What makes an RPG good?

[Quertus]

1) A world that is fun to be adventuring in and interesting to players. As a side bar this includes a breadth and depth of material so you aren’t stuck in any one place. Space 1889 is an example of a game that mechanically was average at best but because the world was so much fun players enjoyed the gaming experience.

Without this the game will fail.

Eh… I build my own campaign settings. So, afaict, the only fail state is if the game is locked into a single setting, *and* that setting doesn't deliver.

So, it needs a good setting, *or* an open setting. Both is just gravy.

2) Support for the DM. Most of us have day jobs and families. Unless you have the luxury of time for some reason DMs need as much help as possible. If the game requires too much from the DM in terms of campaign building, campaigns will stall.

I generally make my own content. What help do you think a system *needs* to give me?

3) Mechanics that are consistent with the world as described in the fiction. If I’m playing Star Wars and people start running gun toting Jedi because that’s mechanically better than using light sabers - that’s a fail.

Hmmm… this is tricky. When it's *obvious* to all the characters that the fluff-compliant methods are suboptimal, that can be an issue. Was there a version of Star Wars that had this specific issue?

Anyone who thinks D&D is "obvious", though, I'd love to Obliviate their D&D PhD, lock them in a room with no internet, and see just what they create. Based on my extensive experience with earlier editions, my intuition suggests that it's not at all as obvious as some would have you believe. And, since D&D Wizards don't exactly have the internet, it's bad role-playing to play them as if they understand things that they realistically wouldn't.

Spoiler: THAC0, digital

Show

4) Mechanics that are consistent and easy to understand. THAC0 is the poster child for a dis-intuitive mechanic that smart people couldn’t grasp because it ran negative to every other mechanic in the game. (I know people defend THAC0, but if it was so good why has it been abandoned and no other game stile the concept?)

"Mechanics that are consistent and easy to understand." Great goal, nobody would ever complain right?

Lets look a little closer at D&D to-hit. Start with AD&D 1e, it had charts. Roll, add bonuses, check the class chart for the AC. Sounds terrible? It's a sheet of paper the DM uses, the player only adds a number or two, plus the charts both made martial classes better at fighting and were not just linear number lists. At the high/good AC range there were a set of ACs that a 20s would hit, then for ACs past that the roll needed to-hit would start going up again. Those charts were written by people who begain with war gaming simulations, those numbers were not just randomly made up. Easy to understand? Maybe not so much, some of the effects weren't obvious. Easy to use? Yeah, roll plus strength plus magic and tell the DM.

Move on to AD&D 2e, thac0. That's a "simplification" of the charts that loses the bumps and plateaus of the charts. Now players have a number on the character sheet and an extra step of math. It's issues come from keeping the backwards compatability of descending AC numbers inherited from the original wargaming roots (where they made sense at the time).

On to D&D 3e, ascending AC and class based attack bonus. Simple ya? We went with straight addition this time. But a plethora of modifiers, feats, gear, etc., including touch AC and "no dex" flat footed AC. And we're back to complaints of "too complicated".

4e, everyone uses powers so everyone with the same stat bonus has the same chance to stab/shoot/magic a target. In theory you could have characters with different levels or different magic item plusses, but the system is trying to be balanced and different levels/bonuses isn't balanced. Complaints of "too samey".

5e and we're even simpler with the only difference in stabbing/to-hit ability between characters is attribute bonuses and a magic item or two. But at least you might have the option to trade a bit of character improvement to have the option to trade -5 attack for +10 damage if you use the right kind of weapon. We're consistent and easy to understand, but unless the character is casting spells the difference in character's martial skill is 16, 18, or 20 stat and what plus of magic weapon they use.

How about 6e? We can make things even more consistent and easier to understand. Everyone gets 1d20 vs AC and AC is limited to a 5 to 15 range. Consistent, everyone is the same. Easy, no math at all. We can make it even easier! If we move all differences in combat ability to damage and hit points we can do away with AC too, the to-hit can be just be 1d20 vs 11. But wait! We can make that easier too! Since that's a 50% chance we can just double all the hit points and do away with attack rolls. Mechanics that are consistent and easy to understand, plus we just eliminated all the attack rolls so the character sheets and combat rounds are simpler too. In fact, there are tables that already do away with rolling damage and hit points. Just take the averages and things are even more consistent and simpler.

I think I recall reading a couple 1-page games that used a single d6 with a 5+ success and characters having a few +1s and +2s. That's about the epitome of consistent and easy to understand, but nobody ever seems to use them.

How about a game that plays great but has a custom dedicated "results" app that it needs in order to be played? Easy to use, hit three buttons in order and read the result. Consistently good and accurate range of results. The actual randomizing is completely opaque. Some people would hate it for the electronics bit of course, but that's not part off "is the game any good". High stats/skills are good and pushing three buttons to read a result is easy to understand, right?

2e THAC0 was bad. 3e "touch AC" was not "added complexity" - it replaced the more complicated, less defined, and more obfuscated "AC 10".

There is no way in which the 3e attack roll mechanics were inferior to the 2e THAC0 mechanics. And I say this as someone who considers 2e to be the best RPG!

The 1e tables added value at the cost of complexity - not better or worse, but different.

As i understand it, 4e and 5e have the same basic "mechanic" (d20 + bonus vs DC) as 3e. So the differences in the implementation of the rest of the system, that produce these different opinions, seem unrelated to the question of how easy and intuitive the system is.

Digital randomness is quite difficult to handle. Players easily over-interpret results and will quickly feel like the results are rigged or unfair. [Peoples also think their dice are cursed, but they blame the physical dice, not the game itself].

Opacity is seen as unfair. Just displaying the odds is rarely enough, as a lot of peoples don't trust randomness if it doesn't match their intuition. The two solutions I've see that seems to work to reduce player's feeling of unfairness are
(1) "Materialisation" of the randomness through explicit cards or dice.
(2) Lies and illusions. You fake transparency by displaying odds of success/failure that are wrong by using a different formula for your "odds" and the actual check. [Usually you undervaluate the probability of success for easy/medium checks].

IME, (2) is the most frequent choice, especially in tactical video games (Fire Emblem, XCOM, etc).

Huh. I always felt that my "rolls" were on the lucky side in XCOM, which just made it more frustrating that I could never beat it. Is there a source for the display math being wrong in those games?

Personally, I like rolling physical dice. I'll only sacrifice that bit of enjoyment if the game when I have a compelling reason - like when I'm running an army of the undead, or a mech with 40 machine guns...