so I'm gonna try to reframe how you're approaching this.
How oppinionated a game is, and how rules heavy a game is are orthoganal axes. A game can be highly oppinionated and comparatively rules light, or it can be totally unopinionated and mechanically heavy.
Heck, we can make a nice chart to display it:
I've included dnd 5e as a familiar point of comparison, but other than that, all of these are games I really respect the design of.
You have rules-light unopinionated games, like Into The Odd, where the mechanics are kept extremely minimal so you can bring them in at key moments but mostly just resolve everything through the conversation loop.
You have rules-light oppinionated games, like monsterhearts, where although the mechanics are simple and streamlined, you'll refer to them quite often, and they'll be shaping play quite heavily.
You have rules-heavy unopinionated games, like dnd 5e, where there's a lot of crunch and minutia to the game but a lot of it actually boils down to GM interpretation or gets handwaved away.
And you have rules-heavy oppinionated games, like Vampire v5, where the game mechanics are pretty detailed and robust and will be pushing the direction of the game quite hard.
But lets discuss the one you asked about, "Highly Oppinionated + Rules Heavy".
Vampire v5 is a game about playing as vampires, but it's not just that. It's a game about playing in vampires in a very specific setting, with a very specific tone and themes. Even compared to other editions of Vampire, it zeroes in on one particular experience you can have with vamp games: it wants you to play as younger, less experienced, less enfranchised vampires who need to come to terms with what they are, and must struggle to hold onto their humanity in the face of the monstrousness of vampiric existance.
V5's mechanics all act to reinforce this. There's a tight loop of feeding and getting hungry, and the mechanics constantly tempt you with power (extra dice to your rolls) if you accept the risk of getting hungrier. And as you get hungrier, some of the dice in your dice pools are replaced with hunger dice. And when those hunger dice roll well enough, you'll start to lose control of your actions (there's a table you can roll on for the specifics of how) as your hunger takes over. And as well as creating complications you'll need to deal with, when you lose control of your actions, you'll go against your moral beliefs, and your humanity tracker will be degraded, making it mechanically harder and harder for you to relate to humans. Of course, if you want to stay in control of yourself, you can reduce your hunger by hunting, but hunting still requires rolls that can create complications, and the easy methods often also risk your humanity tracker.
So, you see how it's all a big feedback loop? Each bit of this process is mechanically relevant. All the parts interlink and your actions have mechanical consequences that intersect with other aspects of the game.
So when you're playing vampire, you'll find the rules are constantly nudging you one way or another, incentivising or disincentivising certain actions, or sometimes even actively forcing events. The way these elements intersect reflect the setting and its themes.
Playing vampire is what I'd call mechanically hands-on. At any given point, you need to be remembering to apply the mechanics so that the feedback loops actually work.
If you handwave things in this game without requiring rolls for them, the game stops working because now you aren't tempted to increase your hunger, and so you aren't risking those complications and the whole loop of the game falls apart.
For the game to work, underneath the narrative conversation-loop there's a second layer of tracking the mechanics of things. And sometimes those mechanics will rear up and say that, right now in this moment, this is happening. And that loop will push the game forward without even really needing much GM planning. You can set up a situation and just kinda let the players do their own thing, and the push and pull of the dice mechanics will create a cascade of consequences and complications to deal with, and there's your narrative right there.
This might seem like it's hard to learn, but it's really not. The actual mechanics of a vampire game are pretty simple - I'd argue simpler than dnd 5e - but they kick in constantly. By the end of a session, you'll have got the hang of it, because you'll be getting a lot of practice and it's all the same underlying mechanic. Sure, last time you rolled Manipulation + Ettiquette to blend into a fancy party, and this time you're rolling Strength + Athletics to kick down a door, but it's basically the same mechanic every time, and the consequences - success, failure, bestial failure, messy critical - are the same each time.
Anyway.
Here we get to the actual point of my argument, which is that simple rules needn't mean incomplete rules that require constant improvisation to make them work. There are a lot of games where the mechanics are extremely tightly written; they're simple and streamlined, but you will be using them constantly, and they will drive play. Like how I described vampire working, but with a much smaller character sheet.
Let's take Monsterhearts as our example here. Monsterhearts is a game about playing supernatural teen melodramas & romances - think buffy, twilight, riverdale, etc - and it's very much about queer characters. You play as a collection of secret vampires, witches, etc that are all attending high-school together and are all engaged in petty overblown teenage relationship drama. It's a lot of fun.
Monsterhearts uses the PbtA engine, which means it uses a mechanical system called moves. A move consistes of two parts: a trigger and an output. A trigger is something that happens in the fiction - "when you lash out angrily at somebody" or "when you're put on the spot" - and when that thing happens in the fiction, you always trigger the move. Generally you'll rolls some dice, and get one of three results:
- The GM uses a GM move, from a list of Things To Do to push the narrative forward.
- You kinda get what you want; the move will explicitely say what this means mechanically and in the fiction.
- You totally get what you want; again, the move will tell you what this means.
There's not really much interpretation. You do the back and forth of RP, and then a move is triggered. You pause the narration, resolve the move, and the move will tell you what happens as a result. You add that to the fiction, and then continue roleplaying.
Like with the vampire example, simply applying the moves will create complications and consequences. You don't need to make these up, the game mechanics will tell you; generally, there's a list of options to pick from. For example, let's say you rolled the mixed success to Run Away. The move tells you that you get away, but have to pick; either you cause a scene, you encounter something worse, or somebody left behind gats a string (a metacurrency for emotional influence) on you. No need for the GM to make much up, the events flow naturally from the rules.
Monsterhearts's mechanics are very simple. I could teach you how to play in fifteen minutes. You can make a PC in 5 minutes. You can fit everything you need to play - literally every bit of mechanically relevant information - on two sheets of a4 paper.
I think the problem is that dnd 5e gives people a really bad impression of what learning a game is like. 5e's mechanics are fiddly and pedantic and unintuitive and full of exceptions and special class abilities in a way that means there's a lot of mechanical slop to slog through, but underneath that there's not really any underlying depth. So starting off with 5e conditions you to think that this horrible learning-burden is what all games are like, which simply isn't true.
The thing is that DnD's mechanics aren't really oppinionated. There's not really an underlying feedback loop like there is with Vampire, and applying those mechanics doesn't naturally push the fiction forwards like Monsterhearts does. So, combine that with how dense and finicky they are, and of course people will struggle to engage with them! And if you're not engaged with them, particularly if all the mechanical heavy lifting is being done by the GM, you're not going to learn them properly, and this is - as OP says - a self reinforcing probblem.
Once you're in this mindset, you'll take the 5e approach to other games, meaning that you *won't* see how they're different. If you try to run vampire v5 like dnd 5e, you'll be applying mechanics in a wishy-washy, arbitary fashion and ignoring bits when you don't feel like it, and the game won't fucking work. So the conclusion becomes that all games are the same, and the effort of learning a new game is wasted, because the game is never actually engaged with properly.
(Also, the dirty secret: everybody makes mistakes playing rpgs. That's normal. It matters less that you're getting every detail correct and more that you're keeping the big overarching mechanical systems - like hunger in Vampire - moving as intended.)
Maybe this sounds harsh, but reading through your post, it genuinely sounds like you've never actually engaged with an oppinionated game on its own terms; hence you view game mechanics as the 'price' you have to pay in order to do freeform RP.
Serious question: why not just do freeform RP? You can just do that! It's fun, and it's free. I do it all the time! Why are you actually bothering with all these dice and character sheets and rulebooks?
I seriously reccomend you play a rules-light, oppinionated game. Some of them are really not work to learn. (Example: Dread. Dread is a slasher-horror RPG using a jenga tower. Whenever your PC does something dangerous, you need to pull a brick from the jenga tower, and if the tower falls over, your PC dies. That is the entirety of the mechanics, you now know how to play Dread.)
Actually experience an RPG as a game that's driven by its mechanics, engage with it as a mechanical experience and not as freeform RP with extra steps, and then reevaluate.
