To answer the question from the title of this thread : Well, it dedpends from which tradition among role-playing you come from (and what you like to play, of course).
There's the tradition of the "Hack 'n' Slay" (H/S) games, nowadays developed into the "Action-RPG" sub-genre, and there is the tradition of story-telling rather than emphasizing combat. This leads for example to PS:T and the Realms of Arcania series.
Also, there's the fraction of people liking games which incorporate lots of statistics. WiSim's, for example ("WiSim is a German Acronym for "Wirtschafts-Simulation" and means games where you are a leader of a company, influencing economy).
These are the main traditions in RPG gaming nowadays, and the current games are normally more or less a mixture of these.
