You can have fun playing a bad game just like you can enjoy a bad movie, especially if you gather 4 of your favorite people to play it with you, but what do I even mean by a bad "game"? Simply that it's a game that, when stripped of it's themes and story to the point where it's just the pure mechanics of the game isn't fun to play in the same way that a game of uno, a round of poker, or a chess match might be. Would you ever play just d20? Where you stripped all the names of creatures and abilities away and you were just running combats where it was "Unit number 32 moves to square A12 and activates ability 4c"? I sure wouldn't, I'd rather play tetris or connect 4.
If we want to make an RPG that's actually good as a game I think we need to try and make it fun to play at the lowest level possible in the same way that it's fun to run around in Mario 64 even without actually working on any sort of progress towards beating a level, and for RPGs the lowest level you can go is the resolution mechanic. In d20 (and indeed most RPGs), the resolution mechanic is just "You roll some dice and see if the result is bigger or smaller than some number", sometimes there's player agency in deciding whether to roll or not but no agency involved in the actual act of rolling. Classes and other character abilities often add in agency, such as by letting a player decide to reroll sometimes or by otherwise subverting the resolution system, but this feels to me like trying to patch in fun on top of a boring system and we should try to make these things part of the system itself. I think there are at least two ways you can go about this: You can make the resolution system have an element of gambling/wagering or you can have the resolution system be about solving small puzzles that the system generates.
For wagering, there are a few models I can think of that seem to apply:
- The chance to get a result you want, which is what we have now in d20, but there's no player agency involved at the point of execution.
- The chance that a result you already have now could be a better result if you decided to regenerate it (rerolling a die or discarding and drawing a card for example).
- The chance that a result you have currently is better than an already generated secret value and deciding how to act on that.
You can even combine these two methods to have a system where, for example you might have a dicepool that you roll in advance and you decide where to spend those dice, hoping that you're using your dice in a way that lets you beat secret target numbers so that you accomplish as much as possible and don't fail any of them.
Finally, because this is a multiplayer game, you can introduce an element of bluffing, where one or both sides of a wager are trying to fool the other into thinking they have better or worse values than they actually do.
I can think of two videogames that each fit one of these models well.
For wagering I'd look to Dicey Dungeon as an example. Characters in Dicey Dungeon have a dice pool they roll each turn and a board of actions that can accept dice with varying values in different ways to activate them. Some actions can be used multiple times a turn, some only once, some require you to spend multiple dice on them that add together to hit a certain value, some just require you spend a fixed number of dice on them regardless of the result, lots of them have maximum or minimum values that you can use in them, and there's a lot more variation than that. The different classes in dicey dungeon have different methods available to them to reroll dice, and characters gain access to a larger dice pool as they advance in level.
For puzzle solving I think a good example is Into the Breach. Into the breach is already a tactical RPG where you control a team of three mechs you level up through a campaign. The player always knows exactly what the results of an action they take is going to be before they execute it, and the only randomization is in the form of what opposition the player will face in the campaign and where enemies are going to spawn each turn.
I don't have an idea of what exact system I'd like to see an RPG use, but I do think if you want to make an RPG fun in and of itself as a game it needs that fun to start at the lowest level of the system possible, and I'm interested to see what other people here think of it.