For reference (and because I feel like it), here are some of elements of RPG design (regardless of what kind) I find particularly interesting to talk about, both positive and negative. None of these are universal or strictly only traits found in RPGs, they are just things I think are worth mentioning. They are also all my opinion of course.

Pros:

• Complexity - There is nothing wrong with being complex. In fact the more complicated and intricate something is the more I personally tend to enjoy it, at least as long as it's not made too hard to understand. And if that sounds like a contradiction, it really isn't. Something can be complex and be relatively easy to understand as long as the connecting points are explained well enough. But more on that later.
  
• Tendency for Abstraction - Abstraction is a very useful tool, especially in game design. The ability to take complex and/or hard to understand things and abstract them down into more easy to digest parts is perhaps one of the core essences of good game design, and RPGs often take that and run with it. Using formulas and numerical values for everything for example allows the building of complex yet easy to understand systems out of universal well understood parts.
  
• Dynamic Gameplay - The ability for the gameplay to evolve in different ways is one of the great things about RPGs. Allowing the player to take the time to improve themselves or rush things allows for a kind of dynamic difficulty, letting the player to choose between different sets of abilities allowed for a greater possibility space and greater replay value. A set of static challenges where you have a set of static abilities just doesn't seem nearly as engrossing to me as a more open system that allows the player to fiddle with a lot of approaches.
  
• Tactical and Strategic Focused Gameplay: A good RPG, in my opinion, is one where the primary challenge is about making you think about what you are doing, both what to do in the moment and in the long term for how to maximize your effectiveness. The execution isn't as important in an RPG as the thought and planning that goes into decision making. Crunching the numbers, finding weaknesses, exploiting systems, these are all vital parts of what makes RPGs fun to me.
  
• Exploration - Most of the best RPGs tend to involve the player traveling and uncovering things, always finding themselves in a new location and finding new items and abilities to play with. It tends to, in my opinion, be better when things are not necessarily explored in an overly forced linear way and the player is allowed to explore and discover on their own. This allows the game to be a bit more magical and personal of an experience then a set linear series of challenges would be.
  

Cons:

• Skinner Box Syndrome - There is nothing fun about doing the same thing over and over again in order to get some reward given to you only for taking the time to do something over and over again. Even less so when it's random when you get the reward. It's nothing but exploiting a dumb psychological trick. It isn't fulfilling or rewarding. Allowing players to take the time to work on side goals and having chance factor into game decisions are fine, but grinding and farming are things that should be discouraged.
  
• Mediocre storytelling - Yes it's true, on average I say RPG storytelling isn't done very well. That's partly my feeling for most games regardless of genre, but it can be even worse in RPGs. Partly it's the rampant overused clichés, partly it's that gameplay progression and story progression are always stepping on each other's toes, party it's the often forced town-dungeon-cutscene-boss-cutscene structure, but mostly I think it's just kind of a result of the overall difficulty of writing a good story while also making a good game at the same time. Doing one or the other is hard enough, but both?
  
• Are Often Vague or Muddled About Lots Of Things - Here is the bulk of the 'later' I spoke of when talking about complexity. The thing about making something that is complex is you have to make sure it's intuitive enough or explained well enough that, even if someone can't really quite grasp the whole thing at once due to all the variables or moving parts, the bigger picture is still fairly understandable. But many many things fail to do this, leaving vital connections obscured or connecting things together haphazardly so that in the end it just looks like a big mess. And sometimes that's because it is a big mess, something that might look complex but really isn't. There is nothing complex about a pile of trash after all, it's just a pile of trash. Yes yes, if you go through the trash and try and reconstruct who the people who left it and what it tells you about them it might be a interesting result, but that's you going the extra mile to make it into something new.
  
• Lack of Interactivity - In most (but not all) RPGs the world is mostly a static backdrop filled with static signpost objects which can only be really interacted with by pressing the 'interact' button, in which case they spew out a few lines of text or if you are lucky plays a cutscene or brings up some static menu. Battles are little better, offering little more then a menu of different attacks which can sometimes only differ by what flashy animation plays. Real time action RPG battles are mostly little better and mostly revolve around button mashing and spamming attacks healing when your HP runs low rather then featuring any finesse or skill. Fact is, it seems like at least 80% of the stuff in most RPGs is simply backdrop and has no actual impact on gameplay.
  

Mixed/Neutral:

• Worldbuilding/Lore Dumps - Since attempts at traditional storytelling in games tends to fall flat and games are good at fostering exploration and discovery, a common tactic is to write up setting or background plot information and scatter them around a game's world to discover. The results of this are kind of mixed though if you ask me. First of all for those that are interested in traditional storytelling, focusing on lore doesn't really replace it. No matter how fascinating and fleshed out a world is, the details of it aren't going to satisfy someone who craves an actual plot. Secondly, for the purpose of most people playing the game, a lot of the details are pretty pointless and any that are important tend to be buried under pages and pages of stuff they don't care about. It can ideally solve a lot of problems with pacing and makes exploring more rewarding though.
  
• Combat Focus - Other then a handful of RPGs (most of which are expressly trying to avoid this), most RPGs focus almost entirely on combat. And the thing is, while this is true for just about all game genres, RPGs are the genre with the least reason to be focused so much on combat. After all, RPGs are some of the most heavily abstracted types of games. Stats, formulas, and menus can be applied just as much to conversations or farming or fishing or whatever. I am not saying focusing on battling enemies makes games bad or uninteresting though, and I am especially not trying to make a big moral argument about violence in games. All I am saying is that I would maybe like to see more RPGs use their stats and other core gameplay elements in ways that don't relate to combat. Like the way a Bard in D&D is skilled in bluffing and influencing people while a Rogue is good at picking locks and disarming traps.
  
• Wild Abstractions - This is kind of a pet peeve of mine, even though I recognize maybe it shouldn't be. I just can't help but notice there are lots of RPGs that have systems and rules that totally don't make any real world sense or correspond to any real world analogy. For example in FF8 one of the main ways you get stronger is to 'junction' absorbed magic to your stats. But what does that actually mean in the game's fictional universe? I have no idea. I mean I guess storing this para-magic stuff in your body can make you stronger? And you can choose how? But it seems more like a weird gaming abstraction then anything else. Also their are RPGs where battles are card based. How does that apply to have the game's fictional universe works? Then there are games like Undertale which just kinda implicitly say "hey, this is a game, everyone in this universe kinda understands that, so just roll with it", which I am not sure if I should prase or not. I mean, since I am not often that big a fan of most RPG stories I guess it shouldn't bother me, but I guess I still kinda wanna see games as simulations of other worlds even if they aren't very deep ones. Still, creative and interesting mechanics should be encouraged so I can't really think of this as all bad.
  
• Tone/Atmosphere/Cinematics - It's interesting because for all I may yammer on about the poor quality of RPG stories and their lack of interactivity, there are few other genres of games that really tend to reach the same kind of awe, spectacle, and raw beauty that RPGs can. It's not too uncommon in an RPG for there to be a moment where the gameplay and even the story just... fall away, and it just shows you some awesome scene, or even better lets you walk through it, letting you pause as long as you wish. Powerful moments filled with almost pure emotion, where nothing needs to be said, nothing really needs to be done. You could even build whole games based around the idea, like Yume Nikki. The problem is though that it's not really an RPG when you do that, heck it's hardly a game at all. I know people rag on too much about 'walking simulators', and while part of the reason may be that they force way to much narration and story into a format that is often better with pure mood and impression, it's also that wondering around looking at something pretty isn't a very immersive experience for too long. The longer things like that last the more you will notice how it's little more then a cardboard cutout, a backdrop for a play without the play. A good breather perhaps, but unless you are playing up it's fake or unreal nature like The Stanly Parable or Yume Nikki (and sometimes not even then), people are going to lose interest in poking around your world. All and all, I much rather that those moments of awe and emotion be parts in normal gameplay.
  

I guess that's it for now!