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Thrawn4
2015-11-29, 07:31 AM
Alright, so I have played and bought several RPGs over my gaming career, among them The Dark Eye (Germany's D&D), Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade (my favourite). All of them are quite enjoyable.
And then I thought: Hey, there are so many other RPGs with settings that you love, or interesting premises, or new fancy mechanics. And so I bought several of them (Unknown Armies, two installments of Lone Wolf, Nephilim) and they were all so disappointing that I will probably never buy another one and rather focus on the systems I like.
Long story short: I think the most popular games are actually the best designed ones - that's why they are so popular. Or was I just especially unlucky? What is your experience?

Florian
2015-11-29, 07:39 AM
The most popular RPGs are the worst designed ones, in the sense that they allow for a wide variety of play styles and people can always compromise on how to game together.

Outside the mainstream, you'll find very tight and precise designs that are hyped by the (few) people who are the actuall target audience for it, but its harder to find common ground for said compromise.

goto124
2015-11-29, 08:22 AM
I bought several of them (Unknown Armies, two installments of Lone Wolf, Nephilim) and they were all so disappointing

Perhaps you could elaborate on why the games were disappointing?

Minty
2015-11-29, 08:30 AM
D&D is a looooooooooooooong way from being the best designed game out there.

Broken Crown
2015-11-29, 08:57 AM
D&D is a looooooooooooooong way from being the best designed game out there.

To be fair, D&D was the best designed RPG until someone invented another one.

In my experience, I find that RPGs depend more on the DM than on the rules for their enjoyability. A bad DM can make a bad game out of a good system, while a good DM can make a good game out of a bad system (though the latter often involves scrapping large parts of the bad system). A good DM makes the system mechanics either fun or invisible; a bad DM makes them a chore.

That being the case, I think "mainstream" status comes about largely as a result of early entry to the field. D&D was the first; Traveller was the first Sci-Fi; VtM took a very new and different "storytelling" approach to RPGs and rode on the fashion for pretty, Gothy vampires at the time. Once a market niche was filled, it became hard to break in; the gaming community was rather small. Since a good DM would be running good games with what was already available, and a bad DM would be running bad games regardless of what became available, a new system would have to be very superior in some respect (and very well-marketed) in order to catch on.

Grinner
2015-11-29, 09:03 AM
...And so I bought several of them (Unknown Armies, two installments of Lone Wolf, Nephilim) ...

Long story short: I think the most popular games are actually the best designed ones - that's why they are so popular. Or was I just especially unlucky? What is your experience?

Uhh...I actually like Unknown Armies. :smalleek:

Though to be fair, I think I like thinking about it more than I like actually playing it.

Edit: D&D, on the other hand, I will probably never again touch in its raw format. 3.P, at least. I bought 4e but never had the chance to use it.

Florian
2015-11-29, 09:19 AM
@Broken Crown:

That was not what was implied by "bad" rules.
Let's say we use the Powered by the Apocalypse engine to create a Tomb of Horrors dungeon crawl. We get exatly that and exatly that experience.
And then it ends.

Now, PbtA is considered to be generall good game design, but it simply stops by reaching its own limits. Now, stuff like D&D and the aforementioned DSA are considered bad game design, because they have rules for everything but lack a certain specific rule, namely how the game should be played. And that makes them so enjoyable, because you're not stuck at playing what the designers intended you to do.

Thrawn4
2015-11-29, 09:24 AM
Perhaps you could elaborate on why the games were disappointing?
Unknown Armies has some novel ideas like the Avatar-Powers and how they can shape the Invisible Clergy / World – I like those, but I have no idea how to put it into an interesting campaign. The examples provided in the core book are poorly designed – basically random stuff happens lol.
Other interesting ideas are just as poor:
Sorcery basically works by plot devices, is unbalanced, und most rituals are both very specific and have little impact.
The mental stress system seems rather unnecessary, too. You roll, and maybe you have to react in a certain way, but mostly all those notches don't do anything that separate your characters.

Lone Wolf D20: I absolutely love the setting, but the mechanics are imbalanced and so very clumsy.

Lone Wolf Multiplayer book: Same as above, but with random mechanics that make me love (at it) and cry at the same time.

Nephilim: Poor setting, extremely clumsy mechanics, imbalanced.


Now, I guess in summary my problem is that most mechanics do not deliver what the fluff promises. And yes, I could repair those flaws, but it would take a lot of time that I am not willing to invest when I already paid others to do so. The mainstream systems have their flaws as well, but they are comparatively easy to fix without a need to invent a new system.

Thrawn4
2015-11-29, 09:31 AM
@Broken Crown:

That was not what was implied by "bad" rules.

Now, stuff like D&D and the aforementioned DSA are considered bad game design, because they have rules for everything but lack a certain specific rule, namely how the game should be played. And that makes them so enjoyable, because you're not stuck at playing what the designers intended you to do.

You have a unique definition of the word "bad". How about "general" instead? Or "less specific playstyle"?

mephnick
2015-11-29, 10:07 AM
Outside of the name, D&D is popular because you can attempt to do anything with it. I say "attempt" because it's still designed 100% with combat in mind with exploration and social interaction as two tiny pillars somewhere in there apparently. It doesn't do anything outside of 6-8 combats a day very well, but you can rig it to work. So if you learn the one system, you can play anything.

You can't turn CoC into an action movie, because you will die immediately or ruin the entire aesthetic of the system, but you can turn D&D into a mystery horror. I love CoC, but if I want to gather people for a mystery horror game I'm still going to propose D&D because no one wants to learn another system for some one-off horror game. It's not going to be the best horror game, because D&D doesn't do horror well, but it actually has a chance to draw a group.

The flexibility is what makes DnD mainstream and well designed, even though it's badly designed when used flexibly? I guess?

goto124
2015-11-29, 10:13 AM
But we have stuff such as GURPS, which is intentionally made to be a 'universal' system.

Florian
2015-11-29, 10:37 AM
You have a unique definition of the word "bad". How about "general" instead? Or "less specific playstyle"?

Notice "bad game design", not "bad rules".

Like I said, DSA, D20, Gurps, want to perform an action? You'll find a rule for it. If done right, you, as player, can pick and use the whole rule en block without needing any outside imput.

The systems you critized work differently, more akin to what the OSR is all about. You can't find "complete rules" as the gm has to be the final arbiter there and has to work based on the setting instead of the basic rules.

What I mentioned is the other direction that is also availlable, to be found in some Indie games, 4E and 13th Age, namely a build-in rule on how the game should be played. For example, this completelly disregards the setting for following the procedure of the rules.

Now we do know the whole bunch of problems that crop up with the typical meanstream game system, especially D20 and DSA. But besides that, they are still more well-received than the gm-bias or rules-only variants.

Broken Crown
2015-11-29, 02:27 PM
@Broken Crown:

That was not what was implied by "bad" rules.

Sorry, I don't understand you. What was not implied by "bad" rules?

Pluto!
2015-11-29, 03:03 PM
I think the big-budget games are the ones that have the most resources spent on their development and production, but I don't think that makes them the most fun to play.

In many cases, design features that are built to sell a long series of splatbooks contradict ease of use. Look at AD&D 2e and onward, where kits, proficiencies, feats, etc. filled up long series' of books (along with racial variants, prestige classes, etc.) - for the brand name, that was great. But for a player trying to walk into the game, pick it up and go, there was more required to know and much more required to do than many 20-page RPGs like Dungeon World or Warrior Rogue and Mage, where within half an hour of hearing of the game, you can be playing with a sound grasp of the rules.

I think the variance in quality of the big-name games is low. I don't know how Shadowrun or the new Fantasy Flight Star Wars games work, but based on their widespread recognition, I have faith in their production values and robustness covering the types of game that they're built for. But I'd also be surprised if they're the most elegant and minimalistic systems for their genres.

Knaight
2015-11-29, 03:07 PM
I'd suggest that the reason you found the other games you looked at bad is that you were so used to D&D style design that it was being used as a baseline. As someone who's background is mostly not in D&D, the bigger mainstream systems often come across as incredibly sloppy and downright painful to work with - wheareas much smaller things are frequently better. If I want to use a rules heavy fantasy system, Burning Wheel is way preferable to D&D. If I want horror, Nemesis is far preferable to the World of Darkness line.

That's not to say that there isn't a reason the mainstream games are popular, I'd just argue it isn't quality. As long as they don't completely suck, just being well known and the probability of other people already knowing the system is enough to stay in the lead. Network effects are a powerful thing, as is being the first system someone tries.

The Shadowdove
2015-11-29, 03:25 PM
best designed just means "easiest for people to pick up and enjoy " to me.

D&D has such a reputation, history, and recognizable content that non tabletop gamers can enjoy it as first time players easily.

from my limited experience, WoD is similar. totally different system, but the pick up and play something familiar yet different is there.


I agree ive seen plenty of well designed systems.. but theyre just not popular / reputable enough to be "found" as easily.

which makes mainstream "better" in that its easier to find support/people/answers/content. Thus theres more to use and more clarification, should you need it. presenting less problems/misunderstanding.

Vitruviansquid
2015-11-29, 03:55 PM
Sometimes, you have to ask yourself, is it really the design that allows mainstream games to be flexible, or is it the fact that so many people have gotten their hands on it and disseminated homebrews and sensible houserules?

Hell, the most popular RPG out there, DnD 3.5, is also probably the least playable out-of-the-box.

The Shadowdove
2015-11-29, 04:18 PM
Sometimes, you have to ask yourself, is it really the design that allows mainstream games to be flexible, or is it the fact that so many people have gotten their hands on it and disseminated homebrews and sensible houserules?

Hell, the most popular RPG out there, DnD 3.5, is also probably the least playable out-of-the-box.

+1。 This is a great point.

CharonsHelper
2015-11-29, 04:31 PM
Sometimes, you have to ask yourself, is it really the design that allows mainstream games to be flexible, or is it the fact that so many people have gotten their hands on it and disseminated homebrews and sensible houserules?

Hell, the most popular RPG out there, DnD 3.5, is also probably the least playable out-of-the-box.

Why do you say that? Sure - it's crunchier than most lesser known systems, but I figured it out just by reading the book, and it was my first tabletop RPG. (I'd done some wargaming though.)

It does a pretty decent job of keeping the bulk of the rules specialized, so anyone picking up the game to play only needs to know a fraction of them to play. Some other games I've read (but not played for good reason) put all of the rules in the body of the game so that everyone needs to know everything. That works fine for storytelling focused games which have few rules (not my schtick - but nothing wrong with them) but it falls apart horribly if the game has any significant crunch.

MrStabby
2015-11-29, 05:42 PM
When you read about how things like D&D 5th ed was made, the design choices, the market research and the public playtesting as well as the ongoing feedback that the team look for and the support they give I would be surprised if it all went to waste.

Listening to people, finding out what they find fun and acting on it isn't perfect, but there are worse ways to try and build a good game.

Mainstream producers can invest these resources and they do get the player base they need for feedback and testing so this does work to their advantage. This isn't to say small producers cant have inspired products but given the expectation that the average quality of unknown companies is less than the big players it is tough to justify putting the cash out there to buy their products.

Jay R
2015-11-29, 07:16 PM
If you stop thinking in terms of "good" or "bad" design, and start thinking in terms of people's preferences, it all makes much better sense.

Mainstream games are games that appeal to larger numbers of people. That is neither inherently "better" nor "worse" design; it is clearly more financially rewarding for their designers.

Some of my favorite games are non-mainstream. But they are aimed at me and people who share my tastes.

Flashing Blades was never popular. I loved it because it simulated swashbuckling movies and 17th century France better than anything else, complete with 5 different dueling styles that actually changed how your character fought.

Pendragon aimed simulating the moral and emotional aspects of the Arthurian tales. I was fascinated, but I never found a large enough group who wanted to play it.

Champions is my favorite super-hero simulation. Most people don't like it because the system requires thinking in math terms during character development. Since I love doing that, it's great for me, but it takes a specialized group to play it.

The original game of D&D was written by and for highly focused war-game nerds. Neither the designers nor the players wanted any intelligence checks or tactics simulated by rolling dice. They wanted to make their own tactics, because they had studied tactics and were fascinated by it. This was great rules design - for the small group of highly focused war-game nerds. regular risk of character deaths were expected by people who usually played wargames in which one side or the other would lose.

Later versions slowly removed the various aspects that a small demographic wanted, and replaced them with aspects designed to appeal to a much larger crowd. This cannot be either "better design" or "worse design". Those terms have no meaning until there is a clear, universally accepted standard for better game design. But it is a more popular game because it's a design that appeals to more people.

AMFV
2015-11-29, 10:45 PM
If you stop thinking in terms of "good" or "bad" design, and start thinking in terms of people's preferences, it all makes much better sense.

I think you've done it! We can shut the forums down now.

Chauncymancer
2015-11-30, 02:43 AM
Why do you say that? Sure - it's crunchier than most lesser known systems, but I figured it out just by reading the book, and it was my first tabletop RPG. (I'd done some wargaming though.)

There are a few places in the game where, if you do what is says in the book and only exactly what it says in the book, there are a few modular but common events where either: you aren't clear in what situation to use the rules, what a particular die roll means is not clear, or the steps of how to use the rules are not clearly written. Diplomacy, grappling riders, the alignment of certain Acts, monks TWF and making an item with a limitation are all examples of rules where you have to make a personal call how they work. But since many people play 3.5, there's some consensus on the most reasonable options.

Pluto!
2015-11-30, 04:59 AM
I don't particularly like d20, but I don't think its rules are particularly contradictory. Just heavier (separate resolution tables for all 30-40 skills), more combat focused (most rules are designed to speed through/gloss over noncombat conflicts, but slow down to get real wargamey when the swords come out) and way, way more centered around the character-building minigame than I think is reasonable for a game that's often treated as a generic swords and sorcery system.

Anonymouswizard
2015-11-30, 06:47 AM
I disagree with the idea that mainstream games are more flexible, simply because I own both Qin: the Warring States and D&D5eD, and Qin is just more flexible.

My only real problem with Qin is that, if I want to run it as a purely historical game, I can make characters without combat techniques, but nothing says that you can't pool the 30 point from skills and special features together.

However, without any homebrew, I can easily run four types of Wuxia (names mine):
-Purely Historical, where I ban magic and Taos.
-Kung Fu Action, where I just ban magic.
-Mystic China, where I just ban Taos.
-Full on Wuxia, with Taos and Taoist magic.

If I wanted to do no magic in 5e, I've dropped the available classes to three. That's lots of character customisation.

Now 5e is great at what it does, but that 'what' is narrow. If you want a game that does a lot, there are many out there, such as GURPS, Fate, Savage World's, and HERO for gritty, narrative, pulpy, and probably whatever the GM allows, respectively. Of these I consider Fate the best designed because it can give you a party consisting of an intelligent sword, a cybernetically enhanced ape, a human soldier, and a sentient cloud of plasma, all using the same character creation system, but YMMV.

veti
2015-11-30, 07:02 AM
Why do you say that? Sure - it's crunchier than most lesser known systems, but I figured it out just by reading the book, and it was my first tabletop RPG. (I'd done some wargaming though.)

It does a pretty decent job of keeping the bulk of the rules specialized, so anyone picking up the game to play only needs to know a fraction of them to play.

And that right there is its problem. You can learn absolutely everything you need to know to play a straight fighter, and by level 8 or so you're still going to be irrelevant in a party of optimisers, because you learned the wrong thing. And there was nothing on it to suggest it was the wrong thing. The munchkin next to you who memorised 'Tome of Battle' is eating your lunch, and you can't even tell how he's doing it.

Fable Wright
2015-11-30, 07:33 AM
Unknown Armies has some novel ideas like the Avatar-Powers and how they can shape the Invisible Clergy / World – I like those, but I have no idea how to put it into an interesting campaign. The examples provided in the core book are poorly designed – basically random stuff happens lol.
Other interesting ideas are just as poor:
Sorcery basically works by plot devices, is unbalanced, und most rituals are both very specific and have little impact.
The mental stress system seems rather unnecessary, too. You roll, and maybe you have to react in a certain way, but mostly all those notches don't do anything that separate your characters.

I'm not sure I properly comprehend this. The mental stress system is one of the defining parts of Unknown Armies, along with the magick. Notches define what your character is able to shut out in the world. Someone with zero hardened notches in violence can freak out the moment someone draws a pocket knife in a fight, while someone with 5 hardened notches can easily keep their cool under gunfire without needing a roll. But if they also had, say, five failed notches as well, anything out of their combat comfort zone will freak them out immediately. Meanwhile, if you flip that, the one with no notches in violence might take waking up with cuts across their body spelling out the first chapter of Genesis in hebrew in stride, while the combat survivor would panic like no one else. It's a way to reflect how well you deal with the extraordinary—and how much that can distance you from the mundane.

Sorcery, meanwhile, is mechanically undeniably the strongest option. At the same time... being an adept is a horrible experience that will backfire on you in so many ways. You can mess someone up six ways from sunday, sure, but you'll be doing this while living in a cardboard box because you can't hold down a job. People not in the know will think you're crazy, and it'll be hard to make friends in game. People who are in the know will think you're crazy and dangerous, so they'll work with you, but again, good luck. And don't think for a moment they'll understand when you need to drive 40 minutes out to get your daily charge when you're in the middle of a stakeout, or when you sell them out for a one of a kind or really rare book.

And yes, rituals are intentionally weak and specific. That's because anyone can do them. Even the sane people, if the sane people have the right skillset. That's kind of the point of Unknown Armies. It's about losing your humanity in a way that World of Darkness games try to emulate but don't quite go into depth with. You can sacrifice some time and effort to do some neat, minor rituals. You can sacrifice your ability to emote with others for the power to ignore the terror lurking around you. You can sacrifice others' perspectives of you for the power to live an Archetype. Or you can sacrifice your ability to live like a human being for the power of doing magick. Unknown Armies is a game about power and consequences. You can gain power in many different forms and it can go beyond expectations. But at what cost?

Finally, I'll admit, the example rumors in the core rulebooks are poorly defined. They're not supposed to be turned into a campaign. They're designed to give you an example of the kinds of beliefs and powers characters and locations at those levels hold, and more importantly, what the impact of those would be. At the global level, you will find some people that are terrified of the concept of being hit by magic, and don't have the resources or knowledge to make proxies. So they start doing crazy things like avoiding personal pronouns to try and dodge it. You find people paranoid of authority figures or dogs and the kinds of conspiracies that make sense, like the president being a clockwork. That's quite viable if a mechanomancer got to work. You get artifacts that players might get their hands on—real blizzards in snowglobes, talismans made by mundane means that seem to have major mojo. You get places with odd properties. Springboards if you need to add a bit of weirdness to your game instead of plots to build around. This could have been much better advertised in its section.

I think I get what you're saying about the game, though. The game isn't clear in the picture it's trying to present. It doesn't lay out what the mental stresses are trying to represent. It doesn't describe to the GM how to make the Adepts feel the cost for their mojo. It doesn't tell you that the rumors are there to add sample artifacts, locations, and NPCs to the game. It drops hints and implies, whereas mainstream games lay it out straight. What I'm getting from you is the intuitiveness of mainstream games is why they're much better than indie ones, and I can respect that opinion. But Unknown Armies is a fantastic game once you understand what it's trying to do. Look at the book One Shots, if you'd like to know what a game of Unknown Armies feels like. It may surprise you.

goto124
2015-11-30, 07:46 AM
It drops hints and implies, whereas mainstream games lay it out straight. What I'm getting from you is the intuitiveness of mainstream games is why they're much better than indie ones, and I can respect that opinion.

So that's another reason mainstream games are so popular - intuitiveness means more people can understand and get into the game without feeling betrayed after a while.

Unknown Armies seems to be the horror and super-gritty kind of game that probably appeals to a niche group of people. Which may be another reason. Is it fair to compare this to CoC?

Anonymouswizard
2015-11-30, 08:01 AM
So that's another reason mainstream games are so popular - intuitiveness means more people can understand and get into the game without feeling betrayed after a while.

Unknown Armies seems to be the horror and super-gritty kind of game that probably appeals to a niche group of people. Which may be another reason. Is it fair to compare this to CoC?

Eh, Unknown Armies is weird. I've sometimes described the setting as anti-CoC because part of the horror is that the world isn't screwed.

Also, once you drop guns, combat is relatively survivable. Still incredibly easy though, in the campaign I played we sailed through the first fight only to almost dying against cable snakes (we would have died right there in session two if we hadn't got some NPCs working on cutting the power earlier).

The madness metres work better than Call of Cthulhu's SAN track. They don't tell you if you're mad, they tell you how you're mad. There's also a couple of fun factors, such as having to balance resistance to madness with being able to relate to other people (especially important for Avatars), and being able to trade in a full set of failed notches for adept powers.

The main problem with rituals is that it's easy for a thaumaturge to have nothing relevant.

Knaight
2015-11-30, 08:37 AM
So that's another reason mainstream games are so popular - intuitiveness means more people can understand and get into the game without feeling betrayed after a while.

The intuitiveness is greatly exaggerated. Using D&D 3.5 as an example here, and pulling up a stat block, we have:
Size/Type - Pretty intuitive, with some weirdness.
Hit Dice - A bit odd, but HP is ubiquitous. The scale has to be memorized.
Initiative - Reasonably intuitive, but memorization is needed to figure out what the numbers mean.
Speed - Intuitive, except for everything that changes it.
AC - Counter intuitive, given that it's a generic defense score that includes a bunch of non-armor factors, and has its own scale.
BAB - Straight up jargon that needs to be memorized.

Then it just keeps going on. There's a big chunk of jargon there, there are several distinct numerical scales, and it's just a mess. A +10 attribute bonus is incredible, and completely distinct from a 10 in an attribute. A +10 save is also pretty solid for much of the game, but +10 to a skill gets really unimpressive in a hurry. Just looking at levels, skills, attributes, attribute bonuses, saves, and spells there's a nominal 3-18 scale, a 1-20 scale, a 0-24 scale, a 0-9 scale, a 0-6 scale, a 2-12 scale, and a nominal -4 to +4 scale. Some of these then get applied to less than intuitive things.

Meanwhile, take something like Fate. You've got your one list of adjectives, you use them for everything, and it's pretty clear what they mean. It's a bit of a long list to memorize - there's a reason that Fudge has a core seven and no more, and Fate adding a bunch just made it more obtuse, but it still is a lot more intuitive than something like D&D. What D&D does have going for it is familiarity, and even then that's mostly because videogames ripped off D&D mechanics wholesale for a while.

Fable Wright
2015-11-30, 12:23 PM
So that's another reason mainstream games are so popular - intuitiveness means more people can understand and get into the game without feeling betrayed after a while.

Unknown Armies seems to be the horror and super-gritty kind of game that probably appeals to a niche group of people. Which may be another reason. Is it fair to compare this to CoC?

Kind of. Call of Cthulhu is about dealing with inhuman creatures whose subtle machinations will be the end of us all. Unknown Armies is about dealing with utterly human creatures whose subtle machinations will be the end of us all. It's more analogous to a Call of Cthulhu game that focuses entirely on the cultists. Replace the Evil Book of Madness with a porno VHS and you get a pretty good idea of what it's like.

CharonsHelper
2015-11-30, 01:12 PM
And that right there is its problem. You can learn absolutely everything you need to know to play a straight fighter, and by level 8 or so you're still going to be irrelevant in a party of optimisers, because you learned the wrong thing. And there was nothing on it to suggest it was the wrong thing. The munchkin next to you who memorised 'Tome of Battle' is eating your lunch, and you can't even tell how he's doing it.

That has to do with balance - not playability. (3.5 definitely has balance issues - especially past levels 8-10.) Balance becomes far harder when you have the customizability of 3.5.

Note: That's not an excuse for bad balance - just a reason. Though in a system with significant customization, you're never going to have balance between people who optimize for the system and people who pick options at random. Nature of the beast.

Plus - I always thought that Tome of Battle was rubbish within 3.5. I always thought that it was basically a marketing test for 4e. (which - considering the results of 4e - led them astray)

Grinner
2015-11-30, 08:53 PM
Kind of. Call of Cthulhu is about dealing with inhuman creatures whose subtle machinations will be the end of us all. Unknown Armies is about dealing with utterly human creatures whose subtle machinations will be the end of us all. It's more analogous to a Call of Cthulhu game that focuses entirely on the cultists. Replace the Evil Book of Madness with a porno VHS and you get a pretty good idea of what it's like.

I was going to say "It's Buddhism by way of Jungian psychology", but I like this description more. :smallbiggrin:

According to the designers, the game is partly a reaction to the issue of humans, and consequently the players, being irrelevant in the grand scheme of things in Call of Cthulhu. Thus, the monsters are more or less tossed out, and the cultists are brought to the fore.

Thrawn4
2015-12-02, 09:47 AM
My description of UA would be "Supernatural if Tarantino had made it".


If you stop thinking in terms of "good" or "bad" design, and start thinking in terms of people's preferences, it all makes much better sense.
This cannot be either "better design" or "worse design". Those terms have no meaning until there is a clear, universally accepted standard for better game design.
I think there is. "Worse design" applies to systems that do not achieve the desired results / preferences (e. g. complex rules, support of fluff), where "better design" does or at least is more likely (e. g. by better mechanics or better fluff).
I agree that people have different tastes, and that different systems aim for different goals, but there is still the matter of quality in regard to said taste.