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I don't think I'd characterize that as being an accurate description of OD&D. I don't think I'd even say it "fundamentally worked" except by the perspective of people who had very limited expectations in system. I won't speak personally of later versions.

"Working out things as they went" and not taking time to integrate them is sloppy as far as I'm concerned, and it showed across the evolution of the system.

I don't think it was clearly intended to be secondary to dungeon-crawling at least, but I agree it wasn't well designed. Which was my point. Then we disagree. They scream "system as afterthought" to me.

It isn't automatically. It can be in support of genre, instead for example. But as I said, I think using "intent" for any deliberate design ends up conflating things that don't go together.

I think this misunderstands some if not most of the purposes of general use games. It may well be that there's a theoretical design space for any given campaign one might want to run that would serve it better than a more general use game. But that game may not exist, you may not be aware of...

I believe the term for that sort of thing is "compromised design", and its usually not complimentary for a reason.

Went back to this given your addition of your third paragraph. I think the problem here is "intent" is serving a bit too many masters for this sub-discussion. A general purpose game like GURPS or Hero is not really being designed with a theme or even a tone intrinsically in mind; it may hit...

As it is, then. If my prior posts didn't make that clear, my elaborating further is unlikely to.

If you'll note, I'm mostly applying it to games that are not only apparently misaimed (which I do think can be a problem, but a lesser one) but ones that the design is, from lack of a better term, sloppy. I'm perfectly willing to let people take offense at the latter if they want to, because I...

An interesting contrast is, I think, Monsterhearts. I'm willing to say that PbtA was a good general choice for Monsterhearts, and you'd have had to do some reinventing the wheel to hit the aims it had there. The problems with it are twofold: 1. Because of what its representing, it very much...

Look at my further posts and see if you still read me as saying that.

I'm not defending the semantic loading on this if you see my follow-up post.

I don't disagree that's a pretty semantically loaded term when used too broadly; I do, however, think in at least some cases its not inaccurate. As I said, if you're just plopping down subsystems as you get to them (and its hard to see some games as having been done otherwise) I don't know that...

While I don't really disagree with your point, I think even at that point there were some differences in how they presented the role of the two. Whether that showed up in play is a different question.

Well, that's a different set of problems; you see it often with game systems that are D&D 5e based where you ask if there's a real reason for that in actual design rather than marketing and familiarity, but I've seen some PbtA based games where I had to ask if they really thought about whether...

Our old girl Belle had that down to a fine art, and what's worse, before she left it, she taught it to Max the dog who came in as a puppy when she was still around (the fact he thought she was the Best Thing Ever probably helped...)

I don't disagree in principal, but I maintain its really, really easy for a fair bit of self-deception to creep in even on a well-meaning GM's part on whether his weaknesses are harming the game he's running or not (or even what those weaknesses are). And no, you can't count on his players...

I agree they have a worldview--as you say, its why you can run the same campaign with GURPS and Hero and get a pretty different play experience--but I'm not sold that's actually a support of theme.

There are two problems with that: 1. He may have pushed the dungeon pretty hard, but there was also a heavy focus in parts about wilderness play, and it was much more poorly supported; 2. Even within the dungeon play mode, there were design elements that appear pointlessly ad-hoc. Once he'd...

You start to have serious questions about the purposefulness of design when you see a bunch of independent subsystems for different things where the particular choice of subsystem does not point at any particular reason for the decision in the first place. It at least suggests a lack of care.