Quote Originally Posted by MrStabby View Post
The elements of a good story are often the elements of a good D&D type game. Compeling characters, a good cause and all that for sure, but also something about the combats.
A good D&D game maps well to a type of fairly simple form of story. Specifically, the kind of short story that unfolds as 'go to place A, face problem B and complication C, overcome using cool stratagem X and plucky effort Y, grab rewards and go home. Many of the Sword & Sorcery short stories that inspire D&D - Conan, Nehwon, etc. - do in fact unfold in this fashion. In more modern parlance a lot of effective TTRPG storytelling represents the better class of procedural TV episode - there's a team of characters, they are presented with a problem, and they solve it while dealing with various complications. Games set in modern settings can in fact be built explicitly off this model (ex. The Mentalist can be modeled without basically any alteration at all as an oWoD Technocracy game).

However, there are complications. 'Don't split the party' is a very obvious one. Splitting the party is an incredibly useful storytelling technique that is widely employed in fiction for all kinds of reasons, but it destroys tabletop games (games in modern settings can get around this through the miracle of cell phones) because it demands all the principles be in every scene.

Quote Originally Posted by Pex
A Point Buy system is no better because you never have enough build points.
Point buy systems mostly represent a shift in responsibilities. The whole point of a class-based system is to provide option sets that are intended to be viable for gameplay needs simply by picking them (insofar as this often doesn't work, that is a major design issue). In point buy, the GM and player have to evaluate the resulting capabilities of every character and ensure that the character is neither useless nor absurdly OP, something that often requires considerable system mastery to do effectively. For example, it was widely joked that every WW 'sample character' ever made (and this is literally hundreds across dozens of books) was jaw-droppingly terrible and often completely incapable of doing the things the write-up stated the character must to be able to do.

A properly-designed class system is limiting, but it's limiting in that it cuts out the vast array of theoretical outputs that won't fit the system. cRPGs, which often do math hammer out the outputs, tend to be good at this, with games with active management like MMORPGs constantly tweaking those outputs to make sure the classes remain balanced. It's worth noting that most point-buy systems include guardrails of this kind too, such as the FATE pyramid, that are designed to keep characters within certain boundaries.