I feel, as many have mentioned, that modern design is intentional. The decisions in games like Drawsteel, Daggerheart, Shadowdark, Mothership, Into the Odd, etc. are carefully thought out,
I do not believe that intentional design or careful thought is a new thing. Surely games like Runequest, Pendragon, Ghostbusters, Amber, Paranoia and Ars Magica are games designed with clear intent to support particular styles of play and were developed with careful thought by the designers.
Whether they are games you want to play, or designed to do the things you want, the ways you want, is another question. But I don't understand how anyone can suggest that the designers involved lacked an ability or willingness to use careful thought or to design with intent.
and the designers are willing to throw out beloved ideas if they don't fit the game's intention. His Majesty the Worm, for example is a deliberate desire to redo dungeon crawling. It's tight, strategic, old schoolish, without any mechanical trappings from D&D. Draw Steel states its elevator pitch clearly and closely hews to its purpose.
I'm not sure how this observation can even be applied to most games. Unless you're making a new edition or variant of an existing game, what non-fitting, beloved ideas are people generally keeping? Traveller, Runequest and Rolemaster are early games with a clear willingness to ditch D&D assumptions. RM specifically is an attempt to offer D&D while ditching and replacing basically every single mechanic and many fundamental underlying assumptions.. The history of the hobby is littered with attempts to remake D&D and, prior to the d20 boom, these games didn't typically retain much of anything of the original D&D mechanics and they did not tend to retain the so-called sacred cows that linger in the official line. Their selling point was, in general, the fact they were ditching such things.
Which, now that my thoughts are moving in this direction, makes me wonder -- are people's opinions on this subject being influenced by the glut of d20 and OSR products we have seen in the last 20-ish years, and perhaps even things like PbtA and FitD game families, and completely missing the fact that, once upon a time, every game was pretty much it's own thing?
These days, many new games are hacks and mods to existing, successful games. Once upon a time, this was not remotely the case. I would suggest that maybe what we're seeing is things coming full circle in some respects, except that people are accepting hacks of some games into the "modern" umbrella, so it's not just a matter of modern being a game that differentiates itself from others in some way.
With well designed modern games, players are far less likely to feel let down by unkept promises.
It is equally true that with well-designed, older games, players are far less likely to feel let down by unkept promises. A well-designed game is a well-designed game, and a modern, well-designed game is not inherently better than other games by virtue of "modern" being appended to the description.
More games these days deliver what they're selling,which is why I have been buying more games than I'll ever actually get to run.
That's easy to assert, but I'm not sure there is any way show this is actually the case, as it sounds like a question of taste and perspective, to me.
I mean, it is probably true in general that "more games these days" do [anything you wish to state] simply because there are more games. But suggesting that more games, as a significant fraction of the total number, deliver what they're selling ... that seems highly unlikely to me, given the insanely low bar we have and the glut of products out there.
Edit: In summary, I reject any definition of "modern" games that attempts to claim modern games are somehow
better designed, as opposed to
differently designed, than games that fall outside whatever definition is being used.
