hey, I'm a law student and I recently read your posts about your 5e villain arc and I just want to say I completely understand your pain and also it's so interesting the overlap between interpretation of ttrpg rules and actual laws. They should make law drafters design ttrpgs as a training exercise, but I feel like the knock-on effects of that would be devastating.
Thank you for reading through the villain arc! Despite my vitriolic stance against 5e, those were a passion project (of rage) which I am generally pretty happy with, and it's nice to see other people get something out of it. Eventually, I plan to turn them into a "5e is bad and this is why" style X-hour video essay (with more research and fact-checking).
I think there is an overlap in TTRPGs and many fields, law including. That's because the field of law, and say engineering or literature, are based on rules/laws of logic with different allowances of interpretation. One of my friends works in the field of nuclear engineering as a radiation safety officer, or something (they are not at full liberty to explain their job), and they cite my game Motte and Bailey as "should be required reading/playing for my fuckwit engineers" because of the manner in which the game expects players to establish arguments and follow through on them. This was not written to be a game about engineering, but any study that uses rules, proceeding and antecedent claims/proofs/cases, and needs to establish a path of actualization using them can and will benefit from playing, and mayhaps designing, TTRPGs. What makes these games unique, as opposed to board games or card games, is that the rules have to be applied in cases outside the intended scope of the expectations of the system. This will happen inevitably in all TTRPGs, and I think that's where the fun is. Taking the elements of the game and determining what they can be used to accomplish. Your amount of "jank" will vary.
My specific field, anthropology is no exception to this. There are many principles that guide the research and analysis of cultures (and biology), but this must also be balanced to resist overly-dogmatic, deterministic, biased, or (at the worst end) teleological thinking. This is true in biological and cultural anthropology.
A game like 5e fails as a TTRPG, in my ultimate opinion, because its rules fail to deliver engaging gameplay AND fail to deliver interesting out-of-bound cases.
I hope law school goes well for you. It's something I'm very much considering once I pay off this stupid medical debt.
