For me its about freedom.

"Video Gamey" is about the limitations of explicitly programmed worlds. Its about things coming down to limited options, with pre programmed outcomes or probabilities of success. Its about excluding the things a flesh and blood and brains DM can make a call on.

You want to sneek into a room and stab the guard? There are probably rules for that.

You want to use some kind of detect thoughts effect to uncover their deepest shame and to whisper it loudly from just out of view to creep them out - most systems probably don't have a defined set of rolls for that.

Video gamey is, to me, where there is no support for the second type of action. It fails or it gets mapped to some other action for both difficulty and effects without being treated on its own merits.


Video Gamey is where what is written on a character on a character sheet matters more than a PC's character and experience at the table all the time (is swinging a sword, a strength stat might naurally matter more that a character having formed a loving polyamorous relationship with a pair of goblins from warring tribes or that they have tried but repeatedly failed to forge a magical shortsword or whatever). Video gamey is squeezing the richness that can reallistically still only be achieved with a human DM our of an RPG experience.


As a criticism of a system, I would guess its maybe about reducing things to dice rolls with little nuance (tables of DCs for different tasks, no flexability to use ad-hoc abilities to raise or lower success, diplomacy comming down to a die roll rather than depending on what you say etc.). Its not the most harsh criticism, and many tables like a bit of that. It may be you don't have a lot of open ended abilities - polymorph gives you a choice of three creatures, fireball has a set radius, searcing for traps always takes 30 seconds and so on.