Roleplaying Games belong to a vast genre that spans a good variety of media: table-top dungeon romps, epic linear adventures, free-form character development sandboxes, or flailing at eachother in fields. Aside from the latter, a relatively new blog that’s popped up at 1up.com called The Grind aims to cover the best of what RPGs have to offer.

Headed up by Jeremy Parish — an online writer that I’ve known of since I started frequenting the internet for games news at The Gaming Intelligence Agency (RIP) and have had the pleasure of lunching with — the blog has gotten off to a great start with coverage of a variety of upcoming titles, as well as beginning several weekly columns that cover specific topics.

In one of the first posts, Parish attempts to dissect exactly what it is that makes an RPG today. We see so many games taking up the mantle of “…with deep RPG elements!” that it would be easy to peg many recently-released titles as RPGs as well as their assigned genres. Do character levels beget a genre label? Or is it having a skill tree, or inventories, or equippable relics? There are certainly some tropes of games PR that would have anyone believe in a game’s RPG nature. Parish doesn’t come to any conclusion on the matter, but there doesn’t really need to be. An RPG can be simply a series of level grinds though a story, or it can be a toolset that aids other genres’ development. Whatever makes it fun and worthwhile is what we cull from its lack of definition.

I highly recommend checking out the blog if you’re drawn at all to RPGs and their intricacies. It’s some great writing on the subject, and all matter of timely stuff.