Why ssso sssserioussssssss?

Choices and Consequences.

Also, the progress of your character/party should depend on skill points, so if you talk to an NPC and you have low intelligence points, the only dialogue choices should make you sound like a caveman. And if you have high intelligence points, you should have more suave and varied choices in branching dialogue.

Race x Gender x Intelligence x Beauty x Charisma x Alignment = Choices

Only really Fallout and Arcanum nailed this.

And no, (T)Witcher is not an RPG, it has more in common with a rocket propelled grenade.

Screw it, I know you're just trolling as usual, but I'll bite.
Soooo... Game built around choices and consequences is not an RPG, but a game where you can choose your character is (Like Far Cry 2!) I am yet to encouter a game where your choices would cause consequences so deeply rooted in the game world as in The Witcher. No, not even New Vegas gets there. But yeah, it's not an RPG, because you cannot create character. Totally not utterly superficial and biased reasoning.

edit: I have got to say, however, that I am kind of sad Planescape Torment is not an RPG. ... Oh, wait.

the witcher falls into a catagory of games, that to me, is more action then rpg'ish. that and skyrim, i mean you can level up and all that and thats great, but to me, what really makes an rpg is a certain element of strategy. making choices on how to fight from battle to battle, maybe one battle you use a certain spell, maybe another you have to use special spells that you don't use normally, maybe one battle is easy and you don't even need spells.

I like turn based too, becuase you put in your order, and then grit your teeth and wait to see what effect it has.

Wizardry 7 was great, becuase you gave everyone in the party orders, then pressed a button to see how the battle played out. depending on how well it goes, you change your strategy for the next attack.

The comparison to New Vegas is unfair, as New Vegas is an open world setting. For choices and consequences to have effects beyond the ending slides you need linear storytelling. But otherwise I have to agree that The Witcher is an RPG in the purest sense of the word. A pretty medicore one, imo, but an RPG.

For me, a world I want to explore and choices that matter.

Others have vastly different interpretations though, of course. For most of the RPG Codex it would be stat and character building systems that supersede player skill.

Which makes it even more impressive that it came close to The Witcher's complexity - I was picking out of games that fit Crosmando's definition.
That only works if you think combat is core mechanic of an RPG (which ... you clearly do)

shoot man, back in the day all rpgs were was this giant grind that had very little to do with story at all. in fact, a lot of them didn't make any sense!

look at rouge likes. or diablo. did anybody care about the story? no! they just wanted to slay a bunch of demons and find some nice armour or spells or something!

the quests could have gone like this:

"hey, hero. i need a ball. its on level 3 and is guarded by the butcher. go get it." and nobody would even have noticed!

you make a good point though, i'm a combat guy largely. I figure you can have a great story in any game.

Romances.

http://cache.ohinternet.com/images/thumb/2/2d/Trollface_HD.png/618px-Trollface_HD.png

... And back in the day from the day you're talking about, RPGs were mainly narrative of a group of people, often very story and character oriented. Weren't called 'RPGs' back then, granted, but that is what the genre mostly comes from.

True, but story is married to gameplay imo, especially in an RPG.

Sure, story became more important once players only controled one character and the game became more freeform. But the earliest CRPGs, with the exception of Ultima, was mainly based on the combat aspect of tabletop roleplaying, mainly because a computer could resolve combat much faster than a DM, and because computeres weren't very good at telling stories (and still are woefully inferior at storytelling compared to books).

I like your idea of dialog choices and how it influences the world your in. I would like to include examples of other aspects.

Story- No such thing as good or evil only the lines of morality you draw in your head and how far your willing to go to achieve your goal. Yet breaks in your very bleak world with a sense of hope or nostalga so you dont have Darkness induced Apathy.- Legacy of Kain hell even Starcraft 1 and not the 2nd one

Diverse Enviroment- Morrowind and include destructible enviroment on a realistic standard like how Battlefield bad company does. A sword for example would break if you hit a stone wall to many times

Combat system- Gothic or Witcher or in modern/future setting S.T.A.L.K.E.R

Fast Travel, not a fan of Fast Travel because it would make the enviroment pointless unless using a taxi like system to get from point A to B faster or being allowed a mount. Again Morrowind

Customizing Appearence/Items/Spells- I may sound like a TES series fanboy but they got alot of this right escpially in Morrowind in being able to make Spells and having these items/spells/abilities influence the enviroment around you

Day and Night Cycle- Effects the whole game and what you will find and depends on the setting for example in a medieval setting Everybody will be in their homes and locking doors unless there was a festivel happening or nobles gathering for dinner. In modern and future settings people may be in there homes or out depending on the time of day/night or perhaps seedy deals happen during the dead of night.

Voice Acting/dialog/interaction- Widly varies from excellent quality all the way down to people who Voice act for laughs as long as it varies and the people have intresting stuff to talk about. Cant think of a game that specific right now but you get the idea.

Open world- Thats a given in recent rpg or if you have a linear game it had better be very interesting, have all your choices have consequences truly for example if you are wearing enclave armor in Fallout 3 you would be shot on sight or joining a guild/group would improve realtions with differnt people/groups or vise versa where some people would refuse to interact with you or even attack on sight unless there was a very good reason to put aside their differnces.

Endings- This is sticky topic as it wont satisfy everyone but I believe in multiple ending and seeing a epilouge of everything you have done and how it affected the world and what happens many years later to all the people who travled with you and most importantly what happens to the PC.

Music- Enhance the enviroment and gives off a certain mood and when and where its ok for it to stand out. THIEF for example is a great game but the soundtrack is not meant to be played alone other then the intro and credit song.

Horror [optional]- To many times your character faces otherworldy beings or horrifying truths or otherwise abominations and your PC slays them like it was a chore I would like to see a system like the eternal darkness sanity system with two meters. One a temporary bar in which you can recover easily represents trauma, the other is permanent bar which represents your mental health overall and the more you lose the less likely you are to get freaked out or shocked. But can affect Dialog in both good and bad ways. However if your PC is justified in not being shocked by any sort of events then thats fine.

I have more ideas but this has gone long enough feel free to include other ideas.

Yes, which in turn come from other storytelling elements. We could go on like this for hours :-P Truth is that story is part of RPG, it's part of RP, and it's an important aspect alongside with storytelling. Thanks to this, RPG is a very broad genre, and that's only a good thing - but belittling one part of this beautiful genre because one doesn't understand it / consider it important is just bad, bad, bad.
I disagree. Writing is inferior to books, clearly. But storytelling? Books will never allow you to choose, they will never allow you to influence and become part of a story. Someone might not consider that important, I understand it. But at current state, videogames are a storytelling medium very much comparable to books or movies - just not as mature.
I don't think it's his idea, you know, it's been around ever since DnD :-P (most probably much, much longer)