So many criteria to judge RPG's are subjective that I got to wonder if there were any actual objective criteria for an RPG to be good.  I came up with a few so far

1)  The game must be fun for the target audience

2)  The rules are no more complicated than they have to be to accomplish their purpose.

3)  The rules are clearly written and well organized.

Are there any others?  Or shoot down the ones above if you like.

Quote from: Mishihari;1121898So many criteria to judge RPG's are subjective that I got to wonder if there were any actual objective criteria for an RPG to be good.  I came up with a few so far

1)  The game must be fun for the target audience

2)  The rules are no more complicated than they have to be to accomplish their purpose.

3)  The rules are clearly written and well organized.

Are there any others?  Or shoot down the ones above if you like.

Those are still all subjective.

Define first what role-play is, and how it's done by the players. Then judge RPG rules on whether they are a benefit or a hindrance to the players. Don't know if there will ever be objective role-play though.

When I roll the dice, using their rules - do the results make me either puke, nose/ear/eye-bleed, or flip the table over in rage?  Those are my starting criteria.

The index in the D&D 5E Players Guide is objectively bad.

Example: Look up Temporary Hit Points

Here's the entry.

Quotetemporary hit points. See under hit points

Which leads us to...

Quotehit points
....... temporary, 198

This indexing is objectively worse than one in which they put the damn page number in both locations.

Quote from: Mishihari;1121898So many criteria to judge RPG's are subjective that I got to wonder if there were any actual objective criteria for an RPG to be good.  I came up with a few so far

1)  The game must be fun for the target audience

2)  The rules are no more complicated than they have to be to accomplish their purpose.

3)  The rules are clearly written and well organized.

Are there any others?  Or shoot down the ones above if you like.

Yes, seems rather subjective, though you could apply various documentation type rules for #3. But related to #3, I can think of some positives and negatives that often come up in reviews, such as inclusions of tables of contents and indexes, grammar, display of page numbers, informative section titles, fonts & color that are easily readable, and the like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjHORRHXtyI

There you go.

Sales

That's pretty much it for objective criteria. And even then we can discuss whether it's actually objective or not.

Rules contradict each other.  If they do, that's objectively bad.  Of course, the evaluation of whether or not the rules do, in fact, contradict each other, is likely to have a subjective component, because so often the intent/wording of the rules is vague.

You get the same thing with "bad math in the mechanics" and vague design intents.  Read the subjective intent as generously as possible, and the math of the mechanics can't deliver, then that's objectively bad.  But from a subjective premise.  

A good counter example is probably the 5E "bounded accuracy" part of the design.  The design intent is fairly clear (once one wades through the various places to piece it together).  Whether or not it is a good thing is subjective.  Whether or not they met the design is mostly objective.  (There is a subjective part in defining the criteria to evaluate whether they met it or not.)  That is, one could if so inclined explicitly list premises for evaluating it, explicitly reject some edge cases as irrelevant for purposes of discussion, and then make objective arguments pro or con on the mechanics meeting the design.

Maybe if you established a guild of different-minded enthusiasts, then hotly debated the various criteria penning these down into a leather-bound tome, then assembled the best 8 minds from this group to run the academy using the "Rule of 8", then had an annual awards ceremony with various categories where games would be measure by these criteria, THEN...

You might have something that stinks of objectivity. It will still be subjective, but you'll have CLOUT. Protests could be handled by maiming each loser from each category publicly. It would almost seem objective. Almost.

Quote from: trechriron;1121994Maybe if you established a guild of different-minded enthusiasts, then hotly debated the various criteria penning these down into a leather-bound tome, then assembled the best 8 minds from this group to run the academy using the "Rule of 8", then had an annual awards ceremony with various categories where games would be measure by these criteria, THEN...

You might have something that stinks of objectivity. It will still be subjective, but you'll have CLOUT. Protests could be handled by maiming each loser from each category publicly. It would almost seem objective. Almost.

Cute...

Seriously though, one reason you will never come up with an objective way to rate RPGs is that the core of what makes an RPG and RPG is actually that the games allow subjectivity as part of the game play. They aren't like chess where every attempt to move a piece is either legal or not legal. Since subjectivity is such a big part of the fun of an RPG, every person will have a different subjective reaction to the game.

So what we are left with for objectivity is objective measures of the sales of an RPG or the number of people playing it. Of course super tiny niche market Game X may objectively rate as a miserable failure because it sold 10 copies, but if there actually were only 10 people interested in the specific genre and who it is played out such that the 10 people who bought the game were the 10 people the game was targeted at, well, then you might have the MOST successful game because it hit 100% of it's market whereas by overall marketing measures D&D is generally the most successful game but it does NOT reach 100% of it's target market (some of them bought other games, or didn't buy any game at all).

Big ones for me:
-How long does combat take for me to get through? I can time a fight with a clock so this is pretty objective. Sure it varies from table to table but I don't give a shit about your table, just mine.

-This one is a bit fuzzy but "can you play without knowing the rules." There's always that one guy who never learns the rules well but you want to play with him anyway because he's your friend. Hell in my group That Guy is the host so we need to play with him. But he sucks at learning rules. With a lot of games the DM can navigate that guy through pretty easily even if the rules remain something of a black box for him, while with other games that guy just can't play. So you can't play either. Because he's your friend and you don't choose your friends based on how good they are at learning rules. He's still a great guy even if you have to remind him AGAIN what proficiency applies to even after playing the same PC in 5e for a year and half.

"Does it do what it's supposed to do?" (whatever that is)

The only question that matters.

Quote from: Daztur;1122013Big ones for me:
-How long does combat take for me to get through? I can time a fight with a clock so this is pretty objective. Sure it varies from table to table but I don't give a shit about your table, just mine.

Yea, you could have an objective measure there as long as you took care with the parameters of the measurement.

Quote-This one is a bit fuzzy but "can you play without knowing the rules." There's always that one guy who never learns the rules well but you want to play with him anyway because he's your friend. Hell in my group That Guy is the host so we need to play with him. But he sucks at learning rules. With a lot of games the DM can navigate that guy through pretty easily even if the rules remain something of a black box for him, while with other games that guy just can't play. So you can't play either. Because he's your friend and you don't choose your friends based on how good they are at learning rules. He's still a great guy even if you have to remind him AGAIN what proficiency applies to even after playing the same PC in 5e for a year and half.

Can you play without knowing the rules is going to end up being subjective I think just because it's going to rely on a subjective measure of if the player who doesn't know the rules is contributing in a way that makes you still want to play with them.

page count is objective

There have been several rpg's that I won't even look at because I know there's no damn way I'm reading a 600 page rulebook.