Your Least Favorite Roleplaying Games [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Chainsaw Hobbit

2013-03-22, 12:46 PM

What are your least favorite tabletop roleplaying games?

(Let's keep our descriptions subjective. I don't want to be responsible for a thread that degenerates into a flame-war or hurts anyone's feelings. Also, I would prefer if we kept our hands off of highly specialized obscure indie games.)

My blatantly biased list, in alphabetical order ...

D&D Third Edition/3.5/Pathfinder ... I'm very happy the Open Game Licence exists, but D&D Third Edition itself holds little appeal for me. Some characters blatantly outshine others, the rules are more complex than they need to be, and its rather difficult to run.

Fantasy Craft ... Nearly everything I dislike about D&D Third Edition, cranked up to 11, with some other things I dislike thrown in. Pointlessly thick and often baffling. No thanks.

GURPS ... The whole thing seems convoluted, intimidating, and overly complex. The rules describe too much, leaving little room for narrative freedom. Character creation takes forever, and is easily abused. Each time I've run GURPS, it has felt like work.

Hero System ... Close enough to GURPS to almost be considered a copy, yet somehow less appealing. The core rules amount to 788 packed pages. How am I supposed to even use that?

paddyfool

2013-03-22, 12:53 PM

BESM, of an edition I forget. Just didn't work for what we tried to make it do. (Started over with FATE, and all was fine).

EDIT: D&D 4th Ed. Not so much that it was designed around most things being combat; fine, if that's what they're going for. But the choice of "this specific and very limited range of things to do, which have these very specific effects" left too little room for interesting decision-making or creative solutions in combat. But then I've only tried this twice, and both at low-level... maybe it gets more interesting later?

Obvious disagreement with the OP on one choice is obvious, incidentally :)

navar100

2013-03-22, 01:38 PM

Paranoia - I play RPGs to have fun, not go on a murder spree against other player characters which is what every Paranoia game eventually ends up. I also don't like the inherent DM against the Players atmosphere.

D&D 4E - Magic doesn't exist. It's just another word for "sword" or bow". Most powers are just a variant of X[W] damage and bad guy inconvenienced for a round. X slowly increases and the inconvenience progressively gets worse as the levels increase. The only difference between the damage is the 'color" - martial, fire, necrotic, etc. While the classes aren't exactly alike they are samey. "Magic item" is just another term for daily power, and you are limited to how many you can use. Except for a few like portable hole all are just +Xd6 damage of a "color". Healing potions aren't. They're just a means to have you spend a limited resource healing surge which you can do anyway. It just allows you for more than one healing surge in a combat. If you have no more healing surges, tough luck. No healing potion for you.

Fantasy Warhammer - Probably more as a result of the DMs at the time, but I never felt I got anywhere with my characters. They didn't really improve.

GURPS - Like Fantasy Warhammer but worse. I don't know the latest version with gaining XP, so I'll just stick with Classic. You get measly points to improve your character which is only enough to make one skill succeed by 1 more, such as 15 or less when it was 14 or less. You can get social disadvantages in game by the play of the game but you can not get advantages unless you pay points which you'll never have enough. For example, after completing an adventure a particular NPC bad guy becomes your Enemy. However, the wealthy merchant you helped can not be considered your Patron by fiat.

Rolemaster - Charts for everything. I have no idea what's going on.

Black Jester

2013-03-22, 01:59 PM

"Least Favorite" may be a bit strong, bur I was quite disappointed by the new "The One Ring" RPG by Cubicle 7. An odd mix of overtly abstract rules and very nitty-gritty specific rules which just come out as an odd mix instead of a good compromise, some aspects are overtly balanced, so that your character may be an outstanding and brave hobbit or an Elven cretin, while at the same time some special abilities are so unbalanced that you can basically chose between something sensible, like healing or climbing, or stuff like Smoking pipe-leaf. Yeah. And you can never, ever learn these special abilities after character creation so according to these rules it is basically impossible to learn how to use a pipe.
This is also one of the worst organized roleplaying book I have ever seen, and as a gamemaster you constantly have to look up stuff in two different books, with an index which is there but does not help you at all.
The pictures are pretty though, but good artwork does not make a good game.

Fighter1000

2013-03-22, 02:06 PM

Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition
The game is an unmitigated disaster. Realism has been tossed out the window for retarded game mechanics. Playing a battle in the game is sort of like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube when there's hardly any toothpaste left. The magic items are only useful in vvveeerrryyy specific situations, which annoys me. Why spend my hard-earned gold on something that might not even help me at all? The whole game just makes me want to scream :smallfurious:

RuneQuest
Better than 4th edition at least, but still has some problems. The magic system is horrible because of that rune bullcrap. So, no point in being a mage really. Creating a character is too tedious. Player characters will be too weak to do much of anything. There is no race other than human! And I wish they put some pictures with the monsters, or at least a short description of appearance. The hit points of your character and of the monsters are localized to head, chest, abdomen, arms, legs, which is sooo annoying and difficult to keep track of. The rules for dying is all weird and convoluted. Even just trying to hit someone with your sword gets overly-complicated!

awa

2013-03-22, 04:27 PM

I had a lousy experience with In Nomine. To be fair I think a large part of it was a bad dm but It was probably the consistently least fun rpg I had ever played

ArcturusV

2013-03-22, 04:49 PM

I suppose the one I had the worst time with was playing Werewolf under Old World of Darkness.

Ad this was just due to two things really. The really lopsided characters Point Buy made in that group, and people taking innane penalties in return for very concrete bonuses. To this day when I think "Min-Max" I think back to those old Werewolf games, and groups taking things like "Hatred: Sock Puppets" for 10 bonus points. :smallsigh:

Grinner

2013-03-22, 05:07 PM

I won't say D&D 4E was bad. It was really just disappointing, because it didn't strike me as being D&D at all. Considered on its own merits, it did make a good boardgame though.

..To this day when I think "Min-Max" I think back to those old Werewolf games, and groups taking things like "Hatred: Sock Puppets" for 10 bonus points. :smallsigh:

Round where I come from, we give those sorts a good booking. :smalltongue:

elliott20

2013-03-22, 09:12 PM

Round where I come from, we give those sorts a good booking. :smalltongue:
around where I come from, we give those a good justification for it's existence. demonic sock puppets anyone?

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned FATAL yet. I'm not sure if the whole thing was really just poorly written or a masterful troll product.

I have also tried the Street Fighter RPG game in the past and I HATED it thanks to one of the most confusing combat resolution mechanics ever.

ArcturusV

2013-03-22, 09:18 PM

Oh, honorable mention to the Final Fantasy RPG, I think third edition?

Now... the game itself isn't all THAT bad. Though there are some annoying things. Like the Summoner Class (Obviously based off Yuna) has no class abilities outside of Summoning even when the character they are basing it off of was also a capable White Mage...

And how broken some things could get like the "Animal Companion" perk. Using it I made a freakin' "Dwarven Battle Tank" as a companion to my first level character...

But mostly because the book is horribly, horribly laid out. Nothing is intuitive. Nothing is explained. Things are placed in the book seemingly haphazardly, with references sprinkled across the book so you cannot actually just read it naturally and find what you want.

Lets give an example:

The second chapter covers character creation. Simple right? And like most RPG books, it has an example of character creation so you can follow along, right?

Well the guy in their example "Already knew the system", and followed steps that made absolutely no sense what so ever in the context of making a character. You ended up basically choosing things backwards, deciding things like Languages Spoken/Known and Special Powers before you even figured out what class you were in order to actually know what you can conceivably choose for Skills and Powers.

The Dark Fiddler

2013-03-22, 09:58 PM

There's this Dragon Ball Z game based off of some system called FUZION or something like that. It was absolutely atrocious. Only actual bad system I've ever met that's been published and isn't FATAL. From what I hear, the FUZION base isn't bad... it's the DBZ part that makes it bad.

ArcturusV

2013-03-22, 10:07 PM

I played that. It was bad. But I don't think you could really make a good DBZ system without actually making a DBZ purpose built system. Which is hard to do and expensive to launch.

Hiro Protagonest

2013-03-22, 10:59 PM

Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition
The game is an unmitigated disaster. Realism has been tossed out the window

Hehe, "realism".

Have you ever played D&D? Like, ever?

Ahhhh, I do love seeing how most of the railing against 4e in this thread is due to misconceptions of how 3.5 worked (because of the presentation choices the games made), or just confusing the fact that all classes (except psionics and Essentials) use the same basic formula with the idea that there's no difference at all between two classes of the same role. As someone who has thoroughly read the books of both editions, I can see where you're coming from. As someone who's spent two years on these boards, I can safely say I hate 3.X. I mean, yeah, I prefer FATE to 4e, but I prefer 4e to 3.5 when it comes to casual games (the only games that I think fit any edition of D&D).

Big Fau

2013-03-22, 11:32 PM

Hehe, "realism".

Have you ever played D&D? Like, ever?

Ahhhh, I do love seeing how most of the railing against 4e in this thread is due to misconceptions of how 3.5 worked (because of the presentation choices the games made), or just confusing the fact that all classes (except psionics and Essentials) use the same basic formula with the idea that there's no difference at all between two classes of the same role. As someone who has thoroughly read the books of both editions, I can see where you're coming from. As someone who's spent two years on these boards, I can safely say I hate 3.X. I mean, yeah, I prefer FATE to 4e, but I prefer 4e to 3.5 when it comes to casual games (the only games that I think fit any edition of D&D).

I'm one of the players who's tried 4E (for 2 years, as a matter of fact), and I hated it. I lost a lot of flexibility (you cannot go outside of a designated role with 4E, and when they inevitably screwed up by inventing a way to do so, that method was errata'ed into oblivion). I also love that 3.5 has so many subsystems. 4E doesn't (it has Essentials and Psionics, both of which play somewhat differently, but not enough to be a real game changer).

As far as least favorites, I'll nominate Pathfinder. I'm never going to forget about being banned from Paizo's forums for trying to help them make the ****ing game.

Also, Scion. The game falls apart if you so much as even think about optimizing a character.

0Megabyte

2013-03-22, 11:40 PM

Original Dungeons and Dragons: This game is terrible. The mechanics require a completely different wargame to use properly, and it barely has any rules for anything. Worse, stats are completely worthless!

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition: Ugh, talk about a mess. Look at all those random, meandering rules! Why do I need rules specifically for infectious diseases AND parasites? What's up with this bizarre psionics stuff? The books are seriously disorganized, and the game is a cobbled together series of rule suggestions with no cohesion or unified mechanics. Plus, it's still clearly just a tactical wargame.

Basic Dungeons and Dragons: Seriously, elf and dwarf as classes? What the heck is this?! Pass.

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition: This, conversely, gets rid of all the flavor of 1st edition, what with the elimination of demons, devils, half-orcs, etc... and this silly "story game" sensibility that doesn't work with the rules, which are ultimately still the same tactical wargame as before. If you want a "story game" then play World of Darkness.

Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition: Whoa, this is totally a change in the wrong direction! Look at all this new complexity, even worse than first edition. Massive lists of classes, races, feats, skills, powers, spells, all jumbled together with no sense of balance, practically infinite subsystems all with their own arcane rulesets, a confusing edition change right in the middle, and a huge number of newbie traps just to make it harder to figure out what you want to do. And look at the obsession with miniatures and squares... it's like some terrible tactical wargame. Why would I spend time trying to play this game?!

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition: Good Lord, talk about an MMO. There's no realism here, no sense that the rules make any sort of coherent sense, all the rules are dedicated to some sort of septic "balance" without regard for verisimilitude, and the entire game is just some... tactical wargame. Ugh.

CarpeGuitarrem

2013-03-23, 12:32 AM

I hate to say it, because it had a lot of promise and neat little mechanics ideas (and some great thoughts in the GMing section), but I couldn't get Mecha to run right. Seemed like it was a little too rules-light for what it was trying to do, not enough framework to properly engage things. It's possible that I just didn't grok how to run it, though.

Other'n that, I have no love for D&D 3.5, moreso than other editions. (Not a huge 4E fan any longer, because I've found things that scratch my itches far better--13th Age, for instance. But at least I'm neutral on it.) 3.5 requires the heaviest gentlemens' (and gentleladies') agreement ever, if you don't want some characters to rule almighty. The only way I'm playing 3.5 now is because I'm with a group that doesn't give two shakes about taking the game seriously or being successful.

Friv

2013-03-23, 01:19 AM

I assume that we're limiting ourselves to games that we've actually played? No just naming FATAL, or name-dropping some insanely obscure game like On Her Majesty's Secret Service?

Because if we are, I call Rifts.

The game that looks at old D&D and says, "No, not nearly random, unbalanced, and poorly organized enough!"

Libertad

2013-03-23, 01:42 AM

The 2001 Star Wars d20 RPG was overly complicated, and Force-users had all sorts of problems in play. SAGA Edition is far preferable.

I'm not a big fan of Cthulhutech, due to its uninspired setting, an intuitiveness as hell dice system, and unnecessarily creepy and juvenile attitudes towards sex.

BESM is unbalanced as hell and other systems can replicate popular anime genres far better.

GolemsVoice

2013-03-23, 03:45 AM

mjlush

2013-03-23, 04:20 AM

Hero System ... Close enough to GURPS to almost be considered a copy, yet somehow less appealing. The core rules amount to 788 packed pages. How am I supposed to even use that?

Hero system is on my list of least favorite (along with Rolemaster). But I will say that the first Hero System game (Champions) was first published 1981, GURPS was first published 1986.

Edit: Just seen Libertad post about d20 star wars. You Git! You gave me post tramatic flash backs!! (added it to the hate list, .we bought both editions )

mjlush

2013-03-23, 04:46 AM

Original Dungeons and Dragons:
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition:
Basic Dungeons and Dragons:
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition:
Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition:
Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition:.

For some one who clearly does not like D&D you seem to know a lot about it... its almost as if your in an abusive relationship with it :-> :-> :->

Yora

2013-03-23, 04:50 AM

The Pre-AD&D D&D versions seem pretty horrible. At that time, it was a new thing and nobody knew how to do such games, but still lots of the design descision seem far too convoluted when much simpler solution should have been a lot more obvious.
AD&D 1st Edition still suffers from that, but at least it seems reasonably playable.

I tried learning the rules of GURPS a couple of time, but that game seems to consist of nothing but tables and completely devoid of fun or exitement. Every time I wanted to learn the rules, it was like a huge pile of complicated blandness.

I'm also not a fan of D&D 4th Edition. Even ignoring the fact that it is supposed a D&D game, the way the books talk to the reader just doesn't work. If you wear boots on your boot slot instead of your feet, there is something really wrong, and seriously writting stuff like "Play a Dragonborn if: - You want to be a dragon." really doesn't work.
And abilities all looked like they created the mechanic first and then thought what an ability could be representing in the game. And usually, this was limited to giving it a name and nothing else. First you should have an idea for what things a character would be doing in the story, and then you start thinking about how that could be represented as a game mechanic. This game seemed to do it the other way round. And poorly.

mjlush

2013-03-23, 05:06 AM

around where I come from, we give those a good justification for it's existence. demonic sock puppets anyone?

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned FATAL yet. I'm not sure if the whole thing was really just poorly written or a masterful troll product.

I have also tried the Street Fighter RPG game in the past and I HATED it thanks to one of the most confusing combat resolution mechanics ever.

I own a copy of Spawn of Fashan its not on my list of least favorite games... one day I plan to play it... or at least try and roll up a character.

Jay R

2013-03-23, 09:06 AM

I had some immediate ideas of what to post when I saw the thread title.

Then I went through the posts, and saw my favorite games maligned because the designers built a game around the concepts I enjoy, instead around the concepts that somebody else enjoys.

I choose not to do that to anybody else's favorites.

I'll play the games I enjoy, you play the games you enjoy, and neither of us has to speak against other tastes.

Chainsaw Hobbit

2013-03-23, 10:58 AM

I have spent significant time both reading and playing D&D Fourth Edition. Based on that experience, I can say with complete confidence that it isn't an inherently bad game. The problem is that it has an incredible amount of potential to be dull and tedious in the hands of the wrong group.

Unless everyone really knows what they are doing, and everyone adopts a mindset where they can roleplay and describe things in a fun way without being bogged down by the complexity, it becomes a dull slog. It is also easy to misinterpret after a skimming.

Because of this, I would be reluctant to recommend D&D Fourth Edition to a new roleplayer. I would start them off with something relatively simple and story-based, like FATE Core or maybe New World of Darkness. Veteran roleplayers, however, should all at least give D&D 4 a try. It has some fun potential.

The Fury

2013-03-23, 11:28 AM

Grinner

2013-03-23, 12:36 PM

around where I come from, we give those a good justification for it's existence. demonic sock puppets anyone?

I guess that just depends on your opinion of form and function.

Friv

2013-03-23, 12:37 PM

For some one who clearly does not like D&D you seem to know a lot about it... its almost as if your in an abusive relationship with it :-> :-> :->

Don't explain the joke. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DontExplainTheJoke)

CarpeGuitarrem

2013-03-23, 01:21 PM

There should be a game where you fight demonic sock puppets.

Hiro Protagonest

2013-03-23, 03:31 PM

I'm one of the players who's tried 4E (for 2 years, as a matter of fact), and I hated it. I lost a lot of flexibility (you cannot go outside of a designated role with 4E, and when they inevitably screwed up by inventing a way to do so, that method was errata'ed into oblivion). I also love that 3.5 has so many subsystems. 4E doesn't (it has Essentials and Psionics, both of which play somewhat differently, but not enough to be a real game changer).

4e's not great. But 3.5 is worse if you don't like the chargen minigame. Like I said, I only use D&D for beer-and-pretzels games (I'm looking to convert Eberron to FATE (without all those D&D artifacts such as spellcasting and "magic items". Magic, artifacts, and wands will be in there, spellcasting and magic items won't), and maybe Dark Sun to GURPS).

Morty

2013-03-23, 04:06 PM

Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition is probably the worst game I've played. It's unbalanced and restrictive, with trap choices lurking around every corner and the number of viable character concepts being oppressively narrow unless you have half a dozen splatbooks. Then there's the awful hit point system and immersion-breakingly steep power curve.

Odin the Ignoble

2013-03-23, 04:10 PM

Hero System ... Close enough to GURPS to almost be considered a copy, yet somehow less appealing. The core rules amount to 788 packed pages. How am I supposed to even use that?

You should retry Hero with somebody who knows the rule set. GURPS is sort of Hero's handicapped cousin nobody likes to talk about.

In my experience Hero is the system. I only ever look at other RPG books for fluff, compared to Hero all other systems rules are at least awkward if not down right awful. I kind of look at learning Hero System as an investment, once you learn it you won't have to bother learning any other system.

Dnd 3.5 was clumsy, pigeonholed and awkward. But still enjoyable for nostalgia reasons. I absolutely hated 4th Ed. It was like they tried taking the RPG elements out of a RPGing game.

Raimun

2013-03-23, 04:25 PM

Call of Cthulhu.

The game has amazing mythology, based on the stories of the master of horror, H.P. Lovecraft. Sounds awesome, right? This has got be fun, right?

And it sure is, if you enjoy playing a murder victim in a horror story. Or that guy who goes insane. :smalltongue:

I like to read mythos stories but I just don't think they make a good roleplaying game. I'd rather be a legendary warrior or something but that's just me.

Hiro Protagonest

2013-03-23, 06:02 PM

ArcturusV

2013-03-23, 06:04 PM

Considering the only time I saw people play it, they were trying to stock up on dynamite, rocket launchers, etc, so they could kill the Elder Tentacle God... Yes?

Hiro Protagonest

2013-03-23, 06:07 PM

Considering the only time I saw people play it, they were trying to stock up on dynamite, rocket launchers, etc, so they could kill the Elder Tentacle God... Yes?

I don't think you can kill an elder god (although Cthulhu might be killable), but everything your average cult can summon? Yes.

Killing monsters is also the only way to get sanity back.

Grinner

2013-03-23, 06:18 PM

Killing monsters is also the only way to get sanity back.

See, that doesn't much sense to me.

If I remember correctly, phobias are randomly acquired, but how does seeing your best friend ripped into shreds by some slavering, tentacled horror make you afraid of heights? And how does killing it do anything to alleviate your acrophobia?

Raimun

2013-03-23, 06:49 PM

Please, everyone knows CoC is an action game.

That's what your GM wants you to think, kid.

In reality, s/he is just using CoC as a perfect excuse to kill every player character. :smallamused:

TuggyNE

2013-03-23, 07:12 PM

That's what your GM wants you to think, kid.

In reality, s/he is just using CoC as a perfect excuse to kill every player. :smallamused:

Player, or character? If the former, Jack Chick would like to get your testimony for his new tract series.

Dimers

2013-03-23, 07:12 PM

I absolutely hated 4th Ed. It was like they tried taking the RPG elements out of a RPGing game.

You know, over time, that's what I've come to most appreciate about 4e. They didn't mix fluff into their crunch, and instead made a good tactical wargame. It bugs me that they don't come out and SAY that, though! The separation can be a huge advantage for groups who are comfortable with the idea of a game that includes combat and roleplaying ... why didn't WotC just put the positive spin on a trait that existed right from Page One?

My least favorite played game was oWoD Vampire, followed not far behind by nWoD Mage. I think the systems are sparse and poor in both cases. New Mage has the problem of greatly reducing what imagination is allowed to accomplish, though maybe that's only an issue because I played the much more flexible oWoD Mage first. And Vampire's rules want you to die painfully, which is an ill fit for the heroics I prefer in a RPG.

Raimun

2013-03-23, 07:27 PM

Player, or character? If the former, Jack Chick would like to get your testimony for his new tract series.

Heh, player character... most likely.

ArcturusV

2013-03-23, 07:33 PM

Is it odd that when I read most of the comments about 4th edition I think almost the complete opposite? I mean... it plays out a war game mostly due to really poor DMs. Who learned it from the WotC encounters campaigns which were literally just back to back battles with pretty much no context given or any sort of exploration.

So it's saying the system is flawed by experience with a very flawed DM and Adventure Module (and the ones I've seen written for 4th edition are STILL all just mindless combat with maybe a few fixed cut scenes that you just read to players). And every edition has bad DMs and bad Adventure Modules.

What I liked about 4th was actually it's flexibility. I wasn't locked into minute details. I didn't have to burn all my stats, skill points, and feats to be moderately decent at a single concept which could be eclipsed by a single item (As was often the case). That the system was built so rather than everything being exactly defined and locked into this set up it was all given flex, and guidelines for that flexibility other than the usual "just make up a bonus/penalty" hand wave.

Which in turn made for an inventive, fun game when I got my players out of that "War game" mindset. Instead of looking at abilities and saying "Well I can only do X with it..." I had them instantly thinking "... how can I do something cool/fun with pieces X, Y, and Z...". Which made for a richer game. I've had it more "War game" like with earlier editions because everything was so codified and there really wasn't a lot of flex built in the system for going off the rails. Other than assigning random "circumstance" bonuses that basically amounted to me DM Fiating if I wanted it to work or not.

It's still not my favorite. But not exactly my least either. Don't quite think it's worthy of quite the level of hate that it gets. Probably the only real crime it's committed is in the same line as that Godzilla 2000 movie. It was called Godzilla. If it was called anything else it'd have probably be considered decent, but instead it got dragged down for not fitting the legacy material. Similarly if they just called it something else, and it didn't have that legacy to live up to? Probably would have been a lot better received than it was. Then again without the Legacy Name it probably wouldn't have reached as many people either. *shrug*

Eldan

2013-03-23, 08:01 PM

Chainsaw Hobbit

2013-03-23, 09:57 PM

You should retry Hero with somebody who knows the rule set. GURPS is sort of Hero's handicapped cousin nobody likes to talk about.

In my experience Hero is the system. I only ever look at other RPG books for fluff, compared to Hero all other systems rules are at least awkward if not down right awful. I kind of look at learning Hero System as an investment, once you learn it you won't have to bother learning any other system.
Maybe I'll give it another look ...

Player, or character? If the former, Jack Chick would like to get your testimony for his new tract series.
Hahahahahaha! Ahahahahahaha! :D

Is it odd that when I read most of the comments about 4th edition I think almost the complete opposite? I mean... it plays out a war game mostly due to really poor DMs. Who learned it from the WotC encounters campaigns which were literally just back to back battles with pretty much no context given or any sort of exploration.

So it's saying the system is flawed by experience with a very flawed DM and Adventure Module (and the ones I've seen written for 4th edition are STILL all just mindless combat with maybe a few fixed cut scenes that you just read to players). And every edition has bad DMs and bad Adventure Modules.

What I liked about 4th was actually it's flexibility. I wasn't locked into minute details. I didn't have to burn all my stats, skill points, and feats to be moderately decent at a single concept which could be eclipsed by a single item (As was often the case). That the system was built so rather than everything being exactly defined and locked into this set up it was all given flex, and guidelines for that flexibility other than the usual "just make up a bonus/penalty" hand wave.

Which in turn made for an inventive, fun game when I got my players out of that "War game" mindset. Instead of looking at abilities and saying "Well I can only do X with it..." I had them instantly thinking "... how can I do something cool/fun with pieces X, Y, and Z...". Which made for a richer game. I've had it more "War game" like with earlier editions because everything was so codified and there really wasn't a lot of flex built in the system for going off the rails. Other than assigning random "circumstance" bonuses that basically amounted to me DM Fiating if I wanted it to work or not.

It's still not my favorite. But not exactly my least either. Don't quite think it's worthy of quite the level of hate that it gets. Probably the only real crime it's committed is in the same line as that Godzilla 2000 movie. It was called Godzilla. If it was called anything else it'd have probably be considered decent, but instead it got dragged down for not fitting the legacy material. Similarly if they just called it something else, and it didn't have that legacy to live up to? Probably would have been a lot better received than it was. Then again without the Legacy Name it probably wouldn't have reached as many people either. *shrug*
This!

Hiro Protagonest

2013-03-23, 09:57 PM

I agree with that. I could have accepted 4E as a game I had no interest in if they made it just as a wargame.

But they had to take the worlds I love, and tear them apart. They had to write those horrible lore articles online that were page after page of "Hey, remember Planescape? Man, that sucked, right? Yeeeeah. You'd have ot be insane to like that. Eladrin are elves now, because no one needs chaotic good outsiders, you can't even kill them because they don't ping evil! Angels? Bull****, they are elementals now! Succubi? They are like demons, but subtle, so they are devils now! Elemental planes? More like boring-emental planes!"

At that point, I just couldn't ever like that game again.

Strange. Maybe because none of those things have nostalgia value for me, but I don't really care that they decided to name a group of elemental soldiers Archons, and then called every celestial outsider an Angel. I don't particularly care about which group succubi go in either, because they can fit in both. I like Eladrin more as denizens of the Fey planes than... chaotic good outsiders. And I found the idea of the separate elemental planes to be rather boring compared to the Elemental Chaos.

Chainsaw Hobbit

2013-03-23, 10:00 PM

I've never played MERP, or read the rulebook, but I have seen some of the modules and skimmed a quick-start guide. Based on that, it looks awful. The writing is fine, but the rules look terribly ill-fitting for Middle Earth.

prufock

2013-03-23, 11:46 PM

Vampire: the Masquerade. Ugh.

Vknight

2013-03-24, 12:32 AM

D&D second edition. This game near drew me to shutting down and going into a state of complete destructive rage and death. There are not enough words to describe what I can hate about 2nd Edition.

Warhammer stuff. I mean fun but, anything Warhammer actually playing, running, or people talking about and not playing. I snapped my bo-staff in half well my group rattled on about it

B.E.S.M
The story of Vknight. He buys BESM looking toward a simple but fun anime style game he got it for a decent price... 2 hours later.
All I know is that I somehow yanked out the eyelashes of my right eye like pulled them out(most of them) and that is when I came back too this world
Just this system it was all wrong everything about it was just wrong

Deadlands. I love Deadlands to bits but, I cannot read that book for the life of me, nor can I understand the math, or anything. And this game just that idea where a games math gives me a headache bugs me

I can't stand these games from the rules, game play if I'm involved what have you the point being I'm not going to stick around for that

Yora

2013-03-24, 06:19 AM

I like Eladrin more as denizens of the Fey planes than... chaotic good outsiders.
Eladrin is just a name. I think it's the only thing the two completely different creatures have in common. Same with Archons.

The only effect using these names have, is making it difficult for GMs to introduce the classic creatures as homebrew monsters into a 4th Edition game.
If they don't want us to play their game, we are happy to comply.

lesser_minion

2013-03-24, 10:05 AM

Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition. It's far more complex and bloated than could ever be justified by its goals, to the point that almost every mechanic in the game is warped at best and outright broken at worst.

I'll give Paranoia the second spot. I have nothing against the game, but it just isn't my cup of tea.

Killing monsters is also the only way to get sanity back.

No, it isn't. Your sanity can be replenished up to your luck score by therapy (and Investigators can start off as suitable therapists). And there's also a +2d6 bonus every time you master a skill through advancement in play.

If I remember correctly, phobias are randomly acquired, but how does seeing your best friend ripped into shreds by some slavering, tentacled horror make you afraid of heights?

It doesn't. It's only determined randomly whether or not you gain a phobia at all. Once it's established that you do, the Keeper picks or invents one.

And how does killing it do anything to alleviate your acrophobia?

It doesn't. You get back sanity points (which makes you less likely to develop insanities in the future), but that doesn't cure you of any insanities you've already acquired. This isn't World of Darkness.

Eldan

2013-03-24, 11:00 AM

Eladrin is just a name. I think it's the only thing the two completely different creatures have in common. Same with Archons.

The only effect using these names have, is making it difficult for GMs to introduce the classic creatures as homebrew monsters into a 4th Edition game.
If they don't want us to play their game, we are happy to comply.

The thing is, if they want to introduce a new cosmology, sure. I'm all for that. But then, please, make it new. Don't sprinkle it with random pieces of Planescape's corpse arranged into mocking statues.

They could have come up with new names, at least.

And, they didn't just change things. They wrote an entire article series insulting people who liked the old cosmology.

Morty

2013-03-24, 11:12 AM

While I think D&D 4e is a better designed system than 3e, the butchery of the actually interesting parts of 3e's cosmology was apallingly stupid - and made worse by the way in which they went about it. Their tone could be summed up as "Maaaan, this is, like, so boring and complicated! Let's just make up a few generic planes and killable things!"

If they wanted the players to see 4e as a role-playing game and not a combat simulator, they picked a strange way of accomplishing it. In general, whatever one might think about 4e's mechanics and flavor, its marketing was thoroughly botched.

The Dark Fiddler

2013-03-24, 04:30 PM

GURPS is sort of Hero's handicapped cousin nobody likes to talk about.

That's an odd simile to make considering I hear about GURPS far more often than I do Hero. :smalltongue:

warty goblin

2013-03-24, 06:43 PM

Chainsaw Hobbit

2013-03-24, 07:16 PM

Guizonde

2013-03-24, 07:24 PM

I've never met a d20 derived system that wasn't intensely boring. It's using the same boring mechanic for every single part of the game that gets to me. I want some variety and flexibility and flavor please.

this.

i'm not gonna rag on systems due to poor fluff or crunch, but i find i'm not comfortable with the different d20 systems i've tested. (so far, DnD 3+3.5 and the dark eye). i find i'm way more at ease with whfrp 2.0 when it comes to understanding the mechanics. (an upgrade of +10% is easy to see on the dice, less math= less headaches and rules lawyering).
i also find the d20 to be waaaaaaaay too fiddly. gimme 2d10's any day of the week, thank you. at least i can visualize my chances of success.
fluffwise, i don't mind them. heck, dnd is so vast there's something in there for everyone. regarding the dark eye, i've never played a campaign, my friends who got me into pen and paper ripped the mechanics and integrated their own fluff. felt clunky though to have an arbitrary score to beat to successfully pull off an attack, though. at least now anyone of my friends can dm the dark eye.

nevertheless, i've tried age of conan. ouch. that was beyond painful. i mean. wow. chargen took too long (ok, so i wanna be a mongolian horse archer, but i can't since i've only got squire and noble as options, but X then Y...), and because the dm wanted a band of mercs, we had no two people speaking the same language. and that was before we learned he used the optional rule for "always roll on the crit table for damage". this is probably the only rpg i won't play again. it doesn't cut it for me. it felt like being shoved through a meat grinder, from chargen to a tpk 30 minutes in. no rerolls, just dm fiat, and then he threw us against a castle. all 6 of us. none made it to the top of the castle, because it's meant to be "gritty realism". you do not lose an eye when you slip off the first rung of a ladder for pelor's sake!
... ok, maybe it was a psycho dm that ruined it for me.

shadowrun i feel is clunky, but that is both my friend's opinion and what i got from diagonally skimming the rulebook. i'm sure it's simpler in practice than in theory.

C.O.P.S is really newbie friendly, however. band of newbies (5 people) with only the dm knowing the system. chargen took 80 minutes for all the players at once. 15 minutes into the game, we all knew the system down pat. only problem, not a lot of newbies will have 5d10's and 10d6's (the max amount of dice ever needed, including cheese). yes, you only need two types of dice.

edit:
@Chainsaw Hobbit: internal consistency is fine. it gets annoying when it's "roll d20 + (skill score + attribute + random bonus + racial bonus - 3 if it's tuesday)". that's my main beef with dnd. i've never been able to visualize what i need at a glance, and i've got a good head for probabilities and statistics.

warty goblin

2013-03-24, 07:43 PM

Huh? I always thought internal consistency was incredibly helpful.

Helpful in terms of making things easier yes, but it makes every action feel identical. My basic view is that if your mechanics aren't adding flavor, it's time to get new mechanics. And I've never met a more flavor-starved batch of ways to roll dice than d20. Generally I prefer something where expertise isn't essentially linear, which makes a skilled character actually different than an inexpert one. I also like my special options to be more in-depth and flavorful than taking -X to one number for +Y to a different number until the end of the round.

And if I do want something that flavorless, I don't really think it should take multiple expensive books to run...

this.

i'm not gonna rag on systems due to poor fluff or crunch, but i find i'm not comfortable with the different d20 systems i've tested. (so far, DnD 3+3.5 and the dark eye).
The Dark Eye is many things, but it isn't a d20 system game. It does use d20s, but the probability structure for most tests is, because you roll against three attributes modified by skill, much more complex than 1d20 + modifier against DC.

@Chainsaw Hobbit: internal consistency is fine. it gets annoying when it's "roll d20 + (skill score + attribute + random bonus + racial bonus - 3 if it's tuesday)". that's my main beef with dnd. i've never been able to visualize what i need at a glance, and i've got a good head for probabilities and statistics.
The one upside of d20 as a system is that it actually makes this very easy. Your probability of success increases by .05 for each +1 you get, up to a maximum of 1. All you need to do is sum up your modifications.

Guizonde

2013-03-24, 09:07 PM

The Dark Eye is many things, but it isn't a d20 system game. It does use d20s, but the probability structure for most tests is, because you roll against three attributes modified by skill, much more complex than 1d20 + modifier against DC.

The one upside of d20 as a system is that it actually makes this very easy. Your probability of success increases by .05 for each +1 you get, up to a maximum of 1. All you need to do is sum up your modifications.

thank you very much for clearing that up :smallsmile:! now all i need is to keep that in my head!

still, it's easier to eyeball d10 style games than doing that, methinks. i'm off to relearn how to look at my d20's (and hopefully unjinx a few)

warty goblin

2013-03-24, 09:28 PM

thank you very much for clearing that up :smallsmile:! now all i need is to keep that in my head!

still, it's easier to eyeball d10 style games than doing that, methinks. i'm off to relearn how to look at my d20's (and hopefully unjinx a few)

Depends on how you use the d10. If you use 2d10 as a d100, then it's fairly straightforwards, and just offers a finer grained version of d20. If you sum them then the change in probability of success for a +1 difficulty increase are actually more complicated, because the sum has a roughly bell-shaped distribution instead of the uniformity of d100 or d20. If you only keep the best like in Sorcerer, then you are looking at the distribution of the maximum, which is different yet again. If you roll a greater number, and sum the best X, then you're looking at a transformation of the joint order statistics, which is again different (and somewhat complicated to work out). If, ala say Shadowrun, you roll a dice pool and determine success per dice, the distribution is binomial.

When it comes to dice, the number of faces matters far less than what you do with them. All the size controls is the number of possible outcomes, the interesting bit comes from what process underlies the probability distribution of those outcomes.

oxybe

2013-03-24, 09:34 PM

generally speaking, i don't look to an RPG system for fluff.

it's nice to have some i can pick and choose from, but i play games first and foremost for the game part. if i just wanted to play pretend with my friends, i'd do just that.

what i do care about is when the game system starts getting in my way of having fun.

as such i would say 3rd ed and it's various stepchildren are least favourite, followed by a vague 2nd.

my reasons:

-low level is too swingy with the low HP VS damage output.

-high level is too swingy due to how easy it is to get shut down and taken out of the game

-combat is either too quick & easy/hard or a prolonged slog. it often comes down to planning and it can make or break you if you didn't get the right weapon or spell loadouts. on the flipside, i've had fights that went on for FAR too long due to everyone simply using abilities meant to prolong the fight in a war of attrition. i've very, very rarely had a fight that i could remember as "fun".

-the skill system is bogged down with too many skills and not enough skill points. it's also a pain because many skills that should be naturally paired up (hide+move silently, spot+listen) aren't and as such a character who wants to be good at being unseen can easily spend all his skill points on being just that and nothing else, thanks to cross-class skills taking 2sp per full point of proficency and most classes in the core book getting 4 or less.

-the CR system is a joke if used as is. a single monster VS 4 PCs of a given level will not stand much chance thanks to the action economy of 4 full rounds VS 1 full round. the monsters themselves aren't always balanced for their given CR and are much harder then their CR indicates. as such unless you know the specific tactic to use on those monsters, you'll get crushed.

-the item dependency to stay relevant is VERY high. most of your money will be spent on stat & save boosters, magic weapons/armor, permanent magical items that simply "do" things, be it make you invisible or flying, etc...

-on the flipside, non-magical consumables like alchemist's fire suck past the first few levels where they tend to be too costly to buy if you want to save for those magic items you need.

-and finally caster superiority. the non-casters just simply do not have the options built-in to meet the same basic level of competence that the casters have and will often rely on mimicking the casters to simply to stay relevant. the scope and variety of effects that "magic" allows when compared to "i hit it" and "i have 3-5 highly specific skills" is the biggest straw that broke the poor camel's back.

the main reason 2nd ed is a vague step behind is that i simply haven't played it in a VERY long time, but i do remember being highly frustrated with the system and quickly moving onto 3rd which while cleaner as a whole, had a bunch of problems the inexperienced me couldn't pick out immediately.

Fighter1000

2013-03-24, 11:28 PM

Chainsaw Hobbit

2013-03-24, 11:39 PM

Grod_The_Giant

2013-03-24, 11:49 PM

Wow. Reading this thread has really taught me a lot.
I used to absolutely LOVE D&D 3.5, because it was the game that got me into the hobby of tabletop roleplaying.
But now, after playing it a lot and familiarizing myself with the system a great deal, and after reading these enlightening posts, I realize I really shouldn't waste anymore time with that system.
Never let anyone tell you what you can and can't enjoy. Especially random people on the internet. Me, I'm fully aware of how godawful the balance of 3.5 is, but I still enjoy it from time to time.

I don't know that I could really say I have a least favorite system. I wasn't overly fond of 4e, but I also didn't have great groups, and I understand it's gotten better since when I played. I had some serious issues with the mechanics of Exalted, but love the fluff and did have a good group (and I probably would have been more OK with the mechanics if I wasn't playing a sorcerer). 3.5? Enjoy it. M&M? Love it. Fate? Quite enjoyable. My homebrew system (STaRS)? Not perfect, not quite finished, but not bad. And I think that's really all I've played.

oxybe

2013-03-25, 12:57 AM

i used to love 3rd ed also, but once i started tinkering with the system due to some frustrations i gained enough mastery of the rules to find out that i should simply look at other systems for my gaming fill.

since then i've played and read several other systems but, much to my chagrin, my group keeps going back to system i like the least.

i still play with them and i do have fun, but it's fun despite the system and entirely because of the people i'm with... D&D night has become more of a social outing where i get to hang out with my awesome friends and an excuse to leave the house then simply going to play a game with some guys at the FLGS.

wouldn't mind changing system though.

Mono Vertigo

2013-03-25, 06:55 AM

Mage: the Awakening.
I don't like the origin story, no matter how metaphoric it actually is. Mages are not jacks of all trades, they actually are masters of all trades that have access to all the other splats' role, but do it even better. It is much easier for them to avoid their natural enemies than it is for the other supernaturals. Their only real weakness is their arrogance (and vulnerability if they are not properly prepared, but it ties in with their hubris; if they're humble enough to admit they can run into trouble, they WILL be prepared). And even then, is it still arrogance when you genuinely ARE more powerful and more knowledgeable about the universe than just everyone else?
It speaks lots that a common theory is that the nWoD is actually a in-game rebooted version of the oWoD with some bits changed. So, they can do that. But not solve other problems experienced by non-Mages. Must not be interesting enough. Or they fixed them so hard already nobody remembers they were there in the first place.
I'm sure it's a fun game, but I feel it's very out of place in nWoD. Personally, if I wanted to play a quasi-god playing with metaphysical concepts, I'd get Exalted or Nobilis. Not a system based around psychological horror, where combat is lethal, humanity is hard to keep/get, and most splats can be endangered by well-prepared mortals (they don't even have to be Hunters!).

DigoDragon

2013-03-25, 06:57 AM

Paranoia - I play RPGs to have fun, not go on a murder spree against other player characters which is what every Paranoia game eventually ends up. I also don't like the inherent DM against the Players atmosphere.

I've played Paranoia and have come to the same conclusion. I prefer more cooperative play styles, though the "DM against the Players atmosphere" is okay for me as long as the DM is fair and is trying to challenge the players rather than outright kill them off. :smallsmile:

Tsriel

2013-03-25, 01:35 PM

My experience in tabletop RPGs are somewhat limited (and dated). In my experience, I've played:

AD&D 2nd Ed.
D&D 3.0/3.5/4e
Pathfinder
Star Wars RPG
Star Wars: Saga Edition
Call of Cthulu
Shadowrun (3rd Edition)

Of that short list, the one I disliked the most has been Shadowrun. I like the setting, but that's about where it stops for me. I find the rules and mechanics far too conflicting and confusing. Computer hacking has it's own seperate rules and guidelines that isolate everyone else that have little to no hacking skill. You practically need to be savant to find appropriate rulings in the books.

Honorable Mention: THAC0 from AD&D

Tengu_temp

2013-03-25, 02:56 PM

4e is the only DND I find okay, and it's a boring system with unexciting combat where you have too few powers on low levels and everything takes way too long to kill on later levels. Other DNDs only go downhill from here, with the general rule that the older the system, the less I like it.
The exception, and the DND system I probably like least, is Essentials. It basically takes 4e and replaces its best part, the flexible power system, with the worst part of pre-4e DND, non-casters being reduced to auto-attack monkeys with little to no options in combat.

Also, Cyberpunk 2020. The setting is fun, if amusingly dated, but the mechanics are total crap. Everything is too simple or too overcomplicated, there is no balance at all, and the system does a terrible job at actually representing a cyberpunk setting.

I've never met a d20 derived system that wasn't intensely boring. It's using the same boring mechanic for every single part of the game that gets to me. I want some variety and flexibility and flavor please.

Mutants and Masterminds 2e/3e.

Guizonde

2013-03-25, 08:07 PM

Wow. Reading this thread has really taught me a lot.
I used to absolutely LOVE D&D 3.5, because it was the game that got me into the hobby of tabletop roleplaying.
But now, after playing it a lot and familiarizing myself with the system a great deal, and after reading these enlightening posts, I realize I really shouldn't waste anymore time with that system.

to be honest, i find 3.5 obtuse due to other gaming systems being more rules light. it's a fun game, and as far as i'm concerned, balance goes to the dm. the real problem with dnd is that you need at least one expert of the system for it to work properly (ie, have a great gaming session).
does this mean i don't like dnd? no, of course not! am i comfortable with the mechanics? not really, so what? do i have fun playing it? yes! that's the important part. don't have your views soured by this forum. it's a great place to get advice, but sometimes to have real fun you need to go against the general consensus.

CarpeGuitarrem

2013-03-25, 08:48 PM

Never let anyone tell you what you can and can't enjoy. Especially random people on the internet. Me, I'm fully aware of how godawful the balance of 3.5 is, but I still enjoy it from time to time.

Seconded, and this is coming from a guy who really can't stand a lot of parts of 3.5.

Jerthanis

2013-03-25, 09:00 PM

In no particular order:

Mage: The Awakening. Terrible, uninteresting flavor with totally plot shattering powers in every school available to every character. Then, it gives you nothing interesting to do with your powers, no interesting enemies to engage with and no interesting political groups to support, oppose or engage with... It's a game about a culture of self-obsessed losers sitting in their basements/towers until they get bored enough to make their own goals, at which point they screw everything up for everyone, most of all themselves. Being as godlike as they are could be interesting if it were worth doing anything with the power, but it isn't.

Smallville the most simulationist game I've ever seen, modeling exactly the kind of Soap Opera that Smallville is... but when you abstract every aspect of interaction down to "Ill-defined concept versus Ill-defined concept" and apply it to actual gameplay, you wind up with most of the actual content dictated directly by the GM. If I wanted nonfunctional mechanics to just talk about staring at each other and engaging in witty banter, I can do that without resolving physical conflict when it comes up with "Justice Versus Power" contests where one guy rolls a d8 and the other rolls a d10 to resolve the scene. It's also endemic of how the Margret Weiss system tries to apply the same basic chassis of a system to every property it can snag the rights to when that chassis has no granularity.

Apocalypse World Speaking of resolving complicated conflicts through single rolls of ill-defined concepts and having most of the results dictated directly by GM fiat... I do however accept that this could have been run poorly, as I don't have the book for this one personally. From my experience though, whenever anything happens, wait for someone else to deal with it, because you'll always take damage, pretty much no matter what when you roll to resolve pretty much any situation. I did like some aspects of this game though.

Exalted 2nd Edition from a pure mechanics standpoint. Out of the box it is the worst game I have ever personally played from a pure mechanics point of view.

Savage Worlds I didn't actually play this one, but about three or four years ago it sort of swept through the RPG community as a sort of One True System, where every other thread involved suggestions to adapt this or that to Savage Worlds, it got constantly pimped on podcasts and blogs I listened to or kept up with, but when I read it I found nothing to like.

OverdrivePrime

2013-03-25, 09:51 PM

I don't really have a particular order for these; they all occupy the same bile-filled crevice in the smelliest part of my intestines.

The Entire Palladium System: I'd admit it - I had a ton of fun with this system as a kid. Robotech, Palladium Fantasy, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas and Superspies, and game after game of Rifts. Soooo much Rifts. But Palladium mechanics are laughably horrid, and any of the modern or future games really only require one stat - physical prowess - for a win button. With the different groups I played in, if you didn't have a PP of at least 22 (on a scale of 3-18 with a maximum of 30), you were the next thing to useless. The sneak mechanics are borked beyond belief, and in Rifts in particular, the power creep with each new book became a running joke. If you rolled up a character from any book beyond Triax, you got a free punch in the junk from everyone at the table. In time, we all grew to utterly loathe Kevin Sambieda, his writing, his lawsuit-prone company and the merest mention of Psi Cola.

That said, I think my disdain for Rifts in particular is because I absolutely love the setting. It's amazing and a joy to imagine yourself in for pure, absolute escapism. And the terrible mechanics, and Sambieda's later writing almost completely scuttles it.

HōL: Eff. That.

Paranoia: No, seriously. Eff that.

I hate randomly-generated, throw-away characters that I have zero reason to form any attachment to. What's the point? I tried playing HōL and Paranoia a couple times each, and each time found myself wishing I was out getting dangerously drunk instead.

D&D 4th Edition: I don't play MMOs, don't want to play MMOs and sure as heck don't want to play a tabletop port of an MMO. I tried playing D&D4 for six months, with my best friend running the game, in a fun setting, and just couldn't go on. My character - and the rest of the party - just never stopped feeling generic and bland. My combat actions were scripted, and didn't really make a difference. All that mattered was turn order and tactics, because some other guy would just do something that did the same amount of damage one bump down the initiative order. The game wasn't wholly with out merit, but for me, it was wholly without fun.

Wraith: Who's got two incorporeal thumbs and wants to spend a lot of time RPing being depressed and thinking about death and sorrow a lot? Not this guy!
I had a couple interesting character concepts for a couple wraith games I played in. I just wound up feeling sad, lonely, and kind of hopeless as the game went on.

Lost Demiurge

2013-03-26, 02:46 PM

RIFTS
Ah, Rifts. Such a setting. Such nifty options... Playing a DRAGON for bork's sake!

And then such horrible, terrible, AWFUL rules. Dear lord. Who thought that was a good idea again?

Would have been forgiveable if the authors had moved with the times, and updated to a more modern system and let people try homebrews and fixes on the internet. But as it is? Naw. Hell naw.

-----

AD&D
Not because it's clunky, which it kinda is. Not because it's got some silly rules, which it does. Not because it doesn't offer much character variety, which is true. But mainly because it was the only show in town for the first 5-7 years I was learning about RPG's, and I was stuck playing this or nothing.

Don't get me wrong, a good DM willing to homebrew some can do some good stuff with it. But a good enough DM can make any system dance, so meh.

-----

SCION
I wanted to like you, Scion. I really did. But one fight into the new system, and we could see the writing on the wall. Scaling? Bah. Balance? Pfft. Workable system? Well, kinda. Useable plot based on anything except fighting? Not really.

::Sighs:: You could maybe do something with it, with the right GM and group. As it is, I'm not wasting my time.

-----

DEGENESIS
Okay. Cracking open the book... The art's got some NSFW in it, but hokay... Kinda fetishy too but whatever... Ooh, hey, the first half of the book is setting and flavor, kinda nice. Now to check out the rules.

Oh. Oh no.

So let me get this straight. The average difficulty is from 8-12.

The average skilled character, who is supposed to be good at something, has a skill rating of it between 12-14.

In order to succeed, you must roll 2D10 and get HIGHER than the difficulty number, but LOWER than your skill rating.

This is a system where you are lucky if your PC can tie his shoes without killing himself.

PASS!

-----

WEREWOLF THE APOCALYPSE
So lemme get this straight. Everyone is playing a superpowerful werewolf who is hard as nails to kill, can slip into a spirit world that most other supernatural entities cannot even touch, has access to safe and reliable magic tricks that do amazing things, is indisputably BETTER in almost EVERY way than almost any other PC type in the setting, and has a moral mandate to go do whatever they want as long as they can justify it in some way as making the world a nicer place? Up to and including ripping those filthy, evil humans to shreds?

Yeah, pass. Maybe they'd make good villains, but PC's? Psh, no.

CarpeGuitarrem

2013-03-26, 06:51 PM

Apocalypse World Speaking of resolving complicated conflicts through single rolls of ill-defined concepts and having most of the results dictated directly by GM fiat... I do however accept that this could have been run poorly, as I don't have the book for this one personally. From my experience though, whenever anything happens, wait for someone else to deal with it, because you'll always take damage, pretty much no matter what when you roll to resolve pretty much any situation. I did like some aspects of this game though.
This could've been your GM, yeah.

In that situation, one of two things could happen. One: the GM/MC starts making hard moves after telegraphing them with soft moves. Two: you use other moves to get into position, so that you can deal harm without taking any yourself. It can be a very story-tactical game in that regard.

Tengu_temp

2013-03-26, 06:59 PM

So let me get this straight. The average difficulty is from 8-12.

The average skilled character, who is supposed to be good at something, has a skill rating of it between 12-14.

In order to succeed, you must roll 2D10 and get HIGHER than the difficulty number, but LOWER than your skill rating.

This is a system where you are lucky if your PC can tie his shoes without killing himself.

PASS!

I don't see the problem. The chance of rolling 9-13 on 2d10, which seems to be average difficulty vs average skill by this game's standards, is 44%. That's a bit lower than DND, but nowhere near the low chances you're describing. You discarded what seems to be a perfectly okay system.

TuggyNE

2013-03-26, 07:48 PM

I don't see the problem. The chance of rolling 9-13 on 2d10, which seems to be average difficulty vs average skill by this game's standards, is 44%. That's a bit lower than DND, but nowhere near the low chances you're describing. You discarded what seems to be a perfectly okay system.

Well, it matters whether it includes or excludes the endpoints; if the latter, it drops to 28%. Not so great. Oddly, bumping it to difficulty 8 and skill 14 only changes it to 58%/44%, respectively; 12 and 12 means either 9% or 0%.

Without knowing the system, I can't say for sure, but if that's how (they thought) it worked, I can see why they'd drop it.

Tengu_temp

2013-03-26, 08:21 PM

Well, it matters whether it includes or excludes the endpoints; if the latter, it drops to 28%. Not so great. Oddly, bumping it to difficulty 8 and skill 14 only changes it to 58%/44%, respectively; 12 and 12 means either 9% or 0%.

I already excluded the endpoints; I went with the assumption of difficulty 8 and skill 14.

Grinner

2013-03-26, 09:13 PM

DEGENESIS
Okay. Cracking open the book... The art's got some NSFW in it, but hokay... Kinda fetishy too but whatever... Ooh, hey, the first half of the book is setting and flavor, kinda nice. Now to check out the rules.

Oh. Oh no.

So let me get this straight. The average difficulty is from 8-12.

The average skilled character, who is supposed to be good at something, has a skill rating of it between 12-14.

In order to succeed, you must roll 2D10 and get HIGHER than the difficulty number, but LOWER than your skill rating.

This is a system where you are lucky if your PC can tie his shoes without killing himself.

PASS!

Because of the bell curve made using 2d10, it's not quite as bad as it sounds, but the mechanic is deeply flawed nonetheless. (Edit: Also, a difficulty of 8 is described as "Hard", and 12 is described as "Nearly Impossible". 6-8 seems more reasonable as an average difficulty.)

The setting itself is lovely, though. Well...as lovely as a post-apocalyptic wasteland can get.

zorenathres

2013-03-26, 09:41 PM

RIFTS
And then such horrible, terrible, AWFUL rules. Dear lord. Who thought that was a good idea again?

Would have been forgiveable if the authors had moved with the times, and updated to a more modern system and let people try homebrews and fixes on the internet. But as it is? Naw. Hell naw.

RIFTS; by the gods, i can't believe this was my first tabletop RPG, the fluff was ok, but the rules system was completely fubar. combat that would last hours, all on the wasted time between attacking, parrying, & dodging. evil cthulu-esk alien inteligences controlling every single civilization (choking on memories of Phase World). vampire intelligences (wtf!). & a slew of ever increasingly incoherent books with more reprinted material in new books than any other RPG i can think of...

& lets not forget MD & SDC, the most retarded idea ever.

Shadowrun 2ed; one of my earliest gaming experiences, bogged down by confusing rules for chargen & completely perplexed by hacking, i resorted to playing a street-sammi most of my shadowrun career, only to be repeatedly nerfed by my DM, only to see the mage of the group astral project into the enemy stronghold & fireball them with impunity...

Paranoia; i enjoyed this on my first run, but it was mainly because i grasped the idea of the game really fast, & got lucky with my mutant power (i got telekinesis, & we were all carrying these spiffy new foam grenades), by the end of the game, i had killed off at least six clones, & detonated at least 5 grenades without anyone being the wiser: evil notes to the DM.

Every consecutive game of paranoia my DM caught on, & i was subjected to endless lines of accusal of being a redcoat & other nonsense from NPC's, while most of the other players got by without losing more than 1-2 clones (shrug).

AD&D 2ed; unfortunately, my experience of 2nd ed was colored by a bad DM, who for our very first introductory campaign into 2nd ed was hosting a game in Ravenloft (at the time i had never read a single D&D book). Literally after hours of chargen (while horsing around & talking), we were in town for 5 minutes before i walk into a tavern & the DM takes me aside, telling me i have just been knocked out & replaced by a doppleganger (without a single roll), then he tells me that i have to play the doppleganger for the rest of the session. At the epic showdown with the sheriff (a doppleganger), i betray the other PC's & assist the sheriff's men (without any direction from the DM, i decided to play the doppleganger as my PC from then on).

If i was playing that campaign now, I'm sure i would play differently, but that was my very first experience with AD&D. I was angry (at the time) for how much time we invested into the initial chargen, just to end up sacked & playing an NPC disguised as a PC.

As for 3.X, I have yet to find a system where i can easily port stuff from other games quickly (I guess its largely due to familiarity). I made a d20 modern Rifts setting & its much more enjoyable than the palladium system, which i can throw literally anything into. Players are less concerned with the rules in my games & more focused on the plot/ world itself & their characters.

Not to mention the massive amount of second party material for d20 (not to mention the massive amount of sweet homebrew & 3.5 material on this site alone), makes d20/ 3.5 the default system for me, just from the sake of familiarity.

Hiro Protagonest

2013-03-26, 10:11 PM

As for 3.X, I have yet to find a system where i can easily port stuff from other games quickly (I guess its largely due to familiarity). I made a d20 modern Rifts setting & its much more enjoyable than the palladium system, which i can throw literally anything into. Players are less concerned with the rules in my games & more focused on the plot/ world itself & their characters.

Not to mention the massive amount of second party material for d20 (not to mention the massive amount of sweet homebrew & 3.5 material on this site alone), makes d20/ 3.5 the default system for me, just from the sake of familiarity.

You're advocating for d20 as a universal system?

Bleh. I'll play FATE or GURPS, thank you very much.

zorenathres

2013-03-26, 10:31 PM

You're advocating for d20 as a universal system?

Bleh. I'll play FATE or GURPS, thank you very much.

nah, i wouldn't advocate for most, i just said i was most familiar with it, so for my purposes it works best.

MirddinEmris

2013-03-26, 11:49 PM

WEREWOLF THE APOCALYPSE
So lemme get this straight. Everyone is playing a superpowerful werewolf who is hard as nails to kill, can slip into a spirit world that most other supernatural entities cannot even touch, has access to safe and reliable magic tricks that do amazing things, is indisputably BETTER in almost EVERY way than almost any other PC type in the setting, and has a moral mandate to go do whatever they want as long as they can justify it in some way as making the world a nicer place? Up to and including ripping those filthy, evil humans to shreds?

Yeah, pass. Maybe they'd make good villains, but PC's? Psh, no.

Well, not to defend White Wolfs, but most of their OldWoD settings never intended for crossovers, and it's even written (somewhere there...) that you'll have problems of party balance if you do so. Besides, if you do crossovers, you'll have MUCH bigger problems than party balance - better people than us gone completely nuts trying to sew all settings in one (with Wyrm, Tuata, Arcadia and Netherworld on one world). Possible exception is a VtM (most of the information describes only vampires, not the world as such)

PrinceOfMadness

2013-03-27, 12:29 AM

Deathwatch RPG. It's so easy to create just a horribly unbalanced character that can steamroll any monster presented in any of the core books by mid-to-late game. Between dodging, parrying, additional reactions, stacking modifiers, force fields, armor, psychic powers, and fate points it becomes ridiculously difficult to put the hurt on a competent player. Additionally, the system is horrifyingly complicated - by the time you hit rank 9 you could be consulting around 30 different tables for advances, with lots and lots of stuff being duplicated for different costs at different levels....

Black Crusade RPG at least made an effort to streamline the process, but I still feel that the d10 system constructed by FFG isn't really workable in any kind of balanced game system.

Black Jester

2013-03-27, 12:41 AM

oxybe

2013-03-27, 01:51 AM

i don't know anything about warhammer, fantasy or space, other then it's a grimdark world of WAAAUGHS and everyone dies. as you can guess, my actual knowledge is very, very small.

what i will say, however, is that instead of bringing the space marine type guy down to normal level, have the game balanced where he's the norm if the space marine concept is that important to your setting.

other characters can have their own backgrounds of rigorous training, worldly experience or simply (or not-so-simply) really good genetics to back them up.

otherwise rather then have the game start with Johnny Spacemarine being a fully trained murderwagon, have him start as a cadet chosen due to high scores on his MurderSAT or a vat-bred combat clone lacking experience and training, where he needs to get up to par alongside Andy Everyman.

if you know the concepts don't mesh thematically or mechanically, don't force them to. pick one to be the expected baseline and work from there to allow other more powerful or complex concepts to grow from.

not every game is better for allowing every concept, but i would say every game has the potential to be good if it knows what it wants from the start.

lesser_minion

2013-03-27, 04:50 AM

Yes, that's precisely what they did. There are three Warhammer 40k RPGs -- one with a low power level, and two with a much higher power level.

But in general, the games are not that balance-centric. Which is not a bad thing. Most games aren't particularly balanced, and they don't need to be.

Tengu_temp

2013-03-27, 05:51 AM

Well, when one character is a normal guy, and another character is a genetically engineered elite soldier trained his whole life for warfare with a series of cybernetic implants to increase his potential and abilities, balancing these two would be a colossal failure of adapting the setting to the table. I am not much of a Warhammer fan, but downgrading and castrating space marines to prevent player envy seems like a very horrible idea. This is a prime example how balancing can do a lot more harm than good to a game.

Did anyone make the point you're trying to counter? The only thing I noticed was "the characters are so powerful that no enemies pose a challenge for them", which is a genuine problem.

Sidenote: if a DM lets a normal human and a Space Marine to be in the same game then yes, they should be on roughly the same power level, preferably by upscaling the former rather than downgrading the latter. It's not fun to be a second grade party member, overshadowed in everything, just because you didn't want to play a SMurf for whatever reason (like the fact that as individual characters they're usually boring as hell).

Black Jester

2013-03-27, 06:51 AM

Valuing verisimilitude higher than balance might be a different choice, but is by no means any less legitimate than the other way round - and in some cases, preferable.
Again, I am not much of a warhammer fan, and my familiarity with the setting - or the FFG games is only superficial, but if I am not really mistaken, the presentation of space marines as nigh unstoppable juggernauts who can withstand the assault of a whole pack of Orcs or something like that is pretty much the intended power level and a distinct element of the background - the idea is that your space marine character is a superhuman badass. That might be boring to some, sure. Different people have different preferences. But as it is clearly intended that way, t's not a flaw, it's a feature. Arguing against it is a bit like complaining that superman isn't threated by an average gang of street thugs (while Batman a least has to treat them as an obstacle). And I am pretty sure that there are enough powerful foes to threaten a small unit of space marines, and if not based on quality, than certainly quantity.

And you can play absolutely awesome games with a widely differing power level between characters without any issues. Roleplaying games are not a competitive event, after all, and as long as everybody is content with his or her character, everything's fine, especially when the different power levels comes with a good tied-in narrative. This is such a useful tool to establish various group dynamics (e.g. mentor-student relationships, rivalries, or a protector role) that it should not be regarded as inferior by default, because there are so many ways to play these games, which are all interesting, fascinating and fulfilling in their own ways, and trying to evaluate all of them by one standard (and a rather arbitrary one at best as well) has a pretentious and condescending aftertaste.

Balancing in RPGs has become a self-fulfilling dogma, despite its obvious impossibility and inflexibility and is way too often stretched to a point where other contributing elements to a good game, such as verisimilitude or drama are sacrificed in the name of this dogma. And this can actually become a hindrance when it comes to experience other games or playing styles.
I am not saying that balancing is bad or anything, but it's just one approach among many, and it's neither intrinsically better or worse than any other.

mjlush

2013-03-27, 07:55 AM

Shadowrun 2ed; one of my earliest gaming experiences, bogged down by confusing rules for chargen & completely perplexed by hacking, i resorted to playing a street-sammi most of my shadowrun career, only to be repeatedly nerfed by my DM, only to see the mage of the group astral project into the enemy stronghold & fireball them with impunity...

Shadowrun has the inherent problem that you couldn't have a fight the whole party can join in... Physical battle the Street Sams will have more or less finished the shooting before the others can draw/cast. Hacking runs? non netrunners can go play cards. Astral battles .. didn't have that problem don't think we had a mage. long time ago

Krazzman

2013-03-27, 09:36 AM

I have seen a few different systems... and have played them... abit. DnD 3.5 most of the time.

In no particular Order:
Shadowrun 4th
DnD 3.5
Pathfinder
Warhammer Fantasy (don't know the Edition)
Das Schwarze Auge
DnD 4th
GURPS
MARVEL(???)
AFMBE (short testrun only)

And I'm beginning to read into SAGA...

The ones I actively dislike are DnD 4th, DSA and GURPS. Mostly because of the DM I think.
DSA was actually a nice start. Really low power, combat being really harsh. Just not what I sought in gaming. Ridiculus stuff happened to me and it felt like me only (my freshly aquired Crossbow exploded...luckily I had a spare). I was laughed at for IC decisions and in the end I didn't have that much fun.

GURPS
See the "Gamemaster why have you forsaken us" Thread. I thought the campaign idea was rather cool. Supernatural (yes the series) in medievil times with us as Mages. Had problems building the char, ended up with too few points and had a half-assed character with no real backstory...

DnD 4th
GM(same as for GURPS) didn't let us read through the whole book. As such I had a hard time. We tried it out twice. I played a Rogue and a Ranger. Ranger was melee, and allowed to change to Archery afterwards. Wasn't that fun with suddenly chances to hit buddies when firing into melee range.
Rogue died to minions. Yes. You know why? Because I didn't knew that weapons gave a bonus to hit. A totally bonkers Adventure (Keep on the Borderlands?) that had SNIPER Goblin miners. I went KO around 14 times in a single session. And got yelled at for looting instead of helping them when I asked "What does my enemy wear?" to determine the vs AC or vs Ref strike.

Can't say anything about SAGA or anything strikingly bad about Shadowrun (except that I miscalculated a few times in char gen and it was a pain in the ass to backtrack those mistakes and I get laughed at for picking Lactoseintolerant as a disadvantage and it get's ruled out... otherwise that campaign was fun all till the DM and our Rigger(the DM for DSA) had an... let's just call it argument.)

And I have to say... I still ahve no frigging clue how the Marvel system works.

nyarlathotep

2013-03-27, 10:53 AM

Exalted- It has all of the same balance problems of 3rd edition D&D but also makes sure that every piece of crunch it tied directly to a piece of fluff, so that concepts are bad not sure mechanical means or reaching them. It is specifically designed for a single setting, but is among the worst RPGs for actually representing that setting the way the authors seem to want it played. As setting which I might add is far to filled in for any real creative freedom on the Gm's part without throwing out fluff they gave you anyways, which defeats the purpose of buying their book in the first place. Finally the majority of supremely powerful beings just look like humans in bad star trek costumes when they interact with the players.

d20 Modern- Hilariously unbalanced as the 20 system it is built off it at least most of the time there are interesting things to build with it. Unfortunately d20 modern can't even manage that and there is at most 1 way to build whatever concept you want and most of the time it is inferior to handguns or melee weapons. Then when they get splats they essentially just start making only partially related systems that cannot be used in conjunction with any other splat most of the time.

oWoD (Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, Changeling)- Suffers hugely from "no you can't build the cool people in the illustrations or fluff" syndrome, as well as "only NPCs are allowed to affect the plot" itis. The mechanics are not balanced within a given splat ever let alone crossover games. Lastly the undercurrent of "discovery through exploration is bad, boring, and kills you soul" really rustles my jimmies, especially when it is presented as somehow worse and "less real" than information given to you through feelings, emotions, and imagination.

Asmodai

2013-03-27, 12:25 PM

WEREWOLF THE APOCALYPSE
So lemme get this straight. Everyone is playing a superpowerful werewolf who is hard as nails to kill, can slip into a spirit world that most other supernatural entities cannot even touch, has access to safe and reliable magic tricks that do amazing things, is indisputably BETTER in almost EVERY way than almost any other PC type in the setting, and has a moral mandate to go do whatever they want as long as they can justify it in some way as making the world a nicer place? Up to and including ripping those filthy, evil humans to shreds?

Yeah, pass. Maybe they'd make good villains, but PC's? Psh, no.

You're so missing the point. Werewolf is also about coping with the fact that you're goign to flip out and kill your family just because it was the wrong day. Werewolf is also about the fact that for all that moral high that your religion gives you, it doesn't matter in the large scale because the world is beyond ****ed. And most of all, for all their physical power they're some of the weakest monsters that go bump in the night. For all their power they are nothing compared to the power of the Wyrm.

Besides, in Old WoD every game is its own setting.

zorenathres

2013-03-27, 12:32 PM

Shadowrun has the inherent problem that you couldn't have a fight the whole party can join in... Physical battle the Street Sams will have more or less finished the shooting before the others can draw/cast. Hacking runs? non netrunners can go play cards. Astral battles .. didn't have that problem don't think we had a mage. long time ago

/\ This, never seen more 1-on-1 conversation between the DM & 1 player in any other game before... but hacking was the worst offender by far, even with a DM who was a pro with the matrix rules, no player was proficient enough to keep up with the "action" on the net. Thus, we all resorted to picking meat shields & such, while the one guy bent on pushing the boundaries made the mage of the party, who broke off from the rest of the group as often as he could to do crazy things (maybe he was bored).

Clawhound

2013-03-27, 12:52 PM

As a DM, I can say that I hated 3.X. Running a 4e game was far easier. In fact, running a 4E game was a treat.

As a player, I can say that I tolerated 3.X. When I ran a fighter/bear warrior, I literally needed a spreadsheet to manage the character. In fact, tracking your character was a complete chore. I can pass on that level of complexity.

Early games. I forgot most of their titles. They were painful. I've forgotten them because I must, and you never heard of them because people like me made sure that they got forgotten and then got therapists to get over the trauma.

Ringworld. It was built on a similar system to Call of Cthulhu, but the CoC system didn't work for it.

Raimun

2013-03-27, 01:41 PM

Mage: The Awakening.

So much investigation... which leads to further investigations, which leads to... you get the picture.

You do get some "powers" but they don't really help you. You'd have to play the game for longer than you would want to, if you want to develop them to useful levels.

Then again, I'm honestly thinking Mages are just delusional. Why else their "powers" won't work if a normal person is present?

Also, everything about the setting is so... vague. It's like shaggy dog story about a wild goose chase.

My main beef is that I don't like games where all the characters have to be the same kind of specialists, in this case, mages.

Kadzar

2013-03-27, 02:44 PM

DnD 4th
GM(same as for GURPS) didn't let us read through the whole book. As such I had a hard time. We tried it out twice. I played a Rogue and a Ranger. Ranger was melee, and allowed to change to Archery afterwards. Wasn't that fun with suddenly chances to hit buddies when firing into melee range.Having a chance to hit enemies when firing into melee is explicitly one of the things that changed from 3.5 to 4e, so that is really just a problem with that particular DM.

Lost Demiurge

2013-03-28, 09:36 AM

You're so missing the point. Werewolf is also about coping with the fact that you're goign to flip out and kill your family just because it was the wrong day. Werewolf is also about the fact that for all that moral high that your religion gives you, it doesn't matter in the large scale because the world is beyond ****ed. And most of all, for all their physical power they're some of the weakest monsters that go bump in the night. For all their power they are nothing compared to the power of the Wyrm.

Besides, in Old WoD every game is its own setting.

Except that
1. It's up to the group and DM what kind of tone a game takes, and the only kind I ever saw was "Fuzzy superheroes."
2. Every @$!%#%* Vampire game I tried to get into, there was always the "Can I play a werewolf?" guy. Saying a game is its own setting is a cop-out when you put'em all in the same world and make them interchangeable and encourage it at every step.
3. No, they are not some of the weakest monsters around. Werewolves are little gods, who can slaughter 1d6 vampires a round, take on mages so long as they get the drop on them, find ways around wraiths (who ARE the weakest monsters around), and freak out humans simply by being in their line of vision and fuzzy. Don't even get me started on hunters and changelings.

OverdrivePrime

2013-03-28, 10:43 AM

Except that
2. Every @$!%#%* Vampire game I tried to get into, there was always the "Can I play a werewolf?" guy. Saying a game is its own setting is a cop-out when you put'em all in the same world and make them interchangeable and encourage it at every step.

Ha! We always had the "Can I play a Highlander" guy.

And... sometimes we let him. Poor SOB. It was like the ST would give him the shiny new gun he asked for, and forget to mention that it was just a 1/16th scale model that didn't actually work.

nyarlathotep

2013-03-28, 11:41 AM

3. No, they are not some of the weakest monsters around. Werewolves are little gods, who can slaughter 1d6 vampires a round, take on mages so long as they get the drop on them, find ways around wraiths (who ARE the weakest monsters around), and freak out humans simply by being in their line of vision and fuzzy. Don't even get me started on hunters and changelings.

Poor wraiths weakest but most interesting supernatural. Also had some of the best writing among the horrible quagmire that was the oWoD. I honestly have no idea how people think that nWoD has a worse story than oWoD unless they got all of the latter's metaplot through a great GM instead of reading the awful awful books.

Jon_Dahl

2013-03-28, 11:58 AM

The most awful games I have played have been homebrew systems. And they are quite common, actually. It seems that we have lots of people who think they can design a system, but they can't. I would estimate that 9 out of 10 homebrew systems are less than average in quality.

I really want to believe that the gamemasters were just trolling us, but Twilight 2000 was incredible in its hideousness! I didn't read the rules, but the game wants you to declare what you are doing for EVERY live second in the game and the amount tweaking for every single step is astonishing! For example:
"I look around for one tick* then I make an aimed shot at the opponent."
The combat is very, very, very slow. I'm absolutely sure that most playgrounders would have been upset with the slowness of the game. One of the PCs simply committed suicide in the middle of combat because it was so slow. I tried not to laugh.

*tick is one second.

Grinner

2013-03-28, 12:40 PM

Asmodai

2013-03-28, 01:37 PM

Except that
1. It's up to the group and DM what kind of tone a game takes, and the only kind I ever saw was "Fuzzy superheroes."
2. Every @$!%#%* Vampire game I tried to get into, there was always the "Can I play a werewolf?" guy. Saying a game is its own setting is a cop-out when you put'em all in the same world and make them interchangeable and encourage it at every step.
3. No, they are not some of the weakest monsters around. Werewolves are little gods, who can slaughter 1d6 vampires a round, take on mages so long as they get the drop on them, find ways around wraiths (who ARE the weakest monsters around), and freak out humans simply by being in their line of vision and fuzzy. Don't even get me started on hunters and changelings.

1. and 2. I'm sorry you played with idiots then. Anyone wanting to play a Werewolf among Vampires (or vice versa) has a serious issue with how the setting actually works. And no, the core game assumptions and function works completely different depending on what you run.

3. Again, you're thinking about crossovers. I'm telling you about the actual monsters Werewolves fight. You know, the ones that are the cause of the Apocalypse?

lesser_minion

2013-03-28, 01:59 PM

I would estimate that 9 out of 10 homebrew systems are less than average in quality.

Well yes, that's Sturgeon's Law: ninety percent of everything is crud.

As Grinner mentioned, however, it would be interesting to see what homebrew systems you've encountered, and examples of what sucked about them.

Lost Demiurge

2013-03-28, 02:15 PM

1. and 2. I'm sorry you played with idiots then. Anyone wanting to play a Werewolf among Vampires (or vice versa) has a serious issue with how the setting actually works. And no, the core game assumptions and function works completely different depending on what you run.

3. Again, you're thinking about crossovers. I'm telling you about the actual monsters Werewolves fight. You know, the ones that are the cause of the Apocalypse?

Dude, if it was just one time, or one group of folks I'd roll with it. But no, this is EVERY damn time I EVER tried to play WEREWOLF THE EGO-STROKING. You wanna hear about the time our GM tried to run werewolf, and everyone who played (I wasn't in this one.) showed up with a non-werewolf race? Mokole, Gurahl, Rokea, one of those damn cat things... The game lasted one session, and a more deserved game death was never granted.

And yeah, those monsters that are supposed to be a challenge? We never seemed to go up against any that were a challenge. At all. There's damn little a pack of werewolves can't rip to shreds, turns out.

Not that I'm sure why you're continuing to argue with me. The OP asked me for a list of my least favorite games, and I responded.

I submit that you might be a little biased on the old-WoD stuff. See, everyone I've run into who defends it online always harps on the idea that it "Works fine so long as you use it as intended." Well, I've seen it done over and over again with different folks in different groups, and the oWoD stuff has ALWAYS been wonky. It has NEVER worked quite right. Vampire's the one that comes closest, but when you throw in all those splat-books, especially the STUPID ones, it causes trouble. And Werewolf was always one of the most troublesome. Vampire? Eh, it sorta worked. Needed a good group. Changeling? Weird tone, but if you could capture it, made for some decent fairy-tale stories. Mage? Hells to the yeah! Just gotta have a GM who knows how to let PC's be awesome. Wraith? Real downer, but good for one-shots and miniseries-style games. Hunter? Interesting, if a little weird. Demon? Hidden gem. GREAT fun. Mummy? No clue, willing to give it a shot.

Of all of them, Werewolf's the only one I wouldn't play. You say it works fine if it's done properly. If you were actually ever in a game of it that worked properly, good on you. How many times have you seen it done IMPROPERLY? I'm willing to bet that the answer is FAR MORE than you've seen it done properly.

A game that only works one out of five times is a bad game to me. So I dislike it, for my personal experience with its track record, which is 0 out of 4.

Jon_Dahl

2013-03-28, 04:18 PM

Care to mention the specifics? Were they just boring D&D clones? Overcomplicated, perhaps?

Realism & Gear masturbation. To be fair, mostly these were creation of one man, but there have been some co-creators.
One of the games is actually called Impossibly Complicated Modern RPG or something like this.
All games have the same feature: Weapons and armor lists, and almost nothing else.
They made their own version of D&D and it was levelless. And man, was it horrible... I just played one session of that "D&D". It was based on Forgotten Realms. The system itself is very hard to describe... Take D&D, force everything into the mold of realism, everything, leave NOTHING out, and you have what we had.

One homebrew was very fun, for a while. It was a homebrew system where everyone played a wizard. All spells were minor wishes. You selected some words for your wizards and using combinations of those words you cast spells. It was fun for only about 2-4 sessions. The system was deadly broken. It was fun but didn't offer long term fun.

In one homebrew system all the players wrote sentences or words on a paper and gave them to the GM. The papers were kept secret. While we played, the GM took one random paper and whatever was written in that paper had to be fitted into the game world ASAP. It was kind of fun, but it wasn't a real RPG. It was a spice and merely offered wackiness and inconsistent gaming.

Then there's my homebrew systems... I had a really ambitious idea about a superhero game that had a few "new" ideas, for instance about a game balance. The problem was that the character creation is too demanding for players. Amusingly, my desire to create perfect balance led to very unbalanced groups of PCs. It taught me many things eg. too much freedom is bad. You really need base classes. You really need hit points. Or maybe you don't need classes or hit points, but at least you need something that can replace them and it has to work really well.
I still think that my homebrew superhero game was great, even though very demanding for players. My dream is to one day translate the rules into English and let you view them. I'm sure that they will draw heavy criticism but at least we did have fun playing it.

Black Jester

2013-03-29, 04:21 AM

Dude, if it was just one time, or one group of folks I'd roll with it. But no, this is EVERY damn time I EVER tried to play WEREWOLF THE EGO-STROKING. You wanna hear about the time our GM tried to run werewolf, and everyone who played (I wasn't in this one.) showed up with a non-werewolf race? Mokole, Gurahl, Rokea, one of those damn cat things... The game lasted one session, and a more deserved game death was never granted.

So the GM utterly failed to focus the game or to tell the players about that focus. So yeah, I think that's a fairly good argument to support Asmodai's assessment of said players. With a vast, vast background (and Werewolf is one of the largest there is), you need to prepare carefully, or your game will fail (and does deserve to fail anyway).
That's what I like about Werewolf: the enormous flexibility of the setting which allows for so many different character and campaign concepts within a common framework. But due to this very broad selection of styles and stories, it is mandatory for any good gamemaster to prepare and focus the game.
Yes, Werewolf is not an easy game to run - to really run a Werewolf game good, you basically need a homebase [Caern] and its population - meaning that you need about a dozen or twenty NPCs at hand almost at all times. One of the great things about the Original World of Darkness is that the writers decided to go with verisimilitude and style instead of simplicity and player convenience.

It is also a very good reminder to keep in mind, that almost none of the games listed in this thread are actually bad. "i don't like it´" and "it doesn't work" are two very different things, and most of the games which have been mentioned here are quite good within their specific focuses. Sometimes these focuses do not overlap with personal tastes, and in a few cases, people just fail to understand a game or are too busy or lazy to invest the time into a game that doesn't interest them that much.

Lost Demiurge

2013-03-29, 07:09 AM

You make some good points, but I STILL contend that exalting the system by blaming the players is a cop-out.

Saying "Ah, well, you guys weren't GOOD enough for this game" is a slippery slope, ese. It's elitist, and more than a little insulting.

If I held back my disgust and went back to Werewolf today and actually tried to run the thing? Yeah, I could probably do a decent job at it. But that's because I'm a good GM. A game that requires a good GM to be enjoyed at all isn't a good game in my opinion. The GM's I tried to play Werewolf under weren't BAD. They just couldn't make it work.

But thank you for pointing out that just because someone dislikes a game, doesn't necessarily mean it's BAD. There's been a lot of games listed which, in my opinion, are awesome. Our own experience is gonna color things, and unless you were there for the same experience, there's no real way to prove'em wrong.

Mono Vertigo

2013-03-29, 07:18 AM

Well, the title of the thread is "your least favorite roleplaying game".
Not "the worst roleplaying game".
So we are, indeed, just stating our opinions, using subjective arguments. And if those arguments have to do with the base concepts or fluff, it makes sense we don't want to buy or borrow the books in order to learn more about the mechanics.
So, maybe it's just me, but I always read the other posts with the subtext of "if it happens to work for you and you like it, great for you, it's just not my thing".

Black Jester

2013-03-29, 12:30 PM

You make some good points, but I STILL contend that exalting the system by blaming the players is a cop-out.

Saying "Ah, well, you guys weren't GOOD enough for this game" is a slippery slope, ese. It's elitist, and more than a little insulting.

Of course it can be seen as elitist. That, unfortunately, doesn't mean it cannot be true as well. With all activities, tasks or hobbies doing stuff frequently and well will make you better. There are people ho run faster and have better endurance among joggers, as well as more or less talented or dedicated hand puppet theater directors (just picking two random activities). RPGs do not differ from this pattern in any way and form. There are better and there are worse players. It's no big deal, anyway, and it would be a lot simpler if people just accepted that and moved on.

If I held back my disgust and went back to Werewolf today and actually tried to run the thing? Yeah, I could probably do a decent job at it. But that's because I'm a good GM. A game that requires a good GM to be enjoyed at all isn't a good game in my opinion. The GM's I tried to play Werewolf under weren't BAD. They just couldn't make it work.

No game is ever better than the GM who actually runs the system. After all, even the best background is rather pointless if it is not implemented in the game. Likewise, an inept or bored GM will ruin even the background and enthralling plots. Every game requires a good GM to be enjoyed thoroughly, but not all games or game styles require the same approaches (or 'gamemastering sub-skills') and trying to press a game setting in a different style or form does not always work. Or: just because I can run good horror and intrigue games (which I do), I am not very good at creating dungeon runs, mostly because I find most dungeon-delving adventures rather dull and uninspired. Everybody has his or her strengths and weaknesses. There is nothing wrong with that. After all, life is not a competition who is the most inspired gamemaster (unfortunately; in a global RPG-based meritocracy we would rule the world, after all).

nyarlathotep

2013-03-29, 12:56 PM

One of the great things about the Original World of Darkness is that the writers decided to go with verisimilitude and style instead of simplicity and player convenience.

Ah yes verisimilitude that gives us supplements about China in which all Chinese characters have an astonishingly bad grasp of their own history, vampires among the weakest and most easily killed supernatural race being vast and influential despite having numerous enemies that are statistically stronger and motivated to kill them all, and a reality whose nature shifts between consensus based and concrete depending on the whims of the writer and plot at a given time.

Black Jester

2013-03-29, 01:40 PM

Compare it to Shadowrun, with its stories about environment-conscious colonization in Australia or the idea that Henry Ford invented the car - in the early 1900s in Detroit.

(1) Chinese not knowing much about their history: I once met a German boy, about 15 years old, who tried to explain his patriotism with the number of great German leaders he knew: Charlemagne, Barbarossa and Alexander the Great. A bad grasp on history is nothing uncommon, at all (however, I don't know this concrete example, and I personally don't know anything of relevance about Chinese history, so I admit, I would probably miss any such occurrences).

(2) Vampires being easy to kill and controlling the world: Apart from the more stupid first edition, latter works (i.e. Gilded Cage and especially Midnight Siege, if I remember correctly) made it very clear that Vampires did not "control" anything, they just influence individual people and otherwise use what real world shady businessmen use as well: money. And: enemies being powerful isn't that important when said enemies can barely be bothered to care about you most of the time; for Vampires, a dedicated pack of werewolves tracking own and destroying the leeches of a city is a cataclysmic horror story come true; for the Werewolves, it's pest control. They have literally bigger fishes to fry.

(3)Mages believe that public awareness forms the universe; werewolves will tell you that the opinion of a bunch of hairless monkeys is mostly insignificant; as far as I know, these two different approaches are used consequently and consistently in each of its separate settings (underlining the fact that these are different games which happen to overlap and not one, unified setting with comprehensive in-universe rules.

The original World of Darkness is certainly not perfect (no game world is, or could be), but if you try to focus on its weaknesses, why not focus on actually problematic stuff like in the spoiler below (please note: this is actually a problematic issue, an I have no idea how someone came to the idea that it would be a good idea to put something like that in a game) the vengeful ghosts of aborted fetuses. It doesn't matter how one includes that in a game, failure is the only possible outcome..

nyarlathotep

2013-03-29, 01:50 PM

Compare it to Shadowrun, with its stories about environment-conscious colonization in Australia or the idea that Henry Ford invented the car - in the early 1900s in Detroit.

(1) Chinese not knowing much about their history: I once met a German boy, about 15 years old, who tried to explain his patriotism with the number of great German leaders he knew: Charlemagne, Barbarossa and Alexander the Great. A bad grasp on history is nothing uncommon, at all (however, I don't know this concrete example, and I personally don't know anything of relevance about Chinese history, so I admit, I would probably miss any such occurrences).

The really offensive stuff was the vampires old enough that they were supposed to have experienced history. Then even after they kind of dropped the "exalted is backstory for oWoD" angle they still had everything using really bad Exalted naming conventions. The real problem was that Kindred of the East was rather obviously written by someone who had not real understanding of any Asian history and most of their "knowledge" came from nerd imports from China and Japan.

(3)Mages believe that public awareness forms the universe; werewolves will tell you that the opinion of a bunch of hairless monkeys is mostly insignificant; as far as I know, these two different approaches are used consequently and consistently in each of its separate settings (underlining the fact that these are different games which happen to overlap and not one, unified setting with comprehensive in-universe rules.

Save for anytime they try to do anything with the metaplot which stressed that the devs at least believed it to be a single unified campaign setting and had things crossing over all nilly willy without any real consistency. Remember we once had a vampire/werewolf/mage/other things hybrid running around between books. oWoD may have been way better as separate games with little overlap, but that is clearly not have a large portion of the devs saw it. If they only make sense at all when separate why have them in the same game together?

Lost Demiurge

2013-03-29, 02:57 PM

Of course it can be seen as elitist. That, unfortunately, doesn't mean it cannot be true as well. With all activities, tasks or hobbies doing stuff frequently and well will make you better. There are people ho run faster and have better endurance among joggers, as well as more or less talented or dedicated hand puppet theater directors (just picking two random activities). RPGs do not differ from this pattern in any way and form. There are better and there are worse players. It's no big deal, anyway, and it would be a lot simpler if people just accepted that and moved on.

Except no, sorry, you're wrong. You're calling me and everyone I knew who played this game a basic player who can't handle advanced stuff because no one I know could make werewolf work to our satisfaction.

Son, that says way more about YOU, then it does ME, or ANY of those other people who YOU DO NOT KNOW.

No game is ever better than the GM who actually runs the system. After all, even the best background is rather pointless if it is not implemented in the game. Likewise, an inept or bored GM will ruin even the background and enthralling plots. Every game requires a good GM to be enjoyed thoroughly, but not all games or game styles require the same approaches (or 'gamemastering sub-skills') and trying to press a game setting in a different style or form does not always work. Or: just because I can run good horror and intrigue games (which I do), I am not very good at creating dungeon runs, mostly because I find most dungeon-delving adventures rather dull and uninspired. Everybody has his or her strengths and weaknesses. There is nothing wrong with that. After all, life is not a competition who is the most inspired gamemaster (unfortunately; in a global RPG-based meritocracy we would rule the world, after all).

See, you admit this out of one side of your mouth, but with the other side you keep talking about the superiority of Werewolf and how it's "not for my inferiors". I do not think you can take both stances convincingly, sorry.

Kitsap Charles

2013-03-29, 03:21 PM

I had a lousy experience with In Nomine. To be fair I think a large part of it was a bad dm but It was probably the consistently least fun rpg I had ever playedI once described In Nomine as being like Call of Cthulhu, but without the inner message of hope. Everyone nodded their heads.

Jerthanis

2013-03-29, 04:02 PM

This could've been your GM, yeah.

In that situation, one of two things could happen. One: the GM/MC starts making hard moves after telegraphing them with soft moves. Two: you use other moves to get into position, so that you can deal harm without taking any yourself. It can be a very story-tactical game in that regard.

The way the game was described to me was that only Players make rolls, that 1-6 is a failure, 7-10 is a success where you also suffer a complication, which could include taking harm and 11+ is a success where you can either not have a complication or still have a complication but accomplish a lot more.

So there would be situations like our Skinner trying to seduce someone, rolls Hot and gets a 6 due to a poor roll, takes 2 harm because the guy she was trying to seduce pistol whips her. I try to shoot at a guy and roll Hard and get a 9 as an average roll and it's narrated that I kill the guy, but that he manages to wing me in return for 1 harm.

Then we had a guy who was the Slasher Movie monster with the mask, and he had 3 armor because of a power, and so took no damage from any source of harm that ever came up in the game. It became a game about staying silent whenever the GM narrated any conflict until the Slasher Movie Monster said, "I kill him", rolls, takes no harm no matter what he rolls, keeps rolling until everyone is dead. Because if we intimidated them, seduced them, ran away, used psychic powers, or whatever else we might roll for, we'd take Harm, and once we got more than 2 Harm, we stopped healing. So we'd do our One Roll for the session, then be as inconspicuous as possible and wait for the session to end so we could heal.

The idea of using moves to get into a position of dealing harm while taking none would involve a roll, and if it failed, we'd take harm, so it's half dozen of one, six of the other in terms of what we're rolling for, getting to a safe position from which to resolve the situation, or moving to resolve the situation directly.

nyarlathotep

2013-03-29, 08:22 PM

The original World of Darkness is certainly not perfect (no game world is, or could be), but if you try to focus on its weaknesses, why not focus on actually problematic stuff like in the spoiler below (please note: this is actually a problematic issue, an I have no idea how someone came to the idea that it would be a good idea to put something like that in a game) the vengeful ghosts of aborted fetuses. It doesn't matter how one includes that in a game, failure is the only possible outcome..

I didn't notice you fitting this in. The problem is that the initial topic was why the system was bad and then the second topic was why it could not sustain verisimilitude. If you want to talk about the setting being offensive as well I could include a real life ethnicity being included as a supernatural being whose powers relate to stealing and having power be gauged by "blood purity"; oh yes and they are almost exclusively referred to by a real world slur. You also have changeling whose basic message is "medicating mental illness and taking responsibility is wrong, run away from the real world". There is also certain parts of Werewolf straight up endorsing ecoterrorism. The idea that anything from oWoD's main lines was better than there nWoD counterparts is baffling.

Edit: Actually the ghost of an aborted child was used to make a damn good SCP a while back, unfortunately at the time White Wolf had very few if any good writers. I don't remember reading about fetus ghost specifically though, I may disagree with you once I get to it.

Feddlefew

2013-03-29, 08:28 PM

Edit: Actually the ghost of an aborted child was used to make a damn good SCP a while back, unfortunately at the time White Wolf had very few if any good writers. I don't remember reading about fetus ghost specifically though, I may disagree with you once I get to it.

The reason that SCP worked was because the fetus ghost was heavily implied to be an eldrich abomination before it was aborted, not because, so it didn't come off as being moralizing.

obryn

2013-03-29, 08:51 PM

About the only system I have no desire to run or play in right now are 3.X D&D and its immediate descendants like Pathfinder. I ran it for 8 years and thoroughly burned out on it. I'm still burned out on it, after what had been a great campaign got trashed through caster supremacy. I found myself spending 3+ hours building an NPC to specifically counter my casters and realized ... "What the hell am I doing?!" It no longer feels like D&D to me; D&D is about class/level and archetypes as much as it is about anything, and 3.x's multiclassing is just an ugly aberration in the history of the game.

I think the game design - trying to fit the entire world into a class/level scheme, mostly - is objectively flawed. This isn't to say people can't or don't enjoy it; it just is what it is.

Other than that? Umm... I played in some Mage 1e game and the system with the botches and whatnot was terrible. Not in a hurry to do more WoD even though they've probably fixed up the system since then.

But honestly, I think gamers spend way to much time dumping on stuff they don't like instead of celebrating the things they do like. So my favorites right now? D&D 4e, a reawakened interest in AD&D and BECMI/RC D&D, WFRP2e, Savage Worlds, Earthdawn, Powers & Perils (yes, really!) and (newly added to the list) Dungeon World. And there's vanishingly few games I won't at least try out.

(Dungeon World is simply brilliant. I strongly recommend everyone give it a try sometime. It's an awesome take on oldschool D&D.)

I think FATE may get added to the list down the road, but I can't tell until I get my group to try it out. That'll probably be after I get my kickstarter rewards from it and/or Ehdrigohr.

-O

Winter_Wolf

2013-03-29, 09:32 PM

My least favorite RPGs are "clones" or "homages" of some variation of the euphamism "the most popular RPG in the world" (or whatever it is), i.e. some version of D&D.

Because when I want to play D&D of any version, I'd rather play D&D instead of something that's mostly the same but always has those odd things to change it just enough to avoid getting sued for IP infringement but make rules that I know into a chore of going back to look up the "new way" all the time.

One of my biggest regrets is having unloaded all my old edition stuff of D&D and AD&D (we're talking hundreds if not more than a thousand dollars worth of physical copies of old edition stuff from hardbacks to softcovers to boxed sets purchases at or below original MSRP, BEFORE it became hideously expensive "collector" stuff). Trying to replace even a fraction of it now would require me to sell off most of probably all my worldly possessions. :smallfrown:

(Dis)honorable mention to Shadowrun. In theory and flavor, it's aces. In terms of actually playing a game, it's as others have said: you really can't do things as a group because you have ONE person with the skillset to be effective at rigging, or decking, or street combat while the rest of the group kind of sits around waiting for their turn.

awa

2013-03-31, 01:26 AM

I played a number of the old world of darkness games and personally for me the biggest problems i had tended to involve the meta plot and how we kinda felt like the spectators of the real story we weren't allowed to influence.
Ironical the most annoying thing i found about those games wasn't the games them selves but storytellers who thought the games were inherently more mature then d&d and that d&d was inherently stuck in the murder hobo kick in the door style play.

for myself i never had problems feeling unstoppable as a werewolf maby vampires were pushovers but they were all annoying manipulators not combat challenges when we fought something like a thunder wurm we got to see what real combat monster are.

Rion

2013-03-31, 07:33 AM

if a DM lets a normal human and a Space Marine to be in the same game then yes, they should be on roughly the same power level, preferably by upscaling the former rather than downgrading the latter. It's not fun to be a second grade party member, overshadowed in everything, just because you didn't want to play a SMurf for whatever reason (like the fact that as individual characters they're usually boring as hell).
Disclaimer: I don't know the actual system being discussed, only 40K's fluff.

If you actually want to play in the universe of Warhammer 40K rather than just use the system, you can't have a regular human and a Space Marine be equally good at combat.
If one of your player plays the squad leader of (and control in combat) an elite team of 8-12 regular human soldiers on the level of John McClane, Rambo and SEAL Team 6, and another player controls a new Space Marine who hasn't been fully trained, then that might be balanced. Though any imbalance would still be in favour of the Space Marine.

Seriously though, playing a Space Marine in a character focused RPG would be the most boring experience ever. They are over 7 feet tall killing machines who have been purged of all emotion other than those their chapter specifically encourages, feel no pain, can go for weeks without sleep, doesn't need to eat and literally spits acid and ****s plastic explosives.
An Ultramarine (I.E. Smurf) are brainwashed to the point that their ID is a calm and highly intelligent tactician. The emotional spectrum of a Black Templar runs the entire length of fervent piety, xenophobic fevour, righteous fury and hateful faith.

The only chapter whose Space Marines could be interesting play as characters rather than killing machines, would be the Salamanders. Their physical needs are just as removed from regular humans as other Space Marines, and their quirk in the enhancement of new recruits (something almost all chapters have) is that their turns pitch black and their eyes turn to the most bright and bloody red imaginable. Not only are they the only chapter to allow Space Marines to form long-term relationships with regular humans, they even encourages their members to be involved normal society on the planets under their control and form families with normal humans. While the intent is make them connect with humans and thus defend them more ferociously, having to balance the obviously inhuman look and emotions, with the expectation to function alongside humans could be interesting.

They are however a completely unique chapter in that regard.

Water_Bear

2013-03-31, 10:07 AM

Actually, Black Crusade seems like it's pretty good about not letting the (Chaos) Space Marines completely run roughshod over other Heretic PCs.

The important thing to remember about 40K is that while all Space Marines are in the top .00001%, there are still quadrillions of people out there. Anyone who can climb up the ranks to become a Canoness in the Adeptas Sororitas, become a mortal Champion of Chaos, run a Rogue Trader House, or become a Lord Inquisitor is already so far above the ordinary they are essentially superhuman anyway.

Not letting mortals be as cool as a Space Marine ignores the many many people in the fluff who are actually just that good.

(Also, you're right about an all-Marine game being awful. Deathwatch, the loyalist Space Marine RPG, looks about as fun as dental surgery.)

nyarlathotep

2013-03-31, 12:31 PM

awa

2013-03-31, 01:23 PM

even if we went just by the fluff (crunch wise imperial guard/ sisters of battle/ inquisitor special characters would walk all over space marine scouts)

there are lots of imperial subgroups that are a match for space marines in combat.

assassins are easily able to dominate basic marines within there specialty

sanctioned pykers going by the fluff can be tremendously powerful on occasion?

and if the game is not 100% about killing stuff theirs even more room for other characters to work.

the final thing to remember is that space marine fluff (and 40k in general) is widely inconsistent i've read fluff where a space marine is virtually indestructible able to smash through concrete walls with their bare hands and shrug of dozens of direct hits from bolters and slugga and i've seen fluff where a marine goes down to a single shot from a long laz killed instantly by a traitor guardsmen sniper.

Tengu_temp

2013-03-31, 04:47 PM

If you actually want to play in the universe of Warhammer 40K rather than just use the system, you can't have a regular human and a Space Marine be equally good at combat.

Yes you can. Just give the other characters enough experience that they're on roughly the same power level. Their characters are badass enough that they can fight side by side with a SMurf. As far as I know nothing in the Space Marine fluff states that nobody could ever possibly THINK of matching them in combat, and if there's something that says this then it should be disregarded because it's just Mary Suism.

And yes, the fact that all SMurfs from one chapter are more or less identical, and that almost all of them are wholly dedicated to their service with absolutely no private life or personal quirks, is what makes them so boring as RP characters. The best you can hope for is culture clash between one and the rest of the party, which is why Salamanders are the best for the job. You know, other than the fact that they're one of the few chapters that actually care about people.

Water_Bear

2013-03-31, 04:57 PM

As far as I know nothing in the Space Marine fluff states that nobody could ever possibly THINK of matching them in combat, and if there's something that says this then it should be disregarded because it's just Mary Suism.

You dare to question Matt Ward, your SPIRITUAL LIEGE?!? HERESY!

Craft (Cheese)

2013-03-31, 05:22 PM

I agree with that. I could have accepted 4E as a game I had no interest in if they made it just as a wargame.

But they had to take the worlds I love, and tear them apart. They had to write those horrible lore articles online that were page after page of "Hey, remember Planescape? Man, that sucked, right? Yeeeeah. You'd have ot be insane to like that. Eladrin are elves now, because no one needs chaotic good outsiders, you can't even kill them because they don't ping evil! Angels? Bull****, they are elementals now! Succubi? They are like demons, but subtle, so they are devils now! Elemental planes? More like boring-emental planes!"

At that point, I just couldn't ever like that game again.

To be fair, most of these problems started in 3E.

"Planescape? Well, the basic ideas behind it are the defaults now, so we have to bleach it of all the interesting details for the sake of genericity. People who want that stuff can just use the old 2E books anyway."

"Chaotic? That's just another flavor of Evil, basically. Eladrin? Why do we even have these?"

"Not all demons are mindless brutes who just love to smash things! Lots of them are subtle and cunning like Succubi and... umm... well I guess Succubi are the only ones. But you *can* come up with new demons who aren't mindless if you want to!"

Eldan

2013-03-31, 06:13 PM

True, but in 3E, I could blame incompetence. In 4E, they spelled it out in quite clear terms.

puctheplayfull

2013-04-01, 02:21 PM

I've played in and ran a lot of different games and game systems over the years. I've read and studied even more (mostly because I can't find a group that can keep up with my addiction to try new game systems).

As a DM, my least favorite system so far has been Dungeons and Dragons 4th Ed. This is mostly because the system was designed to try and bring MMO players back to the table top, meaning you have every character and every monster falling into a cookie cutter roll that is hard or impossible to change, all classes having essentially the same set of mechanics with slightly different names to very similar powers and abilities, and the loss of magic/spellcasting as a unique game mechanic. The one area they didn't make it like the majority of MMO's out there is equipment dependency at higher levels, and that is only because they made magic items rather generic and trivial over all. I haven't tried 4th Ed as a player, but it seems like it would be fun for a hack and slash minis game.

As a player, my least favorite was Shadowrun 3rd Ed (I've never tried 1st or 2nd). I loved the concept and setting, and still do, and I've had a lot of fun running and playing 4th Ed. The 3rd Ed, I never had the 'pleasure' of running. As a player, I found the character creation rules really bogged down, and needlessly convoluted. The game system itself has changed very little, and it seems really just takes some setting used to. My first 3rd Ed character was a decker, so I got to try the matrix minigame first hand. It lives up to all the complaints I've read so far. The changes for 4th Ed have really sped up the hacking game, and allows hackers and the newer technomancers to stay interactive with the party while doing their jobs. I also saw the problems with over specialization of each party member, but that also seems to have been resolved in 4th ed now that you can more easily customize/optimize your character as part of creation.

Of course, this is all the humble opinion of a systems junkie that would play anything that required light to heavy paperwork and tossing around marked polyhedrons...

Wardog

2013-04-02, 05:41 PM

The only chapter whose Space Marines could be interesting play as characters rather than killing machines, would be the Salamanders.

What about the Space Wolves?

Admittedly, I don't know that much about them, beyond the basics. But can you really go that far wrong with Space Vikings?

As for the OP - do single-player game books count?

If so, I'd like to nominate the Lone Wolf series. Superficially, they looked nice, with an interesting setting and sinister enemies, but I ended up getting very annoyed by several things:

* The narration was very fond of telling you what you thought/how you felt. Worse still, this often took the form of telling you that a wave of nausea washed over you whenever you realised you were looking at the mook spawning vats, or when you were spying on the DefinitelyNotOrcs and realised they were cheerfully tucking into a meal of freshly-butchered DefinitelyNotOrcs. Seriously, you are supposed to be a battle-hardened warrior monk/magic knight, who has fought your way through Hell - you should be use to this by now.

* The combat system "handled" multiple opponent by treating them as a single enemy. That wasn't actually too bad when fighting large groups of weak enemies (e.g. Squad of Mooks: 15 Skill, 20 Endurance) but got silly when fighting Three Collosal Acid-Spitting Serpents (Skill 40 Endurance 80).

* The skill sytem was too variable. Roll low on your stats and choose non-combat special abilities, and even weak enemies were a serious threat, nevermind the boss monsters. Roll low, and compensate with combat special abilities, and you'll probably be ok, but limited in the interesting things you can do. Roll high, and all choose combat special abilities, and you can potentially one-shot the Three Collosal Acid-Spitting Serpents in one round. And then die later, because you took a wrong turning when being chased by a squad of mooks and didn't have the special powers that would let you escape the situation.

* And then there was the ability to carry over equipment and powers from previous books in the series. Nice idea in theory, annoying in practice if you hadn't played the entire series of books. Do you have the Iconic Sword of Automatically Winning this Encounter? If yes, your enemy runs away screaming/dies when you deflect his spell back at him/gets killed in a cut scene. Otherwise, you take some damage and have to fight.

Akal Saris

2013-04-29, 09:24 AM

You know that under-appreciated gem Cyberpunk 2020? I hated it. I mean, it had some good ideas in theory but the way classes were designed it was a mess-- some having specialized abilities that in practice didn't do anything.

It might be unsporting to mention one that I haven't played, but I don't like Cthulutech. Maybe it was just from hearing some guy talk about a character he made and how crazily optimized he made it. I dunno, I guess the fact that system even allows characters to be that optimized kind of undercuts the idea of Lovecraftian horror.

I also hated Cyberpunk 2020. It was mostly just a poor DM plus a terrible character creation process that left me with a useless character while the other 2 PCs were ridiculously strong.

I'm also not a big fan of d20 Modern. I like the IDEA of a simple system that can be added onto at will, but in practice we've never gotten past level 4 in a game of it, so the cool stuff for PCs to use/play never materializes.

Susano-wo

2013-04-29, 05:39 PM

RE apocalypse world:
I've played a short campaign, and am familiar with the rules. depending on the class you are playing you can be quite min-maxed (the description of success and failure above is basically correct. Roll 2d6+stat. 7+ is a success, but not total, and 10+ is a more or less total success). Basically make sure you have +3 in the stat relating to the types of action, so you get total success on 7+, which is basically 50% of the time, and you only fail totally on 3 or less, which is 1 in 12.

I played the Touchstone (additional class that the author made for some web-promotion or another, I think?), and one of my abilities was getting 1-3 uses of a list of special combat abilities(rolled it when you went into combat, so this is per combat), including summarily disabling/executing NPCs, and avoiding all harm from an incoming attack. I held back abit so I wouldn't totally overshadow one of the other party members who was playing the Gunlugger on at least one occasion I can think of.

One of the points of the game is that actions have consequences and you probably aren't going to get out of a scrap untouched, so you generally have to accept that you are probably gonna get Harm, so you can't play with the idea of doing so and having it work as intended. [which is why abilities like the one above gaining 3 points of armor and the touchstone avoiding damage are bad design(though you *can* get above 3 harm, it just requires a bit of optimizing :P)]

of course there are other facepalmy issues with the game--realized when we left the town we started in that the Gunlugger, who was supposed to be a wilderness savvy Mountain Woman accorind to character fluff, had no particular skill in wilderness survival or tracking, or anything. Those mechanics are entirely absent. From a Post-Apocalyptic RPG :smallsigh:

Then there is the obligatory mention of the Character Special. Each character has things that happen if they have sex with someone. These are class specific. So, the Battlebabe does not gain history (the score you use when assisting other characters) when she has sex, meaning that she is essentially nonchalant about sex. Gee, I hope your concept of your Battlebabe fits this. About the only one that make sense is the Brainer, who is a creepy psychic, and has a Character Special where the both of you are affected by psychically opening up to each other.

I like some things about the system, but its too wonky for me to like it totally

Mr Beer

2013-04-29, 10:41 PM

Vampire the Masquerade...this sounds (and probably is) terribly unfair, my opinion is based solely on reading the material as opposed to ever playing the game. While the background is pretty richly detailed, I've never read any RPG work that drips so much pretension. The whole thing gave the distinct impression I was supposed to be thanking the designers for finally making tabletop Important.

I'm playing in a 40K Deathwatch game right now. I'm enjoying running around and hitting things with my force hammer. If I liked developing complex character motivations, I would have a problem, because while the roleplaying section source book assures me that Space Marines are 'epic characters, writ large', they seem to me to be biological battle automatons with all the humanity of the alien greeblies they spend their time mowing down in droves.

2nd Ed D&D was the Terminator III of D&D - a pointlessly similar re-work of the previous edition. Whether or not you then hated 3.0/3.5 or to extend the analogy, Terminator: Salvation, at least it was different.

Yael

2013-05-02, 12:51 AM

D&D 4th Edition.

nyarlathotep

2013-05-02, 01:14 AM

D&D 4th Edition.

Gonna be honest and I don't mean to offend but this is one of the worst sort of posts in a thread like this. You post something that a lot of people would find objectionable, but leave with it no argument or further contribution to the thread. No discussion to be had.

Amphetryon

2013-05-02, 11:06 AM

Pendragon: Perhaps it was a GM issue, but 4 hours of Character creation in order to have the Character die from a single blow 10 minutes in dampened my enthusiasm a bit.

Rolemaster: Please spend 16 hours consulting these 413 charts to determine what your Character can do. Then pass the turn to the next person in combat.

Vampire: the Masquerade: So. Much. "Vampire Drag."* Fandom.

*References a term used by Anne Rice.

Malfunctioned

2013-05-02, 11:35 AM

Cyberpunk V.3

Sure, let's get rid of all this cool fluff and workable crunch.

Sure, let's basically get rid of the internet, make hacking physically dangerous, change the setting a ridiculous amount and have combat rules that are both overly simple and overly complicated at the same time.

Sure, lets make the starting characters so unbalanced that a Desnai Mechjockey comes equipped with a suit of powered armour sporting several rocket launchers and gatling guns whilst most other characters have access to one big weapon and that's about it.

ALSO THERE'S THE ART.

Who needs cool drawings and artwork when instead you can have photos of green-tinted modded action figures and barbie dolls?