Dave Turner wrote above: “This isn’t the first time you’ve written about your inability to find satisfaction with an indie rpg. You always end up throwing away a game because the rules are “broken” somehow.”

I have to confess that i don’t remember well your past posts about this issue. I am following way too many people (I should really strip down my stream…), it becomes a blur after a while, and so I don’t remember if what Dave wrote is true, or if it’s true, the names of the games you wrote about.

But it would not surprise me if it was true, because there are really a lot of broken “indie” games around.  The Forge told us “everybody can write a rpg, and you should, too”, but at the time the games were battered, broken, rebuild and playtested in a very active community that had no qualms saying that something didn’t work well (at least directly if not in public). The result was something I have never seen before in my life: rpgs that actually worked! That you had not to “fix” a lot of times during a game just to be able to play.
Then the Forge closed down, story games never really took its place (or even wanted to) and that environment of peer criticism became a loosely tied web of social relationship that works only as a hype machine.
If you find too many broken indie games, my advice is to play indie games from the Forge Era from 2001-2008, they mostly works and even if they don’t you can find a lot of threads and discussion about how to fix them.
I find that, even design-wise, after that time there was a return to older design, trying to court “traditional” players or OSR aestetics, there was a general return to traditional rpg tropes with “a good GM” that had to make everything works.
These “old” 2001-2008 games are still the most innovative ones. And they works.