What makes an RPG good?

[kyoryu]

I think that mostly tracks, but I do think there are people that just really like mastering complexity, and have less care about depth.

They'd like the greater complexity, whether or not depth increases, and may not actually like more depth (past a point).

IOW, they'd be less concerned about the ratio, and more about the measure of complexity in and of itself.

Which, I mean, is fine. Not every game needs to or can appeal to every player.

And I think that's my big thing about game design - "good games" isn't a single objective set of criteria. It's all about what the individual player wants, and whether or not a game does the things that a specific player wants.

"Bad games" though I think can be more objective. Like, a game that has design elements that make other things it tries to do hard can be said to have "objectively bad" design because at some point it doesn't meet any set of criteria due to having conflicting mechanics... for example, a super-heroic type game with characters doing epic feats - but having a fairly high chance of just random death from a bad roll. It's not going to satisfy people wanting to be "heroic" because random death stuff is usually counter to that, and it's not going to satisfy "gritty" gamers because the overall tone will be too heroic and over the top. It might satisfy some super narrow niche of folks, but that would be an extremely narrow niche.