Thanks for the explanation, I didn't mean to make anyone go out of their way to break role playing games down for me though, I've played tabletop before and even though I haven't played 5th edition I get the gist of what you are saying.
These are completely different experiences we are talking about though. In turn based pen and paper games, it's a very sociable setting, there are rules and every one gets their turn, but it is a very amicable affair and there is much more back and forth engagement than people give it credit for, round by round. That is arguably 98% of the experience.
This simply does not exist in a computer game, especially a single player one. There is no DM, there are no other players, and there is no banter. I have never thought DND translates well directly into a computer game, and I never will, because most of the ingredients are missing. The more slavishly a game tries to follow its tabletop rules, the more empty it feels.
This is why BG and its siblings were uniquely interesting, they were not completely beholden to their pen and paper roots.They appreciated that they were tapping into something different. They managed to slice time into increments of less than 1 round, and nobody objected. And this was only in slices of 10!
I really appreciate what you are trying to tell me, that this is an innovative style of gameplay, but I just don't feel it.
This actually worries me quite a lot. It feels a little bit as if a gameplay style that I greatly enjoyed, probably 500 times from start to finish, wasn't ever really truly understood for what made it great.
in 1998, Bioware took D&D and turned it into some sort of cross between Final Fantasy and Command and Conquer.
