you are refering to P&P, it is indeed different in execution from CRPG but they both share the same basic ideas.

Well, almost all games are hybrids of multiple genres at this point... it's kind of neat how games have sort of merged in a lot of ways to create deeper experiences, rather than new genres being created from scratch, which is almost impossible to do.
There still are real stat-based RPGs though... hopefully Dragon Age is one.

It might not be the most interesting but its actually faithful to the P&P implementation. Basically the higher the skill the more dice you get to roll, the more dice the greater chance of a success, the more successes the higher the damage.
The worst part is that I only found that rule out the very day we stopped playing werewolf. I'd shot a guy in the face with a shotgun that did something like 4 dice of damage but I rolled around 6 successes for the attack so I SHOULD have had 10 dice of damage and blown his damn head off rather than just messed up his hair
I reckon it's not a real RPG unless you can give yourself a serious injury by standing barefoot on a discarded and forgotten D4

Not really. I use turn-based, tactical combat as an example because even the most fanatical purist wouldn't be able to ignore the example by claiming it's not an element that belongs in a REAL RPG.
Take the forthcoming Age of Decadence. Everything we've heard of it indicates that it will offer plenty of solutions that don't involve combat. But it does feature in-depth turn-based combat as well, so the scenario I highlighted, where the player's skills are far more important than the characters' skills, should be entirely possible in the game.
Come on, people have been abusing RPG systems for as long as they've existed, this isn't anything new. I don't do that, because I try to actually... you know, *role play*.
That's questionable game design, but it doesn't go against any RPG-principles. There are no RPG rules which state that you may not be allowed access to overpowered equipment or rewarded with items which makes certain skills unneeded.
Two things. First, realism is key for me. I don't want obvious "this is a game!"-elements in my games. If my sword hits my enemy, then it's a hit, period. Second, I would argue that combat in Gothic 3 demands more player-skills (as opposed to character-skills) than combat in Oblivion, due to the heavy focus on timing against certain enemies.
(I didn't think the boars could be that easily forgotten...)
Bloodlines and Mass Effect are pretty similar in this respect. People who say Mass Effect isn't an RPG due to the combat mechanisms either misunderstood it totally, didn't play it or would also claim Bloodlines isn't an RPG due to the combat mechanisms. Which few of them do.
Granted, there's more focus on combat in Mass Effect, but then again there's quite a lot of focus on combat in Wizardry too and noone's claiming that's not a real RPG. And parts of Bloodlines were pretty damn combat-heavy as well. Esp. later on in the game.
Again, the end of Bloodlines (the latest official version at least, no idea about these endless fan patches) was very combat-heavy. Good luck doing that with a character specialized in seducing people.
Classes should basically be left behind anyway. There's no reason why an arbitrary choice at the start of the game should limit my character's development. It's what happens during the game, not before, that's important.
Don't patronize me, I've been playing games (and RPGs) since the eighties, I work in the games business and I know perfectly well what I want.
I value player skills over randomness. It's pretty obvious to me that we don't need dice in CRPGs, as we've got actual gameplay mechanics that can take their place. Randomness is an empty, uninteresting and unsatisfying gameplay device.
Why is randomness better than player skills? Because that's how it was in the seventies when D&D was invented and we didn't have gaming computers? Or what?

phanboy4:The console limitations thing is primarily the lack of keyboard utilization, and Bethesda/Bioware's refusal to update game interfaces for higher resolutions, Oblivion and Fallout 3 especially suffered from this, I can't play them without a UI mod, as well as the general feeling that mini-games and interactions were designed for those with no mouse and a limited number of buttons (Persuasion anyone?).
wolfar15:I actually liked the persuasion in oblivion versus morrowind. a certain person will always like and dislike the same things and the wheel adds some strategy to the mix instead of simply clicking a button and relying on a numbered stat. How boring. I could get people to fall all over themselves in love with me within 5 minutes in morrowind. Also, who doesn't like being given money? if someone walked up to you and gave you $50 would you be pissed? that always mystified me in morrowind.
(for the record I love both morrowind and oblivion) But im not surprised to find so many oblivion and fallout 3 haters here. After all this is good OLD games dot com ;)
Zeewolf:Big, bloated and inefficient... because it was essentially the same as on Xbox 360. However, there are some mods that make it better.
wolfar15:The interface is absolutely fine if you know what you are doing. (it seems most don't have a clue) Ive been playing oblivion since it was released> No GUI mods and never had a single problem with the interface. Everything is placed in its own section making it quite easy and efficient to display specific information
In response to multiple posts. What exactly is the meaning of a true rpg? Turn based combat? numbers on a sheet automatically dictating what you can and cant do without giving you a chance to try? Real time combat? The ability to try whatever you want regardless of numbers and at least have a chance of success? dice rolls? lots of stats and skills and powers etc? Lots of customization options? good storyline?
None of the above. RPG stands for role playing game. If you play the role of an individual in a game where there is even the slightest allowance for customization of your character and the slightest allowance for your character to improve themselves over the course of the game then guess what? you are in fact playing a bona fide RPG. You can have no stats, one skill, one attribute and the ability to chance your name and face before the game. Its still an RPG. It might be a horrible RPG but its still an RPG
deal with it.

Red Dawn? Taken from the 1984 movie with the same name, about a number of high-school students - the "Wolverines" - fighting an invasion from Russia and Central America? Could work. Or were you thinking of the (seemingly similar) 2010 movie where a group of teenagers are trying to save their home town from an invasion of Chinese and Russian soldiers?
I was thinking of "modERN-day role-playing game using the Infinity Engine", or ERNIE for short.

They're REMAKING Red Dawn?? EEW! Whats next, shitty a Transformers movie where they turn the main characters I loved as a child into lame special effects caricatures with no actual character to them so you don't even remember which one is which when one dies? Oh wait...
Hmm, ERNIE sounds good but we'd need to develop a companion technology called BERT. I still think this Acronym First, Meaning Second approach is how SCUMM was named