Last night I promised a rant about how game design is equal parts technology and philosophy, so I guess let's get to this.
Every cycle of edition wars, you see the same arguments: "X system is objectively better because reasons, and last gen's systems are awful."

Those features from older editions we mock now—feats, attacks per melee, THAC0—those were major innovations that let their systems push ahead of the crowd and dominate the market for years.

But even though the arguments tend to mirror arguments from the console wars, RPGs aren't computers.
There aren't enhanced shaders or surround sound or blast processing.

Tabletop games are technology in that you can take different approaches with math and rules, and streamline or detail those rules to better get the experience you want, but they're philosophy because first you need to decide what that experience is.

Every rules choice boils down to 1) what do I want to achieve, and 2) how well does this achieve/obstruct that? And we tend to look at #2 with the assumption that #1 has never changed.
We assume 2020 games are better than 1978 games b/c 1978 games don't cater to our 2020 wants

RPGs started as an outgrowth of wargames and boardgames, and so their rules modelled that experience. They didn't have tools built around telling stories b/c the point was never to tell stories. The philosophy of game design was to crawl the level, score points, and survive...

Games of that era were deadly & the rules unrealistic b/c the philosophy "pit the players AGAINST the GM." Were you smart enough and lucky enough to survive and "win" the game? The rules existed the same way casino rules do, to give players a glimmer of hope in a rigged setup.

But as games attract new audiences and their existing bases innovate, the philosophy of what games should be shifts. Somewhere in the early 80s, a different philosophical school took hold and a lot of people decided games should simulate reality so your games were "realistic."

Simulationism is where we see a lot of things like stacking modifiers, attacks per round, and endurance start to creep in, but even early D&D tried to model reality a bit with carrying capacity and other nods.

If you built your simulationist character "right," you were an unbreakable superhuman, and games at the time encouraged GMs to push back against you with "realistic" consequences, like escalating police responses, disease, aging, repetitive stress injuries, etc

In the mid to late 90s, the idea of "balance" increasingly became the de facto philosophy of game design. All things should be equal and every character should have the same CHANCE of being as powerful.

For example, early D&D fighters were great at early levels but plateaued early. Wizards started miserable—almost no spells, 1 or 2 hp, no weapons or armor—but if they could survive to level 5 or 6 (and they rarely did), they would start ramping up in power to out-compete everyone

3rd edition D&D tried to balance out the fighter and wizard so they'd be on more equal footing throughout their careers, and if you had enough system mastery they absolutely did. The extreme example of this was probably 4e, where every class felt very similar.

With balance as the major focus, group problems were usually attributed to people "cheating" the system or a rules loophole being "broken," allowing a character to be more powerful than they "should," so advice to GMs talked more about limiting access or changing rules.

The new philosophy dominating game spaces now is that "narrative is king," and it's given us a boom in cool, niche micro-RPGs and rules-lite RPGs that mostly boil down to group storytelling, but even D&D embraced this by minimizing the rules and making character death optional.

Your GM and players are all equal participants now, rather than the GM being the adversary or the referee and GM advice focuses on solving game problems by talking things out away from the table.

None of these philosophies are "better" than any other one, they're just different trends in what people wanted from RPGs, but we all want to believe our personal philosophy is universal. What should measure the success of RPG rules is how well clearly they enact that philosophy.

None of these philosophies existed in a void. There was interest in game balance in the 70s and 80s. There were people emphasizing narrative via other systems (I came up through Palladium, a broken simulationist system, that weirdly forced you to focused on narrative to function)

There's also a followup rant about "standing on the shoulders of giants," but that's for another time.