Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
I think a lot of this is highly subjective.... Like a bad CAD package, you spend more time and effort trying to navigate the interface than actually building things.
Yeah, like a lot of life stuff is different based on where you see it from. For me 5e looks like a decent plug-n-play combat system married to your bad CAD package for everything else. I like not having to know what numbers are on the player's character sheets, worry if I'm calling for too many checks, or have to explain why one character gets a roll and another doesn't. I'm willing to make the players do a little more adding up numbers if the rules relieve me of those sorts of issues and can cover or prevent my mistakes. I'm happier when my notes on a pc are "good at <thing>, bad at <thing>, tempt with <thing>, fears <thing>" and a keyword summary of their background and current fame/social reputation.

Other people like or internalize the things I think of as "working the rules to make the rules work". I'm happier doing a bunch of prep work when there's no time or attention pressure than trying to figure out how to get rules to give appropriate results or if I need to abandon the rules and do a butt pull in order to keep the game going smoothly. I know a DM who absolutely adored 4e combat because he had no decisions to make. He just picked monsters, added up xp, scribbled a map, ran the monsters, and the fights... well they worked untill the hp & condition bloat got too much.

One thing I dislike about the UI metaphor is that a properly designed UI will restrict and channel a user's actions into what the developer wants the user to do. If the software is properly presented and the UI is appropriately subtle then the user won't try to do stuff outside the scope of the software. RPGs... don't function like software or UIs and most of the major titles are, I feel, oversold to the users on their scope. Like software an RPG is just a collection of rules. Unlike software they aren't executed by precision instruments that perform each step as designed. The UI metaphor seems to excuse sloppy rules writing by saying that you're expected to not use the rules because they'll sometimes fail under normal use cases. I don't think that's how the metahpor is intended, but that's how it communicates to me.

More or less unrelated, being the kind of person who likes data & result driven decisions, I had at one point, some years ago, a spreadsheet. Yeah, big surprise eh? It had (or has since its probably still around on the hdd somewhere) a series of questions about RPGs. Typical stuff like how much work you"re willing to put in, how much time & money you want to spend, how much houseruling & prep. All on the usual.... I think it was a 1 to 5 scale. It also clustered them into categories and put a "how important is this question" and "how important is this category" rating on top of those. Then I filled in copies for every RPG I owned or had played. Comparing results & stuff showed me trends in what and why I enjoyed some games more than others. Not a thing I'd expect to be useful across different people, but useful (to me) for provoking thoughts & questions about how I valued, used, and enjoyed different games.