Baldur's Gate - The birthplace of the modern RPG
I love RPG's and I love Dungeons and Dragons.
Baldur's Gate is what you get when some nerdy game designers do their best to recreate the tabletop experience on a computer in the mid to late 90's.
I think they did a pretty great job! The game plays beautifully, still holds up today and offers you an almost perfect opportunity to play the ACTION portion of a table top dungeons and dragons game.
Where the game fails is in its story telling. The mechanics for telling a good story are there, the premise for their story is pretty cool, but the game never really amounts to more then a series of light hearted and comical side quests culminating in something resembling a coherent plot near the end of the game. What this does do however is give you the thinly veiled premise you were looking for to go out and kill monsters for loot, gold and experience points. Which the game totally delivers on.
In essence, Baldur's Gate leaves you with the dungeon crawling and exciting combat of a DnD session with your buddies with all the RP and social interaction left out. Your mileage on that assessment will vary as I'm someone that does enjoy the combat in DnD but the real reason why I play is for the roleplaying and storytelling both as a player and a DM.
That said - Without Baldur's Gate we would not get the real gems that are Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment.