What is your worst roleplaying game?

[Rakasta]

Everybody has a favourite roleplaying game such as:d&d(ad&d),Call of chutulu or Gamma world,and and some have a bad roleplaying game that is too complicated,boring or make you angry:smallmad:. My worst roleplaying game has to be Ars magica fourth edition. But what is your worst roleplaying game? I would love to hear your opinion. (Excuse me for my bad english I come from Norway.)

[Anonymouswizard]

That I've played? Mechwarrior 3rd. Unless you cheese the lifepath you'll begin with likely no more than +3 go your skills, +2 for most of them, in a system where checks are 2d10+skill and the standard difficulty is 15. I've never felt so incompetent.

That I've read? FATAL for being insanely overcomplicated and badly researched. I want to hit the designer upside the head with my copy of Ars Magica, which fufils his claims better than FATAL does. Realistic!

That I've heard of? RaHoWa apparently didn't come with rules and was more offensive than FATAL.

[Yora]

The worst system I've actually encountered in action would easily be Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition. So many rules that only get in the way and constantly direct you down a narrow path of endless dice rolling.

[Fri]

Yeah, there's a difference between the theoritically worst roleplaying game you've encounterd, or worst roleplaying game you've actually played.

[Rakasta]

Yeah, there's a difference between the theoritically worst roleplaying game you've encounterd, or worst roleplaying game you've actually played.
I mean those you have played with.

[AMFV]

My personal worsts are FATE, Torchbearer, and Apocalypse World. Which are all fairly exceptional systems, they've just got aspects that make them less enjoyable for me personally. All of them have ideas that I consider to be absolutely awesome. I just wind up disliking enough of the implementation or certain other aspects enough that I'm extremely not fond of the games. Although again, they're well-designed, but that's my personal preference. For me the things that are worst, are the things I can recognize good design, and exceptional quality of work, that I wind up disliking.

[themaque]

I hated Alternity. That 2nd edition Sci-Fi game TSR put out? Ugh I really hated it. I liked the world but there where just a million little things that I could stand in the system.

The big one was it felt like it WANTED to be a classless skill based system at times but it was rooted in the TSR skill based context.

[hamlet]

Champion. I can't quite claim to have played it since I wasn't really able to get past building a character and getting things working.

The thing is so obtuse and nearly impossible to understand and so insanely complicated.

[johnbragg]

EverQuest put out a d20 RPG. The mechanics were not too terrible, but the fluff was very silly, arranging the entire cosmology to validate having save points/"bind altars".

[ComaVision]

I guess my worst is All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

Not because I dislike the system, I just have a very small sample size.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Of one's I've actually played at all, the Serenity RPG and old WoD - rules-heavy mathsy rpgs by writers who don't like maths or rules tend to work out badly.

I've also heard horror stories from good sources about Shadowrun 5th and Exalted 2nd, but nothing first hand.

[Drynwyn]

The least favorite I've played is probably the Cortex RPG. The game just doesn't seem to have a point to it. It's not particularly good at any one thing, nor does it have enough material to allow for a lot of different things. It's basically a needlessly long guide to making your own RPG under a set of needlessly swingy mechanics.

[obryn]

It's tough for me to pick any, because I have enjoyed most of the RPGs I have played of late... But! With that said...

(1) Recent - Despite fond memories, I tried to run Marvel FASERIP not too long ago and it was a huge mess. Not in a good way. It's too bad because I remember loving the system. In practice, the charts are cumbersome and the status effects are too potent.

(2) Never played - Burning Empires. I was really excited for it and loved the comics, but I couldn't understand what the game was that the book was trying to describe.

(3) Honorable mention - After running the game for 8 years, D&D 3.* is the only game I can think of where I would not voluntarily run it again, and would hesistate to play it.

[BWR]

That I've heard of? RaHoWa apparently didn't come with rules and was more offensive than FATAL.

Sort of. It is less offensive than FATAL in that your head won't explode trying to understand the thought processes that lead to that monstrosity. The 'game' is simple, clear and straightforward and perfectly understandable in all its proud horridness. It's kind of like the Hemmingway of bad game design: nothing extraneous distracting you from thinking about how offensive it is.

Worst I've played: Dogs in the Vineyard or FUDGE. I absolutely detested the mechanics in those. At least in the fudge game we mostly ignore dice if at all possible and had a great game otherwise. Dogs was just 2-3 hours of frustration and annoyance with no redeeming features. And it was run by someone who, when he wants to be, is an excellent GM. He just gets too distracted by indie games and game theory and CONFLICT and whatnot and forgets to focus on what makes things fun sometimes.

[Anonymouswizard]

I guess my worst is All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

Not because I dislike the system, I just have a very small sample size.

I hated the game when I played it, but I looked in the book and, if you get past the zombie-bashing mindset and don't have a GM who literally refused to read the book (*insert rant number X about that campaign here*) it looks like a fun system for an action-investigation game where you fend off basic and special zombies while looking for a solution. Which is exactly the kind of game my second character was prepared for (the first, prepared to do well in any campaign, was vetoed for being a priest using the Inspired rules*).

*I can't remember the powers I planned to take, I think I bought Inspired with positive quality points as the game had so few qualities I was interested in, and I remember definitely taking Visions and being interested in the Strength-increasing one. I was specifically going for an Anglican priest who had deluded himself into thinking the apocalypse had made him a prophet, he was all set to be a fun character.


Sort of. It is less offensive than FATAL in that your head won't explode trying to understand the thought processes that lead to that monstrosity. The 'game' is simple, clear and straightforward and perfectly understandable in all its proud horridness. It's kind of like the Hemmingway of bad game design: nothing extraneous distracting you from thinking about how offensive it is.

Let me put it this way, it's more offensive, but FATAL is much better snark bait. RaHoWa is saved from being such a great target because it forgets to include any rules that would make it complex, while FATAL's offensiveness is literally that it's poorly researched and the rules have been known to fry computers through their complexity. At the very core of FATAL is an average fantasy heartbreaker, it just had so much bad research and overcomplicated rules piled on top of it.

[Sith_Happens]

At the very core of FATAL is an average fantasy heartbreaker

Really, because personally I'm not aware of any "average fantasy heartbreakers" that feature such things as Randy Gay OgresTM or cursed swords that forcibly impregnate people with new swords.:smallconfused:

As for the actual thread topic, I had a hell of a frustrating time trying to build a character for Worlds in Peril (a third party Apocalypse Engine superhero game) not too long ago. It's got some neat ideas (mainly where its "Bonds" system is concerned) but holy crap are its playbooks overly specific and poorly designed. Like, I could write quite a long list of popular superheroes that aren't properly buildable usable the Worlds in Peril playbooks or even by building a custom playbook from cherry-picked moves... And when Superman of all people is on that list you've got yourself a problem.

[Anonymouswizard]

Really, because personally I'm not aware of any "average fantasy heartbreakers" that feature such things as Randy Gay OgresTM or cursed swords that forcibly impregnate people with new swords.:smallconfused:

Sorry, by 'very core' I mean the basic idea. I thought we could probably exclude the giant lists of things from the 'very core'.

Now that wrestling move is a more legitimate point.

[LibraryOgre]

Everybody has a favourite roleplaying game such as:d&d(ad&d),Call of chutulu or Gamma world,and and some have a bad roleplaying game that is too complicated,boring or make you angry:smallmad:. My worst roleplaying game has to be Ars magica fourth edition. But what is your worst roleplaying game? I would love to hear your opinion. (Excuse me for my bad english I come from Norway.)

I'm kinda curious as to why Ars Magica is your worst game, myself.

For worst in play? I'd kinda have to lean towards 3.x, though 4e has some strong arguments for it. They gamify character creation in ways I don't enjoy, and get bogged down in too many rules, IME.

[Telwar]

That I've actually played?

I'm going to have to say Amber. It might be good in the hands of a GM who knows and pays attention to the rules (such as they are), but mine...was not. And I'm not a fan of "mother may I?" games, either.

Which is why my second-worst game I've actually played is 5e D&D.

[MeeposFire]

I did a lot of 3e D&D back in the day taking a group from level 1-20 and by the end I had essentially decided I would not DM that edition again. The system is just so much work for so little gain. Every other edition I will DM because they require a lot less work to make the game run well (4e, 5e, AD&D, basic etc all are fine).

As for playing I will play 3e but I will either need some house rules (for instance on eliminating the full attack action or find some way to get full attacks or similar on an attack action) or I will only play certain classes.

[Yuki Akuma]

If "chargen" counts as playing, FATAL - it's the only game that made me cry out 'Oh God why?!' at several chargen steps!

If you're requiring actual roleplaying, then... Synnibarr I suppose? It's way too oldschool for my tastes.

[Rakasta]

I'm kinda curious as to why Ars Magica is your worst game, myself.

For worst in play? I'd kinda have to lean towards 3.x, though 4e has some strong arguments for it. They gamify character creation in ways I don't enjoy, and get bogged down in too many rules, IME.
Its a long story. Will you really know it my good friend?

[Knaight]

Restricting this to games I've actually played, I'd have to go with Torchbearer. I think it's probably a good game, but it requires a dedicated group who all put time into learning the system, and even then will play a bit roughly until there's some system mastery there. I had absolutely the wrong group of people for it, and the game sucked as a result.

With that removed, things like FATAL and Racial Holy War quickly top the list. There's a lot of games I've seen where I've had ample reason to think the people that made it were terrible game designers, and thus avoided them. FATAL and Racial Holy War on the other hand, provide ample reason to think that the people that made it are just terrible people in general. Not that they aren't also terrible game designere.

[Anonymouswizard]

With that removed, things like FATAL and Racial Holy War quickly top the list. There's a lot of games I've seen where I've had ample reason to think the people that made it were terrible game designers, and thus avoided them. FATAL and Racial Holy War on the other hand, provide ample reason to think that the people that made it are just terrible people in general. Not that they aren't also terrible game designere.

Although FATAL is one of my suggestions for those interested in TTRPG design, specifically to show why too many rules is bad. I tend to suggest they look at good rules heavy and rules medium games as well (because I'm not a rules-light fan), but I want to make certain they avoid the more obvious mistakes.

[LibraryOgre]

Its a long story. Will you really know it my good friend?

Sure. PM me if you don't think others will be interested. I've always liked the game, but can see how it wouldn't be someone's favorite.

[Telok]

I can see how people don't enjoy Champions. The character creation can get complex if you don't get the basis for it and understand the powers and the dice rolling isn't well explained. The character building should go "character idea->power effects->mechanics" and simpler is better but that's never quite explained. The dice are just 3d6 under target number, roll ~10d6 for effect, subtract defenses, take the effect. I feel it's a bit like D&D, give the new guy a prebuilt fighter, help them build their first spellcaster, after that they're fine.

My group recently bailed on a Champions game. None of them read the rules or built a character, they just played some pregens I put together. Two typed pages of rules was too much to read but the D&D 3.5 Spell Compendium was considered casual reading. Oy. Plus they're very much locked into the Anonymous Homeless Orphan Murder-HoboHero mode of play, having contacts, dependent NPCs, and codes of conduct was too much for them. They were killing and hospitalizing more people than the villains were.

My personal dislike is D&D 4e. Our group actually had the problems most people only read about, the four hour combat slogs, monsters being so "re-fluffable" that we didn't know or care what we were fighting, nobody being able to track all the +1's and save ends without a gridded whiteboard, having a PC and a monster to change sides during a fight and the crap that spawned from that. By the end of that year I'd read two books in combat between my turns and my turns were still under 30 seconds.

[The_Snark]

Scion. The basic premise - gods and their half-divine children having mythic adventures in the modern world - is fun. The execution, though...

It would not win the label of worst RPG I've played for setting alone, but I do have a few gripes. The authors' grasp of mythology seems a bit shallow, like it's gathered mostly from Wikipedia (or, in the case of one sourcebook, American Gods). The premise is very Greek - gods have lots of bastard children, who grow up to do heroic things - and that doesn't always generalize well with other flavors of mythology. The world suffers from the classic urban fantasy flaw of "magic exists, but it's secret for... some reason... and history basically all happened the same as in the real, magic-less world".

Mechanically, it has my nomination for the worst rules White Wolf has ever written. Like most (all?) of their games, it's based on the Storyteller system; as best as I can tell, this particular iteration is an awkward muddle of oWoD mechanics and early Exalted. The supernatural powers are wildly unbalanced (in both directions); my favorite example is the juxtaposition of a power that gives you infinite ammunition for a scene with one that turns you into a 50-foot metal colossus with massive physical boosts. (To add insult to injury, the former is slightly costlier.)

Combat tends to be either one-sided, an interminable drag, or both at the same time; the game's habit of handing out lots of passive, always-on bonuses does not play well with the d10 system's probability curves, and on top of that the soak rules have been tweaked to make characters more reliably and imperviously tough than any other iteration of the system I've seen. It's very easy to end up in a situation where one party can't hit the other without an improbably good roll. It's also very easy to end up in a situation where one party can't damage the other without an improbably good roll. And if one of your players gets fed up and buys enough Epic Strength/Dexterity/whatever to reliably overcome this problem, they'll steamroll anything which can't match them. This isn't a matter of a few broken abilities (although there are some of those too), these are the basic building blocks you use to make a hero character.

Speaking of which, the game scales absurdly: those passive, always-on bonuses I mentioned scale non-linearly, so that you get increasing returns for focusing on a single thing. Eventually, you reach the point where there's no longer any point to rolling except as a tiebreaker: it's mathematically impossible to beat someone with a higher (equivalent score) than you, or lose to someone with lower. I can only assume the game was never playtested, because these problems become obvious very quickly - the sample PCs are incapable of fighting many of the antagonists statted in the books...

The rules for non-combat situations are all but nonexistent; oh, there are plenty of mental/social Attributes and Skills, but using them boils down to "um, just roll dice and the GM will tell you if you succeed or fail." No subsystems, no suggested difficulties, no advice for the GM on making challenges interesting. This would be fine in a rules-light game, where you only need a quick confict-resolution system, but Scion isn't trying to be that. If you're going to have complex, detailed rules, they need to be interesting, or why bother?

The game is broken in the most literal sense of the word: it doesn't work.

[Anonymouswizard]

Scion. The basic premise - gods and their half-divine children having mythic adventures in the modern world - is fun. The execution, though...

It would not win the label of worst RPG I've played for setting alone, but I do have a few gripes. The authors' grasp of mythology seems a bit shallow, like it's gathered mostly from Wikipedia (or, in the case of one sourcebook, American Gods). The premise is very Greek - gods have lots of bastard children, who grow up to do heroic things - and that doesn't always generalize well with other flavors of mythology. The world suffers from the classic urban fantasy flaw of "magic exists, but it's secret for... some reason... and history basically all happened the same as in the real, magic-less world".

Eh, the game's ambiguous on the 'mystic stuff is secret' part. Partially because the setting assumes that all this heroing started fairly recently.

Also, due to Fatebinding it's going to be a world where most of the population know. It depends on how you see it working, but I see it as pushing Scions towards archetypal stories in intent. So say you have 100 Scions in London. After a few months each is going to have several Fatebound mortals, some lovers, some enemies, some allies, some rivals, maybe a reporter or two on their tail, and Bob, the homeless guy who isn't fatebound to anyone but is in the know.

I agree that this all should have been specified, but the number of Scions receiving visitations shot up recently.


Mechanically, it has my nomination for the worst rules White Wolf has ever written. Like most (all?) of their games, it's based on the Storyteller system; as best as I can tell, this particular iteration is an awkward muddle of oWoD mechanics and early Exalted. The supernatural powers are wildly unbalanced (in both directions); my favorite example is the juxtaposition of a power that gives you infinite ammunition for a scene with one that turns you into a 50-foot metal colossus with massive physical boosts. (To add insult to injury, the former is slightly costlier.)

Mainly agree here, except the base mechanical system is much nicer than oWoD. It's all the add ons (literally all of them).


Combat tends to be either one-sided, an interminable drag, or both at the same time; the game's habit of handing out lots of passive, always-on bonuses does not play well with the d10 system's probability curves, and on top of that the soak rules have been tweaked to make characters more reliably and imperviously tough than any other iteration of the system I've seen. It's very easy to end up in a situation where one party can't hit the other without an improbably good roll. It's also very easy to end up in a situation where one party can't damage the other without an improbably good roll. And if one of your players gets fed up and buys enough Epic Strength/Dexterity/whatever to reliably overcome this problem, they'll steamroll anything which can't match them. This isn't a matter of a few broken abilities (although there are some of those too), these are the basic building blocks you use to make a hero character.

Speaking of which, the game scales absurdly: those passive, always-on bonuses I mentioned scale non-linearly, so that you get increasing returns for focusing on a single thing. Eventually, you reach the point where there's no longer any point to rolling except as a tiebreaker: it's mathematically impossible to beat someone with a higher (equivalent score) than you, or lose to someone with lower. I can only assume the game was never playtested, because these problems become obvious very quickly - the sample PCs are incapable of fighting many of the antagonists statted in the books...

This is what I mean by every add-on is horrible. For powers, look at Jotunblut (basically worthless after the first few dots, and even those are questionable), then look at Arte (very useful, but not the best) and something like Heku (which I love) or the Loa PSP. No thought into balancing at all.

The scaling is horrid, I'll give you that. Firearms fall behind at higher Legend (also, seriously, Donner didn't ask Thor if he could reforge this into a useful form), and even then combat is decided mainly by 'who can nab the most Epic Dexterity'. Which sadly could be fixed if Epics were just +1 bonus success, or even just getting rid of them entirely.


The rules for non-combat situations are all but nonexistent; oh, there are plenty of mental/social Attributes and Skills, but using them boils down to "um, just roll dice and the GM will tell you if you succeed or fail." No subsystems, no suggested difficulties, no advice for the GM on making challenges interesting. This would be fine in a rules-light game, where you only need a quick confict-resolution system, but Scion isn't trying to be that. If you're going to have complex, detailed rules, they need to be interesting, or why bother?

Yeah, this is just WW not realising they were making a combat game, just generally poor form.


The game is broken in the most literal sense of the word: it doesn't work.

Okay, not denying this. Das Spiele ist kaput. (Excuse my awful German). That's why I have various houserules (in fact, I should make my own game, but I'm short on blackjack and hookers).

[Scots Dragon]

Probably Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition for reasons both gameplay related and not.

I won't go into detail as to why because, y'know, edition wars. On the other hand 5th edition is amazing and I've been able to forgive WizBro for a lot simply due to how much they managed to fix.

[sktarq]

Scion. The basic premise - gods and their half-divine children having mythic adventures in the modern world - is fun. The execution, though.......

The game is broken in the most literal sense of the word: it doesn't work.

This...or Mage...Scion just doesn't work and mage just doesn't work for me. Both are ridiculously twisted it totally different ways.
Scion just had so many logical holes as to not hold up any weight.

and oWoD Mage....casting self created equivalencies is just so so so broken. 1-2 dots in a half dozen things (the cheep way to buy magic due to the logarithmic cost system) and then proper application of logic made the world a chew toy.

[Rakasta]

Sure. PM me if you don't think others will be interested. I've always liked the game, but can see how it wouldn't be someone's favorite.
I will maybe make a post about it there you will know the answer. I must first you know dig deep to find the memories. But thanks that you ask about it see you when that post comes out friend:smallsmile::smallbiggrin:

[Raimun]

The worst RPGs I've played? Hmm, I guess it's a close competition between the following:

1) Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium). I'm kind of fed up with anything related to Cthulhu and somehow the system doesn't do any favors to the game. And I do like other Chaosium games that use a similar system. However, they generally have more interesting settings and more fun things to do.

2) Numenera. People hailed this as revolutionary and innovative but in the end it was a total let down. It's just your basic dungeon crawler rpg, what with its class selection of fighter, rogue and wizard and D&D-style equipment lists, skills, special abilities and... everything. The only difference is that magic is actually technology. And no character can carry more than two or three scrolls/potions.

Basic system is D&D-style D20, except PCs are all incompetent in attacks, ability checks, skills, etc.. If a PC succeeds at anything, except walking across the room, it's always a small miracle. Until that happens people just fall off cliffs, fail to impress NPCs and miss against anything with a pulse and/or capability to move. It's possible to use Effort to improve the chances to succeed but this has a two critical weaknesses which are not that fun. One, using Effort is always effectively out of your "hit points". Two, it doesn't really improve your chances that much.

What this means is that if a frail Nano (ie. wizard) with Might (ie. Str) 4 and a musclebound Glaive (ie. fighter) with Might 20 were to arm wrestle and neither used any Effort, both would have equal chances to succeed. If the Fighter-I mean, Glaive-, used Effort to raise his chances to win, he would later die easily to battle damage. If the wiz-I mean, Nano-, used effort as well, the two would again have equal chances to succeed.

I should mention that without skill training, you just roll D20 and try to beat a DC with the raw roll. Skill training improves your chances as much as using Effort, so not very much. Additionally, if you are trained in three skills, you can consider yourself the party's skill monkey. Starting characters can't be trained in attacking. Having high Ability Scores does nothing to your basic chances of success, they just give you more "hit points" to sacrifice.

In a nutshell, a skill system that's based on total incompetence and sacrificing hit points is not fun.

Meanwhile, all NPCs auto-hit during combat, because the DM doesn't roll any dice in the game. The system just doesn't make any sense to me and the rules feel more arbitrary than those found in most board games.

To be fair, the system does have a few small and nifty ideas but none of them are integral to the basic system and all of them could be replicated and added to any other game system.

3) Mage: The [can't remember]-ing. I ended up making an useless character and I suppose the setting felt rather meh to me. Paradox (ie. "don't do really cool magic"-rule) was no fun and felt arbitrary. Probably made up as a kneejerk reaction to someone finding once a too strong spell combo. I'd still be keen to try out other White Wolf stuff but I'm in no hurry.

The worst RPGs I've heard of? Anything with a jenga tower instead of dice. That's just... I don't even know. :smallconfused:
Edit: Oh, and FATAL too but that should go without saying.

[Fumble Jack]

Playing I'd have to say 3.5 D&D, I've never had a good game as a player in that system. As a Dm I had a much better time.

[Raimun]

Playing I'd have to say 3.5 D&D, I've never had a good game as a player in that system. As a Dm I had a much better time.

It can be pretty fun when you are playing a 10+ level full caster. That is, at least for you and any other full casters in the party.

The possibilities are staggering. And there's no way to play a caster like that in video games. Even most spellcasting in films and tv-series pale in comparison. Most magic elsewhere is usually nothing but firebolts and occasional mystic shield.

That said, 3.X is a kind of complex rules set. The only way to remedy that is to know four or more people, who are just as crazy as you and have played the game about as long as you have. That amount of knowledge speeds up the game considerably.

[Digitalelf]

It can be pretty fun when you are playing a 10+ level full caster. That is, at least for you and any other full casters in the party.

The possibilities are staggering.

It was these insane levels of power that eventually turned me away from 3rd edition and PF, and why I returned to playing 2nd edition AD&D (there were other reasons, but the inflated level of power played a HUGE part in that decision).

I get that some people love that style of play; it's just not for me or my groups...

[/Shrug]

[Jay R]

The original Arduin Grimoire was basically original D&D with the serial numbers filed off, and with all its flaws magnified and put center stage.

[Morty]

Of the systems I've actually played, D&D 3e is definitely up there. It's a complete and utter mess that fails at basically everything it sets out to do, and throws arbitrary stumbling blocks the players' way. There are RPGs which are even more dysfunctional, but fortunately I haven't played them - they tend to be rather niche, whereas D&D 3e is anything but.

[Elderand]

Monsterhearts.
We all know every system out there tiptoes around the whole using abilities against other players to influence roleplay, frequently simply saying don't or these rules are for interacting with NPC only and if you want to convince a fellow player you should talk to him rather than roll for diplomacy or such.
Why? Because your character is your character. You decide on personality and actions during the game. And we all get annoyed when a DM simply tell you "your character wouldn't do this".

So why does monsterhearts pisses me off so much? Because in that game a very significant portion of your character is actually decided by other players. And the game punishes you for not going along with what other people want your character to be like. What if I don't want a brooding vampire but another player does? Well I'm screwed, sure I can avoid brooding but if I do I won't get as much XP as other people.

Monsterhearts is peer pressure: the game. And I loath it.

[Fri]

For me it's Exalted, at least 2nd Ed since it's the one I played.

Good premise, really obnoxious and obtuse implementation.

[neonchameleon]

The worst RPG I've played? Werewolf: the Forsaken. Bad Storyteller, no biscuit. You do not saddle the party with three DMPCs - one for each of the three PC's schticks but better. And then deliberately quashing all the PC plans ever so the NPCs could do it all.

The worst I've tried playing - I can't remember its name. But when it takes 20 minutes to resolve where the first bullet goes (right down to how much wall it penetrated to work out if it hit) we abandoned any attempt at a playtest. There are a lot of RPGs out there that are simply non-functional.

The worst I've had fun playing: Middle Earth Role Playing. MERP is a decent gritty swords and sorcery system (it's essentially Rolemaster Lite - something that vastly improves Chartmaster). It's just it has critical tables with results like "Skeleton liquified. Use a spatula." Nothing wrong with that sort of black humour - but it isn't Tolkein.


The worst RPGs I've heard of? Anything with a jenga tower instead of dice. That's just... I don't even know. :smallconfused:

That would be Dread - there's a very sub-par game of it on Tabletop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0loSZFsyoQ), and I strongly recommend it for horror one-shots. It's the tensest horror game I know.


Monsterhearts.
We all know every system out there tiptoes around the whole using abilities against other players to influence roleplay, frequently simply saying don't or these rules are for interacting with NPC only and if you want to convince a fellow player you should talk to him rather than roll for diplomacy or such.
Why? Because your character is your character. You decide on personality and actions during the game. And we all get annoyed when a DM simply tell you "your character wouldn't do this".

So why does monsterhearts pisses me off so much? Because in that game a very significant portion of your character is actually decided by other players. And the game punishes you for not going along with what other people want your character to be like. What if I don't want a brooding vampire but another player does? Well I'm screwed, sure I can avoid brooding but if I do I won't get as much XP as other people.

Monsterhearts is peer pressure: the game. And I loath it.

You loathe a game about playing teenagers that encourages peer pressure to be effective? While being very careful to make sure that you never have to bow to it if you decide not to? To me that sort of stuff makes it much more immediate and immersive and aligns my thought processes far more with the character.

And it really is never "Your character wouldn't do this". It's always "There's a cookie in it for showing the side of you others think is the most interesting or doing what they want". Also not every system avoids using social mechanics against other PCs (I can think of a lot of RPGs with no such hard restriction). It's simply that most RPGs with social mechanics make them god mode abilities that are no fun to be on the receiving end of and then patch the system by saying "We know this makes little sense - so you don't do it to other PCs".

[hamlet]

The original Arduin Grimoire was basically original D&D with the serial numbers filed off, and with all its flaws magnified and put center stage.

Granted, the Grimoire books worked better if you used them as extra rules you could add to a BASIC game rather than a whole game.

However, once you get past the learning curve and just "go with it," the Compleat Arduin (yes, spelled correctly there) was really quite fun. A little badly edited, but good fun at the table. Requires a lot of work by the DM, though.

Can't say great things about Arduin Eternal, though. Not terribly wonderful, but so much unrealized promise.

[Elderand]

You loathe a game about playing teenagers that encourages peer pressure to be effective? While being very careful to make sure that you never have to bow to it if you decide not to? To me that sort of stuff makes it much more immediate and immersive and aligns my thought processes far more with the character.

And it really is never "Your character wouldn't do this". It's always "There's a cookie in it for showing the side of you others think is the most interesting or doing what they want". Also not every system avoids using social mechanics against other PCs (I can think of a lot of RPGs with no such hard restriction). It's simply that most RPGs with social mechanics make them god mode abilities that are no fun to be on the receiving end of and then patch the system by saying "We know this makes little sense - so you don't do it to other PCs".

I loathe a game that use peer pressure on other players. Teenager and peer pressure as element of a story happening in game with the character is one thing. Peer pressure on a real person is not.

But hey, I guess if we came up with a game entirely about sword fighting in an arena between characters, it would be great if the game encouraged you to stab the real person you play with to encourage immersion.

[flond]

I loathe a game that use peer pressure on other players. Teenager and peer pressure as element of a story happening in game with the character is one thing. Peer pressure on a real person is not.

But hey, I guess if we came up with a game entirely about sword fighting in an arena between characters, it would be great if the game encouraged you to stab the real person you play with to encourage immersion.

If it's with a safe foam weapon, sure :D

But more seriously, to be more constructive...I feel like Monsterhearts encourages a little (or rather a LOT) less character identification than some games, which is traded for more ability to influence the character of others. PCs are more a shared resource than they are in some games, and so it's less "peer pressure" and more "everyone is a little bit the group's property." even more so than in DnD's "We already have a thief dude, please don't make a thief."

(But if it's not your bag it's not your bag. And...while some PbTA games might be for you, you may also wanna avoid Apocalypse world, as it uses the same XP mechanics.)

As for my worst game. Probably All Flesh Must Be Eaten. I know everyone else loves it, but for me the system just feels like "We made a flavorless chip! It doesn't fight the dip!"

[Anonymouswizard]

As for my worst game. Probably All Flesh Must Be Eaten. I know everyone else loves it, but for me the system just feels like "We made a flavorless chip! It doesn't fight the dip!"

I think this is the problem of Unisystem, in that it's generic, but it doesn't have any of the distinguishing marks of something like GURPS or Savage Worlds and burdened with an overly specific skill list (on the other hand Cinematic Unisystem feels like Unisystem with a shower and a clear direction). It also hits the worst parts of d20 for me.

But my main annoyance is the horrific amount of combat focus specifically in AFMBE. I took a character who was supposed to be a support dude, selected some interesting drawbacks, and then found I had about 1/10 of the available qualities as suitable to my character concept.

So you aren't alone in disliking AFMBE.

[LordFluffy]

Imagine, sadly.

Imagine had a lot of cool ideas that mirror things they ended up doing in D&D 3x, but many more that just never should have been. Example:

To hit roll which was put on a bullseye chart over a body part to see what body part you actually hit, followed by a damage roll that was then modified by comparing damage type to armor type. Or, you could do a called shot to the neck and kill someone with almost the same chance of success.

Really detailed game master's guide, though.

[Morty]

The worst I've had fun playing: Middle Earth Role Playing. MERP is a decent gritty swords and sorcery system (it's essentially Rolemaster Lite - something that vastly improves Chartmaster). It's just it has critical tables with results like "Skeleton liquified. Use a spatula." Nothing wrong with that sort of black humour - but it isn't Tolkien.

I had some brief contact with the system years back, and I think "decent low-fantasy, bad representation of anything Tolkien wrote" might be a fair summation of it.

[obryn]

I had some brief contact with the system years back, and I think "decent low-fantasy, bad representation of anything Tolkien wrote" might be a fair summation of it.
Yeah, I think that's totally fair. I ran it when it was 'current' and I was probably 12.

Personally, I will always love MERP for the maps, if for nothing else. (I also confess that adult-me really enjoys many of ICE's expansions to the setting to make it more easily gameable. Like expanding the map into complete weirdness, using a basically ignored time period, etc.) They did their homework, they did. And they weren't afraid to go way off-canon.

And much like WEG's Star Wars RPG materials became canon for Star Wars, some of ICE's inventions - most notably the seven other Ringwraiths' names - have worked their way into semi-canon.


I loathe a game that use peer pressure on other players. Teenager and peer pressure as element of a story happening in game with the character is one thing. Peer pressure on a real person is not.

But hey, I guess if we came up with a game entirely about sword fighting in an arena between characters, it would be great if the game encouraged you to stab the real person you play with to encourage immersion.
I think it's a neat exercise in reward systems. I love it when an RPG finds a creative way to reward the player for doing stuff their character would do and/or find rewarding. XP-for-GP is the oldest example I can think of. Fate's Aspects are another good example.

[Elderand]

I think it's a neat exercise in reward systems. I love it when an RPG finds a creative way to reward the player for doing stuff their character would do and/or find rewarding. XP-for-GP is the oldest example I can think of. Fate's Aspects are another good example.

Except it's not a reward for what your character would do. It's a stick forcing you to obey what other people want your character to do. It baffles me that the same people who would be the first to cry foul whenever a story of a DM taking control of the character and say "no your character wouldn't do that" also choose to defend this system. And yes, it's a stick, not a reward. It's not getting a cookie for doing a good job, it's having all food witheld until you break down and do as you're told.

[Raimun]

That would be Dread - there's a very sub-par game of it on Tabletop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0loSZFsyoQ), and I strongly recommend it for horror one-shots. It's the tensest horror game I know.


"Ooh! Will the tower fall? Or not? The horror!"

That kind of sounds like a cheap gimmick.

... And everyone knows all the good games have dice.

[flond]

Except it's not a reward for what your character would do. It's a stick forcing you to obey what other people want your character to do. It baffles me that the same people who would be the first to cry foul whenever a story of a DM taking control of the character and say "no your character wouldn't do that" also choose to defend this system. And yes, it's a stick, not a reward. It's not getting a cookie for doing a good job, it's having all food witheld until you break down and do as you're told.

Well several things.

1. It's two highlighted stats. While some of this can be gamed, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion you're going to be rolling all of those stats at some point during the game (baring stat substitution weirdness) (Especially as it's a max of one XP per stat/move, per scene. That's a pretty sharp limiter)

2. Experince...isn't that huge a deal in MH. It's nice yes, and you want a fairly solid spread. But this isn't dnd. People will advance at different rates and that's mostly fine.

3. It's equal. It's not just the GM doing things to you. You generally will get a say about someone else's PCs too. You're trading exclusive control over your PC for the ability to influence others.

4. It's upfront and you know (or should know) what you're getting into at start of game. I'm willing to get into all sorts of coercive lose control of your PC shennanigans if I know they're in the game's DNA.

[neonchameleon]

But more seriously, to be more constructive...I feel like Monsterhearts encourages a little (or rather a LOT) less character identification than some games, which is traded for more ability to influence the character of others. PCs are more a shared resource than they are in some games, and so it's less "peer pressure" and more "everyone is a little bit the group's property." even more so than in DnD's "We already have a thief dude, please don't make a thief."

I actually find the complete opposite - that Monsterhearts is one game where I pick up a lot of bleed. I pick up a lot of what my character is feeling coming back through roleplaying to influence me personally in a way it simply doesn't in D&D.


Except it's not a reward for what your character would do. It's a stick forcing you to obey what other people want your character to do.

"If you do something like this in the way you interpret it your character gets a reward. If you don't you don't and there are no negative consequences." Some stick.

[kyoryu]

D&D 3.x/PF: Emphasizes all of the things I like least in roleplaying games. Anything I like that it does well, I can think of another game that does that thing better (for me) while avoiding the things I dislike. It's in many ways my anti-game.

Burning Wheel: It's this game where I like so many bits of it, but every time I've tried it the game has utterly failed to click and end up with an enjoyable experience.

These aren't necessarily bad games, mind you. Just bad games *for me*.

[The_Snark]

It baffles me that the same people who would be the first to cry foul whenever a story of a DM taking control of the character and say "no your character wouldn't do that" also choose to defend this system.

4. It's upfront and you know (or should know) what you're getting into at start of game. I'm willing to get into all sorts of coercive lose control of your PC shennanigans if I know they're in the game's DNA.

This is the key point, I think. Not having full control over your character is part of the genre - you're playing teenage werewolves/vampires/whatever, and the game's deliberately trying to evoke a sense of not being fully in control. Monsterhearts is very up front about the fact that the game is likely to touch on triggery subjects, including but not limited to violence, peer pressure, and teenage sexuality; the players are supposed to go over their comfort zones and preferences before playing. If you strongly object to not having full control over your character, that should probably come up in this discussion.

Most of the time, when a DM takes control of your character they are violating the implied contract of the game: players get to control their characters, GM controls everything else. Monsterhearts explicitly lays out a different contract. If you don't like that, it probably isn't the game for you.

(It isn't my cup of tea, either; I have no desire to play out torrid teenage drama/romance. But I don't think it's a bad game, just that it's designed for people with very different tastes.)

[Pluto!]

Cortex (older versions, anyway) - it's like a variant of Savage Worlds, but with the gimmick that the numbers don't work.

Focused fire and cooperative noncombat actions between players is generally auto-success, and independent action is generally auto-failure, regardless of the action, regardless of character skill

I ran a prolonged time travel campaign with it, and once we as a group picked up on a few of those quirks, we started a long grind of shifting houserules to try to keep the system workable (so many of its basic ideas are so simple and so attractive) and honestly made life much more difficult for ourselves than if we'd just shifted to another familiar ruleset early.

[tensai_oni]

I will throw my hat into the ring. This is only for games I actually played of course.
Though I actually enjoyed my time playing a game using all those systems. But it does not mean I do not see their faults.

#3 - Risus

It's a funny little rules lite thing working on a cute concept. The problem is, it's too rules lite. Gameplay boils down to "always try to use your highest rated cliche somehow" and there is no incentive to use lower rated ones.

Despite being so light, the mechanics feel like they get in the way. I'd rather play freeform.

#2 - Bliss Stage

Another system where the mechanics are working against it. Each mission objective is resolved with only a single dice roll, unless you stall in which case you have to roll again. But the more you roll the more stress and bliss you accumulate, so there is no incentive to do anything on a mission except "make sure I win the objective first, protect everything else as available".

On the other hand split between mission time and "downtime" is a good idea, but there are other RPGs that do it better like Chris Perrin's Mecha RPG, which actually I suggest running with a homebrew setting if you really want a game with Bliss Stage fluff. But that fluff has another problem...

To put things bluntly, it's creepy. "Your giant robot is powered by strength of your relationships" is interesting. "And by relationships we mean underage sex", not so much.

#1 - Exalted

The fluff is an incoherent mess: a mix of actually good ideas, typical White Wolf edge, and fake "anime" flavor that makes you think all contact the writer had with anime was watching Voltron as a kid and reading a crappy late 90s "how to draw manga" textbook. The game is a gigantic bloat, it feels like you need to dig through a dozen splats just to know more or less what you can play and how is the setting and its history like - that's as a player. If you want to be the ST, Unconquered Sun help you. And the less said about the horrible mechanics the better.

Also every edition seems to only make things worse. If it fixes shortcomings in one area, many more appear in others.

[Philistine]

Palladium Rifts is certainly up there - what a mess. And Star Wars d20 (with or without the RCR) was downright painful to play.

But I have to go with D&D 3E for top honors: it may be slightly more playable than the above, but OTOH it's made up of the skin from one game blatantly copy-pasted onto the skeleton from another, completely different game, with reckless disregard for how (or indeed whether) the two would work together. And that degree of arrogant incompetence deserves to be rewarded appropriately. And by "appropriately," I do mean "with public floggings."

[MeeposFire]

Palladium Rifts is certainly up there - what a mess. And Star Wars d20 (with or without the RCR) was downright painful to play.

But I have to go with D&D 3E for top honors: it may be slightly more playable than the above, but OTOH it's made up of the skin from one game blatantly copy-pasted onto the skeleton from another, completely different game, with reckless disregard for how (or indeed whether) the two would work together. And that degree of arrogant incompetence deserves to be rewarded appropriately. And by "appropriately," I do mean "with public floggings."

Honestly Star Wars d20 is really just a variant of 3e D&D so really it seems that you get double billing there.

[unbeliever536]

The worst RPGs I've heard of? Anything with a jenga tower instead of dice. That's just... I don't even know. :smallconfused:


Possibly the best rpg I ever played: you are a spy infiltrating the Kremlin. Describe your action, then roll 1d12. Remove that many blocks from the central Jenga tower. If it falls, your action does not succeed.

[Faily]

Never manage to put these in a specific order:

Dogs in the Vineyard - was the first one that came to mind, so I guess it's number 1. Just hated this game and how it forced its set ways down my throat, leaving almost no room for engaging roleplay or interesting developments.

Warhammer Fantasy - while it was amusing to randomly roll starting class and such, I really disliked how it was practically impossible to branch out and learn new things. The system had some interesting tidbits (like the Luck Points), but it would take a lot of convincing to make me play this again.

[BlueBiscuit]

Worst game that I've read: Mage the Ascension, just slightly coming out ahead of Werewolf the Apocalypse, by virtue of it's absolutely ridiculous base premise (consensual reality) and character splats that are yawn-inducing at best (Technocracy and Traditions both).

Worst game I've played: Scion. As others have said the base setting hook is nice, but the mechanics are mostly garbage. It didn't help my attempt at running it the fact that one of the players was actively trying to screw up the campaign. So yeah, worst gaming experience so far.

[raygun goth]

Worst game that I've read: Mage the Ascension, just slightly coming out ahead of Werewolf the Apocalypse, by virtue of it's absolutely ridiculous base premise (consensual reality) and character splats that are yawn-inducing at best (Technocracy and Traditions both)

I love the Mokolé from Werewolf.

But I ran Mage and Werewolf both for almost ten years.

I can tell you that there is a worse hell than simply reading those books.

[Faily]

Worst game I've played: Scion. As others have said the base setting hook is nice, but the mechanics are mostly garbage. It didn't help my attempt at running it the fact that one of the players was actively trying to screw up the campaign. So yeah, worst gaming experience so far.

I played Scion over MSN with friends (when MSN was still a thing :smalltongue: ) some years ago and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Got all the way into Demigod-level. We had a nice spread of characters too; scion of Tezcatlipoca, scion of Aengus, scion of Hel, scion of Hermes, scion of Legba, scion of the Morrigan, and a scion of one of the Hindu gods... damn, I just can't remember which one it was! Could be a good group though, hence why we had little trouble with it, but some of the dislike towards it surprises me a little. :smallsmile:

[LibraryOgre]

Worst game that I've read: Mage the Ascension, just slightly coming out ahead of Werewolf the Apocalypse, by virtue of it's absolutely ridiculous base premise (consensual reality) and character splats that are yawn-inducing at best (Technocracy and Traditions both).

The older I've gotten, the more I've looked at Mage and said "...why am I not with the Technocracy, again?"

[Kurald Galain]

I hated Alternity. That 2nd edition Sci-Fi game TSR put out? Ugh I really hated it. I liked the world but there where just a million little things that I could stand in the system.
Seconded.

Speaking of overly complicated White Wolf games, I'll have to add Aberrant as a game with a way-too-complicated stats and powers system. I haven't played Scion but I hear the two are related.

And then, there's Nephilim. I bought the rulebook at a convention at some point because it looked promising. The premise is that the PCs (and their main antagonists) are some kind of immortal spirit that reincarnates every couple hundred years, meaning that you've basically lived through (and probably fought in) many major events in history. The problem is that the system requires you to build your character on all of them; that is, pick a historical event every century since the Roman Empire, write a backstory for it, and get skill points and other character abilities depending on that. And that all before you begin playing, and it has to be intertwined with the other PCs and major NPCs. This serves to make the game utterly unplayable.

[obryn]

And then, there's Nephilim. I bought the rulebook at a convention at some point because it looked promising. The premise is that the PCs (and their main antagonists) are some kind of immortal spirit that reincarnates every couple hundred years, meaning that you've basically lived through (and probably fought in) many major events in history. The problem is that the system requires you to build your character on all of them; that is, pick a historical event every century since the Roman Empire, write a backstory for it, and get skill points and other character abilities depending on that. And that all before you begin playing, and it has to be intertwined with the other PCs and major NPCs. This serves to make the game utterly unplayable.
That is so 90's RPG.

[Morty]

Yeah, I think that's totally fair. I ran it when it was 'current' and I was probably 12.

Personally, I will always love MERP for the maps, if for nothing else. (I also confess that adult-me really enjoys many of ICE's expansions to the setting to make it more easily gameable. Like expanding the map into complete weirdness, using a basically ignored time period, etc.) They did their homework, they did. And they weren't afraid to go way off-canon.

And much like WEG's Star Wars RPG materials became canon for Star Wars, some of ICE's inventions - most notably the seven other Ringwraiths' names - have worked their way into semi-canon.

Yes, I did like that it covered areas and time periods that Tolkien's own materials mostly skimmed over - the Northern Kingdom, in the case of my short-lived game. A big sticking point, as I remember, is the way magic works - which is appropriate for a low-fantasy sword 'n' sorcery kind of setting, but certainly not Middle-Earth. I wouldn't mind playing the game again, come to think of it.

[obryn]

Yes, I did like that it covered areas and time periods that Tolkien's own materials mostly skimmed over - the Northern Kingdom, in the case of my short-lived game. A big sticking point, as I remember, is the way magic works - which is appropriate for a low-fantasy sword 'n' sorcery kind of setting, but certainly not Middle-Earth. I wouldn't mind playing the game again, come to think of it.
Oh, you'll get absolutely no argument from me on that count. It's a dramatic - nearly legendary - mismatch of system and setting. It's pretty much my go-to example when I'm trying to explain the concept. :smallsmile:

[hamlet]

Does nobody really like Alternity? Am I the only one?

Wow.

[Thrawn4]

And then, there's Nephilim.
Yessss.... I haven't touched it in years, but I remember horribly complex mechanics, some flaws during character creation and a setting that, beyond the basic premise, is so poor that I have no idea what to do with it.

[Philistine]

Honestly Star Wars d20 is really just a variant of 3e D&D so really it seems that you get double billing there.

I don't think that's true. SWd20 seems to have been primarily derived from d20 Modern (you can see the bones of that system poking through in a lot of places), and was published before D&D 3.0. And while SWd20's problems are certainly similar to D&D3E, I feel they're sufficiently distinct as to merit separate consideration. In particular, WotC managed to invent very different disfunctionalities for the magic systems of the two games.

[Malifice]

The World of Synnibarr owns this thread.

https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_4762.phtml


Contrary to my expectations, the World of Synnibarr did not suck all of the flesh off of my face, leaving behind only a screaming skull. It did not rape my other gaming products, leaving them pregnant with “neomods”, McCracken-speak for something as simple as a gaming module. It did not shoot twin streams of hydrochloric acid into my eyes, nor did it squat on my chest and stare at me when I was trying to sleep.

But it God-Damn well should have, because any of the above would have been better than actually trying to review this bastard.

[Scots Dragon]

I don't think that's true. SWd20 seems to have been primarily derived from d20 Modern (you can see the bones of that system poking through in a lot of places), and was published before D&D 3.0. And while SWd20's problems are certainly similar to D&D3E, I feel they're sufficiently distinct as to merit separate consideration. In particular, WotC managed to invent very different disfunctionalities for the magic systems of the two games.

Except, d20 Modern was released in 2002, at least a couple of years after both games.

The original Star Wars d20 core rulebook was released in November 2000, and the Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 Player's Handbook was released at least three months earlier.

[MeeposFire]

I don't think that's true. SWd20 seems to have been primarily derived from d20 Modern (you can see the bones of that system poking through in a lot of places), and was published before D&D 3.0. And while SWd20's problems are certainly similar to D&D3E, I feel they're sufficiently distinct as to merit separate consideration. In particular, WotC managed to invent very different disfunctionalities for the magic systems of the two games.

D20 modern is based off the system that they developed to make D&D 3e. They were all being developed from the same source which was initially for D&D but was expanded into other games. In fact from what I can see d20 modern came out 2 years after 3e D&D. Even games like Star Wars Saga with their variations in the formula are still variations of the original rules.

Clearly they are the same base system. Yes certain things are unique to each version of the rules but essentially many of the problems the system has carries over to each one. For instance unless Modern is different in this regard melee characters being screwed between needing to move and needing full attack actions. That is one annoying thing that seems to persist in every version and variant of the 3e D&D rules set even ones like Star Wars Saga which is a bit different than some other versions of the d20 rules.

[Suteinu]

I don't know about worst system, exactly, but my worst experience with a system was the one time I played Rifts. I've always enjoyed creating characters for Paladium's TMNT and After the Bomb, even played it on a few occasions with my brothers, but Rifts was a different beast somehow. I spent 2 hrs making a character, an additional 2 hrs waiting on everyone else, and played 3 hrs (2 of which were 1 combat encounter.) The story was OK, the players were all great, but the system draaaaaaaaaaaaged! I was glad when my character died, though I did not have him die on purpose. I spent the rest of the time browsing the Rifts books, pretending to build another character.

[nyjastul69]

I don't really have a worst system. Every system I've ever played has risen or fallen based upon those playing the game, not the system. The worst experience I've had gaming comes from D&D 4e though. That doesn't necessarily speak to the system however. Also, I can't say I've had the misfortune to read FATAL or RaHoWa. I'll bet with the right group, those could work too. Wait... I'm wrong about the last bit aren't I?

[Talakeal]

I actually find the complete opposite - that Monsterhearts is one game where I pick up a lot of bleed. I pick up a lot of what my character is feeling coming back through roleplaying to influence me personally in a way it simply doesn't in D&D.



"If you do something like this in the way you interpret it your character gets a reward. If you don't you don't and there are no negative consequences." Some stick.

Most of the time the difference between punishment and withholding reward is purely one of semantics. They might feel different psychologically, but most people are smart enough to realize that "If you are bad you go to bed without supper" and "If you are good I will give you something to eat" mean exactly the same thing.

[Anonymouswizard]

Also, I can't say I've had the misfortune to read FATAL or RaHoWa. I'll bet with the right group, those could work too. Wait... I'm wrong about the last bit aren't I?

Not sure about RaHoWa, but the right group could make FATAL work. You'd want electronic dice to make all the 10d100/2 rolls (I believe it tutorials originally 4d100/2) simple. Throw out most of the 900 page rulebook until it becomes relevant. You'd need a really good GM, but it could be done.

[themaque]

Okay, not denying this. Das Spiele ist kaput. (Excuse my awful German). That's why I have various houserules (in fact, I should make my own game, but I'm short on blackjack and hookers).

If you make a variant of SCION that WORKS please let me know.

I didn't list it but I really want to because it so disappointed me. I briefly looked at the books and the concept and thought "This is amazing! I have so many stories I want to tell!" quickly bought the 3 main books and set down to read them cover to cover.

And then realized I didn't have the RPG they sold me. It was a re-skinned ABERANT game with LESS world building. How the heck does everything stay secret if I can throw a car at some guys head on the evening news? Why isn't.. but... and then... Look at this power... but it cost MORE than .... but ... GRAAAGH!

I still have my books, I still look at them longingly because they had parts I really liked, but I just don't have the time or energy to MAKE them work.


Speaking of overly complicated White Wolf games, I'll have to add Aberrant as a game with a way-to-complicated stats and powers system. I haven't played Scion but I hear the two are related.
.

Yes the rules are very similar but different world building.


The World of Synnibarr owns this thread.

https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_4762.phtml

I have that game. Reading it is like a trip of insanity. Just the ABOUT THE AUTHOR is worth the time it takes to find online alone. I threaten to run this with friends but no one has taken me up on the offer/challenge.

I can't hate it even though it's an obvious train wreck BECAUSE it's an obvious train wreck. To me, the worst games are ones that not only don't work but disappoint you for it. They have something GREAT and there and it makes all the horribleness around it all the more obvious.


As far as MAGE, YMMV but I've had AMAZING Storytellers for that game before and some of my all time favorite gaming experiences where played using MAGE. I love that game.

[Gamgee]

It's a good system by far but compared to all the others I just didn't like the system the WoD games use both old and new. I'm not saying its bad, but i haven't played or hosted any bad RPG's. It's just my least favorite.

[Yuki Akuma]

World of Synnibarr is the type of bad RPG that is fun to play with friends who know enough about RPGs to realise it's a trainwreck.


Not sure about RaHoWa, but the right group could make FATAL work. You'd want electronic dice to make all the 10d100/2 rolls (I believe it tutorials originally 4d100/2) simple. Throw out most of the 900 page rulebook until it becomes relevant. You'd need a really good GM, but it could be done.

"FATAL works if you throw out most of it!"

[Anonymouswizard]

"FATAL works if you throw out most of it!"

Eh, I was intending more of a 'just use the index if it becomes relevant'. The problem with FATAL is that, under the horrible game, there's merely a bad fantasy heartbreaker trying to get out. I think you can safely play the game with less than half of the rulebook anyway, I can't remember how long the list of random magic items is.

Although I might only say that because I have a poor memory for specifics and will check the book for rules I already know in the first few weeks of a campaign, just to be certain (and also fail to find the grappling rules in Shadowrun 5e, that book's a pain compared to the SR3 rulebook).

[Knaight]

Eh, I was intending more of a 'just use the index if it becomes relevant'. The problem with FATAL is that, under the horrible game, there's merely a bad fantasy heartbreaker trying to get out. I think you can safely play the game with less than half of the rulebook anyway, I can't remember how long the list of random magic items is.


There's a lot of scraping involved to get to the fantasy heartbreaker part. You have to systematically remove everything about it that makes it creepy as hell (the rape fascination, the pages of racist caricature armors, "retard strength"), chip away at the bizarre manifesto embedded in it, and then after you've done all that there's still heavy mechanics related cleanup.

[johnbragg]

I looked up RaHoWa a few weeks ago and read it. It's not a good or interesting game that's brought down by racism. There's not much game there at all. The racism is the entire game.

[Cosi]

There are a lot of bad games out there. As such, a few ground rules:

1. I'm not going to pick something because it's offensive. You could write a lot of words about how RaHoWa or FATAL is terrible. Indeed, people have done that. But that's not a failure of game design so much as a failure of good taste. If you took all the rules out of those games, they would not be notably less offensive.
2. I'm also not going to pick something that is a worse version of a game I like. I think D&D 4e is boring and poorly designed. Fortunately, other fantasy games exist, so it's not any particular loss.

All that said, I'd probably pick Dungeons: The Dragoning. I would like a fantasy/sci-fi game that riffs off a bunch of other things I enjoy, but while Dungeons: The Dragoning presents that setting it doesn't do so with a game that is particularly playable. That makes it a much bigger design failure for me than FATAL wrapping a mediocre heartbreaker in 900 words of 4chan-esque ranting.


I looked up RaHoWa a few weeks ago and read it. It's not a good or interesting game that's brought down by racism. There's not much game there at all. The racism is the entire game.

Yes. The game is literally a hate crime. As such, I don't really see the point of asking what the "worst game" is, because the answer is so obviously RaHoWa. It's not the worst designed game (probably FATAL), but the whole "is a hate crime" thing beats even whatever terrible part of FATAL you want to talk about.

[johnbragg]

There are a lot of bad games out there. As such, a few ground rules:

1. I'm not going to pick something because it's offensive. You could write a lot of words about how RaHoWa or FATAL is terrible. Indeed, people have done that. But that's not a failure of game design so much as a failure of good taste. If you took all the rules out of those games, they would not be notably less offensive.
2. I'm also not going to pick something that is a worse version of a game I like. I think D&D 4e is boring and poorly designed. Fortunately, other fantasy games exist, so it's not any particular loss.

All that said, I'd probably pick Dungeons: The Dragoning. I would like a fantasy/sci-fi game that riffs off a bunch of other things I enjoy, but while Dungeons: The Dragoning presents that setting it doesn't do so with a game that is particularly playable. That makes it a much bigger design failure for me than FATAL wrapping a mediocre heartbreaker in 900 words of 4chan-esque ranting.

Yes. The game is literally a hate crime. As such, I don't really see the point of asking what the "worst game" is, because the answer is so obviously RaHoWa. It's not the worst designed game (probably FATAL), but the whole "is a hate crime" thing beats even whatever terrible part of FATAL you want to talk about.

Well, if you want to argue (and it's pretty clear that, on this board, we do) you could rule that RaHoWa is not actually a game so much as one white supremacists' second-hand impression of what an RPG is, and keep the party going. (IT reminded me of the South PArk episode where Cartman writes Christian rock songs by search-and-replacing obscene terms from with "Jesus" and "Love", resulting in "Jesus I want you deep inside me" and "I want your love all over my face, Jesus")

[JoeJ]

Yes. The game is literally a hate crime. As such, I don't really see the point of asking what the "worst game" is, because the answer is so obviously RaHoWa. It's not the worst designed game (probably FATAL), but the whole "is a hate crime" thing beats even whatever terrible part of FATAL you want to talk about.

I haven't read either of those, much less played them, and I'm planning to. Based on second-hand information, however, I wouldn't find it easy to decide whether the game based on race hate or the one that celebrates rape is the more disgusting.

[Yuki Akuma]

I haven't read either of those, much less played them, and I'm planning to. Based on second-hand information, however, I wouldn't find it easy to decide whether the game based on race hate or the one that celebrates rape is the more disgusting.

Don't worry, FATAL is pretty ****ing racist too! :D

[Elderand]

Don't worry, FATAL is pretty ****ing racist too! :D

So the real question is how rapey is RaHoWa ?

[Cosi]

I haven't read either of those, much less played them, and I'm planning to. Based on second-hand information, however, I wouldn't find it easy to decide whether the game based on race hate or the one that celebrates rape is the more disgusting.

I don't think you can make the case that FATAL is worse. I mean, yes, it is super offensive, but the people who wrote RaHoWa are violent racists. It's like comparing /pol/ and the KKK. Yes, the screeds that come out of both are horrifying and offensive, but (as far as I know) /pol/ has murdered zero people.

[johnbragg]

So the real question is how rapey is RaHoWa ?

Not gonna read it again, but I don't remember women mentioned as existing. FATAL is bad in many, many more ways than RaHoWa, because it tried many more things than RaHoWa.

I've never seen or played FATAL, but I've heard things. It tried to be many things. Many of the things it tried to be were terrible, and the things it tried to be that weren't terrible, it was terrible at.

RaHoWa was pretty focused in terms of design goals. It wanted to be a really racist RPG. Full marks on the first, not quite sure it accomplishes the second. (IF you strip out the racism, I"m not sure there's enough left to make a game out of.)

[Talakeal]

Not gonna read it again, but I don't remember women mentioned as existing.

IIRC women were the "objective" in RaHoWa; your primary motivation was protecting the white women from the various minorities. :yuk:

[johnbragg]

IIRC women were the "objective" in RaHoWa; your primary motivation was protecting the white women from the various minorities. :yuk:

OK. Still not gonna read it again.

[JoeJ]

I don't think you can make the case that FATAL is worse. I mean, yes, it is super offensive, but the people who wrote RaHoWa are violent racists. It's like comparing /pol/ and the KKK. Yes, the screeds that come out of both are horrifying and offensive, but (as far as I know) /pol/ has murdered zero people.

Again, I'm only going on second-hand information, but I don't think you could make a case that racial violence is inherently worse than sexual violence. I find them both to be equally repugnant.

[Cosi]

Again, I'm only going on second-hand information, but I don't think you could make a case that racial violence is inherently worse than sexual violence. I find them both to be equally repugnant.

Sure, the ideologies of the games are both terrible. But (as far as I know), the authors of FATAL haven't gone around raping people, but the authors of RaHoWa (or at least, the same organization) did actually kill people.

[Raimun]

Oh, almost forgot. 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons.

I've played it quite a lot and I'm already bored and tired of the game. It's just so bland and uninspired. So... generic. Cliche, even. And as a whole the rules feel only half-finished.

And D&D retroclones. You can't reinvent the wheel and there's no good reason to try it. At least for umpteen times.

Basically, I like Pathfinder's take on D&D better than the above, because that game isn't shackled to the past but still manages to pay homage to it.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder: I would suggest that we leave it at "RaHoWa and FATAL are bad", without going further into why they are bad, or which is worse. They're ****ed up. Let's move on.

[Rakasta]

The Mod Wonder: I would suggest that we leave it at "RaHoWa and FATAL are bad", without going further into why they are bad, or which is worse. They're ****ed up. Let's move on.
You have right my friend. I could not say it better.

[Scots Dragon]

D&D 4e. Played it once. It was: At will, per encounter, per day. Even World of Warcraft gives you more options than that. And with better graphics and more content. If I want to play WoW, I'll download it and play it on my computer. I've heard "but 3.5 combats take forever". Which is exactly why PC RPG games exist. That's the gameplay aspect. I also hated 4e because 3.5 had so much unexplored design space and they spit on it, kicked it to the curb, and called the loyal fanbase losers. I protested in my own ways of course, but they're only recently admitting their mistakes.

The hilarious thing is that though this is a valid criticism of D&D 3.5e, it is not actually a valid defence of D&D 4e.

The hit points of monsters and characters go up pretty rapidly in D&D 4e, but damage remains almost entirely static in contrast. Keeping track of round-per-round things like marking and bonuses is a lot more complicated than D&D 3.5e's equivalent to that as well. I'm not sure which edition is worst of the two, but D&D 4e's attempts to streamline itself ultimately made things dozens of times more complicated than they needed to be.

[Knaight]

I've heard "but 3.5 combats take forever". Which is exactly why PC RPG games exist.

Yeah, no. There's no reason to lock the entire design space of games that don't spend 3/4 of their play time on combat every time there's one significant fight in a session to PC RPGs, and 4e is hardly the only game designed to take less combat time then 3.5 (which it barely even does). The vast majority of the games not named D&D at all take vastly less combat time than 3.x, and while there are a couple of major exceptions (GURPS with enough fiddly modifiers, Rolemaster regardless, HERO if people skew defensive), they are hugely outnumbered.

[hamlet]

I also hated 4e because 3.5 had so much unexplored design space and they spit on it, kicked it to the curb, and called the loyal fanbase losers. I protested in my own ways of course, but they're only recently admitting their mistakes.

You know, the folks of us who still like AD&D and BECMI recall the same thing, being told that our favorite version of the game was crap and "unfun" in the advertising materials.

Welcome to the club.

[Scots Dragon]

You know, the folks of us who still like AD&D and BECMI recall the same thing, being told that our favorite version of the game was crap and "unfun" in the advertising materials.

Welcome to the club.

I actually came to AD&D and the whole B/X, BECM and RC mix later on, having gotten on-board with tabletop games just after the beginning of 3.5e, and honestly it was kinda surprising how simple everything was given how many later materials just spent their time literally just doing nothing but insulting the over-complicated nature of everything. From what I can tell, 3rd edition made two improvements to complexity, the replacement of THAC0 and the flat saving throws, and then spent literally the entire rest of the edition over-complicating everything else.

Even having started with 3rd edition, I'd infinitely rather play AD&D over that.

[neonchameleon]

You know, the folks of us who still like AD&D and BECMI recall the same thing, being told that our favorite version of the game was crap and "unfun" in the advertising materials.

Welcome to the club.

I was thinking I could create something from almost every D&D perspective about how the next one sucked badly.

[Telok]

From what I can tell, 3rd edition made two improvements to complexity, the replacement of THAC0 and the flat saving throws

Well, one improvement at least. I'll agree with THAC0 simply because people are intimidated by subtraction but the saves change made people worse at saving throws as they levelled up, which has never quite gone away since then.

[Scots Dragon]

Well, one improvement at least. I'll agree with THAC0 simply because people are intimidated by subtraction but the saves change made people worse at saving throws as they levelled up, which has never quite gone away since then.

Indeed. I thought Castles & Crusades handled that a lot better, actually, but the basic concept of scaling saving throws was something that at least made a wee bit of sense.

I just use the variant tables from Dungeon Master's Option: High-Level Campaigns for AD&D 2e.

[Kurald Galain]

Well, one improvement at least. I'll agree with THAC0 simply because people are intimidated by subtraction but the saves change made people worse at saving throws as they levelled up, which has never quite gone away since then.

I'd say that the improvement in saving throws is not so much the numbers, but the switch from the nebulously-defined categories of Death/Petrification/Wands/Breath/Spell to the easier-to-distinguish Fort/Ref/Will.

As well as getting rid of some oddities like rolling 1d6 for surprise, 1d10 for initiative, 1d100 for bending bars, and 1d20 for most other things :smallbiggrin:

[hamlet]

I was thinking I could create something from almost every D&D perspective about how the next one sucked badly.

Amen. Edition changes hurt us all.

[Sith_Happens]

Amen. Edition changes hurt us all.

And then there's Shadowrun, where (from what I've heard) each edition has its own entirely unique set of things that are awful about it and picking which one to play is generally acknowledged as a matter of which set you personally have the most tolerance for.:smalltongue:

[JoeJ]

When a game takes years to complete because of story reasons, are long combats a problem?

If the tactical game is something you really enjoy, long combats are a good thing. If combat is something you have to slog through to get to the stuff you really enjoy, they're a bad thing.

[obryn]

Well, one improvement at least. I'll agree with THAC0 simply because people are intimidated by subtraction but the saves change made people worse at saving throws as they levelled up, which has never quite gone away since then.
It's more than just 'intimidation.' Addition is straight-up, no-foolin' less complicated than subtraction. This is because addition is commutative whereas subtraction is not. That is 5+3 = 3+5, but 5-3 =/= 3-5. This is additional cognitive load and a barrier for inexperienced players no matter how intuitive veterans find it.

This is why, when I'm running RC D&D or AD&D 1e, I flip attack rolls to a Target 20 system. The subtraction gets front-loaded on the character sheet into a simple attack bonus. You add that to your d20 roll, and then the DM adds the monster's (descending) AC to that total. 20+ and it's a hit. (And if you want to maintain AD&D attack matrices' repeating 20's for some reason, you can just call a natural 20 a 25.)


I'd say that the improvement in saving throws is not so much the numbers, but the switch from the nebulously-defined categories of Death/Petrification/Wands/Breath/Spell to the easier-to-distinguish Fort/Ref/Will.
Yeah. The scaling got completely jacked up and the math behind them is terribly wrong in actual practice, but collapsing the categories into three intuitive, non-overlapping groups was a really great move.


When a game takes years to complete because of story reasons, are long combats a problem? I was in a club on campus with 50+ members and we ran 3.5 and the combat length wasn't a problem. So either way really, what 4e gutted to achieve speed left me nauseous.
Man. And we'd been doing so well in this thread avoiding any aggrieved grudges and straight-up talking about systems, too. :smallfrown:

[gooddragon1]

Man. And we'd been doing so well in this thread avoiding any aggrieved grudges and straight-up talking about systems, too. :smallfrown:

Is there something I should know about?

Edit: removed my posts just in case.

[obryn]

Is there something I should know about?

Edit: removed my posts just in case.
Well, it's a difference between candidly talking about systems as systems and the aspects of systems that are terrible, and talking about (e.g.) feelings of betrayal, etc.

It's one of the things that's pretty well kept this thread pretty much free of edition warring so far.

[Anonymouswizard]

If the tactical game is something you really enjoy, long combats are a good thing. If combat is something you have to slog through to get to the stuff you really enjoy, they're a bad thing.

This is it. I'm fine with my current game being combat light and combats lasting half an hour at most, but some people enjoy applying small-scale tactics for 2-4 hours straight. I have nothing against the latter, I'll just bow out of the group.

I prefer strategic planning myself. If the group can tilt everything so that we have a sure win I'm loving the game. I'm also loving the game where our opponents have attempted the same thing and we have to desperately try and stop them.


It's more than just 'intimidation.' Addition is straight-up, no-foolin' less complicated than subtraction. This is because addition is commutative whereas subtraction is not. That is 5+3 = 3+5, but 5-3 =/= 3-5. This is additional cognitive load and a barrier for inexperienced players no matter how intuitive veterans find it.

This again? I guess nowhere teaches mental maths anymore. I'm finding systems that use subtraction to generally be faster (although partially because we tend to use degrees of success, so it's one calculations against two).

[Knaight]

If the tactical game is something you really enjoy, long combats are a good thing. If combat is something you have to slog through to get to the stuff you really enjoy, they're a bad thing.

I honestly wouldn't agree with this. Long combats are probably disproportionately liked by those who like the tactical side (although there's definitely a contingent that just likes beating the snot out of everything, and the more time they spend snot-beating the better), but even if you like tactics you might like them sort. There's a reason competitive strategy games come with everything from minute long small scale tactics games to that one game that pretty much requires each side to have a straight up command staff.


This again? I guess nowhere teaches mental maths anymore. I'm finding systems that use subtraction to generally be faster (although partially because we tend to use degrees of success, so it's one calculations against two).
This isn't a mental math issue, this is a remembering game formulas issue. With an addition based system you can pretty much just remember that you're summing over this range. With subtraction, you need to know the sign for every term individually. Say you know that you have a system which uses variables A, B, C, D in one case, A, C, E in another case, and A, E, F in a third case. If the system consistently uses addition and only addition, you know that the formulas in question are A+B+C+D, A+C+E, and A+E+F. If you know the system is consistent with which variables are added or subtracted, then there's 64 possible formulas between the three cases, and you have to remember six signs. If that varies, you've got 1024 possible formulas, and you have to remember ten signs.

[Anonymouswizard]

This isn't a mental math issue, this is a remembering game formulas issue. With an addition based system you can pretty much just remember that you're summing over this range. With subtraction, you need to know the sign for every term individually. Say you know that you have a system which uses variables A, B, C, D in one case, A, C, E in another case, and A, E, F in a third case. If the system consistently uses addition and only addition, you know that the formulas in question are A+B+C+D, A+C+E, and A+E+F. If you know the system is consistent with which variables are added or subtracted, then there's 64 possible formulas between the three cases, and you have to remember six signs. If that varies, you've got 1024 possible formulas, and you have to remember ten signs.

I still have never seen it make a difference in game, as long as the system is consistent. If it's all addition or all subtraction it generally seems to be fine. It's varying that makes the problem.

It's not subtraction that it a problem, it's inconsistency.

[Knaight]

I still have never seen it make a difference in game, as long as the system is consistent. If it's all addition or all subtraction it generally seems to be fine. It's varying that makes the problem.

It's not subtraction that it a problem, it's inconsistency.

I've yet to see a system where something isn't added, even if it's just the die roll.

[obryn]

This again? I guess nowhere teaches mental maths anymore. I'm finding systems that use subtraction to generally be faster (although partially because we tend to use degrees of success, so it's one calculations against two).
This isn't about education or what you personally find faster. This is a fundamental aspect of mathematics. Subtraction and division are inherently more complicated due to their lack of commutivity.

It's fine having a personal preference towards subtraction, and it's completely true that many of us are dandy with subtraction, but I'm not actually talking about opinions.

[MeeposFire]

This isn't about education or what you personally find faster. This is a fundamental aspect of mathematics. Subtraction and division are inherently more complicated due to their lack of commutivity.

It's fine having a personal preference towards subtraction, and it's completely true that many of us are dandy with subtraction, but I'm not actually talking about opinions.

This is not even including the fact that in AD&D they were not always consistent on how to write things. I have seen books that had a +3 meaning improve your AC by three points and later in the same book used a -3 to AC also as an improvement. You had to extrapolate from the description that both were supposed to help your AC.

It would be unlikely to have this problem in an addition based system.

That being said AD&D and basic type D&D are among my favorite editions to play and DM and subtraction did not bother me (though I ended up doing all the math for THAC0 for all my players because they could not do it very well and they were all college grads or future college grads).

[Telok]

It's more than just 'intimidation.' Addition is straight-up, no-foolin' less complicated than subtraction. This is because addition is commutative whereas subtraction is not. That is 5+3 = 3+5, but 5-3 =/= 3-5. This is additional cognitive load and a barrier for inexperienced players no matter how intuitive veterans find it.

I dunno, I can't call something that 5 year olds can do pretty well a barrier to entry for high school students. Even more weird, I've seen subtraction done by middle schoolers in games without a single complaint where adults whine about math.

But for me those first couple of characters where I was still learning had a column, 1 to 20, with the AC hit on that die roll. An extra 45 seconds, written next to the equipment list, and all the "problems" disappear.

You know what I really hate in games though? You're reading the book, or someone is teaching you, and you make characters and start playing... And it turns out nobody and nowhere are some of the basic assumptions of the game mentioned. Pendragon is a great game, I can fully recognize that, but I'm forever soured on it by this. Knoghts in shining armor based on Arthuruan legend? Great! But be sure to tell people which set of Arthurian legends you're using. Don't take someone who knows the old Celtic myth cycles and has Old English translations of stuff sitting on the bookshelf and then spring the twice Christianized Victorian Romantic version on him without warning. That and a few instances of "Oh, we forgot to tell you that you have to do X. You'll need to retcon your last hour of RP to fit that." just killed the game. Good system, bad surprises.

[themaque]

This isn't about education or what you personally find faster. This is a fundamental aspect of mathematics. Subtraction and division are inherently more complicated due to their lack of commutivity.

It's fine having a personal preference towards subtraction, and it's completely true that many of us are dandy with subtraction, but I'm not actually talking about opinions.

I'm going to have to agree with Anonymouswizard here



It's not subtraction that it a problem, it's inconsistency.


It's not that Rolling under or rolling and subtracting numbers are that hard. It's when you sometimes roll high, sometimes roll low, sometimes you add, and sometimes you subtract that starts to make things confusing.

That's one of the things that D20 did right. Roll this Die, add your bonus, roll as high as you can in almost every instance. Making good general easy to understand rules, as was mentioned. What does a Save Vs. Wands MEAN? yes you can explain it to me but if you tell me make a WILL save I pretty much instantly understand what is going on both in and out of game.

I wouldn't play 2e again as I like Castles & Crusades better.
I wouldn't play 3.5 again as I like pathfinder better.
I wouldn't play 4e again as It was all right but not that great a system IMHO. YMMV
I would play 5e again as I don't know something that does the same thing that's better.

The only game I've actually played and actively disliked has been Alternity.

[Telwar]

I was thinking I could create something from almost every D&D perspective about how the next one sucked badly.

It is truly an astounding feeling when, after making fun of grognards for previous editions, you realize you've become one for your favorite edition.

All those damn people on my lawn!

[Telwar]

And then there's Shadowrun, where (from what I've heard) each edition has its own entirely unique set of things that are awful about it and picking which one to play is generally acknowledged as a matter of which set you personally have the most tolerance for.:smalltongue:

...basically this, too. I "grew up" on second, didn't mind third, *loved* fourth, and am meh on fifth.

[raygun goth]

...basically this, too. I "grew up" on second, didn't mind third, *loved* fourth, and am meh on fifth.

I thought 1st was kind of cool, but I was what, nine at the time?
2nd Ed I didn't play.
By 3rd I'd realized what bad game design was and boy was this thing terrible.
I loved the way the setting was done in 4th, even though the mechanics are boggy, and it's still my favorite.
I have no read 5th, so I don't know.

Among the worst RPGs for me is Rifts. It seems like it could be a cool idea until you start reading it and the author wants you to have particular opinions of the factions and people, and flat-out tells you what these opinions are. Then there's actually trying to play the damn thing.

[Hyooz]

My personal worst has got to be Exalted, mostly because I struggle to parse how any of it actually works.

Not even just mechanically. I struggled to understand the setting for most of the core rulebook, and then I go on to find what seems to be an unending stream of splatbooks introducing more and more types of exalted with their own story weirdness and at some point I just give up and lie in the dark weeping.

[PoeticDwarf]

Probably Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition for reasons both gameplay related and not.

I won't go into detail as to why because, y'know, edition wars. On the other hand 5th edition is amazing and I've been able to forgive WizBro for a lot simply due to how much they managed to fix.

Funny. I've only played D&D 3.5, 4e and 5e. But 4e is my favourite.

I don't dislike 3.5, but it is my least favourite roleplaying game I've played yet.

[Scots Dragon]

Funny. I've only played D&D 3.5, 4e and 5e. But 4e is my favourite.

I don't dislike 3.5, but it is my least favourite roleplaying game I've played yet.

I suppose if I were to give some detail; I'm a huge Forgotten Realms fan and that setting (by way of Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights) is what got me into the whole tabletop roleplaying thing in the first place, and arguably also what really got me into fantasy in general.

... and then D&D 4e's whole Spellplague thing happened. I'll let you fill in the gaps on why I might not be the biggest fan of D&D 4e.

[Cosi]

... and then D&D 4e's whole Spellplague thing happened. I'll let you fill in the gaps on why I might not be the biggest fan of D&D 4e.

Didn't the writers also blow up the Forgotten Realms in the 1e -> 2e and 2e -> 3e transitions? What made the Spellplague particularly worse than ... I want to say the Time of Troubles?

[Scots Dragon]

Didn't the writers also blow up the Forgotten Realms in the 1e -> 2e and 2e -> 3e transitions? What made the Spellplague particularly worse than ... I want to say the Time of Troubles?

Okay, let's start.

The 1st edition to 2nd edition changes were known as the Time of Troubles.

During the Time of Troubles, the basic changes to the rules were relatively minor and most of the old material was still not only compatible but entirely usable because ultimately the timeline had jumped ahead a mere ten years. There were going to be differences in a lot of places, certainly, but nothing to the extent of an entire radical overhaul of the entire world. The major characters, geography, nations, concepts, and races of the Forgotten Realms remained relatively constant overall. It did get rid of a few popular gods such as Bane, Myrkul, and Bhaal, and there were a few complaints about that, with many preferring the pre-ToT version of the Realms. For what it's worth I can't really blame people on that front.

The setting was still ultimately recognisable as itself though. A ten year timeskip that didn't massively affect the Realms, and indeed many novels actually mostly brushed over as they were set earlier enough for that to not really be an issue for them anyway.

Note that this was in 1989, and I don't actually really have much of an opinion because I was but a year old at the time.

The 2nd edition to 3rd edition changes went without a major event, though towards the latter end of 3rd edition's tenure several popular deities such as Eilistraee were killed off in order to 'simplify' the drow, as a kind of semi-prelude to the 4th edition changes. I'll get to those in a moment, but suffice it to say that there really was no real major epic event that destroyed the Realms during this period. There were changes that were unpopular and went without explanation, but they were unobtrusive and fans could actively handwave them away.

The 3rd edition to 4th edition changes were somewhat different, and this is where the Spellplague came in.

The Spellplague involved a radical alteration from the ground up in the way that magic, races, alignments, and cosmology of the Forgotten Realms actually worked, and in addition involved several other unpopular changes.

The first was the retconning of several races so that they're now different; the moon elves and gold elves of the Forgotten Realms were now officially 'eladrin', so places like Evereska, Evermeet, and Myth Drannor were now defined as 'eladrin nations' where previously they had been elven nations. In addition many elven deities were retconned so as to be aspects or avatars of various human deities. Sehanine was Selune, Hanali Celanil was Sune, etc. This was something that kinda pissed me off in itself before we even got to the later changes.

The second was the timeskip. The 'current clack' of the Realms was somewhere around 1373-1374 DR in its own yearing system prior to the 4th edition changes. There was a timeskip of over one hundred years, resulting in the current time period of the 4th edition Forgotten Realms being 1479 DR. Most popular human characters would therefore be dead as a result, with the main casts of several popular novel series no longer really being available for use.

The third was the alterations to the geography. They literally tore a whole throughout the entire Shining South and Shaar region, destroying several nations and radically altering several others. Luiren and most of the Chultan Peninsula were sunk into the ocean, Halruaa was blown up by the blue spellfire, Dambrath's half-drow rulership was overthrown by the local barbarians. The nation of Calimshan was conquered by genies and their genasi offspring. The Sea of Fallen Stars shrank in size and in the process resulted in several of those nations losing a lot of influence. On top of that many other nations were replaced by returning historical nations such as Anauroch and Mulhorand being taken over by Netheril and Imaskar, and other regions were outright replaced by sections of the mirroring secondary world, Returned Abeir, with notable examples being the sudden arrival of a dragonborn nation to justify all of the PHB races being available.

More than those was the fact that many of these changes minimised and marginalised the Forgotten Realms' more unique aspects, and it honestly at times read very much like a version of the Forgotten Realms that was meant to appeal to those who didn't actually really like the Realms. A lot of the material there read like it was meant to appeal more to fans of settings like Eberron, since many of the things read like reactions to various complaints from anti-fans who disliked the setting. And as someone who adored the setting, it felt quite alienating. Much of the book and edition in general were written with a completely arrogant disdain for that which had come before, to a degree that made 3rd edition's own arrogance in that respect seem relatively minor.

The Sundering, to explain 5th edition's changes, reads like the setting had the 'undo' key pressed on it without actually reversing the timeline.

[Cosi]

The 1st edition to 2nd edition changes were known as the Time of Troubles.

During the Time of Troubles, the basic changes to the rules were relatively minor and most of the old material was still not only compatible but entirely usable because ultimately the timeline had jumped ahead a mere ten years.

...

The setting was still ultimately recognisable as itself though. A ten year timeskip that didn't massively affect the Realms, and indeed many novels actually mostly brushed over as they were set earlier enough for that to not really be an issue for them anyway.

...

The Spellplague involved a radical alteration from the ground up in the way that magic, races, alignments, and cosmology of the Forgotten Realms actually worked, and in addition involved several other unpopular changes.

That just sounds like people thought 4e sucked and didn't like shoehorning their favorite setting into its fairly tight constraints. I get that, but I think blaming the Spellplague rather than 4e for that is short-sighted.


In addition many elven deities were retconned so as to be aspects or avatars of various human deities. Sehanine was Selune, Hanali Celanil was Sune, etc. This was something that kinda pissed me off in itself before we even got to the later changes.

Why? From an outsider's perspective, that kind of cleaning house seems basically good. The Forgotten Realms has a lot of stuff in it, and without a detailed knowledge of the difference between Sehanine and Selune or Hanali Celanil and Sune, simplifying it seems good. Were they combining different race's War deities (and Magic deities, and so on), or just putting stuff together willy-nilly?


The second was the timeskip.

Was there any reason given for a timeskip? Everything I've read so far sounds like people were trying to either simplify the Realms, or make them more compatible with 4e. Was there any kind of metaplot that got advanced by the timeskip?

That touches on a fairly big question I have about the transition as a whole. Did the setting have some metaplot that got progressed by the Spellplague? It sounds like it was mostly an attempt to get the setting to fit the new edition, rather than an attempt to continue developing the setting. Is that accurate?

[Anonymouswizard]

I want to say that, for me, the one thing a fantasy game cannot have too many of is gods. Good gods, bad gods, dead gods, ex-gods, god-machines, false gods, gods pretending to be other gods, and so on. This is because this allows players to have a large variety of beliefs and worship systems that...

Okay, I admit it, I care not one bit for the number of gods. What I like is a large number of religions, ideally like Eberron where any of them could be right. Imagine a world where followers of the Storm God fight who believe the world was crafted out of the infinite void fight with the worshippers of the Sea God who believe that the world has always been and that the first men raised the continents above the waves, while the followers of the six moon gods (worshipped as a pantheon) get into a discussion with the followers of the two thousand Star Gods over whether the other's deities exist. Who all have magic.

[russdm]

I think at the tail end of 3.5 that the Forgotten Realms has suffered massive bloat, and so change was needed. The Spell Plague and changes for 4E were more than what was needed, but hey, FR was big and bloated at that point.

I think it could have been handled differently and more effectively, but it did remove the bloat.

Then it got shifted again for 5E and it doesn't have the 3.5 bloat, so it should be better.

Besides, I only paid attention to the areas of the sword coast with Waterdeep, Neverwinter, and Icewind dale areas and ignored nearly all of the rest of the setting.

As for games, I would say playing 3.5 on tables versus playing it in Temple of Elemental Evil video game was very different. In ToEE, 3rd/3.5 was rather fun, aside from the weirdness from converting the adventure bare bones, but playing 3.5 at the table was worse, because it had the crappy stuff in and you needed a gentleman's agreement for the wizards not to break stuff.

I was impressed with 4e and liked it mainly because it was new, then got bored when didn't play it really ever. Like 5E, it is like 3.5 with some of 3.5's bloated bad rulings. I suppose 5E could get better or worse.

I have played white wolf stuff, mainly just Werewolf, playing the shadow-something clan (Shadowlord?) that is good at talky. I ended up maxing out my stats for that, and so had amazing skill there. I also played Rifts, as a cat dragon, I think, since I really can't remember.

The only game I would say was the least enjoyable was 3.5 and coming back into the party at first level after dying. The party still was leveling up. Why the DMs didn't get more groups than having 8 player parties, I still don't know.

[Cosi]

I want to say that, for me, the one thing a fantasy game cannot have too many of is gods. Good gods, bad gods, dead gods, ex-gods, god-machines, false gods, gods pretending to be other gods, and so on. This is because this allows players to have a large variety of beliefs and worship systems that...

I have mixed feelings about that. While having a bunch of gods is cool, reading about the three or four dozen gods the author made up for his setting is not. That means that gods should be largely mechanically irrelevant (so I can ignore Meluroni, the elven Goddess of plants until I fight some elven plant cultists) or ripped from actual mythology (so I can vaguely recall that Kali is a goddess of destruction). Maybe have a setup where there is one god/goddess of Magic, and each race/culture worships an aspect with some specific customization (so the elven magic godess is still Mystra, but she cares more about nature magic).

The gods thing is, IMHO, symptomatic of a larger problem: settings tend to have a lot of information that is not very relevant to players. I don't care that Eberron had an ancient goblin empire that was wiped out by aberrations. I care that there are ruins in Darguun which have small-sized tunnels and are full of aberrations and magic items attuned to ... whatever the ancient goblins did. I think that tendency comes from the people writing setting books being fans of the setting, and hence focusing more on the nitty-gritty details (which are interesting to them) than the high level hooks (which are interesting to new players). IMHO, the setting book should focus on providing a simple look at the setting that emphasizes what adventures you can have there, not providing a deep explanation of the history or religion of the setting.

[Scots Dragon]

That just sounds like people thought 4e sucked and didn't like shoehorning their favorite setting into its fairly tight constraints. I get that, but I think blaming the Spellplague rather than 4e for that is short-sighted.

Part of the reason I didn't like 4e was the Spellplague, so it's really hard to extract the two from one-another.


Why? From an outsider's perspective, that kind of cleaning house seems basically good. The Forgotten Realms has a lot of stuff in it, and without a detailed knowledge of the difference between Sehanine and Selune or Hanali Celanil and Sune, simplifying it seems good. Were they combining different race's War deities (and Magic deities, and so on), or just putting stuff together willy-nilly?

From an insider's perspective, the merging of those deities left out a lot of the pretty basic and obvious nuance between the deities in question. Sehanine Moonbow and Hanali Celanil both covered very different areas to Selûne and Sune.

Sehanine Moonbow was a goddess of divination, dreams, travel, and death. Selûne was the goddess of the moon, and good-aligned lycanthropes. There's actually, aside from a superficial lunar association in the case of Sehanine Moonbow, no actual significant overlap there. The two deities are actually remarkably different, and folding them together made no sense.

There's more overlap between Hanali Celanil and Sune, but at the same time Sune was more the goddess of beauty while Hanali Celanil was far more the goddess of love and romance. The two were complementary to one-another, and shoehorning them into being the same person doesn't really help things very much on that front.


Was there any reason given for a timeskip? Everything I've read so far sounds like people were trying to either simplify the Realms, or make them more compatible with 4e. Was there any kind of metaplot that got advanced by the timeskip?

No. The timeskip actually interfered with several ongoing plots that had to be disrupted, put on hold, or radically modified because they involved largely human characters who had largely human lifespans. Most of the casts of several novels had to actually be killed off, and several other novel lines were discontinued entirely due to this.


That touches on a fairly big question I have about the transition as a whole. Did the setting have some metaplot that got progressed by the Spellplague? It sounds like it was mostly an attempt to get the setting to fit the new edition, rather than an attempt to continue developing the setting. Is that accurate?

It read as an attempt to try and shave off the 'bloat' of the setting in order to appeal to people who didn't like it, despite the fact that for most Forgotten Realms fans the hyper-detail and elaborate nature of the setting is a feature and not so much a bug, coupled with changing it to fit the new ruleset. Many of the changes were unnecessary and at times entirely arbitrary.


I think at the tail end of 3.5 that the Forgotten Realms has suffered massive bloat, and so change was needed. The Spell Plague and changes for 4E were more than what was needed, but hey, FR was big and bloated at that point.

I think it could have been handled differently and more effectively, but it did remove the bloat.

I don't think that's entirely accurate. There were around two dozen sourcebooks for the 3rd edition era Forgotten Realms, cetainly, but there were around five times that in the AD&D era; if the setting was bloated at all, it was during the AD&D 2e era and not at any point afterwards. Much of the 3.5e era material was actually already aimed at cutting things out, such as getting rid of the entire drow pantheon except for Lolth throughout the War of the Spider Queen and Lady Penitent novels.

The 4th edition changes were also at times entirely arbitrary, and seemed to be based on the whims of designers who wanted to say 'look, we've got the vaguely semi-Arabic nation which is now ruled by genie overlords!' more than they wanted to create a coherent setting. Certainly what resulted was not a coherent setting.

[neonchameleon]

Why? From an outsider's perspective, that kind of cleaning house seems basically good.

To put it simply, as far as I'm concerned the post-Spellplague Realms is a vast improvement over the pre-Spellplague Realms. But that still doesn't mean I like the Realms, so I'm not going to run games there - almost every other setting in 4e is an improvement. For someone who actually liked the Realms it took away the bits they liked (and I didn't) so it made the setting much much worse.

The Spellplague is what happens when someone who dislikes something is allowed to rewrite it. It generally sucks for everyone. The people who liked it before no longer like it and the people who didn't like it before don't see a real reason to like it now - they merely dislike it less.

[Kurald Galain]

The 2nd edition to 3rd edition changes went without a major event, though towards the latter end of 3rd edition's tenure several popular deities such as Eilistraee were killed off in order to 'simplify' the drow,

The 2E to 3E changes were plotted in the adventure modules The Apocalypse Stone (which can be summarized as "the PCs inadvertently destroy the multivers and everybody dies") and Die Vecna Die (which is German for The Vecna, The about Vecna wrecking Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Planescape in a successful ploy for godhood). However, neither is particularly popular or well-known, the former is not explicity in the Forgotten Realms whereas the latter is explicitly not, and neither is a core rulebook. That's a pretty big difference compared to the spellplague :smallbiggrin:

[Scots Dragon]

The 2E to 3E changes were plotted in the adventure modules The Apocalypse Stone (which can be summarized as "the PCs inadvertently destroy the multivers and everybody dies") and Die Vecna Die (which is German for The Vecna, The about Vecna wrecking Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Planescape in a successful ploy for godhood). However, neither is particularly popular or well-known, the former is not explicity in the Forgotten Realms whereas the latter is explicitly not, and neither is a core rulebook. That's a pretty big difference compared to the spellplague :smallbiggrin:

There are many things to dislike about 3rd edition, but I have to admit that its handling of the Forgotten Realms transition wasn't one of them, given that it basically just replied with a less-than-invasive shrug. Its handling of the Forgotten Realms afterwards, however, raises a few more eyebrows.

[Kurald Galain]

The 4th edition changes were also at times entirely arbitrary, and seemed to be based on the whims of designers who wanted to say 'look, we've got the vaguely semi-Arabic nation which is now ruled by genie overlords!' more than they wanted to create a coherent setting. Certainly what resulted was not a coherent setting.

I think this is key here. 3E Forgotten Realms is a unique and richly detailed setting (regardless of whether you personally like it, which I myself don't, it is still objectively unique and detailed), whereas 4E Forgotten Realms is "generic fantasy land #27b". A love-it-or-hate-it setting is simply much more memorable than one that most people find meh.

"Bloat" of setting background is not actually a problem, as people simply deal with that by ignoring most of it.

[Scots Dragon]

"Bloat" of setting background is not actually a problem, as people simply deal with that by ignoring most of it.

Or in other cases, it's actually a draw. Many people, myself included, actually like the extensively detailed and complex and nuanced campaign settings for the most part. I like that the Forgotten Realms is a richly detailed and 'bloated' setting, largely because that amount of detail makes it feel like a setting that has stuff going on even when the party isn't doing anything. It's a setting that isn't keyed to the idea that the player characters are the most important figures in the world and thus literally everything has to revolve around them, and on top of that it's a setting where there are a lot of options for campaigns.

The Forgotten Realms one of the physically largest campaign settings out there, and the amount of detail and options available means that it's essentially more like if someone stitched around four to six smaller campaign setting areas together into a single large continent.

Each region of the Realms is pretty much its own miniature campaign setting, and that appeals to me.

Another thing that appeals to me is that the setting is explicitly written with unreliable narrators and inaccurate information in mind, with most of the campaign setting books including an explicit note to that effect.

[Morty]

Fourth is the only edition of D&D I consider a competently-designed system. But what it did to FR was just atrocious... in fact, my above statement applies to mechanics, because 4e's fluff was kind of bad in general.

4e Forgotten Realms in particular was basically "FR for people who didn't like FR". They ploughed over everything that was actually distinct about it, leaving behind the same labels on a completely different setting. Forgotten Realms never did make a whole lot of sense, but the people who like it don't care, for one reason or the other. I'm fully aware it's paper-thin, but I have a soft spot for it myself. What they did to it missed the whole point.

[Cosi]

Part of the reason I didn't like 4e was the Spellplague, so it's really hard to extract the two from one-another.

Fair. I do think, from what you've said, that the stark mechanical divergence of 4e made the transition harsher for fans than previous ones rather than the transition per se. Although some stuff (i.e. the timeskip) seems unnecessary even in the context of adapting to 4e's demands.


No. The timeskip actually interfered with several ongoing plots that had to be disrupted, put on hold, or radically modified because they involved largely human characters who had largely human lifespans. Most of the casts of several novels had to actually be killed off, and several other novel lines were discontinued entirely due to this.

I'm interested less in novels and more in plot hooks. Like plotlines in Shadowrun with Insect Spirits, Horrors, or whatever. Did they ignore any major plot points in the transition?


It read as an attempt to try and shave off the 'bloat' of the setting in order to appeal to people who didn't like it, despite the fact that for most Forgotten Realms fans the hyper-detail and elaborate nature of the setting is a feature and not so much a bug, coupled with changing it to fit the new ruleset. Many of the changes were unnecessary and at times entirely arbitrary.

Detail is good. At the same time, I think any setting book needs to condense things down enough that people can get into the setting without knowing the entire hyper-detailed history. The gods thing as implemented seems stupid, but the "core" book for any setting should (IMHO) put its foot down and only elaborate what needs to be elaborated to get people into the setting. Don't nuke things for no reason, but don't give the goddess of good-aligned lycanthropes more than a name-check in the book that people new to the setting are picking up.


Another thing that appeals to me is that the setting is explicitly written with unreliable narrators and inaccurate information in mind, with most of the campaign setting books including an explicit note to that effect.

Eh. I don't know that I see that much benefit to that, especially given that you aren't required to use any material. I personally prefer to have things be true or unknown, with the caveat that those things can be modified for specific campaigns. OTOH, I don't know how exactly FR handles that, so whatever.


Fourth is the only edition of D&D I consider a competently-designed system. But what it did to FR was just atrocious... in fact, my above statement applies to mechanics, because 4e's fluff was kind ohttp://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?479299-What-is-your-worst-roleplaying-gamef bad in general.

Could you elaborate on what you consider a competently designed game and why you think 4e is the only D&D that fits those standards?


4e Forgotten Realms in particular was basically "FR for people who didn't like FR". They ploughed over everything that was actually distinct about it, leaving behind the same labels on a completely different setting. Forgotten Realms never did make a whole lot of sense, but the people who like it don't care, for one reason or the other. I'm fully aware it's paper-thin, but I have a soft spot for it myself. What they did to it missed the whole point.

Doing FR for people who hate FR is bad, but I do think that any setting needs some neutral outsiders to go over it from time to time and call out stuff that is excessively stupid. Particularly in terms of what goes into the book intended as an introduction for new players.

[JoeJ]

The worst game I ever played was Champions. Combat took forever - as in, all evening for one battle. Also, it was way too easy to get killed, and none of my powers worked the way I expected them to, even with the GM helping me create the character. All things considered, it just didn't feel like exciting, superhero action.

For games that I read but didn't play, my top pick would be Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, mainly because character creation seemed to be based on the assumption that you would only play characters from the comics and not anything you created yourself. And only characters that you knew well; a lot of the pregens had abilities that were not very well explained. (What the @$*!% does the "Oh my stars and garters!" power do?)

D&D 4e is in the list too, but it only counts as a runner up because I didn't get any further than reading the Quick Start before deciding I didn't like it. Why does a fighter have "powers" that they can only use once per day? Why does anybody have powers that they can only use once per "encounter"?

[Telwar]

4e Forgotten Realms in particular was basically "FR for people who didn't like FR". They ploughed over everything that was actually distinct about it, leaving behind the same labels on a completely different setting. Forgotten Realms never did make a whole lot of sense, but the people who like it don't care, for one reason or the other. I'm fully aware it's paper-thin, but I have a soft spot for it myself. What they did to it missed the whole point.

I kind of suspect that they expected that the FR fans were so used to Realm-Shattering Events (aka RSEs) that they'd not complain terribly much.

I also suspect the anguished outcry on the part of the FR fans is what kept Eberron and Dark Sun relatively unchanged.

[MeeposFire]

The worst game I ever played was Champions. Combat took forever - as in, all evening for one battle. Also, it was way too easy to get killed, and none of my powers worked the way I expected them to, even with the GM helping me create the character. All things considered, it just didn't feel like exciting, superhero action.

For games that I read but didn't play, my top pick would be Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, mainly because character creation seemed to be based on the assumption that you would only play characters from the comics and not anything you created yourself. And only characters that you knew well; a lot of the pregens had abilities that were not very well explained. (What the @$*!% does the "Oh my stars and garters!" power do?)

D&D 4e is in the list too, but it only counts as a runner up because I didn't get any further than reading the Quick Start before deciding I didn't like it. Why does a fighter have "powers" that they can only use once per day? Why does anybody have powers that they can only use once per "encounter"?

Wait don't you participate on the 5e forum where the fighter class has modified version of the per encounter power (except less so unless you use the variant short rests) and daily power abilities?

[JoeJ]

Wait don't you participate on the 5e forum where the fighter class has modified version of the per encounter power (except less so unless you use the variant short rests) and daily power abilities?

Yep. Changing from encounter to rest makes all the difference in the world. It turned a completely disassociated mechanic into one an associated one.

[Knaight]

I think this is key here. 3E Forgotten Realms is a unique and richly detailed setting (regardless of whether you personally like it, which I myself don't, it is still objectively unique and detailed), whereas 4E Forgotten Realms is "generic fantasy land #27b". A love-it-or-hate-it setting is simply much more memorable than one that most people find meh.

I wouldn't call it love-it-or-hate-it. There's a lot of people (myself included) for whom 3e FR still feels like generic fantasy land #27b. It's lovingly detailed generic fantasy land #27b, but it's still generic fantasy land #27b. It's just that the love it faction is more noticeable, and the hate it faction is way more noticeable.

[Scots Dragon]

Detail is good. At the same time, I think any setting book needs to condense things down enough that people can get into the setting without knowing the entire hyper-detailed history. The gods thing as implemented seems stupid, but the "core" book for any setting should (IMHO) put its foot down and only elaborate what needs to be elaborated to get people into the setting. Don't nuke things for no reason, but don't give the goddess of good-aligned lycanthropes more than a name-check in the book that people new to the setting are picking up.

You seem to have a somewhat different view of what's useful in a campaign setting to me. I find that knowing about the religions and history can generate a lot of plot hooks for both players and DMs that the more explicit 'this is a plot hook' type plot hooks generally can't. With Selûne, knowing that she's the goddess of the moon and good lycanthropes opposed to her sister Shar, the evil goddess of night, can generate a lot of plot hooks. Knowing that she's most likely to have her temples in more rural and remote areas expands upon that further.

These temples would as a result of their more remote locations, be more vulnerable to open attack from the worshippers of Shar, and weaker and less-defended communities would probably require adventurers to help them. There doesn't need to be a specific plot hook saying 'the players are approached by the temple of Selûne to aid them against Shar-worshippers', the simple existence of small details to the effect described does that already. The same applies to detailed history and religious information in other areas. Knowing about the fact that Mystra has a gigantic rivalry with the god Bane, with the former being the goddess of magic and the latter being the god of tyranny who is associated with a group of mercenaries called the Zhentarim, gives you the possibility of players being approached for quests to undermine Zhentarim activities, sponsored by Mystra's church. The rewards would include powerful magical items because, y'know, she's the magic goddess.

It's also useful for players to know who all of the good aligned gods and what their portfolios and daily rituals and domains / spheres are because the cleric or druid classes exist and having a detailed list of gods aids not only with the mechanical side of things – knowing what your actual clerical abilities are as a worshipper of is pretty vital at times – but having information on the typical behaviour of worshippers helps in roleplaying on top of that.

You can extrapolate the same for nations, historical events, and other such. An important note as well is that just because you don't need to know something, doesn't mean that nobody else does because what's important for your campaign isn't the same as what's important for another person's. [i]You don't need to know that there's an island called Ixinos in the Vilhon Reach that's ruled over by a tribe of explicit Amazon women called the She-Wolves, but for the hypothetical player who wants to use the Amazon kit from the Complete Fighter's Handbook, with the intention to try and find some bracers of armour in order to play a fantasy version of Wonder Woman? They might find that information useful.

The Dungeon Master, setting campaigns there, might find the She-Wolves' explicit opposition to pirates useful for generating allies or opponents depending which side of the law the players are on in that area.

(Also, no I'm not making those up. They're first mentioned in the AD&D 2e Forgotten Realms sourcebook, the Vilhon Reach, and elaborated on in Gold and Glory.)


Eh. I don't know that I see that much benefit to that, especially given that you aren't required to use any material. I personally prefer to have things be true or unknown, with the caveat that those things can be modified for specific campaigns. OTOH, I don't know how exactly FR handles that, so whatever.

It basically means that the information in the book could be true, or it could be false, and this leaves it open for the Dungeon Master to modify, add, or change things slightly for the purposes of their own campaigns. It means that if a minor aspect of the setting is introduced that conflicts with the DM's plans, the general answer is that the information is slightly wrong, or doesn't apply to the situations of the current campaign. The information is written to portray what people know about their world, and how that might well be wrong. There are also a lot of outright statements that Elminster, the assumed default narrator, omits a lot of stuff because it's 'safer that way'.

Naturally I can think of plot hooks arising from that.

[Kurald Galain]

It's lovingly detailed generic fantasy land #27b
No. If something is lovingly detailed, then by definition it's not generic any more.


Or in other cases, it's actually a draw. Many people, myself included, actually like the extensively detailed and complex and nuanced campaign settings for the most part.
Indeed. One thing you learn from forum discussions is to tell the difference between (1) complaints about a system from people who don't play it anyway, and tend to exaggerate everything compared to their preferred system; (2) complaints about a system from people who love to tinker with that system and who explicitly want something to improve on it; and (3) complaints about a system that cause people to stop playing it. The overlap between the three is smaller than you'd think.

[tensai_oni]

Yep. Changing from encounter to rest makes all the difference in the world. It turned a completely disassociated mechanic into one an associated one.

You realize 4e's "per encounter' powers actually reset after a short rest, right? They aren't literally renewed when an encounter ends. Likewise daily powers are renewed after an extended rest.

[Anonymouswizard]

You realize 4e's "per encounter' powers actually reset after a short rest, right? They aren't literally renewed when an encounter ends. Likewise daily powers are renewed after an extended rest.

Shush, we have to let them complain about games they haven't read, or they'll stop me from complaining about 5e's lack of rules that annoyed me when running (has it occurred to people that some of us find a set of rules the group has agreed to use a boon when GMing).

Eh, they try to stop me anyway. I'm going to spell it out here:

4e is based on a similar mathematical basis to 5e, it was just decided that level 1 characters should have no chance at beating level 20 monsters, while 5e decided they should be outmatched up able to win if really lucky. It used the same system for almost everyone in order to make it easier to balance, but there's still a lot of differences within the system. Used the term 'encounter' to mean 'recharges after a five minute rest' and 'daily' to mean 'recharges after an eight hour rest'. 4e is at least as competently designed as 5e, and is recognisably D&D, it was just a (probably poorly executed) attempt to modernise D&D into a better ruleset.

Not that I'm ever going to get around to playing the thing, and I like 3.5 too much to run 4e (my next campaign is going to be 3.5 Eberron, using a spellpoints system based off the Unearthed Arcana one, going from about level 2 to level 9).

[Irennan]

Okay, let's start.

The 1st edition to 2nd edition changes were known as the Time of Troubles.

During the Time of Troubles, the basic changes to the rules were relatively minor and most of the old material was still not only compatible but entirely usable because ultimately the timeline had jumped ahead a mere ten years. There were going to be differences in a lot of places, certainly, but nothing to the extent of an entire radical overhaul of the entire world. The major characters, geography, nations, concepts, and races of the Forgotten Realms remained relatively constant overall. It did get rid of a few popular gods such as Bane, Myrkul, and Bhaal, and there were a few complaints about that, with many preferring the pre-ToT version of the Realms. For what it's worth I can't really blame people on that front.

The setting was still ultimately recognisable as itself though. A ten year timeskip that didn't massively affect the Realms, and indeed many novels actually mostly brushed over as they were set earlier enough for that to not really be an issue for them anyway.

Note that this was in 1989, and I don't actually really have much of an opinion because I was but a year old at the time.

The 2nd edition to 3rd edition changes went without a major event, though towards the latter end of 3rd edition's tenure several popular deities such as Eilistraee were killed off in order to 'simplify' the drow, as a kind of semi-prelude to the 4th edition changes. I'll get to those in a moment, but suffice it to say that there really was no real major epic event that destroyed the Realms during this period. There were changes that were unpopular and went without explanation, but they were unobtrusive and fans could actively handwave them away.

The 3rd edition to 4th edition changes were somewhat different, and this is where the Spellplague came in.

The Spellplague involved a radical alteration from the ground up in the way that magic, races, alignments, and cosmology of the Forgotten Realms actually worked, and in addition involved several other unpopular changes.

The first was the retconning of several races so that they're now different; the moon elves and gold elves of the Forgotten Realms were now officially 'eladrin', so places like Evereska, Evermeet, and Myth Drannor were now defined as 'eladrin nations' where previously they had been elven nations. In addition many elven deities were retconned so as to be aspects or avatars of various human deities. Sehanine was Selune, Hanali Celanil was Sune, etc. This was something that kinda pissed me off in itself before we even got to the later changes.

The second was the timeskip. The 'current clack' of the Realms was somewhere around 1373-1374 DR in its own yearing system prior to the 4th edition changes. There was a timeskip of over one hundred years, resulting in the current time period of the 4th edition Forgotten Realms being 1479 DR. Most popular human characters would therefore be dead as a result, with the main casts of several popular novel series no longer really being available for use.

The third was the alterations to the geography. They literally tore a whole throughout the entire Shining South and Shaar region, destroying several nations and radically altering several others. Luiren and most of the Chultan Peninsula were sunk into the ocean, Halruaa was blown up by the blue spellfire, Dambrath's half-drow rulership was overthrown by the local barbarians. The nation of Calimshan was conquered by genies and their genasi offspring. The Sea of Fallen Stars shrank in size and in the process resulted in several of those nations losing a lot of influence. On top of that many other nations were replaced by returning historical nations such as Anauroch and Mulhorand being taken over by Netheril and Imaskar, and other regions were outright replaced by sections of the mirroring secondary world, Returned Abeir, with notable examples being the sudden arrival of a dragonborn nation to justify all of the PHB races being available.

More than those was the fact that many of these changes minimised and marginalised the Forgotten Realms' more unique aspects, and it honestly at times read very much like a version of the Forgotten Realms that was meant to appeal to those who didn't actually really like the Realms. A lot of the material there read like it was meant to appeal more to fans of settings like Eberron, since many of the things read like reactions to various complaints from anti-fans who disliked the setting. And as someone who adored the setting, it felt quite alienating. Much of the book and edition in general were written with a completely arrogant disdain for that which had come before, to a degree that made 3rd edition's own arrogance in that respect seem relatively minor.

The Sundering, to explain 5th edition's changes, reads like the setting had the 'undo' key pressed on it without actually reversing the timeline.

4e FR made me pass on 4e D&D entirely: I just didn't want to come close to anything 4e, because of what it did to the Realms. And I'm not just talking about the Spellplague, but also all that the happenings towards the end of 3e took away to pave the way for the 4e version of the setting, and how it was taken away (I'm especially looking at you, drow pantheon).

As you say 5e feels like an in-world reboot, but it wasn't done well either, IMO. I'm really glad that the Sundering happened, but it could have used much less handwaving, at least for those things that were removed through novels, rather than just washed away by the Spellplague (for example, while it's awesome to have Eilistraee and Vhaeraun are back and allied, WotC went out of their way to write novels with literally the single and only purpose of removing them--even going against what the author would have liked to do--, the least they could do is to provide a good explanation or story for their return that isn't ''Ao did it'').

[Irennan]

From an insider's perspective, the merging of those deities left out a lot of the pretty basic and obvious nuance between the deities in question. Sehanine Moonbow and Hanali Celanil both covered very different areas to Selûne and Sune.

Sehanine Moonbow was a goddess of divination, dreams, travel, and death. Selûne was the goddess of the moon, and good-aligned lycanthropes. There's actually, aside from a superficial lunar association in the case of Sehanine Moonbow, no actual significant overlap there. The two deities are actually remarkably different, and folding them together made no sense.

There's more overlap between Hanali Celanil and Sune, but at the same time Sune was more the goddess of beauty while Hanali Celanil was far more the goddess of love and romance. The two were complementary to one-another, and shoehorning them into being the same person doesn't really help things very much on that front.

Not only that, it doesn't make sense in-world. The elven deities are interlopers who came from another world: they are not aspect of anything, but their own beings. And they have specific roles in the history of the elves. This was a pure and simple retcon, one of the various steps to ''reduce the pantheon''.

And on the matter of superficial similarities, I remeber reading the Q&A thread for the 4e FR on the WotC forums, where Richard Baker and other authors answered questions about the removal of the deities (among the other things). In one of the instances where the topic of Eilistraee came up, their answer was something along the lines of ''how many deities of dance do the FR need?'' It made me wonder, had they even read up about the deities (and this point, I'd say nations too) that they wanted to remove? Did they even know what they were talking about? Because ''a deity of dance'' is a very superficial part of who someone like Eilistraee is...



I don't think that's entirely accurate. There were around two dozen sourcebooks for the 3rd edition era Forgotten Realms, cetainly, but there were around five times that in the AD&D era; if the setting was bloated at all, it was during the AD&D 2e era and not at any point afterwards. Much of the 3.5e era material was actually already aimed at cutting things out, such as getting rid of the entire drow pantheon except for Lolth throughout the War of the Spider Queen and Lady Penitent novels.

Which is far from being bloat, since those deities are what makes the FR drow unique (aside from giving them depth and variety), are just 4 deities that people don't even need to read up unless the drow become a major part of their game, and were originally thought by the creator of the setting for his world, so are integral part of it. If anything, they could have just namedropped them in the 4e setting book (like they did with other deities/entities), without giving away details, and leaving further info to the previous sources and/or future articles and publications. And this can be said for most of the ''bloat'' of 4e. They could have simply put out a ''Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide'' style book, with only the info strictly needed to play the setting (or one of its area) and release it as an introductory book for newcomers.

Lore rarely is bloat, it gives depth and opportunities for stories, it makes a setting feel alive. I agree that if you try to give all of it at once to a newcomer, it becomes oppressing, but it's all in the presentation. A setting-lite book, and further, thematic books (or even pamphlets, or articles throgh DDI) would have solved this issue. 4e blowing up the setting didn't: I still see a lot of people passing on the FR because ''too much lore'', and still not liking it for the very reasons that 4e tried to adress.

[Irennan]

The gods thing is, IMHO, symptomatic of a larger problem: settings tend to have a lot of information that is not very relevant to players. I don't care that Eberron had an ancient goblin empire that was wiped out by aberrations. I care that there are ruins in Darguun which have small-sized tunnels and are full of aberrations and magic items attuned to ... whatever the ancient goblins did. I think that tendency comes from the people writing setting books being fans of the setting, and hence focusing more on the nitty-gritty details (which are interesting to them) than the high level hooks (which are interesting to new players). IMHO, the setting book should focus on providing a simple look at the setting that emphasizes what adventures you can have there, not providing a deep explanation of the history or religion of the setting.

A setting book is also (mainly, I'd argue) used by DMs, and details about history and religion can make the world feel alive, can provide immersion, and make for plot hooks that are rooted in the setting. Like making up a plot about the repercussion in the present time of something that happened long time ago to that ancient goblin empire. Something hidden in its ruin that is tied to a key event of its history.

That's why player's guide books are also printed. Books that provide info mostly useful to the player, rather than providing an in-depth explanation of the setting. The recent Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide is a good example of that, providing a quick update of the various aspects of the Realms to the current age, and essential lore and descriptions that both players and DMs can easily use. However, it doesn't really offer anything that goes deeper than that (and it should have been 4e's approach to the problem since the beginning IMO).

[Scots Dragon]

A setting book is also (mainly, I'd argue) used by DMs, and details about history and religion can make the world feel alive, can provide immersion, and make for plot hooks that are rooted in the setting. Like making up a plot about the repercussion in the present time of something that happened long time ago to that ancient goblin empire. Something hidden in its ruin that is tied to a key event of its history.

That's why player's guide books are also printed. Books that provide info mostly useful to the player, rather than providing an in-depth explanation of the setting. The recent Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide is a good example of that, providing a quick update of the various aspects of the Realms to the current age, and essential lore and descriptions that both players and DMs can easily use. However, it doesn't really offer anything that goes deeper than that.

^ This.

With just a bit of thought it's possible to take any small part of a setting's history or information and spin it into a plot or character hook.

Let's take for example... opening my Cyclopedia of the Realms book to a random page, and pointing at a random section of that page, we get the information on the Rashemi youths undergoing the dajemma. A rite of passage into adulthood where a young Rashemi man goes on an expedition to prove himself worthy as a warrior and such. A really obvious use of that would be, say, spinning it out into the backstory of your berserker ranger with his pet miniature giant space hamster.

[LibraryOgre]

The Spellplague is what happens when someone who dislikes something is allowed to rewrite it. It generally sucks for everyone. The people who liked it before no longer like it and the people who didn't like it before don't see a real reason to like it now - they merely dislike it less.

I think this is a good point. The rewrite changed things a lot of fans liked about the setting, and didn't fix the things people disliked about the setting.

[Morty]

Could you elaborate on what you consider a competently designed game and why you think 4e is the only D&D that fits those standards?

4e has goals that it tries to achieve. The goals are often suspect, and the execution is lacking, but the process is there. I don't really see anything of the sort in other editions of D&D. 3e is an attempt to bring the old D&D experience into a "modern" framework that went off into several different directions; 5e is only concerned about being familiar to people. Pre-3e versions are a product of a different era, really. It's not my favourite system, by far, but I consider its design to be better than the other editions'.


Doing FR for people who hate FR is bad, but I do think that any setting needs some neutral outsiders to go over it from time to time and call out stuff that is excessively stupid. Particularly in terms of what goes into the book intended as an introduction for new players.

Pruning a setting and fixing parts that make no sense are all well and good, yes, but that's not what 4e's approach did.


I kind of suspect that they expected that the FR fans were so used to Realm-Shattering Events (aka RSEs) that they'd not complain terribly much.

I also suspect the anguished outcry on the part of the FR fans is what kept Eberron and Dark Sun relatively unchanged.

Maybe they did, but in this case, their expectation ended up being misguided, to say the least. Many things 4e did were overblown reactions to real problems in the older editions. Ploughing over FR could be called one of those.

[JoeJ]

You realize 4e's "per encounter' powers actually reset after a short rest, right? They aren't literally renewed when an encounter ends. Likewise daily powers are renewed after an extended rest.

Then they should have been clearer. In fact, they shouldn't have called them "powers" at all. Powers are presented in a way that made them look like some kind of magical abilities that recharge rather than skills. And instead of memorizing spells that they can pick, wizards and clerics have "powers" that recharge too. Oh, and something called a "healing surge," that isn't actually defined anywhere.

Also, there's no flavor at all. Not even the barest description of how the various races and classes fit into the world, or why I would choose one over another on any basis besides combat role. That, plus distances being always given in squares instead of real world units makes the characters seem disconnected from any kind of world.

The thing about first impressions is that you only get one. If you mess it up, you may not have a chance for a second impression. My first impression of 4e was that it wasn't D&D at all, but something more like Gauntlet: The Tabletop Edition. Maybe if I'd had friends that were really into it they could have convinced me to try playing, but I didn't. Nobody that I gamed with was playing 4e, so I saw no reason to spend any time or money delving deeper into something that had already left me cold.

If you look at my history of posting, on the rare occasions where I've said anything about 4e at all, I've always been clear that my opinion is based only on the Quick Start rules. I'm not qualified, and I don't claim to be qualified, to critique any more than that.

[obryn]

A setting book is also (mainly, I'd argue) used by DMs, and details about history and religion can make the world feel alive, can provide immersion, and make for plot hooks that are rooted in the setting. Like making up a plot about the repercussion in the present time of something that happened long time ago to that ancient goblin empire. Something hidden in its ruin that is tied to a key event of its history.
I'm pretty much the opposite when it comes to settings. :smallsmile: I really liked FR, when it was literally just the 1e AD&D grey box. That was just about a perfect level of detail and description for the setting, while leaving all kinds of space for DMs to improvise. It's neatly digestible, and enough to both generate plot hooks and seed a DM's descriptions.

I know that this whole happy equilibrium was destroyed almost immediately with the FR series that ran from 1e to 2e, and the numerous novels. But that first grey box? That was just about right.

e: But this is probably too much of a derail. We can take this up elsewhere if anyone wants to start a thread.

[Irennan]

I'm pretty much the opposite when it comes to settings. :smallsmile: I really liked FR, when it was literally just the 1e AD&D grey box. That was just about a perfect level of detail and description for the setting, while leaving all kinds of space for DMs to improvise. It's neatly digestible, and enough to both generate plot hooks and seed a DM's descriptions.

I know that this whole happy equilibrium was destroyed almost immediately with the FR series that ran from 1e to 2e, and the numerous novels. But that first grey box? That was just about right.

e: But this is probably too much of a derail. We can take this up elsewhere if anyone wants to start a thread.

I've already stated that, but I think that the 5e ''module'' approach works very well with settings like the Realms. When you keep your Grey Box, and then release regional books, a races book, pantheon books, etc... you are providing tools and lore for those who want it, and still keeping the core needed to play and run a game in the FR as a self-contained and independent item for those who want only it. Not only that, but it may come a day when you want some more info about a deity, or a region, and then you *can*, if you *want*, pick other sourcebooks for inspiration (or to simplify your work). It's a win for everyone IMO.

[Amaril]

Of all the systems I've played, my least favorite has to be Exalted 2e. For a game that, as I understand it, is supposed to be about having essentially ultimate power and being able to do just about anything you can imagine, it's awfully heavy and crunchy, so much that I find it gets in the way of enjoying the premise. If I were to make a system for the Exalted setting, which I love, I'd keep it much lighter.

(Yes, I know I'm bastardizing the theme of Exalted, but that's the part that's relevant to my argument.)

[Kurald Galain]

4e has goals that it tries to achieve. The goals are often suspect, and the execution is lacking, but the process is there. I don't really see anything of the sort in other editions of D&D. 3e is an attempt to bring the old D&D experience into a "modern" framework that went off into several different directions; 5e is only concerned about being familiar to people.
So you've just listed (what you perceive to be) the goals of 3E and 5E, which contradicts your point that they wouldn't have goals. Of course they have goals, pretty much every professional gaming system has goals.

The interesting point for any system or edition was never whether it has goals. The point is whether (1) you think those goals are worthwhile, and (2) it achieves those goals.

[obryn]

I've already stated that, but I think that the 5e ''module'' approach works very well with settings like the Realms. When you keep your Grey Box, and then release regional books, a races book, pantheon books, etc... you are providing tools and lore for those who want it, and still keeping the core needed to play and run a game in the FR as a self-contained and independent item for those who want only it. Not only that, but it may come a day when you want some more info about a deity, or a region, and then you *can*, if you *want*, pick other sourcebooks for inspiration (or to simplify your work). It's a win for everyone IMO.
No, I actually disagree. Pretty strongly, in fact. That's essentially the same situation that we are in right now with any bloated setting, and I find it equally unpalatable. :smallsmile: There being a 'lore' out there creates a decision to ignore or follow said lore, along with a pressure to do that research in order to avoid contradicting it.

YMMV, of course, and like I said, I'm happy to discuss this in another thread rather than keep derailing everything. :smallsmile:

[Morty]

So you've just listed (what you perceive to be) the goals of 3E and 5E, which contradicts your point that they wouldn't have goals. Of course they have goals, pretty much every professional gaming system has goals.

The interesting point for any system or edition was never whether it has goals. The point is whether (1) you think those goals are worthwhile, and (2) it achieves those goals.

Yes, that's fair. Let me rephrase: I think 4e has mostly well-defined goals and works towards achieving them, whereas 3e has self-contradictory goals that it flounders trying to achieve. 5e's goal I perceive as reactionary and not very worthwhile.

[Cosi]

A setting book is also (mainly, I'd argue) used by DMs, and details about history and religion can make the world feel alive, can provide immersion, and make for plot hooks that are rooted in the setting. Like making up a plot about the repercussion in the present time of something that happened long time ago to that ancient goblin empire. Something hidden in its ruin that is tied to a key event of its history.

I dunno. I think you want your introductory product to put your best foot forward in terms of introducing people to what makes the setting unique without overwhelming them with detail. I suppose it's a question of old fans versus new (or potential) fans and what you consider to be the selling point of the setting (IMHO, I don't so much care about detail as uniqueness - what does FR offer as a setting that is different from making stuff up as I go along, or using a different setting.


4e has goals that it tries to achieve. The goals are often suspect, and the execution is lacking, but the process is there.

I have difficulty understanding "has goals" as a standard for "competently designed". It's not just that every game has some goals (although that is true), it's that every version of D&D has a basic goal of "create a version of D&D that is better than other versions of D&D at telling the stories you want D&D to tell"*. 4e talks about "roles" or "tiers" or whatever, but that's just shorthand for tools to achieve that goal. The fact that a game has "strikers" and "controllers" doesn't really do anything. It's a potentially useful tool for organizing characters, but it doesn't have any inherent effect on any metric by which I could imagine judging a game.

"Have tiers" isn't a design goal, it's a way to satisfy people who want Lord of the Rings (where characters are personally weak, and an overland journey is the focus of several books) and Lord of Light (where characters are personally strong, and overland journeys can be skipped over) without major imbalances. "Skill challenges" isn't a design goal, it's a way to make non-combat stuff more interesting without separate subsystems for Diplomacy and Stealth and Logistics.

And 4e basically fails to deliver on all its goals. You don't get different powers in Paragon tier, you still deal a couple of [W]s of damage and move a guy a square. Skill challenges don't work, and they have been revised more than any other system in the history of RPGs. Well, maybe. It's certainly in contention with 3e's shape changing rules, Shadowrun's Matrix rules, and (or so I've been told) GURPS's martial arts rules.

I don't think "fails to achieve goals" can be counted as uniquely competently designed. That is, after all, the criticism one would level against 3e or 5e or any other version of D&D. In fact, it's high level enough that there's basically only one other criticism that you can level against RPGs: "goals are stupid". And given that the goals of 3e and 4e are the same (tell fantasy stories in a D&D-ish way), I don't see how you can meaningfully call 4e better than 3e.

*: Alternatively, and somewhat more cynically, the stories you think people will pay for an edition of D&D to tell.


Then they should have been clearer. In fact, they shouldn't have called them "powers" at all. Powers are presented in a way that made them look like some kind of magical abilities that recharge rather than skills.

I have no problem with the "powers" nomenclature. If you are writing a system where everyone has something that is "like spells", you should have a term for all those things and I don't really see a reason not to call them powers. I mean, you could call them abilities, but then what do you call the larger set of "things people get, including things which are not like spells"?


And instead of memorizing spells that they can pick, wizards and clerics have "powers" that recharge too.

There's not anything wrong with moving to a unified power system, really. The problem is doing that and keeping class lists. Wizard powers have all the same definitions as Cleric powers, which makes it all but impossible to justify keeping them on separate lists. The benefit of having everyone on at-will/encounter/daily is that you can get more bang for your buck by opening up the floodgates of multiclassing. If you're not going to do that, what's the point?


Of all the systems I've played, my least favorite has to be Exalted 2e.

I tried to read that, but I had a hard time getting through the introduction. It starts off explaining not "what is Exalted" but "how is Exalted different from D&D, except we won't say D&D and we're going to be snide about all the differences". I did like the media recommendations, although describing Conan as part of the source material for a game about Demigods was weird.

[Scots Dragon]

Yes, that's fair. Let me rephrase: I think 4e has mostly well-defined goals and works towards achieving them, whereas 3e has self-contradictory goals that it flounders trying to achieve. 5e's goal I perceive as reactionary and not very worthwhile.

The problem is that the goals of D&D 4e were to create a game that is radically different to anything that came before or since with regards to the general worlds and concepts of Dungeons & Dragons. Many long-standing traditions were ejected from the game, many of which had little or nothing to do with mechanics, and many other mechanical decisions were made that altered the way in which the game was played.

Regardless of your opinion on the quality of what resulted, you cannot deny that D&D 4e is a very different Dungeons & Dragons to literally any other edition before or since, with little attempt made to accomodate for players who might have preferred the older ways of doing things. In light of that, and the reaction of many fans, a reaction which ignited literally the entire concept of an edition war to begin with – on a scale that dwarfed literally any other edition-based arguments – it actually makes a lot of sense to try and go back to the basics of an older edition of Dungeons & Dragons to try and win back many of the fans who had abandoned the game in the interim. With many of them abandoning Dungeons & Dragons for games that were, essentially, clones of earlier editions with the likes of Pathfinder and the sudden sharp rise in popularity of the OSR.

Coupled with that, the upcoming 2014 was the 40th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons in general.

Naturally you can argue about how well they succeeded, but it would arguably have made very little sense to have made an edition that did not celebrate the past in light of the situation that Wizards of the Coast found themselves in. I personally think they succeeded in that goal; D&D 5e was created as a love-letter to the past, and many aspects of it are in-depth celebrations of everything that made Dungeons & Dragons great, but filtered through a more modern and forward thinking lens than the designers seemed to possess in 1974. It was the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons to have open acceptance of LGBT people coded in the rulebook, and had many people of colour in prominent roles throughout the artwork and character mentions.

There are aspects I wouldn't personally say make for the best edition, and I actually at times feel it lags behind the earlier AD&D rules, but it's far better than either of D&D 3.5e or D&D 4e.

[Kurald Galain]

And given that the goals of 3e and 4e are the same (tell fantasy stories in a D&D-ish way),

If you look a bit closer than the meaninglessly-broad "they're all fantasy games", it is obvious that 4E clearly has different goals than 3E or for that matter 5E. The easiest example is that earlier-edition rangers have the goal of "emulating Aragorn", whereas later edition rangers have the goal of "emulating Drizz't".

A large part of the criticism towards any of these is from people who just don't like those goals. That's aside from the question of whether the goals are achieved. Indeed, I'd say that all these editions achieve their goals well enough for their fans, and that most non-fans simply prefer different goals.

[Irennan]

I dunno. I think you want your introductory product to put your best foot forward in terms of introducing people to what makes the setting unique without overwhelming them with detail. I suppose it's a question of old fans versus new (or potential) fans and what you consider to be the selling point of the setting (IMHO, I don't so much care about detail as uniqueness - what does FR offer as a setting that is different from making stuff up as I go along, or using a different setting.

FR is indeed generic high fantasy. Its selling points are the intricate and deep history, its people and flashed out costumes and traditions, its gods (that are actually given character and are active, although this aspect has been stretched to the point of ridiculousness along the editions) and faiths, and all the vivid details that make them feel alive. A FR without its ''liveliness'', with its history being left behind (like the 100 years time jump was meant to do), or w/o its icons, is just your standard template fantasy setting. In short, FR is different because of its detail, a lot of things that together make the setting (it does have some aspects that make some elements unique to the FR, but they alone aren't enough to define the tone of the setting). That's why pruning stuff didn't work with the Realms (and I totally get that this isn't for everyone, but that's the reason why there are many settings out there).

However, I agree with you that the setting can use an introductory book (like the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide), that briefly describes the setting without giving too many details. But it has to be mostly focused on a region, because trying to cover all the regions alone is going to make the book huge. IMO, the 3e CS didn't really go overboard with the details, it offered a good amount of background on the regions, but the vastity of the setting led to such a heavy tome.

[kyoryu]

I think 4e had some pretty obvious design goals:

1) On an overall level, make a game that is more suited for "The party of adventurers on Their Epic Quest" - get rid of the Gygaxian design decisions that were made around, and optimized for, an open-table game.
2) Bring lethality to a set level, as opposed to the highly-lethal early levels and SoD rockets of higher levels
3) De-emphasize character optimization
4) Ensure that all characters have interesting mechanical options at all levels.
5) Make each fight tense on its own, while removing the need for the '15 minute workday'
6) Reinforce the idea of classes as archetypes, as opposed to being merely building blocks. "Being a Fighter" should mean something.

Unfortunately, points 3 and 6 directly opposed the preferences of many of the existing players, and there really should have been a 7th goal in there of "make a game that at least cosmetically looks like previous editions".

[obryn]

I have difficulty understanding "has goals" as a standard for "competently designed". It's not just that every game has some goals (although that is true), it's that every version of D&D has a basic goal of "create a version of D&D that is better than other versions of D&D at telling the stories you want D&D to tell"*. 4e talks about "roles" or "tiers" or whatever, but that's just shorthand for tools to achieve that goal. The fact that a game has "strikers" and "controllers" doesn't really do anything. It's a potentially useful tool for organizing characters, but it doesn't have any inherent effect on any metric by which I could imagine judging a game.

"Have tiers" isn't a design goal, it's a way to satisfy people who want Lord of the Rings (where characters are personally weak, and an overland journey is the focus of several books) and Lord of Light (where characters are personally strong, and overland journeys can be skipped over) without major imbalances. "Skill challenges" isn't a design goal, it's a way to make non-combat stuff more interesting without separate subsystems for Diplomacy and Stealth and Logistics.

And 4e basically fails to deliver on all its goals. You don't get different powers in Paragon tier, you still deal a couple of [W]s of damage and move a guy a square. Skill challenges don't work, and they have been revised more than any other system in the history of RPGs. Well, maybe. It's certainly in contention with 3e's shape changing rules, Shadowrun's Matrix rules, and (or so I've been told) GURPS's martial arts rules.

I don't think "fails to achieve goals" can be counted as uniquely competently designed. That is, after all, the criticism one would level against 3e or 5e or any other version of D&D. In fact, it's high level enough that there's basically only one other criticism that you can level against RPGs: "goals are stupid". And given that the goals of 3e and 4e are the same (tell fantasy stories in a D&D-ish way), I don't see how you can meaningfully call 4e better than 3e.
The goals of the edition were pretty clearly laid out in the preview books that came out in the lead-up to the edition. You are focusing on a much higher-level goal ("Tell D&D stories") than Morty was talking about - which are more along the line of "every character should be capable of contributing to an adventure at every level." And since I've been running the game literally since it came out... well, my view is complicated.

I'll disagree with your take on powers, since that's not at all how they work out in play, but I don't want to derail this bus more. :smallsmile:

Skill challenges, though ... well, on the downside, the original DMG skill challenges are a terrible mishmash of bad math and poor implementation. On the upside, 4e was a living, continually-developed game, and by the Rules Compendium, they got it right. So how do you judge - on the initial releases, which I'll agree had serious problems in the specifics of some implementations, or on the final state, which was dramatically improved? If we're judging on the monster creation system, should we look at the bad math of the original MM which led to boring, grindy battles? Or the final Monster Vault math, which finally married good design and good math? And for that matter, what about the related goal of making monsters both easier to run and create with self-contained stat blocks? (At which they were broadly successful.)

Since I'm running a game, obviously the final state is a lot more interesting to me. But I also can't disagree with a negative assessment of the PHB/DMG/MM - particularly the latter two - and more critically, I think the initial design was very conflicted on the final release. I don't think the designers actually knew how the game they'd design would work. The difference from other editions is that they fixed it. It wasn't until later releases - probably as early as PHB2 - that they started to figure out their own game.

So ... TL;DR I think 4e had ambitious design goals, but the specific implementations of those ideas were hit-or-miss at the start of the edition. By the end of the edition, though, I see a lot more hits than misses.

[Kurald Galain]

3) De-emphasize character optimization
They certainly failed at that particular goal :smallbiggrin:

[neonchameleon]

For games that I read but didn't play, my top pick would be Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, mainly because character creation seemed to be based on the assumption that you would only play characters from the comics and not anything you created yourself.

Or alternatively it made creation of anything you want to create easy and fun to the point that there are literally hundreds of fan-made datafiles online (this is just a sampling made in about the six months after MHRP was published (http://exploring-infinity.com/marvel-heroic-roleplaying/lost-files-of-marvel-unofficial-datafile-index/)). The thing about character creation in MHRP is that the character creation is a markup approach - you create the character's fiction and then turn that into numbers whatever the fiction said.


Then they should have been clearer.

And you should have actually tried looking up what encounter powers and rests were. Almost eight years after the publication of 4e your excuse for not getting basic concepts right in a system that's been argued about to hell and back is low. They were 100% clear in the rulebook whenever they did any defining at all.

In fact, they shouldn't have called them "powers" at all. Powers are presented in a way that made them look like some kind of magical abilities that recharge rather than skills. And instead of memorizing spells that they can pick, wizards and clerics have "powers" that recharge too. Oh, and something called a "healing surge," that isn't actually defined anywhere.


Also, there's no flavor at all. Not even the barest description of how the various races and classes fit into the world, or why I would choose one over another on any basis besides combat role.

So. Based on the rest of your post your problem is that there wasn't much worldbuilding in the quick start rules and that you couldn't even be bothered to read the PHB? And 4e character creation is based on the idea of "You are what you do".

Personally I find 4e has more flavour in any of its classes and in its races than prior editions or even 5e. For example the elves split in half - and the magical high elves get to teleport short distances. The gnomes are now no longer a confusing mix of dwarf and halfling so much as the weakest intelligent race in faerie. Divine boons/clerical magic is no longer almost all interchangeable; it is entirely possible that two clerics hold no spells in common because their gods and/or their relationship to those gods is so different.


The thing about first impressions is that you only get one. If you mess it up, you may not have a chance for a second impression. My first impression of 4e was

... demonstrably based on not reading the rulebook or understaning the very basic concepts of an encounter power or a short rest despite them being present in the quick start rules. Yes, you only get one chance to make a first impression - and yes the presentation of 4e was bad (and Mike Mearls' Keep on the Shadowfell might be one of the worst adventures ever). But literally every other complaint you've raised that doesn't boil down to presentation is based on a strawman because you couldn't even be bothered to understand the basics of any new concept in 4e.

JoeJ's Straw RPG is probably a terrible RPG - I do not dispute that. But it exists only inside your head. Please stop claiming that it has anything to do with the actual D&D 4e RPG other than your admittedly legitimate criticism that the initial presentation of 4e was terrible.


If you look at my history of posting, on the rare occasions where I've said anything about 4e at all, I've always been clear that my opinion is based only on the Quick Start rules. I'm not qualified, and I don't claim to be qualified, to critique any more than that.

And yet the rests are defined in the quick start rules - and based on not reading the quick start rules you felt yourself qualified to claim that something that had not changed at all made all the difference in the world.


Yes, that's fair. Let me rephrase: I think 4e has mostly well-defined goals and works towards achieving them, whereas 3e has self-contradictory goals that it flounders trying to achieve. 5e's goal I perceive as reactionary and not very worthwhile.

I'm going to disagree with you here. oD&D also has well defined goals and works towards achieving them, and so does B/X, BECMI, and the Rules Cyclopaedia. The goals are very different to those of 4e - but the zero to hero "By this axe I rule"/gritty logistics-focussed dungeoncrawler is a worthwhile goal. It's also worth pointing out that that line of games is possibly better balanced than 4e for what it does (which is not at all what 4e does).

Basically there are two games D&D has tried to be over the years. A gritty dungeon crawler where most of your character abilities were based on loot (including all the wizard's spells), player skill was considered essential, and mortaity and character generation were high - and at low to medium levels you brought a team of hirelings with you. And a larger than life action movie where the abilities of the individual characters were who they were, player skill was secondary to roleplaying, and you were playing Big Damn Heroes most of the time. oD&D/B/X/BECMI/RC were all about the first. 4e was all about the second.

As for 5e, 5e's goal is more worthwhile than I realised while they were creating it. It's to turn the clock back to 2000 and get 3.0 right. If you're going to play a game that tries to be all things to all people, at least 5e has learned - and has taken some things from 4e. I may want more invocations for the Warlock (and indeed a variant to turn it into an Elementalist Sorcerer) - but I can probably write that myself. The Rogue and Monk are actually pretty good (and learned extensively from 4e), and the spellbook collectors aren't that broken. And overall although I won't run it again I won't turn down a game of 5e on the grounds it's 5e.

[obryn]

I'll just lend my voice and agree with neonchameleon that RC D&D is probably the best-designed D&D, period, at what it's trying to do. :smallsmile: This shouldn't be too surprising - they had about 20 years to nail it down!

There's still some stuff in there that doesn't work out right, mind you, like ... say ... the implementation of demihuman level limits and/or atttack ranks and the entire Thief class ... but it's remarkably solid and well-thought-out.

[kyoryu]

They certainly failed at that particular goal :smallbiggrin:

I.... kinda disagree with that. Maybe they didn't de-emphasize it as much as some people would like, but I definitely think that it's much, much easier for a new player to come up with a reasonably effective character build than it was in 3.x.

I kind of look at five points for character effectiveness:

1) The anti-optimizer - the guy looking to make a sub-optimal character
2) The newbie - the guy coming to the system for the first time and making what looks like reasonable choices
3) Joe Average - the guy with some experience making choices based on a fairly good understanding of the system
4) The Optimizer - the guy who gains enjoyment from really making optimal choices and who is looking for non-obvious things to do
5) The Theoretical Optimizer - the guy that looks for stuff like Pun-Pun.

Now, I throw out #1 and #5, because it's useful to acknowledge their existence, but they don't impact typical gameplay. What's the range of effectiveness left between numbers 2 and 4? It's a lot narrower in 4e than in 3e.

The other thing that I look at is how counter-intuitive you have to go to go from #2 to #4. And you have to do a lot fewer counter-intuitive things to get well-optimized in 4e than you do in 3.x.

Charop is still a factor in 4e, sure, especially compared to something like Fate or AW which are almost anti-optimization. But it's less of a deal, in my experience, than it was in 3.x.

[Cosi]

A large part of the criticism towards any of these is from people who just don't like those goals. That's aside from the question of whether the goals are achieved. Indeed, I'd say that all these editions achieve their goals well enough for their fans, and that most non-fans simply prefer different goals.

You can say something fails without having to want it to succeed. I have no interest in owning a MacBook Air, but that doesn't mean I am incapable of comparing its size and weight to competing laptops to determine if it actually is "thinner and lighter" than similar computers. In the same vein, I am capable of assessing whether or not 4e successfully implemented meaningful class roles without supporting that idea.


1) On an overall level, make a game that is more suited for "The party of adventurers on Their Epic Quest" - get rid of the Gygaxian design decisions that were made around, and optimized for, an open-table game.

I don't think you've defined that well enough for something so succeed or fail at it. Consider the following "Epic Quests" characters embark on in various fantasy stories:


In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Fellowship sets out on an overland journey to throw the One Ring into Mount Doom
In the Prince of Thorns trilogy, Jorg spends some time wandering, some time engaged in various military or political ventures, and some time trying to defeat The Dead King.
In Lord of Light, Sam gathers allies to fight and attempt to overthrow the gods.


Those are all "Epic Quests", and they all want different things. If you're doing LotR, teleport breaks almost the entire plot. If you're doing Prince of Thorns, teleport breaks some parts of the plot (the parts where Jorg travels the world) and not others (the parts where Jorg engages in medieval politics or defends territory). If you're doing Lord of Light, teleport does very little to effect the plot.


2) Bring lethality to a set level, as opposed to the highly-lethal early levels and SoD rockets of higher levels

I can understand this as design goal, but I don't understand the attached complaint. How can going from highly-lethal combat at low levels (where people die easily to an unlucky roll) to rocket launcher tag at high levels (where people die easily to an unlucky roll) represent a change in lethality?

As far as the success or failure of this goal, I couldn't really say. I assume hit points and damage diverge in one direction or the other at high levels, but I haven't done the math at all.


3) De-emphasize character optimization

I think the existence of the Yogi Hat Ranger alone proves this was a failure.


4) Ensure that all characters have interesting mechanical options at all levels.

I haven't delved deeply enough into 4e to say if it succeeded at this on its own merits, but I don't see any 4e options as being as interesting as the ones that came before.


5) Make each fight tense on its own, while removing the need for the '15 minute workday'

4e fights take a long enough time that they are essentially deterministic, which removes any real tension that could conceivably exist.


6) Reinforce the idea of classes as archetypes, as opposed to being merely building blocks. "Being a Fighter" should mean something.

Moving everyone to at-will/encounter/daily was the exact opposite of doing this. When Warblades recharge their powers by making attacks and Incarnates have powers which are always on whose strength can be modulated by moving essentia around, those classes feel different and being a Incarnate rather than a Warblade has real meaning. When Fighters have at-wills, Wizards have at-wills, Clerics have at-wills, and Rogues have at-wills, the classes don't feel meaningfully different.


Skill challenges, though ... well, on the downside, the original DMG skill challenges are a terrible mishmash of bad math and poor implementation. On the upside, 4e was a living, continually-developed game, and by the Rules Compendium, they got it right.

Would you mind a quick explanation of the set of skill challenge rules you think were "right"? I believe they were different, but I have very little faith that Mearls et al eventually produced something good.


So how do you judge - on the initial releases, which I'll agree had serious problems in the specifics of some implementations, or on the final state, which was dramatically improved?

I think you have to judge the product that was released. If putting more work into it was needed to make it function, that work should have been done before the game was released, not after. There was nothing that required 3e to be canceled when it was or 4e to be released when it was. If moving the timeline back would have resulted in a better product, that should have happened.

I also find the assertion that the game got better later on dubious at best, as that "later on" was the timeframe when the game was scrapped, essentials was rolled out, and then that was scrapped. Whatever math fixes were presented then were, apparently, insufficient to salvage the edition.


I'll just lend my voice and agree with neonchameleon that RC D&D is probably the best-designed D&D, period, at what it's trying to do. :smallsmile: This shouldn't be too surprising - they had about 20 years to nail it down!

There's still some stuff in there that doesn't work out right, mind you, like ... say ... the implementation of demihuman level limits and/or atttack ranks and the entire Thief class ... but it's remarkably solid and well-thought-out.

I disagree with this fairly strongly. Older editions aren't "better", they are less examined. AD&D didn't have thousands of people hammering at it in a combined effort powered by the internet. It had individual people looking at it from the perspective of their gaming groups. There are plenty of things which are broken, but there aren't lists of them lying around on the internet until the end of time.

Frankly, once you strip away the stupid (racial level limits), the pointlessly complex (THAC0), and things that are both (class based XP charts), you're left with a game that looks a lot like 3e, except the HP curve is lower and the DM advice is aggressively bad. For example, 2e's time stop recommends that the DM take a physical stopwatch and drop the player out of time stop when a long enough period of real world time has passed.

[obryn]

Charop is still a factor in 4e, sure, especially compared to something like Fate or AW which are almost anti-optimization. But it's less of a deal, in my experience, than it was in 3.x.
Good breakdown. I agree.

The biggest 4e CharOp loopholes still remaining are with multi-tap and vulnerability exploits. The full Charge kit can be pretty crazy, too. And the Re-Breather is still a thing, I suppose. None of those approach CoDzilla, or optimized high-level 3.x Wizards, however. And a 4e vampire or binder isn't as bad off as a 3.5 monk or fighter at high levels (or Truenamer, but that's dirty pool).

You can certainly optimize in 4e, and that optimization is very noticeable. But - like I mentioned before - a lot of the most extreme abuses were scaled back due to the developers' relative comfort with patching their game.

[Kurald Galain]

Now, I throw out #1 and #5, because it's useful to acknowledge their existence, but they don't impact typical gameplay. What's the range of effectiveness left between numbers 2 and 4? It's a lot narrower in 4e than in 3e.
Well, the thing is that you're asking the wrong question.

Game balance is a primary design goal of 4E, and not of 3E. Forum vocal minorities notwithstanding, most players of 3E/PF just don't think that game balance is particularly important. So by making a game where balance is a priority, and attracting mainly players that think balance is important, 4E has put a greater emphasis on optimization. The prominence of the WOTC charop forum underlines this.

Aside from that, speaking from personal experience, it's still true that a poorly made 4E character (starting from high heroic levels) has trouble contributing in combat, to the point that he might as well be not at the table. I've seen several characters that simply had zero impact in battle.

So without going into whether this is "more so" or "less so" than other editions, 4E is a game that creates a lot of debate about optimization, and where an optimized character vastly overshadows a non-optimized, so in my view if their goal was to de-emphasize optimization, they've failed at that goal.

[Cosi]

None of those approach CoDzilla, or optimized high-level 3.x Wizards, however.

But that's because they're doing radically different things. The big cheeses in 3e are open ended or downtime spells like planar binding or wish. And those things don't exist in 4e. 4e's version of simulacrum isn't "more balanced", it is "not there". When you compare a 3e battle-mage who is doing thing like casting cloudkill or web to an optimized 4e build (I hear Rangers are good?), I think the relative imbalance is a lot closer.

If you want to compare 3e downtime options like animate dead and major creation to 4e, you need to compare characters using them to characters using rituals. Not to combat options, because they aren't combat options.


Game balance is a primary design goal of 4E, and not of 3E. Forum vocal minorities notwithstanding, most players of 3E/PF just don't think that game balance is particularly important. So by making a game where balance is a priority, and attracting mainly players that think balance is important, 4E has put a greater emphasis on optimization. The prominence of the WOTC charop forum underlines this.

What the hell? Where do you think 4e's emphasis on balance came from? Why are classes like Warblade among the most popular 3e expansion options? Could it be that people want a balanced game?

I mean, look how successful 4e and PF are for just claiming to have a balanced version of 3e. You really think that's coming from a fanbase that doesn't care about optimization?


Aside from that, speaking from personal experience, it's still true that a poorly made 4E character (starting from high heroic levels) has trouble contributing in combat, to the point that he might as well be not at the table. I've seen several characters that simply had zero impact in battle.

I think that has something to do with the smaller spread of things characters can do in 4e. There just isn't that much there, other than the combat engine, and the combat engine is fairly sharply dependent on you keeping the right numbers up. A Wizard with poor stat selection in 3e could still offer downtime spells or no-save BFC like evard's black tentacles, whereas one in 4e is basically stuck on the sidelines.

[obryn]

Would you mind a quick explanation of the set of skill challenge rules you think were "right"? I believe they were different, but I have very little faith that Mearls et al eventually produced something good.
The math was thoroughly patched, the usage was explained better, group skill challenges were acknowledged, the weird bit about rolling initiative was deleted, and there's specific advice about listing out useful skills for it.


I think you have to judge the product that was released. If putting more work into it was needed to make it function, that work should have been done before the game was released, not after. There was nothing that required 3e to be canceled when it was or 4e to be released when it was. If moving the timeline back would have resulted in a better product, that should have happened.

I also find the assertion that the game got better later on dubious at best, as that "later on" was the timeframe when the game was scrapped, essentials was rolled out, and then that was scrapped. Whatever math fixes were presented then were, apparently, insufficient to salvage the edition.
Well, there were released books. There was also released errata. Yes, there should have been more work put into the game before it was released. Yes, there should have been more playtesting. No, the errata should not have been as necessary. I don't think anyone would disagree with you, there.

But the improvements were made. Monster math was fixed. Class design was improved. Exploits and broken bits were patched, skill challenges were refined (and re-refined). Classes were rounded out and expanded so that sub-par classes were improved. Adventure design even improved, though way, way too late. (The flagship adventure line starting with Keep on the Shadowfell is just terrible, and casts a long shadow.)

You can be dubious all you want; the sad fact is that much of this improvement happened after players ran afoul of the parts that didn't work so well on release, and you never get a second chance for that first impression. Also, edition wars were pretty well entrenched at this point, so...


I disagree with this fairly strongly. Older editions aren't "better", they are less examined. AD&D didn't have thousands of people hammering at it in a combined effort powered by the internet. It had individual people looking at it from the perspective of their gaming groups. There are plenty of things which are broken, but there aren't lists of them lying around on the internet until the end of time.

Frankly, once you strip away the stupid (racial level limits), the pointlessly complex (THAC0), and things that are both (class based XP charts), you're left with a game that looks a lot like 3e, except the HP curve is lower and the DM advice is aggressively bad. For example, 2e's time stop recommends that the DM take a physical stopwatch and drop the player out of time stop when a long enough period of real world time has passed.
Hm? I don't think many games have been as thoroughly examined as the BECMI line. I'm not going to go into 2e, because that's the AD&D line, which is a different beast, entirely.

[Kurald Galain]

I can understand this as design goal, but I don't understand the attached complaint. How can going from highly-lethal combat at low levels (where people die easily to an unlucky roll) to rocket launcher tag at high levels (where people die easily to an unlucky roll) represent a change in lethality?
The fact that there's a middle part where people don't die like this, and the fact that if you die at higher levels, your party members can likely raise you the next round.

The point is, an explicit design goal of 3E is that low-level gameplay is very different from high-level gameplay, and an explicit design goal of 4E and 5E is that it's not. This is not a matter of better-or-worse, but it is clear that different players have different preferences. (FWIW, designers are on record that 4E was modeled after levels 7-12 of 3E, whereas 5E was modeled after levels 3-7 of 3E).


Would you mind a quick explanation of the set of skill challenge rules you think were "right"? I believe they were different, but I have very little faith that Mearls et al eventually produced something good.
It's worth noting that "no more skill challenges" was an explicit design goal of 5E.


I also find the assertion that the game got better later on dubious at best, as that "later on" was the timeframe when the game was scrapped, essentials was rolled out, and then that was scrapped. Whatever math fixes were presented then were, apparently, insufficient to salvage the edition.
An interesting thing is that the later books of 4E explicitly have different design principles than the earlier books. Of course, this change was controversial, and for every fan that feels the newer books fixed 4E, there is one that claims they ruined it.

But fair or not, any RPGs is mainly going to be judged on its first book.

[Cosi]

The math was thoroughly patched, the usage was explained better, group skill challenges were acknowledged, the weird bit about rolling initiative was deleted, and there's specific advice about listing out useful skills for it.

I don't think any of that fixes the core problem: counting failures is a perverse incentive. The way skill challenges are structured, the party is allowed to make skill checks until they accumulate three failures. That means that conributing with a bonus smaller than your party's largest bonus drops your chances of success. I know the DCs were mathhammered, with automatic success and automatic failure being the orders of the day at various points during the edition. I want to know if they fixed the fundamental problem with incentives.


You can be dubious all you want; the sad fact is that much of this improvement happened after players ran afoul of the parts that didn't work so well on release, and you never get a second chance for that first impression. Also, edition wars were pretty well entrenched at this point, so...

I'm sure the game improved. I just don't see how you make something good with its fundamentals. I also don't trust the design team working on it to make something good, even if that was possible.


Hm? I don't think many games have been as thoroughly examined as the BECMI line. I'm not going to go into 2e, because that's the AD&D line, which is a different beast, entirely.

To be frank, I haven't gone down that rabbit hole. But when I went down the 2e rabbit hole, the game was rife with terrible advice, pointless complexity, and baffling design decisions. And when I go down the rabbit holes of various retroclones, those things are also bad. Why should this be any different?


(FWIW, designers are on record that 4E was modeled after levels 7-12 of 3E

...I cannot imagine someone starting with that goal and producing 4e. Where is animate dead? Where is teleport? Where is literally any spell over 3rd level?


It's worth noting that "no more skill challenges" was an explicit design goal of 5E.

I think that is stupid. Skill challenges are good. Having a resolution system for things that are not combat, but more complex than a single skill check is good, and you could fix all the conceptual problems with 4e skill challenges by limiting people by rounds instead of failures.

It does certainly make it look like the designers didn't think they could fix skill challenges though.

[Kurald Galain]

But that's because they're doing radically different things. The big cheeses in 3e are open ended or downtime spells like planar binding or wish. And those things don't exist in 4e. 4e's version of simulacrum isn't "more balanced", it is "not there".
Yes, and it turns out that more players care about the presence of these options than the balance thereof.


What the hell? Where do you think 4e's emphasis on balance came from?
From vocal minorities on forums.



I think that has something to do with the smaller spread of things characters can do in 4e. There just isn't that much there, other than the combat engine, and the combat engine is fairly sharply dependent on you keeping the right numbers up. A Wizard with poor stat selection in 3e could still offer downtime spells or no-save BFC like evard's black tentacles, whereas one in 4e is basically stuck on the sidelines.
I agree. And that is what I mean by a greater emphasis on optimization.

[kyoryu]

The fact that there's a middle part where people don't die like this, and the fact that if you die at higher levels, your party members can likely raise you the next round.

Plus the fact that, at any level, *any* attack is potentially lethal to just about *any* character. For a 1-3 level character, just about any opponent can get lucky and kill you in a round or two.

At higher levels, death is much more predictable and avoidable, except from SoD spells.


The point is, an explicit design goal of 3E is that low-level gameplay is very different from high-level gameplay, and an explicit design goal of 4E and 5E is that it's not. This is not a matter of better-or-worse, but it is clear that different players have different preferences. (FWIW, designers are on record that 4E was modeled after levels 7-12 of 3E, whereas 5E was modeled after levels 3-7 of 3E).

Sure, 3e, 4e, and 5e have very different design goals. That doesn't make any of them inherently better than the others, but it certainly gives you a choice as to which lines up better with your preferences for gameplay.

[obryn]

I don't think any of that fixes the core problem: counting failures is a perverse incentive. The way skill challenges are structured, the party is allowed to make skill checks until they accumulate three failures. That means that conributing with a bonus smaller than your party's largest bonus drops your chances of success. I know the DCs were mathhammered, with automatic success and automatic failure being the orders of the day at various points during the edition. I want to know if they fixed the fundamental problem with incentives.
"Counting individual failures" is only one possible resolution method. There's group checks, group-checks-with-consequences, etc.

As an example, in my Dark Sun campaign, the players decided to try to traverse the Silt Reef on the outskirts of Old Giustenal (basically the sunken portion of the city's walls). Nature and Perception rolls from the scouts set the DCs for the party's Athletics or Acrobatics check. Success from half the group advanced you forward. Individual failures cost you a Healing Surge. It worked really smoothly.


I'm sure the game improved. I just don't see how you make something good with its fundamentals. I also don't trust the design team working on it to make something good, even if that was possible.
They didn't know the game they had when they released it. They figured it out. I don't know what else to tell you. :smallsmile:


To be frank, I haven't gone down that rabbit hole. But when I went down the 2e rabbit hole, the game was rife with terrible advice, pointless complexity, and baffling design decisions. And when I go down the rabbit holes of various retroclones, those things are also bad. Why should this be any different?
If your ideal design resembles 3.x or other rules-heavy systems, then you probably won't find much to admire about it. But it really doesn't resemble 2e all that much, IMO.

If you start from blank and judge it as a zero-to-hero game with scaling complexity that moves you from the dungeons all the way to immortality, it does a pretty great job. You can see the mechanics which are there, and see the reasons they are there. (With some exceptions, mind you - there's some useless cruft here and there.) It's not a perfect game, but it's a solid one.

[Kurald Galain]

Sure, 3e, 4e, and 5e have very different design goals. That doesn't make any of them inherently better than the others, but it certainly gives you a choice as to which lines up better with your preferences for gameplay.
Yes, that's my point (in reaction to an earlier poster who said that they all have the exact same goals).

Furthermore, players in general tend to pick a game with goals they like, and care much less about how well exactly a game achieves its goals. So while forum discussions tend to focus a lot about corner cases where a game's goals don't work, such arguments are far from persuasive to the average player.


...I cannot imagine someone starting with that goal and producing 4e. Where is animate dead? Where is teleport? Where is literally any spell over 3rd level?
I'm not sure what your point is but most of those spells still exist (Animate Dead is a level 9 wizard daily; Teleport is a level 28 ritual; and most high-level classics like Disintegrate are still there).



If you start from blank and judge it as a zero-to-hero game with scaling complexity that moves you from the dungeons all the way to immortality, it does a pretty great job. You can see the mechanics which are there, and see the reasons they are there. (With some exceptions, mind you - there's some useless cruft here and there.) It's not a perfect game, but it's a solid one.
(edit) Well, that explains why BECMI has outsold every other edition by at least 300%.

[Cosi]

Yes, and it turns out that more players care about the presence of these options than the balance thereof.

I don't think that's true. Consider wish. PF removed the magic items clause. If people cared more about presence than balance, why make that change?


From vocal minorities on forums.

No more so than any other opinion on forums. Also, it's not like there's any strong anti-balance caucus campaigning for Fighters being worse than Wizards.

Also, even among people who do not post on forums, I have found very few who know that imbalance exists and don't care about it.


"Counting individual failures" is only one possible resolution method. There's group checks, group-checks-with-consequences, etc.

And which versions introduce those?


If you start from blank and judge it as a zero-to-hero game with scaling complexity that moves you from the dungeons all the way to immortality, it does a pretty great job. You can see the mechanics which are there, and see the reasons they are there. (With some exceptions, mind you - there's some useless cruft here and there.) It's not a perfect game, but it's a solid one.

Could you be somewhat more specific?


Furthermore, players in general tend to pick a game with goals they like, and care much less about how well exactly a game achieves its goals. So while forum discussions tend to focus a lot about corner cases where a game's goals don't work, such arguments are far from persuasive to the average player.

Yes, but when you're talking about game design, the only people who really matter are ones who can be persuaded to care (or not care) about your game based on the quality of its mechanics. If someone is going to play your game regardless of how well it achieves its design goals, their opinion doesn't matter when deciding how to fulfill those goals.


I'm not sure what your point is but most of those spells still exist (Animate Dead is a level 9 wizard power; Teleport is a level 8 ritual; and most high-level classics like Disintegrate are still there).

Ritual teleport is fairly radically different in function from 3e teleport. It's a change I can get behind, to a degree, but I don't particularly think it's one that you'd make if your goal was "3e, focused on 7 - 12".

[Kurald Galain]

No more so than any other opinion on forums.
Precisely. The point is that companies shouldn't base marketing decisions on forum opinions; a fact that WOTC learned the hard way.


Also, even among people who do not post on forums, I have found very few who know that imbalance exists and don't care about it.
That would be a confirmation bias.


Yes, but when you're talking about game design, the only people who really matter are ones who can be persuaded to care (or not care) about your game based on the quality of its mechanics. If someone is going to play your game regardless of how well it achieves its design goals, their opinion doesn't matter when deciding how to fulfill those goals.
Precisely. Selection of goals is much more important than attainment of those goals. This, of course, is why 5E spent over a year on market research, which is several orders of magnitude above any other RPG.


Ritual teleport is fairly radically different in function from 3e teleport.
Of course. Compatibility with earlier editions was explicitly not a design goal, after all.

[JoeJ]

Or alternatively it made creation of anything you want to create easy and fun to the point that there are literally hundreds of fan-made datafiles online (this is just a sampling made in about the six months after MHRP was published (http://exploring-infinity.com/marvel-heroic-roleplaying/lost-files-of-marvel-unofficial-datafile-index/)). The thing about character creation in MHRP is that the character creation is a markup approach - you create the character's fiction and then turn that into numbers whatever the fiction said.

Which is completely nonfunctional if you want to create the character first and use the game to write the story. Glancing at the names at that link, it looks like they're all characters from the comics, not original creations, which is what I said the problem was.


And you should have actually tried looking up what encounter powers and rests were.

Why should I have done that, instead of spending the time playing games I enjoy?


So. Based on the rest of your post your problem is that there wasn't much worldbuilding in the quick start rules and that you couldn't even be bothered to read the PHB? And 4e character creation is based on the idea of "You are what you do".

That's right. And how would I know how character creation works in 4e? That's not in the Quick Start either.


Personally I find 4e has more flavour in any of its classes and in its races than prior editions or even 5e. For example the elves split in half - and the magical high elves get to teleport short distances. The gnomes are now no longer a confusing mix of dwarf and halfling so much as the weakest intelligent race in faerie. Divine boons/clerical magic is no longer almost all interchangeable; it is entirely possible that two clerics hold no spells in common because their gods and/or their relationship to those gods is so different.

I'm happy for you. You should play the games you enjoy.


And yet the rests are defined in the quick start rules - and based on not reading the quick start rules you felt yourself qualified to claim that something that had not changed at all changed from a dissociated to an associated mechanic made all the difference in the world.

Fixed it for you.

[obryn]

(edit) Well, that explains why BECMI has outsold every other edition by at least 300%.
I don't really love to equate sales quantity with rules quality. But yeah, WotC has been trying to recapture the early 80's glory days with every release.


And which versions introduce those?
The one I've been talking about - the Rules Compendium.


Could you be somewhat more specific?
Yes. Do we want to talk about this in this thread, though?


Ritual teleport is fairly radically different in function from 3e teleport. It's a change I can get behind, to a degree, but I don't particularly think it's one that you'd make if your goal was "3e, focused on 7 - 12".
If your goal is to re-emphasize travel, like you have at lower levels, it's necessary to remove easy access to teleportation. It wasn't literally intended as a clone of certain levels; it was designed to expand the 'sweet spot.'

[Elderand]

Claiming BECMI sold better than other dnd edition because it had the best rules is at best horribly shortsighted and at worst completely falacious.

First problem, what's BECMI? Because there are several different versions of it. You have Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, the rules cyclopedia by Allston, all of which had different rules. The immortal rules between Mentzer and cyclopedia for exemple have almost nothing in common. When you take that into account you actually have to do the same sort of grouping for other editions. So when discussing how well 3rd edition sold you have to count 3rd edition, 3.5 AND pathfinder all at once. You might have to count adnd 1st and 2nd edition together as well. The result on what sold best will look quite different when you do that.

Then there is a matter of offering. The market of RPG today is saturated with a glute of games, often designed by just a couple people. You have dozens upon dozens of systems. There was nowhere near the same availability of materials back in those days. And what alternative to dnd there was what far less well known. For better or for worse when you played a roleplaying game in those days that meant playing dungeons and dragons.

And claiming the rules for BECMI are better is quite a huge claim to make, personaly I have found these rules to be sort of alright but rather clunky and needlessly convoluted at times. And there are bits in it that are just very badly designed by modern standard. If I had to define the rules of BECMI in three words it would clunky, innelegant but serviceable. This is the opinion of someone who never played those editions and isn't biased by nostalgia.

I think people are more attached to certain concepts and features that show up in BECMI rather than the actual rules. Name level and the shift away from standard adventuring are always popular. But notice this, modern games do either one or the other, they don't mix them like BECMI did. Why ? Because the rules for dominion aren't all that great. Dnd focused on what it did best, the adventuring and left the semi wargame/dominion to other games who do that right from the start.

Transitioning from one to the other is a bad idea because it betrays expectation. And a sudden genre shift always brings complaints. Look at brutal legends for a videogame exemple.

The sales of Becmi has less to do with quality of rules (which is at best average and often subpar) and more to do with the context in which it was sold.

[neonchameleon]

I'll just lend my voice and agree with neonchameleon that RC D&D is probably the best-designed D&D, period, at what it's trying to do. :smallsmile: This shouldn't be too surprising - they had about 20 years to nail it down!

There's still some stuff in there that doesn't work out right, mind you, like ... say ... the implementation of demihuman level limits and/or atttack ranks and the entire Thief class ... but it's remarkably solid and well-thought-out.

The Demihuman Level Limits I'll defend (the Thief class? Yeah, you got me). You know how in some computer games you can set the game to easy mode - but don't get the super end boss or more than a toehold on the high score table if you do? That's what demihumans are - the ability to play the game on easy mode as long as you are willing to accept the price of never making the high score table. Quite an elegant solution for letting two players at the same table to play at different difficulties. (The fluff reasoning - that they go home - should have been made more explicit).


I haven't delved deeply enough into 4e to say if it succeeded at this on its own merits, but I don't see any 4e options as being as interesting as the ones that came before.

And I see the options that came before 4e as being almost universally less interesting than the characters, monsters, and even magic items in 4e. The sheer interchangeability of non-spontaneous casters in 3.X kills them to me. The 4e wire-fu monk makes the monks from previous editions look like jokes (I'm glad to see the 5e monk learned a lot from 4e) and the fact that the 4e rogue can do a brush pass at low levels if you set it up that way means that they leave the pointlessness of the AD&D thief and the stabity nonsense of the 3e monk in the dust.

Literally the only classes I find more interesting in 3.X than 4e are the Bard, the Crusader (from Bo9S) and the basic design of the artificer (although it was hideously broken as implemented - the 4e artificer IMO didn't work). I understand why people preferred pre-4e wizards, but this really is a case of YMMV.

In 5e the monk, rogue, and warlock are approximately up to 4e standards (although I really want an elementalist warlock). The fighter has a long way to go and I miss the heavy metal barbarians. The Paladin and Ranger are spell-dependent travesties in a way they weren't in prior editions (the two classes I'd prefer to reach back to 3.X for than play in 5e) and the prepared spellcasters have most of the fluff and interchangeability problems they do in 3.X


4e fights take a long enough time that they are essentially deterministic, which removes any real tension that could conceivably exist.

This was why they raised monster damage.


Moving everyone to at-will/encounter/daily was the exact opposite of doing this. When Warblades recharge their powers by making attacks and Incarnates have powers which are always on whose strength can be modulated by moving essentia around, those classes feel different

When how you differentiate between classes is more dependent on how they recharge than what they actually do you have several serious problems.


When Fighters have at-wills, Wizards have at-wills, Clerics have at-wills, and Rogues have at-wills, the classes don't feel meaningfully different.

If stabbing someone doesn't feel meaningfully different from incinerating them and the people standing next to them I honestly don't know what to tell you.


Would you mind a quick explanation of the set of skill challenge rules you think were "right"? I believe they were different, but I have very little faith that Mearls et al eventually produced something good.

To me skills always were an improv tool. A "You have no idea how the hell to handle the PC's latest off the wall plan? Turn it into a skill challenge, and that's easy. Then you can get back to the fiction and pace it properly." Like a lot of 4e the problem is presentation - and once you got outside the rules, the prats who wrote a lot of the guidance were like people who went to a taping of Whose Line Is It Anyway and recorded what the performers did - and then told people to do that.


I think you have to judge the product that was released. If putting more work into it was needed to make it function, that work should have been done before the game was released, not after. There was nothing that required 3e to be canceled when it was or 4e to be released when it was. If moving the timeline back would have resulted in a better product, that should have happened.

Agreed. They restarted developing 4e after ten months of a two year development cycle - and didn't delay 4e coming out. This was a catastrophic mistake.


I disagree with this fairly strongly. Older editions aren't "better", they are less examined. AD&D didn't have thousands of people hammering at it in a combined effort powered by the internet. It had individual people looking at it from the perspective of their gaming groups. There are plenty of things which are broken, but there aren't lists of them lying around on the internet until the end of time.

We're not even talking about AD&D here. oD&D on the other hand was playtested better than any other edition of D&D in history. It had only a few dozen playtesters - but they were playing daily in multiple groups and, more to the point, they were hardcore wargamers competitively going all out to gain competitive advantage and actively trying to break the game in a way that both WotC and Paizo would consider highly antisocial.


Frankly, once you strip away the stupid (racial level limits),

Not stupid - justs gamist. It allowed different players at the same table to play at different difficulty settings - what's stupid about that in a rolling drop-in game?


the pointlessly complex (THAC0),

Didn't show up until 2e. It was lookup tables before that.


and things that are both (class based XP charts),

Which are excellent for fine-balance and calibrating the game so that each class is a distinctly different experience.


you're left with a game that looks a lot like 3e,

You're talking about 2e here. The game that's added lots of unwanted cruft like a spell list several times the length it needs to be. But more to the point 2e threw out the intended XP mechanic which was 1XP for 1GP. Making oD&D a game about looting dungeons where fighting was a last resort for chumps. Throw out the XP for GP mechanic and the most obvious way of gaining XP becomes killing monsters. A fundamentally different and much less interesting game.


except the HP curve is lower

Also the saving throws work.


and the DM advice is aggressively bad.

The DM advice is aggressively bad in different ways in 1e and 2e (they are very different games with some superficil similarities). This is why both Obryn and I are talking about oD&D, BECMI, and RC D&D.

To put it simply, 1E was a scam by Gygax to get out of paying Arneson royalties. 2e was a complete change in the expected playstyle of D&D while not changing the rules much (which meant that 2e was utterly wrongly tuned) and 3.X threw out any part of 2e that looked odd without bothering to understand why that part was there.11111


Well, the thing is that you're asking the wrong question.

Game balance is a primary design goal of 4E, and not of 3E.

Bull****! When 3.0 was launched it was touted as the most balanced version of D&D ever. Some of us remember that far back. That the 3.0 designers failed miserably to the point modern 3e fans don't remember it doesn't mean that it wasn't a major design goal.


What the hell? Where do you think 4e's emphasis on balance came from? Why are classes like Warblade among the most popular 3e expansion options? Could it be that people want a balanced game?

The only reason to not want a balanced game is because you want to lord it over the table. How much of a priority it is varies, but anyone who thinks it shouldn't be one is a muppet.


I think that has something to do with the smaller spread of things characters can do in 4e.

Any non-caster in 4e is more versatile than any non-caster in 3.X when not pretending to be a professional basketweaver. I've made 4e fighters more generally skilled than high INT 3e rogues - and with skill challenges (once you unpick the presentation of them) the skill system doesn't creak as much. What there isn't is the magic user/muggle divide of 3.X.

3.X skill users are generally incompetent at any level - with 33 skills plus three entire families of skills (knowledge, craft, profession) and even the rogue only getting 8 + Int modifier skills per level (let's not get into the 2+Int skills of some) they are no better than commoners at most things. The 3.X skill system is punitive and tells you to not use it if you can avoid it.

4E skill users are broadly competent - they start with between three and seven trained skills out of seventeen and they get better across the board as they level up. I've made a first level (human) fighter who was an enforcer, trained in Perception, Streetwise, Intimidate, Athletics, Stealth, and Thievery. In 3.X terms that would be full training in Spot, Search, Listen, Knowledge (Local), Gather Information, Intimidate, Climb, Jump, Swim, Hide, Move Silenty, Open Lock, and Sleight of Hand. A perfectly sensible set of things for a highly skilled enforcer to be good at - but what sort of rogue can afford training in fourteen skills? And this was a 4e fighter who only gave up a little combat ability and that to be able to hide where normal rogues couldn't. He could also sneak attack 1/fight. And then there's my textbook example of the Brush Pass - picking someone's pocket while you keep walking. In both 3.X and 4e to do that takes a swift/minor action. In 3.X it's a -20 to your check - not gonna happen until a ridiculous level. In 4e it's a utility power that some rogues can take at second level. If a rogue wants one of their things to be a brush pass they can do it at very low level.

4e casters are a bit more flexible than 4e skill users. Mostly by covering argument - skills plus rituals.

3.X wizards on the other hand make the generally barely competent 3.X skill users look as if they need not bother getting out of bed because they are fairly pointless.

So which can do more? A 3.X or 4e character? Are we talking a 3.X Muggle or 3.X wizard? Even the 3.X rogue is a joke by 4e standards. But the 4e character makes no pretensions to being a 3.X wizard. For that matter most Solar Exalted aren't as flexible as 3.X wizards.


To be frank, I haven't gone down that rabbit hole. But when I went down the 2e rabbit hole, the game was rife with terrible advice, pointless complexity, and baffling design decisions.

2e is terrible that way, agreed. As I mentioned before, 1e AD&D was a scam by Gygax to avoid paying Arneson royalties by tacking the word Advanced onto D&D and then adding a ton of optional and unwanted rules. 2e is an attempt to make those rules cover a game with entirely different goals while changing almost none of the rules. 3.0 is an attempt to streamline the 2e rules by people who'd take the spoiler off a F1 or Indy500 car because it looked bulky and they didn't understand what it did (most notably seen in removing the level cap and screwing up the saving throws).


I think that is stupid. Skill challenges are good. Having a resolution system for things that are not combat, but more complex than a single skill check is good, and you could fix all the conceptual problems with 4e skill challenges by limiting people by rounds instead of failures.

No you couldn't. You could solve some - and open more up. It depends what you want skill challenges to model.


No more so than any other opinion on forums. Also, it's not like there's any strong anti-balance caucus campaigning for Fighters being worse than Wizards.

It might not be strong but it is certainly there!


Ritual teleport is fairly radically different in function from 3e teleport. It's a change I can get behind, to a degree, but I don't particularly think it's one that you'd make if your goal was "3e, focused on 7 - 12".

The problem here is the wizard/muggle divide in 3.X. Which do you go with? And I'd have said levels 3-9 anyway (in other words most of the AD&D range and slightly higher - the game soft-caps at level 9/10)


Which is completely nonfunctional if you want to create the character first and use the game to write the story. Glancing at the names at that link, it looks like they're all characters from the comics, not original creations, which is what I said the problem was.

If you can visualise your character you can create them. Simple as that.


Why should I have done that, instead of spending the time playing games I enjoy?

No reason at all. However if you haven't done that you shouldn't make objectively wrong claims about 4e that have been edition warrior talking points for years. If you hadn't been making objectively false claims about 4e no one would have either known or cared. But you did and they are easy to debunk.

[kyoryu]

what's stupid about that in a rolling drop-in game?

This is, honestly, the biggest point I can make about 1e and earlier D&D. They work *just fine*, as written, presuming an open-table/drop-in game structure.

They really don't work very well *at all* for the DragonLance structure of "here's five heroes on their epic quest, and these are Your Guys, and there's a strong expectation that you'll play only these guys and that they won't die because that would suck." Not that there's anything *wrong* with that, but it's not the style of play that the game really was built around.

By 3rd ed you've got a system that really wants to do the second thing, but has a lot of baggage left over from its early days. 4th tried to get rid of that baggage, but screwed up in several significant ways. (This doesn't mean I think 4th is better than 3rd, btw).

[Kurald Galain]

This is, honestly, the biggest point I can make about 1e and earlier D&D. They work *just fine*, as written, presuming an open-table/drop-in game structure.

They really don't work very well *at all* for the DragonLance structure of "here's five heroes on their epic quest, and these are Your Guys, and there's a strong expectation that you'll play only these guys and that they won't die because that would suck." Not that there's anything *wrong* with that, but it's not the style of play that the game really was built around.

Level limits are a good example of a mechanic that doesn't achieve its goal (i.e. balance between races).

See, at low levels the difference between races is most pronounced... and at low levels, this mechanic does absolutely nothing. Most campaigns (and characters) start at low level and have no guarantee of how high they're going to get. At high levels, your class has so much power that the race doesn't make that big a difference any more... and at this point the mechanic basically causes some races to disappear.

Of course, the mechanic is trivial to houserule away. So saying "1E sucks because of level limits" is bogus, as people who dislike level limits would play without them. Easy as pi.

(edit) not that you, Kyoryu in particular, were saying that. Anyway, it strikes me that most of 1E's rules work perfectly fine for the DragonLance structure - which makes sense if you consider that Dragonlance was initially written for 1E.


Claiming BECMI sold better than other dnd edition because it had the best rules is at best horribly shortsighted and at worst completely falacious.
Sure, we get it, you personally didn't like BECMI. That's fine, everybody has their own taste.

That said, there are only three metrics for what the best rules are. One is "the rules that I, personally, prefer" which obviously doesn't get us anywhere because other people are going to disagree. The second is looking at some kind of external awards, but to my knowledge all editions of D&D have won a bunch of those so that doesn't get us anywhere either.

The third is sales figures. Like it or not, the most objective measure of "which game is best" is "which game sold best".

[kyoryu]

Level limits are a good example of a mechanic that doesn't achieve its goal (i.e. balance between races).

Except I don't think that was really its goal. Its goal was to give you reasons to choose humans. In an open-table, Gygaxian game, you can't presume your character will survive. So it becomes a choice to take the higher (initially) powered character knowing you won't get higher levels, but having a higher choice of survival.

Making a 1st level human and a 1st level dwarf equal isn't the goal.


See, at low levels the difference between races is most pronounced... and at low levels, this mechanic does absolutely nothing. Most campaigns (and characters) start at low level and have no guarantee of how high they're going to get. At high levels, your class has so much power that the race doesn't make that big a difference any more... and at this point the mechanic basically causes some races to disappear.

Right, but in the open-table game, you really don't know if your character *will* get to the higher levels or die. And even if they do, and you can't adventure with your buds any more, you pull out one of your other characters.


(edit) not that you, Kyoryu in particular, were saying that. Anyway, it strikes me that most of 1E's rules work perfectly fine for the DragonLance structure - which makes sense if you consider that Dragonlance was initially written for 1E.

I think the majority of "stupid" rules make sense if you presume an open-table, multiple character structure where character death is a real thing. LFQW suddenly works, since that wizard probably doesn't *make it* to the higher levels, and will only be played some of the time anyway. Association restrictions work, since Joe playing an assassin means you can't play one *this week*, not *this campaign*. Etc. etc. Same with a bunch of the rules about magic items costing xp, time to craft things, training time, etc. - these all work just fine if you presume the player will play *other characters* during this time.

[Kurald Galain]

Except I don't think that was really its goal. Its goal was to give you reasons to choose humans. In an open-table, Gygaxian game, you can't presume your character will survive. So it becomes a choice to take the higher (initially) powered character knowing you won't get higher levels, but having a higher choice of survival.
Ok, in that case I must conclude that they served their goal reasonably well.



I think the majority of "stupid" rules make sense if you presume an open-table, multiple character structure where character death is a real thing. LFQW suddenly works, since that wizard probably doesn't *make it* to the higher levels, and will only be played some of the time anyway. Association restrictions work, since Joe playing an assassin means you can't play one *this week*, not *this campaign*. Etc. etc. Same with a bunch of the rules about magic items costing xp, time to craft things, training time, etc. - these all work just fine if you presume the player will play *other characters* during this time.
Yes, but most of these "stupid" rules also work reasonably well in a regular campaign. Perhaps not all of them, and perhaps they can be improved, but tinkering with the system was encouraged. Indeed, large tomes of houserules, variants, and expanded rules are as old as the 'Net itself.

[Elderand]

Sure, we get it, you personally didn't like BECMI. That's fine, everybody has their own taste.

That said, there are only three metrics for what the best rules are. One is "the rules that I, personally, prefer" which obviously doesn't get us anywhere because other people are going to disagree. The second is looking at some kind of external awards, but to my knowledge all editions of D&D have won a bunch of those so that doesn't get us anywhere either.

The third is sales figures. Like it or not, the most objective measure of "which game is best" is "which game sold best".

Clearly you don't get it given that your only answer is a flippant dismissal rather than adressing any of points I raised. And where are you getting the idea that BECMI sold best? That's quite a claim to make, one that is so far completely unsubstantiated. Especialy given that sales figures for RPG are near impossible to find.

So rather than make flippant dismissal why don't you actually put your money where your foot is and show us some sort of sales figures.

[obryn]

So rather than make flippant dismissal why don't you actually put your money where your foot is and show us some sort of sales figures.
You can check a number of histories of the game; I'd recommend Designers and Dragons.

The Basic box sets of the early 80's were the best-selling RPG products of all time, selling literally millions of copies. As a rule, RPG companies don't release actual sales numbers, but it's notable that nobody in the industry has ever said otherwise. It represented the game's peak of popularity.

[JoeJ]

No reason at all. However if you haven't done that you shouldn't make objectively wrong claims about 4e that have been edition warrior talking points for years. If you hadn't been making objectively false claims about 4e no one would have either known or cared. But you did and they are easy to debunk.

This will be my last post on this topic. I did not make any objectively incorrect claims; I made some absolutely correct statements about why I, personally, don't like 4e. I don't go around attacking the game, or those who like it. It's only very rarely that I say anything about it at all, and then I limit my remarks to explaining why I chose not to play it. I understand that a lot of people enjoy 4e, and that's fine. A lot of people like sushi too, even if I think it's gross. I'd even be willing to try it (4e I mean, not sushi) if I had a group of friends who really liked it, just because it's fun to hang out and do stuff with friends. But without that, it would be pretty pointless for me to spend my time digging into a game that doesn't appear to be what I'm looking for.

[Cosi]

Precisely. The point is that companies shouldn't base marketing decisions on forum opinions; a fact that WOTC learned the hard way.

Please, tell me which group was calling for the removal of everything except the combat minigame and a few minor rituals? Oh, was that no-one? Right, because the design goal for 4e wasn't to make things balanced it was to make things easy to right. That's why 4e has narrow classes on hard rails. That's why 4e powers take two or three times the reasonable amount of space. That's why


That would be a confirmation bias.

You do need to present evidence of your position. If your argument is that my claim (people want a balanced game) doesn't have enough evidence, you need to present some evidence that people don't want a balanced game.


Precisely. Selection of goals is much more important than attainment of those goals. This, of course, is why 5E spent over a year on market research, which is several orders of magnitude above any other RPG.

Not indicative of consumer preferences: Things people say on WotC's website.
Indicative of consumer preferences: Polls on WotC's website.


Of course. Compatibility with earlier editions was explicitly not a design goal, after all.

What? Your claim was that 4e was based on a specific level range in 3e. When I claimed that it didn't model that level range, you turned around and claimed it wasn't supposed to behave like that level range.


The third is sales figures. Like it or not, the most objective measure of "which game is best" is "which game sold best".

First, there aren't any objective sales figures. What little exists points to 3e being at least as popular as any other edition of D&D.

Second, the actions of people who have the best information (i.e. WotC) are consistent with 3e doing the best of any edition. They compare products to 3e, not to some other edition.

Third, the market pretty strongly signals that people like 3e. Pathfinder is the most successful TTRPG right now (maybe #2 after D&D), and it is a 3e clone. On the other hand, various OSR games languish in obscurity.


If your goal is to re-emphasize travel, like you have at lower levels, it's necessary to remove easy access to teleportation. It wasn't literally intended as a clone of certain levels; it was designed to expand the 'sweet spot.'

That is true. But Kurald didn't say 4e was patterned off low level 3e, he said it was patterned off 7 - 12 3e. That is not a level range where travel is important. People have had flight already, and got teleport less than halfway through.


You know how in some computer games you can set the game to easy mode - but don't get the super end boss or more than a toehold on the high score table if you do?

Breaking news: Tabletop games and computer games are different.

Substantively, racial level limits are stupid. They are broken at low levels (the fact that you can't be 15th level costs you nothing at 5th level, but you still get something for it) and at high levels (the things you get are of constant value, but the costs you pay for them are variable). It's just another example of trying to balance things by having different things be broken at different times. That is stupid because...

...games are of finite length, and do not always start at level one. If the game ends before you hit the level where strong early options are weak, people get power for nothing. If the game starts after strong early options start sucking, people are penalized for power they never got.
...people hate being underpowered more than they like being overpowered. Even if the overall power of each option is equal, people's perceptions of both options will be worse than if they were balanced at all points.
...balancing options that are intentionally over or under powered is harder than balancing options which are balanced.


And I see the options that came before 4e as being almost universally less interesting than the characters, monsters, and even magic items in 4e.

It takes a powerful level of cognitive dissonance to say that 4e's intentional removal of all non-combat abilities of monsters made them more interesting.


The sheer interchangeability of non-spontaneous casters in 3.X kills them to me.

I don't understand what that could possibly mean. If you mean Wizards and Clerics are interchangeable, I'm going to have to openly mock you. If you mean Wizards have too many options, I don't understand how you could claim that makes them less interesting with a straight face.


When how you differentiate between classes is more dependent on how they recharge than what they actually do you have several serious problems.

You really want to go to "what powers do" in a defense of 4e? Because clearly "push one square": The Tedious Grinding has as much variety as second level spells in 3e. Wait, the opposite of that.


If stabbing someone doesn't feel meaningfully different from incinerating them and the people standing next to them I honestly don't know what to tell you.

Dealing [W] damage in a one square burst feels exactly the same regardless of what the nominal fluff is.


Didn't show up until 2e. It was lookup tables before that.

Yes, because consulting a look-up table is much better than simply doing more complicated arithmetic. However bad THAC0 is, look-up tables are, almost by definition, worse.


Which are excellent for fine-balance and calibrating the game so that each class is a distinctly different experience.

And you can't do that with classes that are balanced why?


But more to the point 2e threw out the intended XP mechanic which was 1XP for 1GP.

That mechanic is crap. It's like 3e WBL, except instead of getting a better sword for stripping everything you find for parts, you personally become massively more powerful. It excludes any story where low level characters have massive personal wealth for no reason.


Throw out the XP for GP mechanic and the most obvious way of gaining XP becomes killing monsters.

No, the obvious thing to do is to not have XP, because it is a bad mechanic that does nothing but add pointless tracking. People should just level up when it is narratively appropriate. Because that is simpler, and creates zero perverse incentives.


Also the saving throws work.

20th level 3e Wizard casting dominate monster:

INT is 34 (18 Base +5 levels +5 wish +6 item)
Base DC is 19
He's probably got Spell Focus (or is an Elf, whatever) for an extra +1

Total is DC 32.

20th level 3e Fighter Will save:

CON is 26 (15 Base +5 wish +6 item)
Base save is +6
He's got a cloak for +5

Total is +19.

That's bad. But it's salvageable, and pretty easily. For one thing, 20th level Fighters basically don't exist. He's presumably multiclassed into Paladin (which nets him CHA to saves for a +4 or +5 which closes the gap), or some martial classes or PrCs that grant Will save bumps (three such dips put him at the +22 needed to pass half the time). For another thing, it's quite likely that he has some kind of casting or item to make him straight up immune.

Run the numbers before you make claims like that.


Bull****! When 3.0 was launched it was touted as the most balanced version of D&D ever. Some of us remember that far back. That the 3.0 designers failed miserably to the point modern 3e fans don't remember it doesn't mean that it wasn't a major design goal.

It actually is balanced. It's close to perfectly balanced up to 6th, mostly balanced to 10th, and only really falls apart (outside planar binding shenanigans) after 15th level.


Any non-caster in 4e is more versatile than any non-caster in 3.X when not pretending to be a professional basketweaver. I've made 4e fighters more generally skilled than high INT 3e rogues - and with skill challenges (once you unpick the presentation of them) the skill system doesn't creak as much. What there isn't is the magic user/muggle divide of 3.X.

Yes, there aren't characters with useful abilities and characters without useful abilities. Because there are no characters with useful abilities.


(most notably seen in removing the level cap and screwing up the saving throws).

So you've identified as big problems a good design decision (no racial level limits) and a lie (saving throws are broken). I care about your opinions why?


The problem here is the wizard/muggle divide in 3.X. Which do you go with? And I'd have said levels 3-9 anyway (in other words most of the AD&D range and slightly higher - the game soft-caps at level 9/10)

Wizards. Because the game has balance standards, and Wizards meet them.


The third is sales figures. Like it or not, the most objective measure of "which game is best" is "which game sold best".

First, there aren't any objective sales figures. What little exists points to 3e being at least as popular as any other edition of D&D.

Second, the actions of people who have the best information (i.e. WotC) are consistent with 3e doing the best of any edition. They compare products to 3e, not to some other edition.

Third, the market pretty strongly signals that people like 3e. Pathfinder is the most successful TTRPG right now (maybe #2 after D&D), and it is a 3e clone. On the other hand, various OSR games languish in obscurity.


Clearly you don't get it given that your only answer is a flippant dismissal rather than adressing any of points I raised.

They don't have sales figures. Because they are wrong. The last time we had this discussion, I got "this guy on the internet thinks it" and "WotC knows less about products they own than I do" in defense of the position. Because it is not consistent with the data we have (3e moved a million units in its launch year), the actions of people in the know (WotC compares to 3e), or the behavior of the market (PF is crushing the OSR). But people

[obryn]

TSR Sales: 1975–1982

Thanks to information in The Dragon #35 (March 1980) and Inc. Magazine (1982) we have a good picture of TSR’s early growth. In The Dragon, Gygax said that TSR’s gross sales were $50,000 in 1975, $300,000 in 1976, $600,000 in 1977, almost $1 million in 1978, and over $2 million in 1979. Inc. Magazine then reported $9.8 million in sales for the nine-month period ending in June 1981 and $27 million for the year ending in June 1982. Though the James Egbert affair and the publicity surrounding it are usually offered as the reason for the roleplaying industry’s terrific growth at the start of the ’80s, TSR was already doing quite well before that — doubling their sales every year. Going from $2 million in sales at the end of 1979 to (to take an average) $20 million by the end of 1981 was an improvement over that — but it “just” represented the company quintupling its sales during one of those years, rather than their usual doubling.

That's about $66.86m in 2015 dollars. TSR employed 172 people in June 1982. And keep in mind - the Basic set was sold for years after that.

3e is likely used as a point of comparison because (1) it's a more immediate success that more of their audience is familiar with, (2) WotC is not TSR, and (3) D&D is never seeing its 1982 sales numbers again.

[nyjastul69]

Yes, that's my point (in reaction to an earlier poster who said that they all have the exact same goals).

Furthermore, players in general tend to pick a game with goals they like, and care much less about how well exactly a game achieves its goals. So while forum discussions tend to focus a lot about corner cases where a game's goals don't work, such arguments are far from persuasive to the average player.


I'm not sure what your point is but most of those spells still exist (Animate Dead is a level 9 wizard daily; Teleport is a level 28 ritual; and most high-level classics like Disintegrate are still there).


(edit) Well, that explains why BECMI has outsold every other edition by at least 300%.

This sort of claim clearly neads source citation, can you provide it? 300%, you say. Show it.

[Dimers]

Like it or not, the most objective measure of "which game is best" is "which game sold best".

Uhh. Cheap junk from a company that invests in wall-to-wall advertising sells better than the finest of the fine that only collectors have heard of. This is not to say that BECMI is cheap junk! But man is your statement fallacious.

[MeeposFire]

Uhh. Cheap junk from a company that invests in wall-to-wall advertising sells better than the finest of the fine that only collectors have heard of. This is not to say that BECMI is cheap junk! But man is your statement fallacious.

Well it isn't in certain points of view. For instance I would figure from the point of view of the companies making a game that sales figures determines a lot about how they view a game (even if the designers may not agree).

[Kurald Galain]

This sort of claim clearly neads source citation, can you provide it? 300%, you say. Show it.
Here you go. Note that this graph is about a year old, so 5E and PF have sold more units since then. More extensive discussion in this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?423761-Is-D-amp-D-5e-selling-well).
http://s29.postimg.org/a5eb6e2vr/salesgraph.png


What little exists points to 3e being at least as popular as any other edition of D&D.
Indeed, 3.0 is the most successful version of D&D, other than BECMI. By a long shot, in both cases.


Uhh. Cheap junk from a company that invests in wall-to-wall advertising sells better than the finest of the fine that only collectors have heard of. This is not to say that BECMI is cheap junk! But man is your statement fallacious.
I'm not saying it's a great way of measuring things, but it's the best we have; if you have a better measurement that doesn't boil down to personal preferences, I'd be happy to hear it. Also, bear in mind that TSR, WOTC, and Paizo all make descisions based on "what sells well".

[Khedrac]

---Useful Graph---
Also, bear in mind that TSR, WOTC, and Paizo all make descisions based on "what sells well".

Umm, about that last point - oddly enough no, and the graph you linked is the proof.

For years BECMI/RC was mainly ignored by TSR. Thankfully it was a positive form of ignoring it - they put Bruce Heard in charge and let him do what he wanted (the Gazeteers line being the main result) - something that suggests that someone was looking at sales; but in terms of the big announcements, the novel spin-offs, content in Dragon Magazine (which was published by TSR) everything was about AD&D, D&D (which is what BECMI was called then) barely got a look in. Bruce managed to get a regular column in Dragon and a few adventures in Dungeon were for D&D, but nearly everything else was AD&D.

Eventually they decided they needed to rationalize and stop publishing two competing systems - so which one did they cancel? - the better selling one.

Now the perception I had back then is that the general theory was the D&D was bought by teenagers who didn't go on to buy more support material, while AD&D was bought by gamers (any age) who would buy the support material; for that reason AD&D was the better game to support financially. I don't know how true that was, but I don't think it was a valid argument even if true back then! A case of trying to change your customers to fit your business model than changing your business model to fit your customers.

As for the "does a game system fulfill its design goals?" question, the system for which that was most true has to be OD&D - simply because its goal was to enable running characters rather than military squads and it succeeded in creating the entire RPG concept. However does that make the game good or bad? - No. Not only are those subjective opinions, but a game's ability to meet the design goals is irrelevant to it being a good game (admittedly the inability to meet them can make a game a bad game depending on the goals not met, e.g. a goal for playability.)

All of the above is very off topic for this thread so, what's the worst game I have played? That probably has to be "referee modified Traveller".

I liked Traveller as a game, but when the ref (who was about to go to medical school) was inventing penalties and side-effects for wounds based on where the wound would be, it rather spoilt the balance of the system.
E.g. My character got hit for 2 or 3 points of damage in the shoulder (iirc, it's been over 25 years) which renders the arm pretty much unusable.
Another character got a leg hit - could not walk I think.
A third took 8 points of damage in the back - no rider effects "because there's nothing vital there".
8 points of damage was a serious wound in Traveller - so for it to have less negative effect on the recipient that the minor wounds the other characters took was just wrong.
Moral: if you want to play freeform, play freeform, even if you use dice for RNGs, don't use a system and make-up the house-rules on the fly.

[obryn]

Also, bear in mind that TSR, WOTC, and Paizo all make descisions based on "what sells well".
I still think that graph is incredibly shaky. :smallsmile:


For years BECMI/RC was mainly ignored by TSR. Thankfully it was a positive form of ignoring it - they put Bruce Heard in charge and let him do what he wanted (the Gazeteers line being the main result) - something that suggests that someone was looking at sales; but in terms of the big announcements, the novel spin-offs, content in Dragon Magazine (which was published by TSR) everything was about AD&D, D&D (which is what BECMI was called then) barely got a look in. Bruce managed to get a regular column in Dragon and a few adventures in Dungeon were for D&D, but nearly everything else was AD&D.

Eventually they decided they needed to rationalize and stop publishing two competing systems - so which one did they cancel? - the better selling one.

Now the perception I had back then is that the general theory was the D&D was bought by teenagers who didn't go on to buy more support material, while AD&D was bought by gamers (any age) who would buy the support material; for that reason AD&D was the better game to support financially. I don't know how true that was, but I don't think it was a valid argument even if true back then! A case of trying to change your customers to fit your business model than changing your business model to fit your customers.
Yeah. The Moldvay and Mentzer Box Sets were the only editions of D&D which expanded the hobby out of the niche community it was before, and has been ever since. (They are also still, IMO, the very best ways for a brand new player to learn D&D from a cold start.)

I think the decision to support AD&D over D&D was in large part a legal one, given the various disputes with Arneson and (later) Gygax himself.

But yes - AD&D was viewed as the more 'serious' game, and you were expected to 'graduate' to it if you were serious. The thing is, though, it was a very complicated and (dare I say) worse game, when played straight by the book. Poorly-explained, overly detailed, and downright bizarre in many places. Most groups in the 80's that I knew of - my own included - used AD&D kind of as a content expansion for the Basic rules we'd already been playing. So, AD&D classes/races/spells/monsters/etc., with the blessedly uncluttered Basic rules.

[Beheld]

Here you go. Note that this graph is about a year old, so 5E and PF have sold more units since then. More extensive discussion in this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?423761-Is-D-amp-D-5e-selling-well).
http://s29.postimg.org/a5eb6e2vr/salesgraph.png

Except that aside from your graph having absolutely no sources at all, it's also completely wrong.

In 2002 3e had sold more than a million Core books. So assuming that 3e exists at all, and that non core books were sold for money, they vastly beat out BCEMI.

http://icv2.com/articles/games/view/1021/over-1-million-d-d-3e-rulebooks-sold

Since your "estimations" for 3e are basically completely wrong, I wouldn't be surprised that the "industry insider" on which is relied for the BCEMI sales is also completely wrong, and was just making up numbers to hail his favorite edition (if there was in fact, and industry insider at all, and not just some guy on a forum assuring everyone that his totally inside sources told him that BCEMI was the best).

[Kurald Galain]

{{scrubbed}}

[Cosi]

Here you go. Note that this graph is about a year old, so 5E and PF have sold more units since then. More extensive discussion in this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?423761-Is-D-amp-D-5e-selling-well).
http://s29.postimg.org/a5eb6e2vr/salesgraph.png

There are problems with that graph:


Someone forgot to put "in thousands" on the bottom of the graph. Or D&D has apparently never had an edition which sold more than 2,000 units.
The evidence for that graph is incredibly shady. You're citing to another post you made, which cites to estimates from a forum thread which no longer exists.
There's competing evidence in that thread that indicates your numbers are flat wrong (for 3e at least). This (http://icv2.com/articles/games/view/1021/over-1-million-d-d-3e-rulebooks-sold) link has 3e sales at a million in the first year. For those doing math at home, that's double your listed value.
I suppose it's possible those numbers count only PHBs, but that's a stupid methodology and I somehow doubt the guy who ran up the BECMI numbers failed to count the Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, or Immortal boxes when doing those numbers.
BECMI isn't one edition. Different versions of the Basic box came out in 1977, 1981, 1983, and 1991, all of which have different listed authors. Or, so says Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Basic_Set).
Those numbers seem super low to me, based on what I know about the industry. I don't have time to dig it up now, but I remember White Wolf boasting total sales (prior to collapsing) of around 10 million. The idea that a game which sold all of half a million units drove them out of business seems... dubious.



I'm not saying it's a great way of measuring things, but it's the best we have; if you have a better measurement that doesn't boil down to personal preferences, I'd be happy to hear it. Also, bear in mind that TSR, WOTC, and Paizo all make descisions based on "what sells well".

So to be clear, the best car is the Toyota Corolla, the best computer is the Commodore 64, and the best restaurant is McDonalds? Those are (based in some quick research) the best selling products in their respective categories. Or, is it possible that things have quality that can be meaningfully measured outside sales?

[Beheld]

The sources are in the thread I linked.

The only counterargument I've seem so far is "waaah, I don't like that <my favorite game> didn't sell as much as <some other game>". Which I'm sure has plenty of sources :smallbiggrin:

The claimed sources are "This is based on several independent sources that turn out to be mostly consistent with each other, including industry insiders and Amazon sales figures. Make of that what you will."

So how about this "3e sold infinity copies and BCEMI sold one copy ever, this is based on several independent sources that turn out to be mostly consistent with each other, including industry insiders and amazon sales figures. Make of that what you will."

My claim is just as backed as yours. Of course, I just linked you to the fact that 3e sold over a million core rulebooks by 2002, so your claim that 3e sold 500,000 copies total is so wrong that you should actually apologize and completely back off your claims, but you won't.

[Malifice]

The third is sales figures. Like it or not, the most objective measure of "which game is best" is "which game sold best".

By that metric One Direction or Nickelback are a better band than several thousand other far more giften musicians.

Because they sold more albums.

Im not sure I buy into 'more is better' as an argument supporting quality of the product.

[Lord Torath]

By that metric One Direction or Nickelback are a better band than several thousand other far more gifted musicians.

Because they sold more albums.

I'm not sure I buy into 'more is better' as an argument supporting quality of the product.And the best PC game was Deer Hunter.

Somehow we've gotten from "What is your worst RPG" to "What is the worst, objectively, RPG?" A little too much edition wars here.

I've played: BECMI/RC, AD&D, AD&D 2E, Rolemaster (1990 or so edition), Shadowrun 2E, and Runequest (which edition? I don't know. We only ran through one combat). I'll disqualify RuneQuest from my worst for lack of familiarity. I had fun with Shadowrun, but my system mastery was too low to make an effective Rigger. I needed to have watched Sneakers, and not turn my nose up at the Doberman as a drone (but the illustration was so ugly!). I had a good time with BECMI, and my brother made an awesome Mystic (monk) from the RC. AD&D I played a bit, but I like the changes they made to it (as far as initiative and some of the combat rules - like only being able to charge once per round) when it became 2nd Edition. Rolemaster was fun, but there were so many tables! So I'd probably have to say Rolemaster, followed by AD&D. But I really had a fun time with all of them. Probably because I had good DMs, or was too noobish to realize when I didn't.

[2D8HP]

I haven't yet read all seven pages that have already been posted in this thread, so I may be repeating what had already been said.
When I started RPG'ing in the mid to late 1970's it was D&D with "Arduin" and "All the World's Monster's" mixed in. We then moved on to other RPG's (Traveller, Champions, Runequest, etc.), and since then I have read many, many RPG rules almost none of which I can actually remember besides the 1977 Holmes authored "Basic Set" Dungeons and Dragons and Chaosiums Call of Cthullu/Runequest system and to a.lesser extent "King Arthur Pendragon" which remains my favorite rules. In true 0e fashion all the "rulings" were mostly improv (um lets see give him a 40% chance of failure so... "roll above a 8 to succeed!), so I don't care that much about "rules" anyway, SETTING IS ALL! The Castle Falkenstein setting sure looked like it would be Great!!, but I am still jonesing for a rules lite Dungeon Adventure as long as it's not too Alice in Wonderland/Monty-Python bizarre like I remember some of the "adults" who played D&D in the 1970's and very early 1980's were trying to subject us to.
I still craved RPG'ing in the 1990's (and really I still do), so I tried to join local game sessions, and I went to some conventions (this was before I had internet access). It seemed that all anyone wanted to play was "Cyberpunk", "Shadowrun", and "Vampire". No thanks! Having spent too much of the 1980's hearing the gunshots and sirens that accompanied the crack cocaine market share turf battle I had very little interest in playing in any kind of "Dark Future" or "World of Darkness". Real life was already grim enough! I had a hard enough time watching "The Wire" with my wife when she got it from the library, but to do those settings for the kind of immersion that is the RPG experience, why? More "Princess Bride" and less "Black Hawk Down"!
Just say NO (or even HELL NO) to "grim", "gritty", and "dark" please! If I ever get a chance to RPG again I hope subsequent generations have better taste in settings then "Generation X" had!
More Dragons, and less bionic psychopaths please! And while the more fantastic elements were intriguing , I just don't want to role-play a cannibal struggling with other cannibals, supernatural or otherwise. What was next "Texas Chainsaw massacre the RPG"?
I wanted to play Ivanhoe, Robin hood, Aragon, Fahrd, and the Grey Mouser please!
While I will still watch "Double Indemnity" or "The Maltese Falcon", real life is "Noire" enough! I understand the desire to pretend to slay Dragons, but fighting Mega-Corporations? I don't want to play "Get the insurance company to pay for your health care the RPG"! Maybe such settings are fun for Canadians, and Scandinavians but as an Oakland, California resident and U.S.A. citizen when I was role-playing I wanted to escape for a while a modern day Darwinian struggle, and not into a "near future" or with literal rather then metaphoric bloodsuckers either. A pox on such settings! If they are dungeons I want some dragons please!

[neonchameleon]

I'm also going to pitch in and say that Michael Bay is not one of the greatest film makers of all time despite sales figures.

And I'm surprised that people don't remember the 2001 3.0 bubble. 3.0 caught the non-roleplaying zeitegeist in 2001 in a way that was second only to the 1982 bubble. The OGL was a smart business move as a PR move amongst smart techy nerds who were mostly too young to have been around in 1981. I'd also point out at this point that not only was 3.0 the second best selling edition, it's also the edition that seems to have been sunk without trace amongst the online community.


Level limits are a good example of a mechanic that doesn't achieve its goal (i.e. balance between races).

But balance between races was never the goal. The goal was a different play experience between races - and to allow different people at the same table to set different difficulty settings. So because one of your premises is wrong your conclusion is.


Most campaigns (and characters) start at low level and have no guarantee of how high they're going to get.

And here too you are demonstrateing once more that you have a lot of unexamined assumptions. oD&D wasn't designed round one small group of half a dozen players and you brought one new PC to each campaign. It was designed around a gaming club where about half the players DM'd in their shared world. So one week you might bring your PCs to Mike's Megadungeon and the next you might be exploring Gary's Grotto. Indeed you might have Mike and Gary running at the same time. The campaign was open ended and as well as multiple GMs with their own dungeons to loot you'd have multiple PCs running around within the universe especially because if Rob was running a Goblin-stomp bringing out Mordaniken was anti-social and also lead to the risk of ignominious defeat. (Ars Ludi's West Marches Campaign (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/) brings back some of the basics.

And that is why Monte Haul DMs were considered a problem. The DM who essentially bribes the players by handing out far too much loot made problems for everyone else.

In short level limits were there for a reason in oD&D and 1e. They were there because the game was played very differently from the way most post-Dragonlance campaigns are played and they work in the environment D&D was designed for.


(edit) not that you, Kyoryu in particular, were saying that. Anyway, it strikes me that most of 1E's rules work perfectly fine for the DragonLance structure - which makes sense if you consider that Dragonlance was initially written for 1E.

A lot of the more bizarre ones don't. And to be honest neither does the wizard with 1d4 hit points at level 1.


That said, there are only three metrics for what the best rules are. One is "the rules that I, personally, prefer" which obviously doesn't get us anywhere because other people are going to disagree. The second is looking at some kind of external awards, but to my knowledge all editions of D&D have won a bunch of those so that doesn't get us anywhere either.

The third is sales figures. Like it or not, the most objective measure of "which game is best" is "which game sold best".

The fourth is "Does it do the job it set out to do?"


Please, tell me which group was calling for the removal of everything except the combat minigame and a few minor rituals? Oh, was that no-one? Right, because the design goal for 4e wasn't to make things balanced it was to make things easy to right. That's why 4e has narrow classes on hard rails. That's why 4e powers take two or three times the reasonable amount of space. That's why

4e powers take an unreasonable amount of space to make them easier to read. I disagree with the decision - and my retroclone does things differently. But that doesn't make things complex.

As for narrow classes on hard rails, as I've said before the rails are harder in previous editions - swap the spellbooks and spell prep over and two prepared 3.X casters are almost interchangeable. There's far more variety between two 4e rogues than two 3.X ones unless they multiclass.


What? Your claim was that 4e was based on a specific level range in 3e. When I claimed that it didn't model that level range, you turned around and claimed it wasn't supposed to behave like that level range.

No. The problem here is that the 3.X wizard was a cancerous mutant class that blew up like a puffer fish and warped the entire game around it.


First, there aren't any objective sales figures. What little exists points to 3e being at least as popular as any other edition of D&D.

First, there are objective sales figures if you can be bothered to look in the court records of the times Arneson sued TSR. Joseph Goodman has. And the fact that the objective sales figures not only can be found but are a matter of legal record points to WotC knowing that their sales figures are nowhere near those of TSR in the early 80s.


Second, the actions of people who have the best information (i.e. WotC) are consistent with 3e doing the best of any edition. They compare products to 3e, not to some other edition.

No. That's consistent with them knowing that 3e did not do as well as prior editions. Which sounds better? "This sold 80% of 3.0s sales?" or "This sold 10% of BECMI's total sales?" I wonder which any marketing department would use?


Third, the market pretty strongly signals that people like 3e. Pathfinder is the most successful TTRPG right now (maybe #2 after D&D), and it is a 3e clone. On the other hand, various OSR games languish in obscurity.

The OSR has the problem that people already own their games and the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia came out 15 years before OSRIC. Why would they suddenly start buying after a gap of 15 years?


Breaking news: Tabletop games and computer games are different.

Breaking news: Tabletop games are different from each other. Or possibly you play Monopoly using D&D rules?

Racial level limits make no sense in an RPG that uses the same default gameplay assumptions as Dragonlance. It does in one with the same default gameplay assumptions as oD&D.


...games are of finite length, and do not always start at level one.

Neither of these is true by the oD&D starting assumptions, as mentioned earlier.


...people hate being underpowered more than they like being overpowered.

Unless they are purposely playing on hard mode.


...balancing options that are intentionally over or under powered is harder than balancing options which are balanced.

Which is why Gygax put a lot of work into it.


It takes a powerful level of cognitive dissonance to say that 4e's intentional removal of all non-combat abilities of monsters made them more interesting.

Or alternatively just not liking your monsters to be wizards with the serial numbers filed off. Let's take the Succubus - a classic mythological monster. A 3.5 Succubus (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/demon.htm#succubus) is little more than a wizard with a prosthetic forehead (or maybe a different sort of prosthetic). Every non-combat ability the succubus has is something that can be done by an #@&^ wizard. A 3.5 succubus is a wannabe wizard with a high save DC. Nothing more interesting than that. Why would a wizard summon a succubus when he can already do everything out of combat the succubus can? The 4e sucubus (Monster Vault p52) on the other hand is its own thing. Its charming kiss ability is utterly unique and can't be stood in for by a wizard from central casting.

The supposed 3.X out of combat abilities are generally boring - showing almost all monsters to be wannabe wizards (or sometimes clerics). Put all 9 level non-spontaneous casters from 3.X through the shredder and the setting gets a whole lot more interesting.


I don't understand what that could possibly mean. If you mean Wizards and Clerics are interchangeable, I'm going to have to openly mock you. If you mean Wizards have too many options, I don't understand how you could claim that makes them less interesting with a straight face.

I mean that any two clerics are close to interchangeable. As for fewer options makign them more interesting, clearly you know nothing about archetypes or storytelling. But for a simple illustration I'm going to request you watch Die Hard. Then imagine Die Hard - but replacing John McClane with the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It has far more options - does that make our remix a more interesting story? Or does John McClane not even having shoes on his feet make Die Hard a better story? For that matter look at almost all second rate Superman stories. They are boring in part because Superman has ludicrous numbers of options.

Things become interesting when it isn't siply a matter of picking pre-made options off the shelf and using them to solve predefined problems. The 3.X wizard is made of premade options.


Dealing [W] damage in a one square burst feels exactly the same regardless of what the nominal fluff is.

In short weapon attacks against everyone next to you are identical. Interesting that spells don't do that.


Yes, because consulting a look-up table is much better than simply doing more complicated arithmetic. However bad THAC0 is, look-up tables are, almost by definition, worse.

Here I'm not arguing.


That mechanic is crap. It's like 3e WBL, except instead of getting a better sword for stripping everything you find for parts, you personally become massively more powerful. It excludes any story where low level characters have massive personal wealth for no reason.

Yes - and Monopoly excludes the possibility of anarcho-capitalist communes. Monopoly might have problems but that sort of outside context problem isn't one of them.

And it's not like 3e WBL. It changes the desired playstyle from killing monsters to robbing them.


No, the obvious thing to do is to not have XP, because it is a bad mechanic that does nothing but add pointless tracking. People should just level up when it is narratively appropriate. Because that is simpler, and creates zero perverse incentives.

All games should be played the same way!

If you are playing adventure paths you are right. On the other hand if you aren't playing adventure paths and are playing the rolling drop-in games that oD&D was designed to be, that approach is silly.


20th level 3e Wizard casting dominate monster:

The exact numbers aren't where the incompetence of 3.0's designers broke wizards. The wizards were broken sideways when Save or Suck spells became as hard to save against as direct damage spells.

There were five saving throws that broadly speaking translate to Magical Damage/Physical Damage/Spell in a Can/Save or Lose/Save or Die. Meaning that you didn't unleash Stinking Cloud over fireball because fireball was both harder to save against and still did half damage when people passed their saving throw.

In 2e Evokers and direct damage were one of the best ways to play. In 3e they were the worst. This is because the saving throws got broken.


Run the numbers before you make claims like that.

Or learn what the hell you are talking about before you make your rebuttals.


It actually is balanced. It's close to perfectly balanced up to 6th, mostly balanced to 10th, and only really falls apart (outside planar binding shenanigans) after 15th level.

If you believe that I've a bridge to sell you.


Yes, there aren't characters with useful abilities and characters without useful abilities. Because there are no characters with useful abilities.

And if you believe that you lack creativity.


So you've identified as big problems a good design decision (no racial level limits) and a lie (saving throws are broken). I care about your opinions why?

Because as I've demonstrated you have very little clue about anything except 3.X D&D and not much clue about that.

[Cosi]

But balance between races was never the goal. The goal was a different play experience between races - and to allow different people at the same table to set different difficulty settings. So because one of your premises is wrong your conclusion is.

But it doesn't do that either. It doesn't make it "easy mode" to play an Elf. It makes it easy mode at low levels, about the same at mid levels (when class outweighs race in terms of character power, or the rest of the party has however many extra levels are equal to the benefit of being an Elf), then hard mode at high levels.


swap the spellbooks and spell prep over and two prepared 3.X casters are almost interchangeable.

So if two people take the same options, they will have the same character? That is true, but so utterly trivial as to make it impossible for me to believe you are arguing in good faith.


No. The problem here is that the 3.X wizard was a cancerous mutant class that blew up like a puffer fish and warped the entire game around it.

Maybe you should run some SGTs before you make balance claims. Or even describe which parts of the 3e Wizard you think are broken.


First, there are objective sales figures if you can be bothered to look in the court records of the times Arneson sued TSR. Joseph Goodman has. And the fact that the objective sales figures not only can be found but are a matter of legal record points to WotC knowing that their sales figures are nowhere near those of TSR in the early 80s.

Maybe you have a citation? Or is this another case of "this guy I won't quote is pretty sure it worked this way if you stack the right assumptions in BECMI's favor"?


Which sounds better? "This sold 80% of 3.0s sales?" or "This sold 10% of BECMI's total sales?" I wonder which any marketing department would use?

Well, WotC said neither of those things, instead optioning to claim that 5e was "on track" to beat 3e. A statement that is (potentially) true for any relative sales, as it contains zero objective claims. They did not say "X% of 3e sales" or "better sales than 3e over Y period". You don't think they would have compared to something else if something else looked better?


Let's take the Succubus - a classic mythological monster. A 3.5 Succubus (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/demon.htm#succubus) is little more than a wizard with a prosthetic forehead (or maybe a different sort of prosthetic). Every non-combat ability the succubus has is something that can be done by an #@&^ wizard.

Yah, my 7th level Wizards have teleport. Wait, no they don't. Also, I don't understand why mind magic working in a consistent (and hence predictable) way between monsters and PCs is bad.


The supposed 3.X out of combat abilities are generally boring - showing almost all monsters to be wannabe wizards (or sometimes clerics). Put all 9 level non-spontaneous casters from 3.X through the shredder and the setting gets a whole lot more interesting.

Yes, shredding teleport, planar binding, fabricate, animate dead, and plane shift makes the game more interesting. Wait, no, the opposite of that.


Then imagine Die Hard - but replacing John McClane with the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It has far more options - does that make our remix a more interesting story?

I actually disagree with the assessment that the T-1000 has "more options". As action movie characters, they are both "plot device" effective at fighting and have "plot device" durability. The T-1000 has totally sweet shape-shifting, but it uses that for infiltration, a skill-set which is not particularly needed in Die Hard, as all the action takes place behind enemy lines.

And that aside, that's changing a character without changing the story. Obviously it's possible to make the story less interesting by doing that, but that has nothing to do with options. Imagine Die Hard, except John McClane is immortal and any gun he holds instantly kills people. He has no additional options, but the story is still ruined. The existence of comics like The Authority, books like The Eye of the World, and movies like The Avengers demonstrates that it is totally possible to have compelling stories for characters with lots of options. If you've ever read really bad Mary Sue fan-fiction, it should be equally clear that not having options doesn't make stories compelling. The problem isn't the level of options, it's having options that don't interact well with the presented problems.

Go read some Zelazny. Or Sanderson. Or Butcher. Or Erikson. Or Feist. Characters in their books have options, but their books are still good.


Things become interesting when it isn't siply a matter of picking pre-made options off the shelf and using them to solve predefined problems. The 3.X wizard is made of premade options.

That's a subjective opinion. Plenty of people enjoy solving problems within constraints. X-COM is a game all about using limited resources to find solutions to tactical problems. And it is very popular. It's true that the benefit of tabletop games is that you can improvise without those improvisations needing to be pre-coded, but there's no reason it's better if you improvise with your Use Rope skill than your teleport spell.

But fundamentally, your demand (that people not use "pre-made" options) is one that rules cannot fulfill. Any options characters have are by definition "pre-made", either because someone put them in the game explicitly or because they are things real people can do that the rules have not disallowed. You could certainly claim that people should be more creative with their options, but I really fail to see how planar binding or major creation give people less of an opportunity to exercise their creativity.


And it's not like 3e WBL. It changes the desired playstyle from killing monsters to robbing them.

No, it changes the optimum playstyle to being a merchant. The incentive there is to get as much money as possible, which is completely orthogonal to fighting dragons or exploring dungeons.


In 2e Evokers and direct damage were one of the best ways to play. In 3e they were the worst. This is because the saving throws got broken.

Jesus, even when your conclusion is true, your premise is wrong. 3e Evokers sucking has nothing to do with saving throws. 3e Evokers (and Fighters) suck because the HP curve was boosted, but damage wasn't. Consider a 5th level Wizard's fireball against a CR 5 Troll. The fireball does 17.5 damage before a save. The Troll has 63 HP. The Troll could survive a pair of fireballs to the face, even if it rolled natural 1s on both saves and the Wizard did max damage both times.


And if you believe that you lack creativity.

You mean if you do things that aren't covered by the rules, it doesn't matter what the rules are? Because, yes, that is true. But it is not something I would pay any amount of money for a game to "let" me do.


Because as I've demonstrated you have very little clue about anything except 3.X D&D and not much clue about that.

Hahahahaha.

https://slm-assets0.secondlife.com/assets/11392465/view_large/61004993.jpg?1428411381

[Sith_Happens]

http://img.memerial.net/memerial.net/587/whats-going-on-in-this-thr.jpg

[Chambers]

Does nobody really like Alternity? Am I the only one?

Wow.

I like Alternity too! ::internet high-five::

If everyone is finished sufficiently derailing the thread, here are my "Worst RPG's Played."

...

I can't actually think of one that would be the Worst. There are some I like less than others, but if given the opportunity to play them again I'd probably shrug and roll up a character. I should say that I haven't played some of the top contenders (FATAL, RaHoWa, Synnibar). I've played a lot of different WoD games, most editions of D&D, some Warhammer Fantasy, Deadlands, various Star Wars, Cthulhu, GURPS, etc.

I guess if I had to pick one, I'd choose Rifts, simply because we only played it once and none of us really knew what we were doing. So it wasn't that much fun.

Taking a slightly different angle, the games that have been listed here as Worst that I'd really like to play again are definitely Alternity and Aberrant.

[Knaight]

The only counterargument I've seem so far is "waaah, I don't like that <my favorite game> didn't sell as much as <some other game>". Which I'm sure has plenty of sources :smallbiggrin:

Let me add to that a bit then: Direct comparison in sales figures between the editions is dramatically hampered by them generally being about a decade apart, and the environments they're being sold into changing dramatically. In particular, there are a few major events that throw the metrics out of whack:

The spreading of videogames. They're a point of competition for time, and while they have existed in some form throughout D&D's history, the prevalence and range expanded dramatically.
The satanic panic. While it pretty much sucked for the people who lost access to D&D because of it (where "lost access" not too infrequently means "the entire collection was deliberately destroyed"), it was also pretty much the best advertising D&D ever got. For that period, it was a really well known thing, and that's immensly helpful.
White Wolf. Just how much market they took up is unclear, but every indication I've seen suggests that it was substantial, and that World of Darkness was a significant competitor. Beyond them though, there's been repeated expansion of options.
The .pdf boom. This would be the biggest of those expansions of options, and while D&D is still the biggest game by far (Pathfinder is being counted as part of it there), there are other games that have pretty sizeable followings. Again, hard data is lacking, but this does contaminate the D&D numbers.
The SRD. Even during the 3e era, the SRD created the space for the emergence of retroclones (along with the .pdf boom), pulling some amount of players away. With 4e though, it created the space for Pathfinder. Again, exact sales numbers are fuzzy, but Pathfinder appears to be comparable to any post 3e D&D edition. Maybe it's bigger, maybe it's smaller, either way it's within an order of magnitude of the same size.


The satanic panic in particular makes things really, really muddy. I'm not getting into the religious aspect here, but from a strictly marketing and cultural aspect, having that sort of name recognition is good for sales, and being something known to piss of a very polarizing group which a lot of people disliked a great deal is also generally helpful. Rules quality doesn't really play into this much.

Expanding past D&D, we run into two big things beyond rules quality. One is, again, name recognition. Almost everyone starts with D&D because it's what almost everyone knows about, and the bulk of the RPG players who really dislike it will still be counted in sales figures at a roughly comparable rate - less with splats, but that's about it. The other is network effects, where the most accessible RPG to play is going to be the one that other people play. One might hypothetically prefer Rolemaster - I can't say I'd understand why, but people do - but Rolemaster has a great big barrier in that you have to convince your group to learn the rules of Rolemaster to play it. This is probably a large part of the reason that Fate boomed the way it did; the barrier is still there but it's a lot smaller than most.

[Beheld]

{{Scrubbed}}

[obryn]

The satanic panic in particular makes things really, really muddy. I'm not getting into the religious aspect here, but from a strictly marketing and cultural aspect, having that sort of name recognition is good for sales, and being something known to piss of a very polarizing group which a lot of people disliked a great deal is also generally helpful. Rules quality doesn't really play into this much.
As I posted a page or so back, TSR quintupled its gross sales in part due to the satanic panic.

[neonchameleon]

But it doesn't do that either. It doesn't make it "easy mode" to play an Elf. It makes it easy mode at low levels, about the same at mid levels (when class outweighs race in terms of character power, or the rest of the party has however many extra levels are equal to the benefit of being an Elf), then hard mode at high levels.

How are you defining low, mid, and high levels? Because if you're doing your normal "3.X blundered into doing things this way therefore this entirely accidental thing is what was intended all along" then what you're defining as high level was not intended to be played using PCs. The highest level PC in Greyhawk was Sir Robilar at level 13.


So if two people take the same options, they will have the same character? That is true, but so utterly trivial as to make it impossible for me to believe you are arguing in good faith.

That sound you just heard was the wooshing noise of the point flying over your head.

In almost any RPG other than D&D 3.X the spells you actually choose to master are a part of your character. Even an AD&D wizard has a cap on the number of spells they can learn as well as the number they can prepare. But in 3.X what magic you master is almost entirely an inconsequential choice you can go back on at a whim with the right spellbook.


Maybe you should run some SGTs before you make balance claims. Or even describe which parts of the 3e Wizard you think are broken.

First, the SGT was not part of the design of D&D. It's a post hoc thing put in place to demonstrate how badly the designers failed to balance things. The fighter and the rogue were parts of the core of D&D 3.0 that went almost unchanged in D&D 3.5 - why not use them as the SGT benchmark?

Second the way the wizard can pass SGTs is proof positive that they are broken. Other classes can't do just about all the options in the SGT - which is part of the point of it being a team based game. 25% of an entire party's resources to take out a fight of equal CR is the official metric.

Third, places the 3.X wizard is broken. First their ability to bypass the entire hit point system without seriously weakening their effectiveness (something which, as I have mentioned, was not present in prior editions of D&D because 3.X screwed up the saving throws). Second the free spells from any school you get. In AD&D a specialist wizard learned one spell of their school per level - and a generalist learned none. Third, the magic item purchase rules allowing you to buy scrolls very easily (a vast change from TSR D&D when swords were the most common magic items). Fourth the magic item creation rules.


Maybe you have a citation? Or is this another case of "this guy I won't quote is pretty sure it worked this way if you stack the right assumptions in BECMI's favor"?

Google is your friend (http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=748571).


Well, WotC said neither of those things, instead optioning to claim that 5e was "on track" to beat 3e. A statement that is (potentially) true for any relative sales, as it contains zero objective claims.

Indeed. As you appear to be clueless about marketing a marketing department will make the strongest claims they can justify. If 3.0 had been the most popular edition of D&D ever then WotC would have claimed that because it is a stronger claim. They only claim on track to beat 3e because it is a lower threshold and therefore one they think they can beat.


They did not say "X% of 3e sales" or "better sales than 3e over Y period". You don't think they would have compared to something else if something else looked better?

Yes. I think "The most popular edition of D&D ever" looks better than "More popular than 3e". I don't think they did that because to do so would have been lying. Whereas if your claims were true they'd have been able to claim that they'd got the most popular edition ever simply because they were on track to beat 3e.

Or are you really so besotted by 3e that you think "More popular than 3e" looks better than "The most popular version of D&D ever"? You would only make one specific edition a separate benchmark if it wasn't the highest.


Yah, my 7th level Wizards have teleport. Wait, no they don't. Also, I don't understand why mind magic working in a consistent (and hence predictable) way between monsters and PCs is bad.

No. That's your 9th level wizard...

And if you don't see why the world being mysterious and magical rather than paint by numbers, all I can say is that you must really like a world so small you can understand everything.


Yes, shredding teleport, planar binding, fabricate, animate dead, and plane shift makes the game more interesting. Wait, no, the opposite of that.

A Tippyverse is an interesting setting. But with all those spells available routinely then all settings should be Tippyverses. Kill the world-shattering magic and you can have far more depth in what you can do with worldbuilding.

And you really think that people in 4e worlds never summon demons? Or raise skeletons? It's simply world and cosmology-specific rather than forcing everything into a proto-Tippyverse with exactly the same methods.


I actually disagree with the assessment that the T-1000 has "more options".

A statement which makes as much sense as disagreeing that a wizard has more options than a fighter in 3.X. Or possibly you're just unable to separate Watsonian from Doylist solutions.

To put it simply Die Hard being a good story is based on the limitations of John McClane. Right down to the lack of shoes.


The existence of comics like The Authority, books like The Eye of the World, and movies like The Avengers demonstrates that it is totally possible to have compelling stories for characters with lots of options.

Oh, indeed. But the weakest part of The Avengers is the way they stack up against their opposition. Puny God. The story of The Avengers is about the formation of the team - and to an extent about Tony's near self-sacrifice. What makes The Avengers work is absolutely nothing to do with anything D&D is good at modelling.

The Eye of the World? You mean Book 1 of The Wheel of Time? When the PCs (Moraine was a DMPC) really didn't have many options? You did notice how that series got worse over time as the characters got more powerful?

The Authority? You've your best case here. But in the Ellis run the stories are Sfx laden versions of "Gathering the team together" (Jenny succeeded), "How far will they go?" (sinking Sliding Italy), and "The Death of Jenny Sparks" (a mix of heroic sacrifice and major secret keeping by a core member). For all Ellis tried the outcome was not in doubt. And then in the Millar run there was "What would it take to not kill the bad guys", a Xanatos Gambit and exploration of The Doctor's powers, and an overwhelming opposition arc that required depowering all except one member of The Authority to make it work.

In short The Authority Volume 1, despite Ellis' best efforts (and he was pretty good at it), had all the tension in the fights of One Punch Man. It was character focussed and moral drama - something that with its incoherent alignment system D&D (with the exceptions of oD&D and 4e, both of which have coherent if different alignment systems) is worse than useless at portraying.

Now there are systems that can work well with the problems of powerful characters. Amber goes PVP, and most of the others like Smallville and Urban Shadows have some representation of values and do have PVP aspects.


If you've ever read really bad Mary Sue fan-fiction, it should be equally clear that not having options doesn't make stories compelling. The problem isn't the level of options, it's having options that don't interact well with the presented problems

On the contrary. When you have tailor made solutions to problems you render the problems irrelevant. Problems are only problems when you don't have solutions that interact well with them to fix them.


Go read some Zelazny. Or Sanderson. Or Butcher. Or Erikson. Or Feist. Characters in their books have options, but their books are still good.

Feist? Good? Are you serious? (Most of the rest I'll grant)


But fundamentally, your demand (that people not use "pre-made" options) is one that rules cannot fulfill.

Only because, as ever, you seem unable to understand the requirement. It's not that the options aren't pre-made. It's that the options aren't pre-made to solve the exact problem in question.


No, it changes the optimum playstyle to being a merchant. The incentive there is to get as much money as possible, which is completely orthogonal to fighting dragons or exploring dungeons.

Assuming that's practical. Who's selling and who's buying? You are assuming that little problems like liquidity don't exist.


Jesus, even when your conclusion is true, your premise is wrong. 3e Evokers sucking has nothing to do with saving throws. 3e Evokers (and Fighters) suck because the HP curve was boosted, but damage wasn't.

Which is the sort of superficial and wrong analysis I'd expect from you - and I'd at this point ask what sort of designers you thought designed 3.0 if they didn't spot that, and how they were competent to tie their own shoe laces. What was meant to counterbalance the HP inflation was that evokers got to throw more spells downrange thanks to getting more spells from INT.

3.0 is more or less balanced if you play it as the designers intended and playtested. Evoker/Healbot/Rogue/Fighter and up to about level 6. Of course that's a terrible way to play two of the core four classes - but it's only in your mind that the way the wizard ended up was anything like the intention.

Still, I'm truly impressed you spend so much time defending the supposed balance of a game when you think the desgners were so incompetent that they didn't realise they'd inflated the hit points but not the damage.

[Chambers]

Mod of the Broken Pattern: This is your official notice to stop the thread derailment. Any further continuation will result in Warnings/Infractions as appropriate. Take it to another thread.

[Amphetryon]

Worst for me, personally? Vampire: The Masquerade gets honorable mention primarily because of bad experiences with it, but Cyberpunk 2020 wins 'worst' for me, because the game's stated play-style goal did not mesh well (read: at all) with my experience of the game's mechanics.

[Vitruviansquid]

I think the worst for me was Eclipse Phase.

The rules weren't ridiculously well written, but I've so far managed to avoid touching any game which was actually unplayably bad, so between DnD 4e, Savage Worlds, PF, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, and Eclipse Phase... ehhh... I'd say Eclipse Phase and Call of Cthulhu were probably the worst written. (For as much as people like to fight over 4e and 3.5/PF, the two games play hilariously similarly compared to non-DnD RPG's). Eclipse Phase's problem was that the whole darn thing is so full of weird "gotcha!" moments during character creation where I'd be merrily trying to generate my character, only to realize I hadn't budgeted any points into this or that obscure thing I may need. Wasn't unbearable with the help of the GM, though.

The part that really breaks Eclipse Phase for me was that we were getting to wind down like a 5 hour one shot when we started finding out about some kind of murder-porn ring, and the following conversation takes place:

GM: "You stay and watch the murder porn? Okay, roll *whatever this game's version of a Sanity check is*"

Me: "yeah, my character watches his fair share of that stuff."

GM: "Uhhhh, most people would find that pretty sick and evil."

Me: "I thought death was kind of like a joke in this setting, what with everyone being able to change bodies at will from back-ups of themselves."

GM: "Naw, dude, death is still really traumatic."

Me: "Oh... well then."

Now, I had seen Ghost in the Shell. I know what cyberpunk is. I've read a fair amount of the fluff in the Eclipse Phase rulebook. I find it disconcerting that the GM and I still don't agree on some of the specifics of the setting, especially in a very setting-based system. Usually I would chalk this up to sloppy GMing or poor player concentration, but Eclipse Phase simply has too much *stuff* to remember about worry about. There are whole swathes of the rulebook that could just be cut out. The book, in my opinion, works much better as a theoretical art piece about a weird future than a way to actually play an RPG set in the weird future.

[Sith_Happens]

I think it would come down to how much dying, you know, hurts.

[Talakeal]

What does SGT mean? Google is failing me.


Also, my vote is for Cypher. I hate having to spend a limited pool of resources to mechanically differentiate my character from someone elses.

[Cosi]

Now, I had seen Ghost in the Shell. I know what cyberpunk is.

Maybe I'm forgetting (or glossed over) something that calls it out as Cyberpunk, but Eclipse phase always seemed more Transhuman or Space Opera to me.


but Eclipse Phase simply has too much *stuff* to remember about worry about.

Eclipse Phase is bloated, that is true. But (IMHO) the bloat is less of a problem than the timeline compression. Earth ended a decade ago, and we are supposed to accept that there are new governments and extra-solar colonies and the like. The math on that doesn't really work on any level. I think that also contributes to the bloat, because it forces all sorts of stuff to happen in relatively short timeframes.

Incidentally, have you read (or watched) The Expanse? They aren't super similar, but something about the protomolecule reminds me of Eclipse Phase.


What does SGT mean? Google is failing me.

SGT is an acronym for Same Game Test.

Generally: It's a game balance methodology where you have a list of challenges and determine if characters are balanced or not based on their performance against those challenges. I've mostly seen it used for combat, but you could have a non-combat SGT with challenges like "travel to <location> and get <thing>" or "convince <person> to help with <issue>" and so on.

Specifically: The SGT I mostly reference and (AFAIK) the only explicit one is the 3e SGT found here (http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Dungeons_and_Dragons_Wiki:The_Same_Game_Test). It has combat (and trap) challenges for 5th, 10th, and 15th level. I think if you dig around enough there's some explicit statements about the tactics and environments of the various encounters, but I honestly don't remember where that is.

[Astralia123]

A vote for D&D 5th edition. 3rd edition was quite competitive, as well as pathfinder, but 5th edition, let's say it is just even worse than what one could have had from all those years of weird “just not feeling right" from 3rd edition.

[2D8HP]

Worst for me, personally? Vampire: The Masquerade gets honorable mention primarily because of bad experiences with it, but Cyberpunk 2020 wins 'worst'.
I very much second this, because of the settings. I just didn't want to play a bionic sociopath or a supernatural cannibal, thank you, real life is "dark" enough. As for the mechanics? Meh, everyone I knew who looked at the LBB's of 0e D&D (even after I got my hands on "Chainmail") tried to play RAI not the incomprehensible RAW, at least until the Holmes Bluebook came out, so just winging the "rules" has become second nature by now (you see this, what do you do? O.K. rule this or higher/lower to succeed, how hard is that?).
Seriously maybe Oe D&D was "the worst", because of how obtuse the written rules were, but man as played what glorious fun!
Really character creation and setting/fluff are the only "rules" that matter!
Are there any RPG"s where what the basic plot/setting is, and who your playing with not the most important parts?

[Vitruviansquid]

Maybe I'm forgetting (or glossed over) something that calls it out as Cyberpunk, but Eclipse phase always seemed more Transhuman or Space Opera to me.



Eclipse Phase is bloated, that is true. But (IMHO) the bloat is less of a problem than the timeline compression. Earth ended a decade ago, and we are supposed to accept that there are new governments and extra-solar colonies and the like. The math on that doesn't really work on any level. I think that also contributes to the bloat, because it forces all sorts of stuff to happen in relatively short timeframes.

Incidentally, have you read (or watched) The Expanse? They aren't super similar, but something about the protomolecule reminds me of Eclipse .

Yeah, I'd say "Transhuman" is probably a better description of the setting. "Space Opera" signals something else to me.

Never seen The Expanse.

[BearonVonMu]

The worst game system I've ever played in?
It's hard to not say Rifts. I'm good at picking apart rules and figuring out how a game should work and how it actually works, but it took three days to put together my first competent character. The second took three more, but that's because I did a great deal of digging (and was rewarded for it with lots of synergy in my abilities).
Playing the characters was a breeze though, so that's something.
I want to also say D&D 4th. It was hard to care about my character building choices when the character builder was being used. Pick one of these four powers. Do it again. Ten more times. Done! It ended up playing and feeling like the watered-down silliness that WoW felt like at the end of Pandaria.
Worst to play? Deadlands, but that is likely because I was always either wrong genre savvy or my dice hated my guts and gizzards.

[2D8HP]

Maybe I'm forgetting (or glossed over) something that calls it out as Cyberpunk
O. K. I keep harping on it, but there is that word "Cyberpunk" again. I STILL JUST DON'T GET IT! What was the attraction? By now were already past the 2013 "Dark Future" of R. Taslorian Games "Cyberpunk", but even back then (I was born in 1968) - gangsters, hackers, and Mega-Corporations? That's called real life!
The same publisher made "Castle Falkenstein" which was gloriously fantastic, but at least in my area no one wanted to play it (the closest one could get to a good old swords and sorcery setting was sometimes Call of Cthullu), but instead it was just mostly "Cyberpunk" and "Vampire" (modern day but even bleaker/"gothic" and you play a monstrous cannibal). Huh? High Fantasy is just so much richer! Now a good GM can make just about anything fun (I had a good time playing a session of "Shadowrun", which was pretty much just Cyberpunk with elves) but if you wanted to do some kind of "Oceans Eleven in the future", why not have it in the larger setting of Space Opera instead? They were so many better settings one could use such as "Flashing Swords" swashbuckling, or Pirates, or Ninjas and Samurai, heck even "Christians and Lions" or "Witch hunt" would have beat Cyberpunk. Since I was still a Punk (I had way too many LP's and 7""s and watched far too many bad bands, friends and otherwise), most of the girls I knew dressed in black and the "Dark Future" was coming fast enough, why game it?
While I continue to haunt game stores, that no one wanted to play anything besides "Cyberpunk" and "Vampire", in the 1990's pretty much killed RPG'ing for me.
So I will repeat "blue book" Holmes authored Dungeons and Dragons, other then love itself - BEST GAME EVER!
Cyberpunk 1e and 2020 (with "Vampire" a hobby ruining second) - MOST BORING AND USELESS GENRE EVER! While I liked his earlier "Gernsbeck Continuum", Gibson's "Neuromancer" bled out Science Fiction for me.
Please tell me it's different now (I see that "Pathfinder" and "5e" sell better now). I know that "it's different strokes, for different folks, but could a playgrounder who can also remember the 90's tell me what was that all about? I had such more fun with the RPG's of the 1970's and very early 1980's, what happened? Was it just being older?

[obryn]

Please tell me it's different now (I see that "Pathfinder" and "5e" sell better now). I know that "it's different strokes, for different folks, but could a playgrounder who can also remember the 90's tell me what was that all about?
Yeah, the whole cynical grim & gothy style that pervaded not just 90's RPGs but also 90's comics/novels/etc. is seen as rather passe now. That's not to say you won't find it, but you have to look a lot harder. Heroic gaming is back in vogue.

And yes, Eclipse Phase is definitely a lot more transhuman than it is cyberpunk.

[hamlet]

Yeah, the whole cynical grim & gothy style that pervaded not just 90's RPGs but also 90's comics/novels/etc. is seen as rather passe now. That's not to say you won't find it, but you have to look a lot harder. Heroic gaming is back in vogue.


A minor quibble, but I would say it's less "grim and gothy" and more . . . "cinematic." The idea of emulating what you see in the movies is a big thing now, bigger than it was for the older games which were closer to certain books instead.

[flond]

O. K. I keep harping on it, but there is that word "Cyberpunk" again. I STILL JUST DON'T GET IT! What was the attraction? By now were already past the 2013 "Dark Future" of R. Taslorian Games "Cyberpunk", but even back then (I was born in 1968) - gangsters, hackers, and Mega-Corporations? That's called real life!
The same publisher made "Castle Falkenstein" which was gloriously fantastic, but at least in my area no one wanted to play it (the closest one could get to a good old swords and sorcery setting was sometimes Call of Cthullu), but instead it was just mostly "Cyberpunk" and "Vampire" (modern day but even bleaker/"gothic" and you play a monstrous cannibal). Huh? High Fantasy is just so much richer! Now a good GM can make just about anything fun (I had a good time playing a session of "Shadowrun", which was pretty much just Cyberpunk with elves) but if you wanted to do some kind of "Oceans Eleven in the future", why not have it in the larger setting of Space Opera instead? They were so many better settings one could use such as "Flashing Swords" swashbuckling, or Pirates, or Ninjas and Samurai, heck even "Christians and Lions" or "Witch hunt" would have beat Cyberpunk. Since I was still a Punk (I had way too many LP's and 7""s), most of the girls I knew dressed in black and the "Dark Future" was coming fast enough, why game it?
While I continue to haunt game stores, that no one wanted to play anything besides "Cyberpunk" and "Vampire", in the 1990's pretty much killed RPG'ing for me.
So I will repeat "blue book" Holmes authored Dungeons and Dragons, other then love itself - BEST GAME EVER!
Cyberpunk 1e (with "Vampire" a hobby ruining second) - MOST BORING AND USELESS GENRE EVER! While I liked his earlier "Gernsbeck Continuum", Gibson's "Neuromancer" bled out Science Fiction for me.
Please tell me it's different now (I see that "Pathfinder" and "5e" sell better now). I know that "it's different strokes, for different folks, but could a playgrounder who can also remember the 90's tell me what was that all about? I had such more fun with the RPG's of the 1970's and very early 1980's, what happened? Was it just being older?

Well...while I wasn't around for the 90's I did catch some of the second wave of that and a fan of those two genres...

1. Both Cyberpunk and Vampire often have strong shades of power fantasy. It's a different, but still pleasing sort of escapism to play "The dark future, but you're a mover and shaker."
2. Style. Both Vampire and Cyberpunk had a strong (and...at least somewhat similar) sense of style. Big looming buildings, intense music. They were the settings of FEELINGS, they conveyed EMOTIONS and THEMES and well, that makes it an easy sell. If you can present a consistent vision, that's a great way to get people to bite.
3. Fidelity. Big settings like Space Opera and honestly, most fantasy tend to be rather loose. There are exceptions (Glorantha) but in general, the further you get from real life, the more...loose and broad stroked settings tend to be. By doing "real life but with monsters hiding around" you have a solid canvas for your world, and you just need to fill in the magic bits. And thus, the players don't need to read a giant setting book. You can just go "It's the year 200X and you're a vampire now! There's an angry dude telling you you need to meet some guy called the prince, what do you do!" Plus, you can use "ripped from the headlines plots"
4. Some people like playing dark characters doing dark things. And for that, closeness to real life is often a bonus. Something recognizable feels more transgressive, often.
5. Are they really cannibals if they aren't human anymore :P

So yeah. Obviously not your thing but...those are some of the big appeals I think.

[flond]

Yeah, the whole cynical grim & gothy style that pervaded not just 90's RPGs but also 90's comics/novels/etc. is seen as rather passe now. That's not to say you won't find it, but you have to look a lot harder. Heroic gaming is back in vogue.

And yes, Eclipse Phase is definitely a lot more transhuman than it is cyberpunk.

Well for what it's worth, I think it's also fair to say that Bleak and Grim gaming is now an...indie thing. Which means there's no monolithic block, it being spread around a dozen microgames (e.g. Night Witches. Fiasco (which is a comedy but a DARK one), Monsterhearts/Urban Shadows.

[Fri]

Also, cyberpunk is totally still valid now eventhough we've past the supposed date. It's totally alternate history in comparison with steampunk now.

[2D8HP]

It's one of the things that's pretty well kept this thread pretty much free of edition warring so far.
While I never bought 2e or the post 1977 "basic", editions, I bought most ever D&D product I could get with my then very limited money from 1978 until "Unearthed Arcana" came out, which I passed on (I am still kicking myself that I didn't buy Dave Arnesons "Adventures in Fantasy" when it was new), and I started buying D&D again with 3e. I mostly skipped 3.5 and 4e, but I have since bought all the 5e (including some non Wotc material) I have found, and I then went back and read some 2e, 3.5, Pathfinder and 4e material and a 1994 basic rulebook I found at half price books.
While I would not feel confident Dungeon Mastering any R. A. W. games beyond "holmes basic", supplemented by 1e (I remember reading the "blue book" cover to cover in 6th grade, three times before I felt "I got it"), while I am reading any additional materials, from any edition, I love it and want to play RIGHT NOW (except for the grappling and psionic rules, which even in the 1970's made my eyes glaze over).
If it's got Dungeons and (especially) Dragons then it's good, whatever edition it is, as long as someone else is the DM (now Call of Cthullu, which is not my favorite to play, was dead easy to GM or "Keeper").
As long as it keeps bringing in players, let a thousand editions bloom!
Now if only I could figure out a way to get someone to GM Castle Falkenstein, Pendragon, or Space 1889!

[obryn]

Well for what it's worth, I think it's also fair to say that Bleak and Grim gaming is now an...indie thing. Which means there's no monolithic block, it being spread around a dozen microgames (e.g. Night Witches. Fiasco (which is a comedy but a DARK one), Monsterhearts/Urban Shadows.
Do you think? Night Witches isn't grim in nearly the same way that cyberpunk/vampire are, since it's all about finding hope in personal relationships. Monsterhearts also takes a serious approach to the teen monster genre, where your 'advancement' is all about growing up to develop healthy relationships. In other words, they're generally optimistic instead of pessimistic. The trend is towards humanization rather than dehumanization, if that makes sense.

Fiasco is way more geared towards comedy, and I don't see any direct lines of comparison between it and 90's grimdark. :smallsmile:

[2D8HP]

A minor quibble, but I would say it's less "grim and gothy" and more . . . "cinematic." The idea of emulating what you see in the movies is a big thing now, bigger than it was for the older games which were closer to certain books instead.
What I remember we emulated "back in the day" was:
7th Voyage of Sinbad,
Robin Hood (with Errol Flynn),
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger,
The Hobbit (TV cartoon movie), and
Star Wars, -all movies.

[hamlet]

What I remember we emulated "back in the day" was:
7th Voyage of Sinbad,
Robin Hood (with Errol Flynn),
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger,
The Hobbit (TV cartoon movie), and
Star Wars, -all movies.

Hmmm, must be a table thing. We tend and tended to stick closer to Vance when we felt silly and Lieber when we felt a bit more serious. Sometimes Lord of the Rings crept in, but typically less than you would imagine.

That said, I will say that, in my experience, modern games that I have read seem to put a bit more emphasis on these things rather than a "do what you want with it" kind of vibe I got from some older things. Just an impression though.

[flond]

Do you think? Night Witches isn't grim in nearly the same way that cyberpunk/vampire are, since it's all about finding hope in personal relationships. Monsterhearts also takes a serious approach to the teen monster genre, where your 'advancement' is all about growing up to develop healthy relationships. In other words, they're generally optimistic instead of pessimistic. The trend is towards humanization rather than dehumanization, if that makes sense.

Fiasco is way more geared towards comedy, and I don't see any direct lines of comparison between it and 90's grimdark. :smallsmile:

I guess I sort of associate them all with 90's grimdark because they have that whole "real (ish) world" feeling. You're right though, they're different I just...I guess, feel like there's a lineage between them and World of Darkness.

Also with Fiasco I'm maybe...more inclined to see things as "this is just comedy shot differently." Which...well I'm going to be honest, most of the Shadowrun PCs I've seen could EASILY be fiasco PCs. Accidental Farce is...while not an intended mode of play for shadowrun, an easy one to end up in if you get a Mowhawk/Mirrorshades misalignment.

[2D8HP]

Well...while I wasn't around for the 90's I did catch some of the second wave of that and a fan of those two genres...

1. Both Cyberpunk and Vampire often have strong shades of power fantasy. It's a different, but still pleasing sort of escapism to play "The dark future, but you're a mover and shaker.".
O. K. I can kind of get that, and I should probably walk back some of my anti-cyberpunk vitriol since I now remember that I liked "When Gravity Fails"years ago, it's just not my thing today, I prefer reading "Stardust", "Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norell", and "A Darker Shade of Magic" now.
Off topic but what are good new RPG's in contrast to the bad ones?

[2D8HP]

Also, cyberpunk is totally still valid now eventhough we've past the supposed date. It's totally alternate history in comparison with steampunk now.
Except that Steampunk is fun.

[flond]

O. K. I can kind of get that, and I should probably walk back some of my anti-cyberpunk vitriol since I now remember that I liked "When Gravity Fails"years ago, it's just not my thing today, I prefer reading "Stardust", "Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norell", and "A Darker Shade of Magic" now.
Off topic but what are good new RPG's in contrast to the bad ones?

Well, define good and bad but...

Dungeon World is pretty great, and has a free SRD up! http://www.dungeonworldsrd.com/ It's...DnD, but much simpler. (It's also tied something called the Apocalypse World Engine but...I'd start with Dungeon World. The rest of the games on offer for that system are a little bit...darker. DW is fun fantasy though!)

If you like Sci-fi you've got a nice backlog of stuff from recent times to look at. http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/166518/Bulldogs-Fate-Core-Edition Bulldogs might be up your alley. It's about playing high flying mercenaries in Space Opera. It also uses the Fate system which is...kind of a big deal in generic books nowadays.

The semi-new Firefly rpg is also pretty great.

There's a The One Ring rpg which is great for well, Tolkenien play.

Oh! And there's Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/134196/Chuubos-Marvelous-WishGranting-Engine Which is a game mostly designed for magical pastoral play in a friendly but weird little town. Diceless. Very strange. Probably a good game for showing some of the more experimental stuff going on.

Pathfinder is well regarded (not my thing at all but...well regarded) Ditto for Savage Worlds

For things that aren't...bad perse but you wouldn't like:

World of Darkness (Vampire and friends) are still around. There's a new version which went even more personal horror, now called the Chronicles of Darkness.

There's stuff like Fiasco (Modern day one shot hijinks about idiots trying to do things. Think Burn after reading)

[2D8HP]

Hmmm, must be a table thing. We tend and tended to stick closer to Vance when we felt silly and Lieber when we felt a bit more serious. Sometimes Lord of the Rings crept in, but typically less than you would imagine.
I am guessing you are a bit older (I will be 48 in June) because D&D ("Appendix N") led me to reading Vance and Lieber (and LeGuin, and Moorcock, etc. All of whom ROCK!) not the other way around.
Tolkien on the other hand was preached to us by the "adults" around us at the time, and was so very infused in popular culture ("Misty Mountain Hop" etc.) and would have been difficult to miss, but I agree with you, except for battling Orcs our characters were much more like "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser" then Aragon and Frodo (I still find "DM of the Rings" hilarious however).

[LibraryOgre]

See, I don't see us passing the date for cyberpunk as invalidating it, or making it an equivalent of steampunk or dieselpunk... cyberpunk has grown up a bit.

I like to point to Stephenson's "Snow Crash" and Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books (Market Forces and Thirteen/Black Man also qualify) as a new cyberpunk... the old "cyber" has given way to a combination of subtle cybernetics and genetic engineering... it tends to be more transhuman, with less elements of "the cybernetic distances me from humanity" and more "the human as a constructed organism", while keeping a lot of the punk elements... resistance to authority, semi-independent operators of great skill, working beyond the bounds of legality, frequently against forces that are incredibly superior (be they corporations, governments, or hybrids thereof).

[Piedmon_Sama]

Yay, let's get negative!

*deep breath* Cthulhutech.

Welp, that was easy. I think that's the only RPG I've ever spent actual money on that I regretted buying. And considering I haven't been able to get anyone to really play RIFTS with me in the uh... nine years since I bought the Ultimate Edition that's really saying something, y'know?

Let's go down the list. I'm not even gonna include the infamous grimderp rapecamp stuff because everybody knows that and I can rip this game apart without it (that's def. part of it too though).

-Incomplete equipment list. Basically a lot of "stay tuned for more releases!" in the weapons and mecha table.
-Incomplete magic. Likewise, the main book pretty much says "you'll get good spells..... when you buy our supplements!" Magic system totally does not let you play Dr. Orpheus, which is bull pockey in what's supposed to be a genre-crossing kitchen sink game.
-Just... totally not getting what makes the Lovecraft mythos cool, at all. Destroying the Dreamlands? You want to do Lovecraft but you want to cut out the most fun, imaginative part of the whole setting? Okay.
-The really bizarre, sheltered worldview in the entire setting description. Everything is Yankee + Japanese cyberpunk strip mall, everywhere; like 90% of the surviving population only speaks English, cultures the writers don't know anything about were all conveniently destroyed, the incredibly euphoric writeup about religion. If you were going to be this bad, why did you even try?
-Haha I did not even get to the rules yet. That's because I've actually blanked them out since I read the book, they were so poorly explained and obviously ill thought out. I'm not the tiniest bit a math guy and even I could see their 2d10 system (BUT YOU CAN ALSO PLAY IT WITH A DECK OF CARDS SOMEHOW!?!?) was garbage.
-So after two days reading the book I was like; there's the germ of a very cool game here but I would have to basically port it to a rule system that isn't garbage and rewrite vast swaths of it to not be offensively stupid.... well at that point I might as well write my own game and call it Bio-Booster Evathulu Plus: Southern Cross, eh?

This was all before they released the weird gross furry sex adventure btw.

[JoeJ]

Yay, let's get negative!

*deep breath* Cthulhutech.

I'd never heard of that one before, so I went and looked it up.

I obviously can't comment on the problems you listed, but I would add that it also has a nearly unreadable website. Seriously, who puts dark gray text on a back background?

[Piedmon_Sama]

Cthulhutech is 2Dark4U-----it's not for babies!

Don't highlight over their text when you read their site or you're breaking the (dark) spirit of the game!

[Cosi]

O. K. I keep harping on it, but there is that word "Cyberpunk" again. I STILL JUST DON'T GET IT! What was the attraction?

The same thing that's attractive about Fantasy or Space Opera or any other genre: it's awesome. Neuromancer is a classic for a reason, and characters like Case or Molly Millions are legitimately cool.


1. Both Cyberpunk and Vampire often have strong shades of power fantasy. It's a different, but still pleasing sort of escapism to play "The dark future, but you're a mover and shaker."

That's the opposite of my reading. In Fantasy, people become very powerful and individuals routinely throw down against gods or civilizations. On the other hand, Vampire and Cyberpunk are both about modern society, and there is basically no amount of hardcore you can be in those stories where you can fight "the man". I can see it as a sort of power fantasy where there are still cold and uncaring corporations that control the world but you are personally a vampire or cyborg, but I don't think "mover and shaker" is accurate.


Also, cyberpunk is totally still valid now eventhough we've past the supposed date. It's totally alternate history in comparison with steampunk now.

I wouldn't call it alternate history in anything other than a technical sense. It's more that people didn't really predict the evolution of technology in the 21st century super well. The CoDominium novels predicted that we would develop FTL in ... 2004, discover habitable exoplanets in 2010, and that interstellar colonies would be established in 2015. None of that happened, but I wouldn't really describe the series as "alternate history". Similarly, the fact that Gibson radically overestimated the speed with which AI and augmentation would develop (also, radically underestimated the amount of processing power computers would have), but that's different from steampunk (which postulates that develop continued in steam technology, instead of not doing that).

[Sith_Happens]

*deep breath* Cthulhutech.

I'm kind of surprised that this is CTech's first mention in this thread, but I guess most of the few people who know about it in the first place also know better than to actually try it.:smalltongue:

(Incidentally, I can totally imagine Honoka slowly flipping through CTech's core book with a perplexed look on her face and an understated "Oh... Hm..." every few pages.)


That's the opposite of my reading. In Fantasy, people become very powerful and individuals routinely throw down against gods or civilizations. On the other hand, Vampire and Cyberpunk are both about modern society, and there is basically no amount of hardcore you can be in those stories where you can fight "the man". I can see it as a sort of power fantasy where there are still cold and uncaring corporations that control the world but you are personally a vampire or cyborg, but I don't think "mover and shaker" is accurate.

In Vampire (especially Masquerade) your goal is more often than not to become The Man.

[Telwar]

Except that Steampunk is fun.

That's very much an opinion thing. :smallbiggrin: The closest thing to steampunk I've ever found enjoyable was better-described as clockwork-punk...with bug people.

Check it out! https://www.goodreads.com/series/45895-shadows-of-the-apt (http://[url%3D%22http://[URL%22).

Ironically, it's based off of the author's homebrew RPG from when he was in college.