dtgreene: There are a few points that i consider crucial for a game to be considered an RPG. In particular:

1. The player is only giving orders to the PCs, not directly controlling them. For instance, to attack, the player tells the character to attack, and chooses the target of the attack. The player does not actually directly control the attack.
2. The success of such an action is determined by the character's skills, not the player's. Therefore, the player's aim with a ranged attack is irrelevant; it is up to the attacker's and defender's stats, along with the RNG (or, for table top games, a dice roll), to determine whether the attack is a hit or a miss.
3. Some form of PC persistence. Once all the opponents in a combat are eliminated, or an encounter is survived another way, the PCs continue to exist. (This criterion is intended to eliminate pure strategy games such as chess, in which, once you defeat your opponent, your surviving pieces don't really exist any more; your next match of chess is with a new board with a new set of pieces, unlike in an RPG.)

Green_Hilltop: Which does make your definition obsolete because if it ignores games like TES, then it doesn't really encompass what a RPG truly is or can be.

LootHunter: TES is not story-driven RPG - that's for sure.

Green_Hilltop: Just because you might not like later TES games' stories doesn't mean they are not storydriven. They have a rich narrative, especially Morrowind. You should play some old dungeon crawlers to see what "not storydriven" really means in an RPG, like early Wizardry games or Eye of the Beholder.

Also edit your post, you're attributing dtgreene's post to me.

Green_Hilltop: Why are you accusing dtgreen of being offtopic, when you're doing exactly the same? They are clarifying their thoughts on the genre, which is on topic in my opinion, while your post about the TES games not being storydriven has nothing to do with the topic, especially since I didn't say anything about that prior to your comment.