the main gameplay of all zelda games is the realtime action combined with the awesome puzzles they have. that way its a brain teaser to journey through a dungeon hacking and slashing while trying to figure out how to get to the boss. Final Fantasy is more of a standard rpg with an AWESOME storylines with semi-real time battles. hope this helped

Zleda: you move a character around and attack in real time (no turns), as well...item collection exists and often you will have to collect a new item to procede and you also use items in combat (need a boomerang to hit the switch that is out of reach, and can throw it to stun enemies that are running at you so you can slash them with a sword...)  The game occurs intirely in an over head/bird's eye view perspective where you can move, interact, and face north, south, east and west.

FF: varies slightly, normaly the game has a huge number of places to go, things to buy, and bosses to beat.  The game is often a round-robin turn based style, you controll a group of people who all make choices on what kind of attacks to do in a combat screen and then after all of your characters have made their choice (magic, attack, defend, run, item...ect) the enemies take their turn until either you all die/escape or they do.  Also, their tend to be stats into the tens of thoundands in size and you can see damage like 'you lost 349,3401 hp' .  Also, complex multi-character story lines with lots of spoken dialogue (text.)  Arguably, the best FFs are VII and X...arguably the worst is GBA FF tactics.

Paper Mario/Mario and Luigi/Mario RPG: has interactive turn based battle where you may be able to, during the enemies turn, jump over an attack to dodge or swing your hammer at just the right point to deal triple damage.  Stats tend to be pretty low, and the games often have light hearted plots based on the mario brother universe.  Often, you will gain new skills and items you can use in battle and to solve puzzles.

Rogue and derivitavies: a game that is like a turn based zelda, you take turns moving and attacking on the map screen as do enemies...generaly, their is no story... just items and monsters that get progressively more powerful as you go down the the bottom of the game world, and a town level resides at the top where you can buy and seel items.

Well, just to shamelessly plug:

Aura is an rpg with a real-time battle system, in which you fight monsters with a variety of weapons in a small side-view area. The main game is bird's eye view, with multiple huge overworlds to explore. It will have a good plot (if I can say so without bragging).

If you want to know how a generic rpg plays, play a game from the FF series. I recommend FF 3, you can get a rom (not illegal since its so old) for Super Nintendo. To get an idea of some more out-of-the-ordinary rpgs, try Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu 3, or Tales of Phantasia (all for Super Nintendo).

Wow, thanks for all the quick replies.

Taskmaker is basically like Ranman's description of Ultima V except you want to steal as much as possible. And it's kind of like the top-down Zelda.

Right now I'm reading http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/frpg/site/. What do you think about the ideas on that site?