For me, the best RPGs have always been about a few elements. The main one being interesting character generation where you can define a nuanced character from a number of viable options (which probably goes a long way to explaining my love for the Pathfinder games and why games with predefined protagonists fall flat). The secondary element for me is the ability to be somewhat freeform in how the game is approached, allowing you to take on challenges in the order you feel like, grind, push the story, never engage with it, or whatever else you might want to do. Many more games hit this second element and can do it fairly well, but not all of them.
Also, I support the limitations of 5 points max to a game and a maximum of 5 games. It actually pushes you to consider what's important to you in the games and rank them whereas there are any number of games I'd love to recognize, etc. and it would be very easy to pick out say 10 games and give them all 1 point, or whatever else. It dilutes the list even more so than some of the other issues have brought up, but issues like
Rincewind brings up are rather beyond pedantic because unless you've got some sort of professional games archivist or someone completely insane like CRPG Addict, there's no reasonable way of getting around it.
Anyway, after much consideration, here are my completely biased (yet objectively more correct than yours) results:
1 pt - Phantasie: Phantasie had a great feeling of adventure and progression both in dungeons and the overland map. Also like many older games, it allowed you to approach the game in whatever order you felt like even if there was an intended order. Most importantly to me, and why the game stuck in my mind for all these years, the game has a ton of races you can use to build your party, it just sucks that most of them are dumped behind RNG instead of being given as directly selectable choices.
2 pt - Wizardry 6: Wizardry 6 was great for introducing DW Bradley's expansion of the classes and races of Wizardry while still delivering a great blobber experience. The ability to push through the game as base classes, or engage in crazy sperg multiclassing make this a great and tight experience that doesn't overstay its welcome.
2 pt - Quest for Glory 1 (Hero's Quest) - So You Want to be a Hero: This is pretty different than the other games in this list, but this game let you define your hero between several different class paths, including a form of "multiclassing" by giving your hero skills that normally belong to a different class. It also allowed you to do other things that fit with your hero's unique abilities like a thief hero generating funds by burgling people's houses and finding the thieves' guild, or playing games of magical skill with your magic user. This really helped provide more of a simulation of the lone hero's life with some adventure game elements and this sort of approach is probably the same reason I love Dragon's Dogma as much as I do. Quest for Glory 1 is such a classic that I kept floppy drives in every computer build I had for years and then once the QfG Anthology came out, I kept optical drives in them up until they were released on GOG. This entire series is one of my all time favourites and if you've never played them, you really should if you have even a glimmer of storyfaggotry in yourself.
2 pt - Quest for Glory 4 - Shadows of Darkness: At the time, this game was pushing multimedia with both voiced and unvoiced versions and great music. This game continues with Quest for Glory's support for a variety of hero types that can experience a variety of facets of the game world and approach things quite differently. I also thought it effectively blended a serious Transylvania/Ravenloft sort of setting with the series' trademark humour and light-heartedness and some Cthulhu elements. Fantastic game.
3 pt - Pool of Radiance: While all the Gold Box games deserve recognition in some manner, Pool of Radiance delivers a very tight experience with exploration, the ability to approach the game more or less in the order of your choosing and adventure around the city and overland map. It also delivered fun tactical combat that considered positioning and what each of your characters are doing in a way that the more abstract presentation of blobbers and games like Phantasie simply don't or can't. The lack of tactical positioning is one of the main shortfalls of blobbers for me, although they can still be great and why I don't rate them higher (although this was approached in interesting ways by later games like Wizardry 8 and Bard's Tale 4).
(as I'm definitely not qualified for the "true" poll) .
