Then it will be closed. I mean, I could post my honest opinion of certain game systems right now and get it closed if that's what you wanted.
I mean, if your honest opinion would run afoul of the board's stated rules on inclusion, for example, then by all means keep that to yourself.
Edit: I will add that a statement such as, for example, "the explicit sexual themes in systems like V:tM, Monsterhearts or Apocalypse World is a huge turnoff for me" is a very different statement than one laced with judgment at the people who make/play said games.
Well if you mean we are better, then "No", I don't think we are. We've gotten a little better informed so that we are a little bit better at matching mechanics to their intention, but as far as clearing the hurdle and actually designing something that is elegant and playable, I don't think we are much better.
Clearly I disagree. We've gotten
significantly better at matching mechanics to their intention, which is to say,
we're actually doing that at some level. There are a lot of smaller indie games that, while not nearly as ambitious in its goals as
Dungeons & Dragons (which has been stated as being "all things to all people" which it... mostly? succeeds at, more in spite of itself really), have very clear intentions and hit their mark beautifully. They're much more niche as a result, but still much better designed.
Pendragon, for example? Basic RPG and WEG D6 are still some of the better designed systems of all time, and for all the problems D&D had, many of its choices - hit points, classes, spell slots, etc. - are still defensible and have not been improved on.
Don't get me wrong, I look back fondly on my experiences with WEG D6, but character creation doesn't need to be that cumbersome. And while HP, classes and... well, HP and classes are certainly still defensible, there have been many alternate interpretations of represent those ideas (character health and archetype/abilities, respectively) that work much better within their own systems. YMMV, of course.
Hell, D&D itself does HP, classes, and spell slots better
now than it did in any iteration that OSR cribs off of.
Nor do I think we have necessarily excelled some of the classic examples of play (by which I mean modules, adventures, scenarios, campaigns) presented 3-4 decades ago.
I said we do
game design much better.
Adventure design has, yeah, sadly become a bit of a lost art, but that's because the broadest swath of examples we have are required to fit into very different molds than classic one-off adventures of old (either really short pick-up and play adventures, a la Adventuer's League, or long, necessarily constrained mini-campaigns, as typified by Adventure Paths). That said, I'd still hold something like Zeitgeist up against any of the old classics (quite a few of which haven't aged nearly as well as some folks would like to believe they have)
