We need to talk about something very clearly. And that is that role-playing games are not a hard technology. They are not like a wing, which has a very clear metric of success.
It is foolish and ultimately self-destructive to proceed as if they are.
RPGs are a process technology that is they represent a set of methodologies and techniques for achieving things which are very squishy and difficult to measure. This is why there is such a massive diversity of them available in the marketplace.
https://x.com/LawDogStrikes/status/1861207092314665237
Never, ever lean into the idea that RPGs represent "a technology" with qualified metrics, because that way lies the madness of the OSR and TTRPG players who have only played one game in their life and they consider it a good thing.
Don't fall into that trap, not even once. Not even entertaining it as a gedanken experiment. Most especially don't fall into it if you want to ever consider yourself a serious game designer and produce a game that people want to play.
The one thing that the online fandom wants to avoid with all of its deep and knotty little heart is raising the obvious question: "By what measure is this thing better than this other thing?"
Because at that point, they have to confront the fact that they don't all want the same thing at the table, nor should they. But once you say that, there's no way to claim superiority to some other group, which is getting what they want, out of the experience they're having.
Hades forfend that we put the kibosh on summarily declaring yourself superior to other people. Whatever would be the purpose of social media at that point?
But let's take this another step further and point out that this is also true down to the individual edition level of any given game.
I'm not even going to tackle the obvious example, and I'm going to go with something more obscure: Kult.
First edition was one of my favorite games of all time, not just because mechanically compared to other games of its era, it worked for me psychologically and intuitively with less friction, but because it really committed to a setting.
It knew what it wanted to do in terms of creating an experience and ran at it as hard as it could. And then there was the very strange choice of having a relatively long section on Kung Fu in the midst of these mechanics.
Great. And then second edition came along, which wasn't for me. My metric was doing the things that first edition did for me, but better — not what second edition of Kult wanted to do. Instead, the designers appeared to want to capitalize on what seemed like a mishmash of modern (at the time) RPG design principles, but mated with an almost soft super-heroism.
Thematically, it wanted to go a different direction. Practically I didn't like it. Does that make it inherently a bad design? Well, I could sit down and work out whether or not it's self-consistent, which is a metric that ignores my taste and might be a good one to go by. However, there were certainly people who liked it.
Compared to the latest edition of the game, it seems to have refound that original nightmare quality that first edition possessed so effortlessly and completely scrapped the mechanical system introduced in second edition to go with something more derived from Powered by the Apocalypse. That's okay with me, I'm here for it.
Is it inherently better than the previous edition? Well for my purposes absolutely, without a question. Is it inherently better than second edition was for the people that liked second edition? I doubt that it is. Or at least not for the vast majority of them. That's the thing.
If we couple that with the fact that the RPG hobby is not doing the same things that it used to do, not because of any technological innovation, though that is part of it but simply because more people are having more and different thoughts about what can be or should be done within the context of role playing games in general, it's unreasonable to demand that all parts of it get better at doing all things simultaneously at exactly the same rate. It's not a technology of that nature. Instead, it's a lot more like cooking. There are a lot of tools that help you cook the way that you want to turn out the dishes that you like. We get better at producing those tools as a side effect of generalized technological development.
But your grandma's cookie recipe is not inherently worse because your mom produced by necessity, or one that you tweaked into being exactly the way that you want.
So too, RPGs. Let's not lose track of that fact in the burdensome effort of pretending that it's something that it's not.
