EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
A significant investment of time and statistical analysis. Which is what I've always said is one of the important steps required for good game design. Serious, methodical data collection and analysis feeding into a feedback loop. (You also have to have a clear idea of what things the game is "for," and sufficient honesty to admit when the thing you were trying to do just isn't working.)
Again: the problem is that this turns into, as TVTropes would put it, "four lines, all waiting." (There it means "four simultaneous plots in a TV show, so none of them actually go anywhere.) This type of balance actually results in at least one of either (a) only one player is ever DOING anything, and everyone else is just sitting there waiting to get to do things, or (b) only one (or perhaps two) players is actually THE person-who-does-things, and everyone else is given an active incentive to NOT personally do things because the person(s)-what-does-the-things will simply do them better.
It's also impossible to actually implement this in D&D, because the Wizard will always be able to be amazing at multiple different things.
Sometimes. Sometimes, repeated failure sours the eventual victory. Hence why I spoke of it as I did. If you start looking at the game and realize, "It's literally nothing, at all, about what I choose to do. It's about whether the dice allow it to happen." That is, consider the "game" where if you draw the Queen of Hearts, you get to start reading a book you are pretty confident you will enjoy reading, and if you draw any other card, you will get a mild but painful electric shock. Does that make reading the book sweeter because you expect to get ~10 electric shocks before you get to read the book? Do those electric shocks add anything at all to your enjoyment of the book? Now imagine that you're only allowed to draw one card a week--so you have an expectation of about two and a half months of electric shocks before you get the chance to read the book.
"Failure makes success sweeter" requires that it actually be something closer to "partial success makes ultimate success sweeter." That is, when you clearly keep making progress, even if you fall short each time. Simply getting slapped back down to square one over and over and over is often just demoralizing. That's why, for example, the FromSoft-style "super hard action RPG" games are so frequently called "hard but fair." Because if they were simply stupidly hard without the fairness, it would be miserable, not motivating--and why even very very hard FromSoft games usually include some form of "pity" system or the like, which makes even repeated failure contribute to future progress.
I mean, if enough people report to you that it is true, perhaps it actually is?
Sure, but part of the problem with a "kitbashable" system is usually that they achieve that by simply abdicating design in the first place. "You figure it out" certainly makes it easier to design! A well-balanced system will be hard to design for, not because it is fragile, but because a well-designed system will usually be pretty transparent, which makes it easy to see when a thing you've drafted isn't actually worth doing (or is stupidly OP.)
Conversely, as noted above, it's quite possible for an RPG to be under-designed as well. You, of course, favor games with the minimum amount of design necessary to achieve their aims, even if that means not fully supporting all of the parts thereof. I, on the other hand, prefer games with no less than the amount of design needed to achieve an effective, well-made product, even if that means parts that aren't entirely necessary. That's part of what doing the statistical analysis I mentioned achieves; that plus actually well-designed surveys helps you filter things down to, hopefully, the Goldilocks zone.
That said? 3e was absolutely 100% over-designed. No question there. I disagree that 4e was--because it relied heavily on exception-based design, rather than on having everything cooked into the core first. Just compare the 3e grappling rules to the 4e ones (which, noteworthy, is one of the few areas where an actual 4e rule truly was translated to 5e, rather than gruesomely flayed so the 5e rule could walk around inside the skin of the 4e rule while doing something very different.)
The metagaming thing is extremely surprising to hear. I had thought a core part of "player skill" was, for example, remembering that trolls are weak to acid and fire because you fought them with acid and fire in the past....even though it was a different character, and thus you shouldn't know that that's a thing. That's metagame thinking--and, as far as I've always been told, an expected part of "player skill."
And I can absolutely say that, for anything close to Gygax's actual table, removing such abilities from monsters was the standard state of play. A number of other such things also applied. For example, both versions of Gygax's approach to non-standard player characters are pure metagame and don't care. The first, as recommended IIRC in the AD&D1e book, was to metagame by actively punishing players who choose the wrong options (meaning: monstrous characters), until they wise up or eventually leave the table. The second, as actually demonstrated from his own table, was to embrace the weird and quirky stuff his players wanted to play, but always have them brought down to low power first, e.g. the person who played a balor was playing a depowered one that had to recover its strength, the person who played a dragon was playing a young dragon that was just beginning to go out and build up its hoard, etc. The requirement that every character, no matter what their origin, must start out at the rough equivalent of a first-level character is pure metagame design, but it is helpful to the game experience.
The middle bit though, about narrative and simulation, absolutely make sense. Because those things are precisely why things have steadily moved away from the original form of the "old school" style. Narrative becomes important in the moment, and then actively trying to build it in the moment becomes important too, and looking forward to building it as well--which leads to the "I'd really rather not have my character spontaneously combust from two bad rolls please." Simulation becomes important, which leads to much more involved game design, and wanting to have rules with specificity--and with its rise, unabashed gamism begins to fade into the background.
You have, quite literally, described what I said: that the style adapted because it had to.
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