I enjoyed this post from Idle Cartulary on their blog, and I feel like the vibe is kinda one that would fit here, essentially 'there's design preferences and having them doesn't make you morally wrong'.
Can't count the number of times that I've bumped into people who've been convinced that There Is One Correct Way to play, which is really funny to me. Anyway, I thought it was a neat way to say 'people are going to want different things from different games', which I really wholeheartedly agree with, and wish more people would talk about with their groups. I swear this is why many groups end up fighting - because they're not clear about what they're expecting to get out of the game or the style of the game before they start playing, and when that tension is revealed later, it causes arguments.
I don't know if I agree with the assertion that there's no such thing as bad design, but my disagreement is more nitpicky than anything so can probably be ignored - I'd call it bad design if your DM book says 'this book will help the DM run games!' and then is layed out or written in such a way as to obscure that goal. I see that as 'game design' as much as 'this is the way that you make characters' but I think that's just a difference in term definitions more than it is a disagreement on fundamentals. Is 5e designed badly if combat takes forever? Nope, especially not if you're one of the people who enjoys it.
I wish I could remember who pointed it out (it was in the last year or two) where in a review of the original Little Black Books for Traveller, the reviewer noticed something about what Marc Miller had written back then. "Play" in that ur-Traveller included just rolling up characters and making subsectors for one's own entertainment, among other similar things. This was a revelation to me, as personally I don't actually play the "A bunch of players get together and send their characters on adventures" very often. I've always played through creating, but had never thought of it as the same quality of thing as the dominant paradigm.
If play can be encapsulated by something that far away from what people normally think of, it makes the idea of "one true way" that's in turn a subset of tabletop play even more ludicrous -- no pun intended.
Which again moves into the territory of the question if RPGs should really be thought of as games.
Generally, there is really no point to take issue with whatever weird and silly games people are having fun with playing. But I think there is one thing where you absolutely can run games and design rules in a way that is wrong. And in my view objectively wrong. And it goes even one level deeper than the specific approaches to manipulation, incentives, and whatever you have. It's a completely wrong assumption of what Roleplaying Games are and why people play them.
Whenever anyone pitches RPGs to new people, it's never "your character is going to play out a story the GM has written for us". It's always "your character can try to do anything you can think of and the GM will make the game world react and change based on your choices".
When people talk about "incentives" or even more polemically "manipulation", the conversation typically seems to be about how to make the players act out the story that the GM wants to happen. Does any player ever want to play such a game? Is it me, or are the only people who have ever defended railroading GMs?
RPGs were barely 10 years old when Dragonlance came around and has been poisoning everything for the last 40 years.
The crimes of WotC and Paizo are not the rules of the games they have created. It's the adventures that they are publishing, which give new GMs looking for any kind of reference on what an adventure should look like the completely wrong image.
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RPGs are, fundamentally, all about the players making choices and dealing with the consequences of their actions. If a campaign is not run like this, it's simply being done wrong. I don't think there's really much malicious intent behind all the people who are perpetuating this falsehood of GMs creating stories for the player. It's simply that few people seem to understand what an RPG is actually supposed to be and everyone is simply parroting the established wisdom. Which is wrong.
I think that is also a matter of preference.
I mostly GM very open, player driven campaigns, but a while back I ran the Dragonlance campaign. I used 4e instead of AD&D and changed some things, but stuck to the major story beats. It was what most people would call a "railroad". I wouldn't say it was entirely free from player choices and consequences, but it was more about choosing what equipment to use and making tactical decisions in combat, rather than choices dictating the course of the campaign. We had fun! Unfortunately, the campaign eventually went on an indefinite hiatus, because the amount of prep work I had to do was just too much.
Now I run a Traveller campaign for the same players. It's a sandbox, entirely different from the Dragonlance campaign. The players travel around the subsector and do whatever they want. I personally prefer this kind of campaign, because what happens in each session is a surprise to me, and it's not as prep-intensive. But my players seem to enjoy both styles. They're having fun in the Traveller campaign, but occasionally reminisce about the Dragonlance campaign and ask if we're going to pick that up again someday, because they want to know "how the story would go".
I don't think there is anything wrong with either style of campaign, as long as everyone involved are enjoying themselves.
I think this is exactly it! The point of any game is to have fun. The details of how you achieve that don't really matter. As long as you and your players are happy you can free roaming the sandbox or chugging along the railroad tracks, or anything in between.
