Late to the party, you say?
Nevertheless, Pathfinder’s a great example of some awful design features.
I took a little longer than the rest of the table to make a character, as everyone else had a tablet, with a program.
Issue 1: When humans resort to software to make your ‘pen and paper’ RPG characters, something has gone terribly wrong.
I noticed that the Sorcerer and Paladin classes both relied on high Charisma, so I went for a multiclass ‘sorcerer/ paladin’ elf.
I thought it’d make for some nice ’elvish flavour’ on top of the paladin class; the pious warrior who also heals, and does elf-magic.
I grew up with people questioning whether you can be a real artist and still use Ctrl+z.
Before that, people probably wondered if digital photography was ‘real photography’.
My generation feels deep suspicion towards any kind of ’not-real-art’ arguments.
Now Chatbot9000 has flooded the web with saccharine kittens and uncanny valley boobs, and they’re clearly ’not actually art’, but it’s hard to say why.
So here is why I say these images are not real art.
They are not designed, nor planned, and cannot represent anything.
The Blade films portrayed a vampire language, which makes no sense.
Why spend another night with some bald twat memorizing cases when you could be in a club getting your teeth wet?
Why would vampires develop and sustain a vampire language when they could speak Wallachian?
Vampire: the Masquerade made no direct use of any vampire languages.
Without Wallachian, the reader had to assume that elders spoke to each other in modern English, leaving them vulnerable to the nearest eavesdropper with Auspex.
I was chatting with a Turkish gent, and he told me about his time playing D&D as a kid.
And to prelude a short anecdote, I have to take my hat off to the bunch of young teenagers reading hundreds of pages of rules in a second language, translating character-sheets on-the-fly, and live-translating the rules for magical items whenever a question comes up.
The Turk played as a shit-stirrer.
He wound people up with awful characters, and enjoyed his characters’ various deaths, which were always self-inflicted and entirely deserved.
But he had limits, he informed me.
RPGs should have a ‘social stat’ to roll, not because you should always roll for social interactions, but because you sometimes must roll for social interactions.
I acknowledge all counterarguments:
This is a ROLE playing game.
It’s fun.
We need to know how that player bribes the guard - rolling dice does not provide a satisfying answer.
…et c.
Everything ever said on the subject is entirely correct;
HOWEVER
The players have just made a 5-point plan to infiltrate the castle. It’s devious and fun, and they’re on ‘point 3: looking presentable in front of the chef’s mother’.
Rules for the darkness, for light and torches, spring up among OSR games like a new cockroach infestation - first you see one, but a thousand more hide in self-made dark recesses.
And like cockroaches, the rules are not new.
They’re simply out in the light, presenting themselves.
Because people used to know the darkness, and now they don’t.
So people make rules to show them how the darkness works.
One Reddit comment described the problem of using Mana Points in an RPG (as opposed to spell slots):
If it’s a game with more-or-less d20 fantasy or JRPG video game progression, then it’s very difficult to find a cost for an ability early in the game that feels worth the price when you have max 8 mp that doesn’t seem unreasonably efficient when you have 100 mp. Cure for 2 mp seems fine at level 1 when you can do it 4 times. When you can do it 50 times, it’s kind of a design issue.
Music cannot add much to a game, and can easily remove a lot.
If one must add music, it should always avoid being too lively, or attention-grabbing, because players shouldn’t spend their attention on the music - it should be on the game.
Soundtracks often work well (nothing too recognizable).
Game sounds should never have identifiable lyrics.
Every RPG class system is bad, but before I tell you what you should want, let me tell you about you.
Or rather, let me say whom I want to speak with.
I’m not writing for people who enjoy class systems, so much as for people who want to sit above it all, with an ineffable air of enlightenment, saying ’everything is preference, truth is a lie’.
I’m here to ’eff’ their air, and bring them back down into the muck.
People may prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but since we make reality-based judgements about washing-machines, the health of eyeballs, and quality of food, we can definitely make statements about game mechanics.