What criticisms do you have for current or previously used systems?

[Thomas Shey]

Sure I also notice a lot of "Insert game does X in a Y way, but I prefer X done in a Z way; therefore insert game sucks". Having some awareness about your preferences is a good thing.

Yeah, at the least you ought to do "insert game does X in a Y way, and that just doesn't work for me".

 

[Emberashh]

Anyone designing a game might care more about some feedback than others, but it's still useful to know what larger groups of people are griping about. It's even useful to know that fewer people are griping about "X" if you are designing for a particular niche.

To take this comment as an excuse to muse on a something peculiar about how online people tend to react to my game, I spend a lot of time reading different forums and subreddits and what have you.

As a would be game designer, I take to heart the advice to stay engaged with your intended audience, and as such, when I read a great mass of discussions about 5e in particular, there's a lot of common trends that become apparent.

5e's lack of meaningful procedures and rules for things like Exploration, or Crafting, are a common complaint people say they'd wish was different, up to and including saying it should be just as indepth as Combat is. There's a lot of want and desire for just more in that game.

And yet, often when my game, which is trying to go just that far in delivering relatively equal depth across all of its experiences, is exposed to others online, its been rejected, with some even going as far as to say that no one actually wants a game like that.

Course, the caveat is that I have yet to actually run into anybody, online or in real life, who was a 5e person, that talked to me about my game and what they can do in it that wasn't enthusiastically supportive.

Around 100ish people have played Labyrinthian in its proto-state and the bulk of those were coming direct from 5e, with a handful having it be their first RPG experience ever, and while there was some reservations about certain things, I've yet to run into any actual dislike for what the game is doing, other than from online people.

So I suppose the point of this musing is, it is important to listen to people and what they're clamoring for, and I think some don't really want to listen to 5e players.

 

[Wolfpack48]

So I suppose the point of this musing is, it is important to listen to people and what they're clamoring for, and I think some don't really want to listen to 5e players.

That's a good point, and a bit why I took particular systems out of the equation and tried to be as generic as possible in this. It's still hard to get out from behind the IP Wars and just get to what people actually are looking for in their systems, but people like to revert to their IP or "GNS" stance and do battle there.

This poll's gripe list might skew a bit toward D&D gripes simply because it has more players, but I think the generic complaints about system are still worth looking at.