There comes a point in every high-concept indie RPG author's career when one must ask: "Is this piece of orthodox rules tech I'm carefully avoiding really objectively bad, or is it merely present in D&D?"
Player characters? What do you take me for, Deirdre—a sellout?
I'm genuinely only halfway being a smartass here. I've been in the game for long enough that I remember when the received wisdom of the indie roleplaying sphere held that character classes are objectively bad game design, and if Apocalypse World hadn't gotten stupid popular a decade back I'm convinced that might well still be the case!
I think we need to acknowledge that D&D has a lot of good ideas with a lot of bad execution. Both the most ardent supporters, and most ardent haters.
The issue is a bit more subtle than that.
Fundamentally, game rules are opinionated: about what the experience of play should look like, about what kinds of stories the game should be used to tell, even about who gets to participate in play. This is unavoidable. It's very difficult to point to any rule, or any execution of a rule, that's bad in principle; about the closest you can get is to establish that a given rule (and its implementation) is more or less fit for a particular purpose.
Of course, we can approach it at one remove and argue that certain rules are bad in principle because no one should ever wish to have the experiences of play those rules want to create, or to tell the kinds of stories those rules want to tell, but that's not an argument that the rules in question are structurally bad; "one shouldn't wish to have this experience of play" is a moral position, and deciding which ways to pretend to be an elf are morally bad is beyond the scope of this post!
Being positioned both in gamer culture and by corporate decree as the RPG that can do anything, Dungeons & Dragons – as a text and as a fandom – doesn't really want to acknowledge any of this. Sure, there are token gestures toward it, like the "rules versus rulings" discourse or all that stuff about Rule 0, but ultimately, many of the baked-in assumptions of the game's rules are foundational, and can't be changed by making small tweaks around the edges. It's less that D&D's rules and structure are "bad" in principle, and more that D&D is very keen on telling you that if you and the rules have a disagreement about what kind of game you're playing that can't be fixed with an off-the-cuff house rule, it's because you're a bad player or a bad GM.
This is where a lot of indie RPG authors trip up. They've seen through the corporate marketing bullshit and recognised that game rules are opinionated, but then they turn around and go "well, these rules foster an experience of play which I dislike, and experiences of play which I dislike are objectively bad, therefore these rules are objectively bad". They convince themselves that there has to be a single objectively correct way to pretend to be an elf, and everybody who claims to enjoy other ways of pretending to be an elf is just too stupid and brainwashed to realise that they're not truly having fun.
To an extent, this is understandable. Many inde RPG authors are former fans of one of the big "universal" systems who've spent their formative years being gaslit by a culture of gaming which insists that game rules are value-neutral, and if you can't make the system du jour do what you want it to, then you're just Bad At Games. "Actually, no, and also fuck you" is a totally reasonable reaction! But it also leads to a whole lot of stupid arguments where folks insist in complete seriousness that if your game acknowledges the concept of hit points you might as well be sucking Hasbro's dick.
