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These are often the most difficult cases to categorize properly, so I thought we should somehow establish when they should be used.

RPGs are easy to spot, since they have "RPG-y elements" in them. Such as attributes, skills, experience, and even inventory is counted as such. But these often omit the role-play part entirely as a requirement. Think of Diablo for example. It's actually just action game with attributes, experience and inventory. It has no role-playing in it at all. Unless you count choice of character as role-play element as well, which would make a huge number of games RPGs (Metal Slug, for example, you have a choice of 2-4 characters in those games, and pretty much all the fighting games and so on).

Adventure on the other hand seems to be described mostly as talking games, where most of the time is spent in dialogs trying to solve some problem or another. Usually these problems involve use of items you've collected along the way (item-based puzzles).

And puzzles... well, they're puzzles. Too obvious to explain. This will be handled with the other two so I won't talk specifically of puzzles much.

So, the problems, as I see them...

Let's start with Adventure games.
* Adventure games often have inventory, which is categorized as RPG element, yet no such adventure games are marked as RPG no matter what.
* Adventure games also pretty much always have puzzles, yet they never are marked as puzzle games, no matter how many, how difficult or what kind of puzzles are involved.
* Adventure games may not have combat even the slightest bit. At least not the kind that doesn't involve puzzles. (a bit incorrect statement, but outwardly true)
* Adventure games with skills, experience or character levels are considered RPG, though.
* And finally, I'm willing to bet Adventure games with actual choices of approach in dialog or otherwise are not considered RPG, even though that's the very definition of role-play.

Amendment: I don't play adventure games because they're just interfactive fiction with very little choices and usually rather illogical puzzles. So my familiarity with the genre is rather poor.

Let's move to RPG then...
* RPGs with lots of dialog and (item-based) puzzles are never considered adventure. Go figure, this was the very definition of Adventure game, if you care to notice.
* RPGs that have puzzles of any kind, difficulty or quantity, are never marked as puzzle games. Similar to what Adventure games face.
* Games without any role-play involved are considered RPGs, simply because they have RPG-y elements in them (covered above). (Actually, these are called light RPGs.)

And the big questions.

* When does Adventure game qualify for Puzzle and/or Action genre?
* When does an RPG qualify for Puzzle and/or Adventure genres?

The latter seems to be answered only by games like Planescape, Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. All of which in my opinion are obvious adventure+RPG games (yet not all are marked as such).

The Action+Adventure is often turned into Action+Puzzle or Action+RPG (in PC). And we actually see the Action+Adventure mostly in console games, even though those are pure action for some peculiar reason . In these the Adventure part seems to coincide more with what the genre is in movies than in games.

I'm actually amazed no-one has objected to DCotE having adventure genre, it's more heavily action oriented and has little dialogue and no choices in the few there are. It still qualifies as adventure game in my eyes, a light one at that.

And my personal opinion on how these should be treated...

* Adventure and RPG games with any kind of puzzles (except "literal puzzles" in dialogs) should also be of Puzzle genre.
* Action games should only qualify for Adventure when there's a noticeable amount of dialog and dialog choices involved and maybe exploration. Doesn't matter if the choices have no effect in much anything, as long as they're there. Just having dialog with no choices of any kind just makes it a cut-scene of sorts and does not point towards any genre. Going this the other way around, Adventure games with noticeable amount of action (either as integral part or as a choice) should also be Action (just a few fights does not). [edit: this doesn't actually cover DCotE, I don't really know how to do that]
* RPG games should have Adventure when the dialog plays more noticeable part and can function as a possible solution to problems (the only solution or not). Obviously this needs dialog choices as well. This is poor definition as it doesn't really differ much from actual role-play, but since RPG doesn't seem to mean that with games, this would make it clear.

And yes, RPG seems to be put in any game that has at least one aspect of it in them. Makes the genre rather poorly defined as such, and makes me want to start tagging games with aspects of genres just so people know how RPG-y or Adventure-like games actually are.