What makes an RPG good?

[kyoryu]

I mean the problem with systems that lead to unintentional broken things and depth of interaction is that they really only work in card games like Mt:G and Hearthstone, because the entire point is to let dominant strategies emerge to determine a temporary meta- but then that meta eventually has to rotate out. it doesn't stay. this makes sure you have to constantly change decks and be in the habit of changing up your strategy to play. and allows that depth to be explored by making sure the choice is a time limit, once it rotates out it isn't competitive anymore.

Sure, and a lot of roleplaying games sit in this weird space where "deck-building" (character building) is a primary focus, but occurs once over a long time scale. That's just kind of fundamentally hard to deal with.

I think that is more how granular 3.x could get, you could make just about any character concept and represent it mechanically. I don't know about Fate or Gurps but at least in 5e

GURPS is extremely granular and can generate damn near any character concept.

Fate is far less granular, but still can generate... damn near any character concept.

5e can't because 5e rolled back its flexibility to pre-3e levels, and chose to focus on "adventuring" as opposed to being a pseudo-generic system. And I think 3e was only a pseudo-generic system unintentionally. 5e has no illusions about being generic in any way. It does "D&D adventuring".

That's probably where we differ. I mostly define complexity as "the number of rules" and "how difficult it is to apply those rules", not the amount of knowledge needed to figure out the valid choices.

As such, with my definition, Go is one of the less complex games in existence, while being one of the game that reward system mastery and knowledge the most. (Chess is also an example of reasonably low complexity [there are 2-3 obscure rules, so not as great as an example as Go] but high skill/knowledge reward)

I'd really say that complexity is the number of choices available, while depth is the number of useful choices.

[While I make a difference between the depth of the character-creation-system, which is how interesting and skill-rewarding is the mini-game of creating your own character and finding the better builds, and the depth of the gameplay itself, which is how interesting and varied is the game once you settled on a valid build]

This is a very good point, and different people will prefer that balance to be in different places.... I prefer depth of at-table gameplay over character creation, personally.

Go and Chess are extremely high complexity games.

By my definitions, I'd say Go is a high depth game more than anything.

A good example of very low complexity is Monopoly or Life, or better: snakes and ladders.

There is a reason those latter are kids / family games, and go and chess are not.

As far as rules complexity goes (which gets away from my more formal definition), Go isn't much more complex than them. Chess is more complex, but Go arguably has greater depth.

The rules of Go aren't much more complex than Othello.