Worst Tabletop RPG

[Kishigane]

What's the worst tabletop RPG you've ever played?

[JNAProductions]

What's the worst tabletop RPG you've ever played?

Ever played?

Probably 3.P D&D. And that system, despite its flaws, is still loads of fun!

Ever read or heard of?

FATAL.

[Jason]

The worst experience I've ever had playing an RPG was playing FFG's Star Wars system. It was with basically the same gamemaster and group as had played in another very good Star Wars game using the Saga edition a few years earlier, so I chalk it up to the game mechanics as the problem.

It's not that they didn't work, it's that they utterly failed to feel like Star Wars to me. I played a Jedi who was also a starfighter pilot, and as it turns out the system isn't very good at making either of those feel like they do in the movies.

As a Jedi I was annoyed at:

How it was impossible to effectively defend myself from blaster shots (you can only reduce the damage of blaster shots by a relatively insignificant amount, not deflect them entirely, unless you buy lots of talents in specific talent trees). Compare that to the movies, where even padawans can fully deflect multiple blaster bolts each round.
How whether an action drew on the Dark Side or not and therefore caused character conflict or not was determined entirely by whether the Dark Side or Light Side pips came up on the dice, not by what you were trying to do or what motivated your character. In fact, as a starting character its more than likely for the single die you get to come up Dark Side, since there are more Dark Side results on the die than Light Side, so you have to take conflict for doing just about ''anything'' with the Force.
How conflict didn't matter much anyway, because it was extremely easy to become a lightside paragon and just stay above 90 morality, no matter what the dice said.

Some of the Force powers were rather limited and others were way overpowered, but that's probably true of any Star Wars game.

As a starfighter pilot I was annoyed by how starfighter combat was basically "He who hits first wins". Starship weapons are so damaging and starfighters have so few hull points that the only effective tactic was to hit the other guy before he got a chance at shooting at you. Maneuvers were so abstract and had so little effect on hit probability that they were basically useless.

As a player overall I was annoyed by how frequently non-sensical dice results would come up. It became almost routine to completely fail at whatever a PC was trying to do but have huge amounts of Advantage that we could spend on minor benefits that wouldn't effect the main result. Or to have multiple Triumphs with a failure or multiple Despairs with a success. Much of the time the gamemaster simply ignored the advantage or threat and just concerned himself with whether the roll had succeeded or not.

A system that can't emulate its source material is a system I consider a failure. I won't say that I will never play the game again, but if I do it won't be as a Jedi starfighter pilot.

[Xervous]

Played? Such a narrow range I’ve got that leaves me at 5e Shadowrun for all the nonsense in its rules and editing. Limits and wireless bonuses are mind bogglingly worse than D&D4e skill challenges and they choke the whole system.

Heard of? Racial Holy War. What it says on the tin.

[Anonymouswizard]

FFG's Star Wars system. But that might be my hate for proprietary dice.


Ever read or heard of?

FATAL.

RaHoWa is slightly worse. It's just as offensive as FATAL, although in a different way, but doesn't even have a complete ruleset.

There's a few contenders for the third spot IIRC, all for similar reasons as the top two spots.

[Cygnia]

Bad players/GMs can make any game system horrible. My opinions of The Everlasting, Earthdawn and Shadowrun have been colored by bad experiences with terrible people during play, giving me no real desire to ever try those games again.

[Morty]

D&D 3.5 is definitely the worst I've had the misfortune to play, even if I didn't realize it at the time. Which was simply because it was my first RPG and I just didn't realize you can do things differently and so much better.

[Ottriman]

Worst I've played is probably.... Deathwatch, though I only tried 1 test session. A game where a boss character can die to one round of basic gunfire due to exploding dice crits and where super experienced super soldiers have like 50% or less chance to hit a target at medium range is just not good on a basic level.

Worst I've heard of: FATAL, nuff said.

[Batcathat]

I haven't played a ton of different systems and I don't think I'd call any of the ones I've played "bad", though if I had to pick the worst one it'd probably be a Swedish game called Gemini. It was also the first one I ever played so the combination of nostalgia and me and my friends not properly understanding all the rules for years make it hard to evaluate it objectively though. It had some interesting ideas, both in the rules and the lore (looking back, it was kind of an odd combo of realistic-ish low fantasy and stereotypical high fantasy) but I think it falls short of the games I've played since.

Out of the games I haven't played but is at least somewhat familiar with, I'd probably agree with FATAL though the name alone certainly make it seem like Racial Holy War could be worse.


How whether an action drew on the Dark Side or not and therefore caused character conflict or not was determined entirely by whether the Dark Side or Light Side pips came up on the dice, not by what you were trying to do or what motivated your character. In fact, as a starting character its more than likely for the single die you get to come up Dark Side, since there are more Dark Side results on the die than Light Side, so you have to take conflict for doing just about ''anything'' with the Force.

What an odd choice for a Star Wars game. While I personally don't like the idea of "these powers are Good, these powers are Evil", it's usually very much the case in Star Wars.

[Morty]

Worst I've played is probably.... Deathwatch, though I only tried 1 test session. A game where a boss character can die to one round of basic gunfire due to exploding dice crits and where super experienced super soldiers have like 50% or less chance to hit a target at medium range is just not good on a basic level.


Having played Deathwatch, it's hard to disagree. Taking the base Dark Heresy system and scaling it up to Space Marines did not go well.

[Jason]

Bad players/GMs can make any game system horrible.
They can make your experience horrible, but that's not really the game system. I used to think that the system didn't matter too much as long as I had a good group to play it with.
FFG Star Wars made me realize the mechanics actually are more important than I had thought, at least to my experience.

My RPG playing experience includes: AD&D 1st & 2nd editions, D&D BECMI, Star Frontiers, D&D 3rd through 5th edition (although only one session of 4th), Shadowrun 3rd edition, Twilight: 2000 (1st edition), GURPS (3rd and 4th). WEG Star Wars, MERP, MegaTraveller, FASA Star Trek, Last Unicorn Star Trek, Decipher Star Trek, Mechwarrior 1st - 3rd edition, Legend of the Five Rings 1st - 4th edition, Call of Cthulhu 5th - 6th edition, WOTC Star Wars Revised - Saga editions, FFG Star Wars, Spycraft 1st & 2nd editions, AEG Stargate SG-1, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Cyberpunk 1st edition, Earthdawn 1st & 2nd editions, WOTC Wheel of Time, 7th Sea, Rifts, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Robotech, Teenagers from Outer Space, Warhammer Fantasy RP 1st edition, The One Ring, and probably a few others I'm not remembering at the moment.

If I add games I've only run but never actually played there's probably at least a dozen more.

[gijoemike]

Bad players/GMs can make any game system horrible. My opinions of The Everlasting, Earthdawn and Shadowrun have been colored by bad experiences with terrible people during play, giving me no real desire to ever try those games again.

The group and prior experience mean everything. I have had amazing games in FFG's Star Wars which several prior posters said was their worst game. It comes down to GM and understanding the system. Some of my best memories of gaming is in FFG Start War's. To each their own.


But also, when you ask what is the worst system, one must ALWAYS specify in what way?

1. Imbalance - I have had really bad experience with White Wolf's EXALTED because there are long power chains but sometimes there is a choice betwee a power like - you can always identify the best horse in a herd vs at the same tier - you can set an entire city block on fire dealing Xd in damage. There are many trap options and required system mastery to just make a decent starting character. Powers were sometimes very specific highly situational but not useful vs effective general common powers. My group played 2 sessions before we agreed this just will not work.

2. Ineffectiveness of characters - We played Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader. Great setting, awesome concept. We all picked a different class to play. I happened to pick the void master because I could pilot a ship. The GM ran a space battle. We quickly discovered that the other 5 players at the table couldn't participate except in contrived situations were they only had like 40% chance to succeed. At first we thought we must have made the characters incorrectly. So we all sat down and read the rules and "remade" our characters. Come to discover, we had created the toons right the first time. Rogue Trader makes characters not very competent at running or operating a space ship. The entire point of the game is you are the leadership on a massive spaceship running trade between sections of space in the 40k setting. The games pitch vs delivery was just plain awful. The system was fine but characters were not good at much even after a few skill pt allocations. Ground combat worked ok but was deadly as all get out.

3. Game Design just didn't work - Tortured Earth - I have played in 2 demo games of this. The way skills level actually makes you worse at the ability because you give up uses of the power to make it better. Combats are supposed to be fast but in reality take quite a bit of time. The demo's are blocked for convention time slots. Never finished one. The game devs think teaching and playing their game is 3 times quicker than it actually is. It is supposed to blend magic, horror, fantasy, sci fi. It doesn't work well. I think this game could be FUN. But I have yet to see it work.

4. Oh God, ick, why am I doing this? - this is the category where FATAL resides. BOVD based D&D games would fall here too. This is more content then system. I would like to point out that FATAL requires multiple d100 stats and sub stats. Lots of math and the numerical combos don't make sense.

5. GM was an idiot. - I played a game of Deadlands: hell on earth some 16 years ago. This is the worst game I have ever sat at. Period. The table wanted to stab the GM. We rolled up to the adventure, we questioned, investigated, prepared. Were were told about the worms in the earth popping up and grabbing folks (we know what it looked liked, how it acted, and where it came from). We got on the roof with our guns, waited until noon before luring them out. We knew what was coming, when it was coming, and we set an ambush, where the monster couldn't get to us. GM called for fear checks. OK. that is pretty common for a mild fear in this game. We had done out best to mitigate this.

The GM set the check at 12. A TWELVE. You draw cards in that game. That means we had to draw from a playing card deck looking for a Queen, King, or Ace, or Joker. I had an ability for +2. 10s, Jacks+. The whole table failed. So the GM rolled fear. He rolled on the massive fear/dread chart. One guy had a heart attack and died (they left the table). I (the extra brave one) fainted and was out for the entire combat ( the only one in session). Some else got the shakes until they got therapy. It was nearly a tpk. We had NPC's that all made their check. It was a horrible session. The GM didn't understand the DC's, or how to tell the story. He refused to understand character motivations or player agency in our character choices. Everything was impossible and made little sense. Missing a roll had horrible consequences even for very minor rolls. WORST GAME EVER.

[gijoemike]

They can make your experience horrible, but that's not really the game system. I used to think that the system didn't matter too much as long as I had a good group to play it with.
FFG Star Wars made me realize the mechanics actually are more important than I had thought, at least to my experience.

My RPG playing experience includes: AD&D 1st & 2nd editions, D&D BECMI, Star Frontiers, D&D 3rd through 5th edition (although only one session of 4th), Shadowrun 3rd edition, Twilight: 2000 (1st edition), GURPS (3rd and 4th). WEG Star Wars, MERP, MegaTraveller, FASA Star Trek, Last Unicorn Star Trek, Decipher Star Trek, Mechwarrior 1st - 3rd edition, Legend of the Five Rings 1st - 4th edition, Call of Cthulhu 5th - 6th edition, WOTC Star Wars Revised - Saga editions, FFG Star Wars, Spycraft 1st & 2nd editions, AEG Stargate SG-1, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Cyberpunk 1st edition, Earthdawn 1st & 2nd editions, WOTC Wheel of Time, 7th Sea, Rifts, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Robotech, Teenagers from Outer Space, Warhammer Fantasy RP 1st edition, The One Ring, and probably a few others I'm not remembering at the moment.

If I add games I've only run but never actually played there's probably at least a dozen more.

LAST UNICORN Star Trek was Amazing. There was a Decipher version of Star Trek?

Game mechanics are always important. How do you interact with the game world without them? I have a tendency to dislike games that become "Mother, may I?" with the DM. If the game mechanics and structure don't give me an idea of how hard or common a given task/item how do I as a character understand it is an option. Having to ask the DM for permission to do everything is a pain. I think this is a reason I have issues with D&D 5e. Different GMs will allow various levels of rule of cool for questions and tasks that should have been in a rulebook. What is the DC for a given task could be a 10 from one GM but a 20 from a different. That makes it hard to function in the world as a PC or P not knowing if I can reasonably do X.

[zarionofarabel]

D&D 3.X made me swear off D&D all together. (Though I may run a really Old Skool Red Box Clone campaign just for nostalgia and a giggle one day!)

The entirety of the "everything D20" era made me realize that System Matters! Finding a system that can properly emulate the media you are trying to, well, emulate, is of the utmost importance.

FFG Star Wars made me realize that dice mechanics that draw players out of the narrative to focus on said dice mechanics are not for me.

Reading and watching some actual plays of Fate and some version of PbtA made me realize that I just can't grasp certain systems no matter how much I want to. I just have to stick to the old "traditional" TTRPGs I guess.

All that being said I don't want to call them the worst TTRPGs. Lots of peeps love these games and will play them and enjoy them and that is awesome!

I think the worst TTRPGs are the ones others have mentioned upthread that I'm guessing were written by Nazis or members of the KKK.

[Jay R]

The Arduin Grimoire managed to combine the vagueness and uncertainty of a rules-light system with the ponderous unplayability of a rules-heavy one.

Chivalry and Sorcery was the most lush, vivid, glorious, immersive, well-researched, carefully-detailed, compellingly unplayable mess I've ever seen.

[Ajustusdaniel]

Not played personally, but a subsection of my gamer group had a go at what I believe was some sort of fan-made Pokemon TTRPG. Game was called part-way through the first session when they realized that the combat rules, as written, were fundamentally non-functional for several of the Pokemon.

[Jason]

The group and prior experience mean everything. I have had amazing games in FFG's Star Wars which several prior posters said was their worst game. It comes down to GM and understanding the system. Some of my best memories of gaming is in FFG Start War's. To each their own.Well, yes, it was a personal taste thing, but it was the mechanics that put me off of FFG Star Wars, since the group was the same one I had enjoyed playing Saga edition with. Part of the problem was also that we played through most of the printed adventures, and it just went on and on. It took us more than a year.


But also, when you ask what is the worst system, one must ALWAYS specify in what way?True. I blame my experience on the imbalance of the system, ineffectiveness of the characters, and the game design not working in the sense that it didn't feel at all like Star Wars. My group was fine and the GM was no idiot.


LAST UNICORN Star Trek was Amazing. There was a Decipher version of Star Trek?A rather short-lived one, yes. It was very similar to LUG's version, actually, and some of the same designers crossed over with the license.


Game mechanics are always important. How do you interact with the game world without them? I have a tendency to dislike games that become "Mother, may I?" with the DM. If the game mechanics and structure don't give me an idea of how hard or common a given task/item how do I as a character understand it is an option. Having to ask the DM for permission to do everything is a pain. I think this is a reason I have issues with D&D 5e. Different GMs will allow various levels of rule of cool for questions and tasks that should have been in a rulebook. What is the DC for a given task could be a 10 from one GM but a 20 from a different. That makes it hard to function in the world as a PC or P not knowing if I can reasonably do X.That sounds to me like a DM problem rather than a system problem. 5th edition actually has fairly clear DCs compared to 3.5, they don't go up as you level up, and if you have a good attribute you have a reasonable chance of succeeding whether or not you are proficient.

[Kishigane]

RaHoWa is slightly worse. It's just as offensive as FATAL, although in a different way, but doesn't even have a complete ruleset.

RaHoWa is strictly worse.

[Grod_The_Giant]

That I've played? Probably Exalted 2e--the system was slow, clunky, unbalanced, and I never really understood how to make it work. I also rolled up a standard wizard type in a game where the was tons of background lore I (as a player) just didn't know and where spellcasting took literally twice as long as anything else in combat for no good return. On the other hand, that game yielded two good friends and a bunch of wonderful RPG moments, so <shrug>.


The party included an ascetic Zenith (paladin type) and a Lunar (turns-into-animals barbarian type). One of the setting concept is "Solar/Lunar mates," where every Solar/chosen of the sun (default character type; Zeniths like the paladin are a type of Solar) have mystical bonds with one of the Lunars/chosen of the moon-- no matter how often they reincarnate, they'll always find each other and become close in one fashion or another. It was established that the Zenith and Lunar were one such pair, but the Zenith didn't know it and the Lunar wasn't entirely happy with it*. The Zenith also had a mischievous demon familiar who would usually refuse to help unless he promised to do some extremely low-level bad thing ("trip that guy!").

You might see where this is going.

The Zenith and most of the party are taking shelter in a bunker, while the Lunar is standing guard outside. The Zenith is trying to get his familiar to go scouting and see if the baddie were still looking for us, and it--as usual--is trying to get something out of him. Finally, giggling (both in and out of character), the GM whispers something in the player's ear.

"Oh no. Oh, no no no. I am not doing that."

There's some more back-and-forth, and finally the Zenith throws up his hands shouting "fine!" He storms out into the hall to find the Lunar, saying "stupid (familiar) won't do his job unless we kiss, let's get this over with."

And the Lunar's player, without missing a beat and with a totally deadpan expression on his face, says "I'm a porcupine."




*The character wasn't happy with it, that is. The players were the ones who'd chosen to set up the relationship in the first place and were both on board with the whole scene.


Legends of Anglerre gets an honorable mention for being an attempt to create a D&D style experience using Fate 2e rules, but written without understanding what made either system fun. In a similar vein, the Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG one-shot I played through straddled the line between "board game" and "combat-focused RPG" in the most frustrating ways.

[Jason]

RaHoWa is strictly worse.

Well, now that raises a question: should an RPG be considered bad if it concerns a subject that you find personally offensive, regardless of whether the system works well or not?

There are plenty of systems out there that I am not interested in playing because they cover subjects I am not interested in. Does that mean they are bad systems?

[JNAProductions]

Well, now that raises a question: should an RPG be considered bad if it concerns a subject that you find personally offensive, regardless of whether the system works well or not?

There are plenty of systems out there that I am not interested in playing because they cover subjects I am not interested in. Does that mean they are bad systems?

There's a difference between "I'm not interested," "I find this distasteful," and "This is morally wrong."

High School Harem Comedy is a system on this forum that I'd imagine a lot of people are just not interested in. That doesn't make it bad, it just makes it unappealing to those folk.

A system that deals with trauma, rape, and other things in a good way could still be distasteful to someone-it's a topic they don't want to address at all. That doesn't make it bad.

But a system that delights in racism and sexual assault, like FATAL does (and presumably RaHoWa, though I've not looked into that) is morally wrong. That doesn't necessarily make the mechanics bad, though FATAL has garbage mechanics, but it does make the system as a whole bad.

[Zombimode]

I think my personal worst RPG experience, system wise, was with Spirit of 77, a PbtA game. Part of the was the setting. But the larger part was the very specific style of game that all PbtA games try to enforce: I do get what these games are trying to do, but to me it is really the complete opposite of how I want to do things in an RPG.

I also had a very bad experience playing a magic user in 2d20 Conan. My disappointment does not extend to the rest of the system. Just trying to play a wizard is an excercise in frustration: you pay an arm and a leg at character creation, and then during the game when you actually cast some magic you roll a bunch of dice to achieve... maybe some minor effect.

[The Random NPC]

What an odd choice for a Star Wars game. While I personally don't like the idea of "these powers are Good, these powers are Evil", it's usually very much the case in Star Wars.

From what I remember, it's a mechanical abstraction of the temptation of the dark side. At low levels you'll only have one force die and light side pips are few and far between to represent your character's difficulty in finding a calm center. On the other hand, you'll nearly always roll at least one dark side pip (there are more faces with dark side pips, more dark side pips on those faces, and some of the light side faces have dark side pips) so if you really need to have that power go off you can just give in to the dark side.

[Friv]

My general experience with FFG Star Wars is that (a) starship combat is definitely the most glaring weakness of the system, and also that (b) the game doesn't start feeling like Star Wars until you're 10-15 sessions in, because you just don't get enough XP to start your characters off as competent people. Once they are, things even out a lot and it's a much more fluid game.

I think the worst game that I've actually played for any length of time was honestly First Edition Scion. The game was a nightmarish mess. It took all of the problems from Exalted 2E and said, "hey, that game was really too balanced and carefully designed. Let's just go wild with it." Nothing in the game works - not the core combat mechanics, not the surrounding mechanics, not the traits you can get, not your powers, not your Epic Attributes. There's no aspect that is functional for anything that it intends to do.

[Faily]

The group and prior experience mean everything. I have had amazing games in FFG's Star Wars which several prior posters said was their worst game. It comes down to GM and understanding the system. Some of my best memories of gaming is in FFG Start War's. To each their own.


Yeah, likewise, I've had some absolute great moments with the FFG Star Wars and having played the old WEG Star Wars and the various d20-ones, FFG's is my favorite version of playing a Star Wars RPG. Was super-sceptical of the dice to start with, and there are still some things I would want to do differently with the game (but hey, that's what houserules are for), but I very much enjoy it. Mind you, I find that it works best with a group that is very good at rolling with the punches and providing creative input to make the intepretation of the dice a fun shared experience. And if the GM is just looking at Success/Failure, well, then you're missing out on a lot of it.



As for me, worst tabletop RPG... hmmmm...

I've played a lot of different games, but if I were to pick...

- Worst gameplay: 7th Sea (2e). Now I adore the work and thought that goes into 7th Sea. The setting, the ideas, the pretty pretty fluff. However, trying to actually play 7th Sea is at best tedious, and often frustrating. I've been in plenty of lengthy combats in other type of games, but 7th Sea takes a looooong time to conclude any fights.

- Worst rulebook: A Song of Ice and Fire. Now I've seen plenty of bad rulebooks, but SIFRP handidly takes first place here. I could also complain a lot about the actual mechanics in gameplay, but most of all I loathe having to use the rulebook. Information can often be hard to find, sometimes it's contradictory, and various tables are several pages away from their relevant text. Not a huge fan of the rules-system either and would either want to play it heavily houseruled, or with a different system all-together. Which is a shame since the game does have aspects I really enjoy, such as the mechanics for building your own house.


I'm currently trying out Hackmaster 5e, and well, time will tell if it ends up on the bad list. It's my first time playing anything Hackmaster, and I can't say I'm terribly impressed by the system or the gameplay so far. Or the rulebook for that matter.

Oh, and games like FATAL and RaHoWa goes without saying for being the absolute worst.

[Delta]

I think the worst game that I've actually played for any length of time was honestly First Edition Scion. The game was a nightmarish mess. It took all of the problems from Exalted 2E and said, "hey, that game was really too balanced and carefully designed. Let's just go wild with it." Nothing in the game works - not the core combat mechanics, not the surrounding mechanics, not the traits you can get, not your powers, not your Epic Attributes. There's no aspect that is functional for anything that it intends to do.

Scion 1e definitely gets a vote in that I can't think of any system with a more extreme gap between how much I loved the whole idea, setting, fluff and even actually playing it because it was just such a blast and how utterly insanely out of whack the mechanics were, forcing a massive bunch of houserules if you even want to be able to have a meaningful combat encounter once characters earn any relevant amount of XP.

Still have to give 2e a try at some point, it's definitely a lot better just from reading it but again, not a high bar to clear.

Of things I tried recently, Shadowrun 6e comes to mind as one of the worst edition "upgrades" I've ever seen. Now Shadowrun has never been exactly blessed by smooth rules, but from 2 through 5, none of the editions I encountered were so shockingly bad that I didn't in the end make some characters just to have them for a random pick up game now and then (Shadowrun is still moderately popular at conventions, gaming clubs and so on over here in Germany), but considering that this is still very heavily based on 5e, it's just that, a shockingly bad product. Like you can't read through any chapter without finding changes that make you go "Whoever wrote this did not think this through and this was not playtested whatsoever"

Thinking of it, I also had a terrible time the one time I played Numenera, which I really liked at first glance, but when actually playing it, it felt like any characters chances of succeeding at any task was more or less the same unless you spent some of the extremely rare special resource which just isn't fun (for me at least), but then I've been told this becomes better quickly as characters advance and the GM wasn't particularly good either so I won't write the system off completely because of that one time.

[Kishigane]

Well, now that raises a question: should an RPG be considered bad if it concerns a subject that you find personally offensive, regardless of whether the system works well or not?

There are plenty of systems out there that I am not interested in playing because they cover subjects I am not interested in. Does that mean they are bad systems?

I'm not the kind who's easily offended; what makes RaHoWa worse is that not only is it flat-out unfinished, but it's content doesn't even cross the line twice like FATAL does.

[Mutazoia]

Worst game for me? Hands down Rifts. Any system where you can't use pilot your fancy Mech because you didn't get the "typing" prereq for computer use (which is a prereq for pilot Mech) is a bad idea to start with. Just how retro is your Mech that it needs a keyboard? What's next? Do you boot it with a 5.25" floppy disk?

And then the issue with their "expansions". Each new expansion made the previous one useless.

[Duff]

Probably the worst system was one I ran rather than played - A Song of Ice and Fire.

There were balance issues - Some advantages and disadvantages were objectively better choices than others - Something which give +1 penetration (so armour reduces damage by 1 less) is worse than something giving +1 damage, since it also helps when the target is unarmoured.
Starting characters can be at "Best in the world" level (level 7). Honestly, why is the best fighter in the world hanging around a tin-pot minor house (TPMH)? Why does a minor house suddenly have the 3 best fighters and the 2 best negotiators?
There are massive holes in the rules. There's no maximum range on bows, just a penalty for every 100 yards. Our great warrior could kill a man at over a mile. There's detailed rules for social "duels" to influence a person, but nothing about what happens when there's: More than one person per side, more than 2 sides or when both competitors are trying to influence a 3rd (y'know, like each trying to turn the king against their opponent, or a trial - the kind of thing that Game of Thrones is mostly about). Some of the "house rules" were more "Record of ruling", some were tweaks to make the game better match what I wanted, but more than 1/2 the 12 (ish) typed pages of house rules were patches over things that were broken or missing
Heroes can attack army units of 100 men, which is great! - Very heroic. But when a good (level 6) archer can take apart an army in a single round, we have a problem...
On the topic of armies, how is a house with lands of only a few square leagues funding/feeding/housing an army of 100s of soldiers?
How do 20 cavalry turn into 100 infantry when they dismount? Why can well led cavalry move at race-winning speeds? Why does good leadership allow infantry to set Olympic records?
The books suggest there's only 4 levels of lordship, the king, the 7 "kingdoms" the great lords and their lesser lords. Trouble is, there must be 100s of lesser lords under each great lord or there's an extra layer or 3 in between the great lord and the TPMH. Which is fine, but it'd be great if they addressed the question



That's the issues I remember off the top of my head

[Jason]

Worst game for me? Hands down Rifts. Any system where you can't use pilot your fancy Mech because you didn't get the "typing" prereq for computer use (which is a prereq for pilot Mech) is a bad idea to start with. Just how retro is your Mech that it needs a keyboard? What's next? Do you boot it with a 5.25" floppy disk?

And then the issue with their "expansions". Each new expansion made the previous one useless.

Unless they've changed something since I last played, which would be very unlike Palladium, someone was pulling your leg. Typing isn't a skill, and there aren't any skill requirements for Pilot: Robots and Power Armor, you just need an O.C.C. that offers the skill. No Computer skill required, and no mentions of a keyboard being needed to pilot a set of power armor that I'm aware of.

[gijoemike]

Unless they've changed something since I last played, which would be very unlike Palladium, someone was pulling your leg. Typing isn't a skill, and there aren't any skill requirements for Pilot: Robots and Power Armor, you just need an O.C.C. that offers the skill. No Computer skill required, and no mentions of a keyboard being needed to pilot a set of power armor that I'm aware of.

I believe he was being facetious. Rifts has skills on top of skills, subsystems on top of subsystems. There is a sub system for everything. I have only played one game of rifts but it was difficult as there was so many skills, abilities, powers. I know of a Rifts GM, several ppl claim he is a master who says he must prepare for hours cutting out swaths of the system for a one shot.

Rifts does have sorcery, alchemy, witchcraft, Thumaturgy, and like 3 other i am a magic user skills. It also has skills called dropping, throwing, bombing which allow a PC to hit enemies with a heavy object at distance but one is like an anvil, the next is a grenade, the last is in a plane releasing bombs.

There are also powers to buy super strength in one limb, in general, or under specific conditions, or only in specific applications.

So, Rifts has a rule for E V E R Y T H I N G. It is a rough system to just jump into.

[gijoemike]

My general experience with FFG Star Wars is that (a) starship combat is definitely the most glaring weakness of the system, and also that (b) the game doesn't start feeling like Star Wars until you're 10-15 sessions in, because you just don't get enough XP to start your characters off as competent people. Once they are, things even out a lot and it's a much more fluid game.

I think the worst game that I've actually played for any length of time was honestly First Edition Scion. The game was a nightmarish mess. It took all of the problems from Exalted 2E and said, "hey, that game was really too balanced and carefully designed. Let's just go wild with it." Nothing in the game works - not the core combat mechanics, not the surrounding mechanics, not the traits you can get, not your powers, not your Epic Attributes. There's no aspect that is functional for anything that it intends to do.

A starting character in FFG Star Wars is Luke on the farm, or Anakin as a child during the first 1/2 of The Phantom Menace. A starting Force User doesn't even necessarily have a lightsaber. A beginning Jedi Knight is stated in the rulebooks as 150 xp past character creation which is a long time. The game offers a low base that players can build up from. Many people think they can be a Han Solo type since he appears early in the movie. No, Han is clearly a badass. He is an outlaw and smuggler who shoots first.

[Drascin]

From what I remember, it's a mechanical abstraction of the temptation of the dark side. At low levels you'll only have one force die and light side pips are few and far between to represent your character's difficulty in finding a calm center. On the other hand, you'll nearly always roll at least one dark side pip (there are more faces with dark side pips, more dark side pips on those faces, and some of the light side faces have dark side pips) so if you really need to have that power go off you can just give in to the dark side.

That was sort of the idea, yes. The basic thinking was something like, since you need a force pip to activate a force power, there's sort of a baked in miss chance for using powers (because if the people shooting blasters can miss, so should the people throwing force pushes) - buuuut hey, you can just not take that miss, and just use those dark force pips you rolled. It'll be fine, really. What's the worst that can happen.

I do feel like the die has a bit too many dark pips, but the basic idea honestly seems quite sound.

[Telok]

The worst TTRPG is one that advertises as one thing, is really something else, leads inexperienced RPG players and DMs into rage quitting, and is either boring or frustrating for experienced RPG players.

Lets see, within the past decade... Starfinder was pretty darned bad once you saw past the glossy art and numbers inflation, D&D 4e had serious issues that led to the players staging a game group coup, 5e D&D played like a weird 1e AD&D/Toon combo and had the fastest 'new DM' rage quit and melt down I've ever seen, and a good & experienced Shadowrun DM said "if you buy me the new SR book as a present we will stop being friends." I think he was talking about 5 but it could have been 6.

Edit: I've realized those were all (well except the SR one) times when someone believed the advertising and went all-in on the system during the first 3 months. Then the group abandoned the system 6 to 8 months later (probably playing 20 to 30 six hour sessions). I think that after the internet forums deconstruct a RPG to find out what really works and the publisher has had about 2+ years to patch some of the worst holes the systems will do just fine in the hands of an experienced DM.

[Khedrac]

There was one back at university that I recall very little about, not even the name so I cannot call that one.

Otherwise my personal worst is probably Vampire the Masquerade.
Part of this was how much the game as it was run for me seems to require a lot of social situation gaming - which can be very hard to keep fair for all players when their characters are individually talking to lots and lots of NPCs (and in my experience was fair, we waited for the NPCs to come and talk to us since we were too new and nervous to approach anyone and the NPCs waited for us so we didn't interact). The other part was the way the system worked which enabled my dice to hate more than in any other system I have played - the more skilled I was at something the bigger my fails were (I think I managed 5 1s on an 8 dice difficulty 7 stealth check and tripped over a werewolf).

There's also an honourable mention to Bushido, but that was a mixture of the DM and my dice.
I rolled a 97 for social standing - perfect background for a samurai, but the DM convinced me to play something else as he had generated an NPC scenario so I made him some sort of monk. The DM then set up a very simple encounter with a thug in the market to introduce me to the system. After getting beaten up twice my character decided on a different career.

[Pex]

Paranoia

Learned the hard way how it's supposed to be played. Tried again with that in mind. So not for me.

Fantasy Warhammer

I never felt my character could do anything. It's like playing a 1st level D&D character forever. The character did improve, but it was so piecemeal by game math and without any noticeable change in effect. I felt stagnant. Which brings me to . . .

GURPS (Fantasy theme)
Same thing. Playing the game in a D&D-like world was no fun. I need my characters to be able to do new things. If improvement is not how the game works then I need to be doing Cool Things from the start. That's why I had fun playing GURPS (Superhero theme).

Rolemaster

I had no idea what was going on. I roll percentile dice. DM looks up a chart and gives me the result. Everything was random chance.

Star Wars

There were two kinds. I don't remember what the version names are. The first one I had to lose hit points to use Force Powers. I was literally killing myself being a Jedi. Even the DM saw how dumb it was. He let me have max hit points just so I could do Jedi things. The second one uses a weird dice mechanic, which isn't that bad. You have different colored dice based on circumstances and want to roll more successess than failures. What I really hate is the Force Die. You roll it when using the force. If it comes up black dot, if you still want to use the Force you have to take a Dark Point. That is dumb. It makes Jedi useless. I'm forbidden from playing a Pure Light Side Jedi because I refuse to take a Dark Point, so I'm not allowed to use the Force and do Jedi things. Doesn't matter how Pure, Benign, and Light Side it is. If I roll a black dot gain corruption or don't do what I want to do.

[Vahnavoi]

Well, now that raises a question: should an RPG be considered bad if it concerns a subject that you find personally offensive, regardless of whether the system works well or not?

No. Personal offense is not a good metric for anything. There are cases where the subject matter of a game might be a reason to call it bad, but few games cut the mustard. FATAL doesn't cut it; rampant rape, murder and misogyny in general doesn't. Racial Holy Wars might barely make the cut by virtue of "Banned in Germany" - I don't know, I'd have to refresh my knowledge of German legistlation and can't discuss the matter in depth here.

Games like RaHoWa are, however, bad because of their subject matter: whoever made it was more concerned with repeating their propaganda than making a functional game. As a result, the game doesn't function even as propaganda. (Or so I heard; supposedly, Jews are overpowered. So the great Aryan heroes meant to fight these conspiratory untermensch? Yeah, by the game's rules, they can't win.)

Much more mainstream ideas and games can fall into the same pit. Imagine doing a Marvel Superheroes game and using mutants as a political commentary. Marvel Comics have certainly done this, it'd be perfectly in line with the source material. But the you'd have to deal with all the ways in which Marvel Comics has failed at doing it, because they couldn't keep their metaphors straight.

[Anonymouswizard]

RaHoWa is strictly worse.

Eh, RaHoWa is much more racist, but FATAL has a bigger helping of misogyny and cuddle struggles plus the misfortune of actually being playable. It's going to vary based on the person how much each element is going to matter.


Well, now that raises a question: should an RPG be considered bad if it concerns a subject that you find personally offensive, regardless of whether the system works well or not?

There are plenty of systems out there that I am not interested in playing because they cover subjects I am not interested in. Does that mean they are bad systems?

It's less that they cover subjects people aren't interested in, and more because it's actively offensive. A game set during the French Revolution is fine, it's playing with themes I'd rather not play with in an RPG but it's not belittling or dehumanising vast portions of the population.


Otherwise my personal worst is probably Vampire the Masquerade.
Part of this was how much the game as it was run for me seems to require a lot of social situation gaming - which can be very hard to keep fair for all players when their characters are individually talking to lots and lots of NPCs (and in my experience was fair, we waited for the NPCs to come and talk to us since we were too new and nervous to approach anyone and the NPCs waited for us so we didn't interact). The other part was the way the system worked which enabled my dice to hate more than in any other system I have played - the more skilled I was at something the bigger my fails were (I think I managed 5 1s on an 8 dice difficulty 7 stealth check and tripped over a werewolf).

The couple of times I ran MasqueradeI normally began with a higher ranked kindred visiting the group shortly after their presentation to make at least one powerful kindred they're comfortable going to, which when you combine it with most players should have their Sire as a mentor makes things easier. But I really can see why that aspect of the game would be difficult, especially with a bad GM.

And the system for the first five editions was a mess and made botches more likely the more skilled you were. The system in fifth edition is much better, but things like the introduction of Blood Potency, the changed nature of Disciplines, and the implications of the new Hunger rules make it somewhat divisive.

[Glorthindel]

I have a decades long refusal to (try to) play GURPS ever again. Making a character is such a fun and involved experience, then as soon as you interact with the rules you realise you can't do anything because there is a skill you haven't got, and those things you can do, you are not very good at, because you spread yourself too thin trying to avoid the first problem. I reckon I tried it 5 or 6 times (Fantasy, Superheroes, Espionage, even effing Bunnies and Burrows), and never made it past session 1.

And I am going to put another vote in for FFG:Star Wars. I so wanted desperately to love it; the books are gorgeous, and I had met one of the authors some years ago, but it was an agonising experience, even putting aside the initial aversion to the special dice. Oddly enough, the only person at the table who had fun was my girlfriend, however, she was also the only person at the table who didn't know anything about Star Wars (she knows there is a Chewbacca, but has no idea who/what it is), and has tried Roleplaying a couple of times but has never really taken to it, but she does enjoy boardgames, so maybe the problem is it is too boardgamey for a roleplay crowd (and barring how easy it is to mow down stormtroopers, how badly it represents the source material at the table).

[Anonymouswizard]

I have a decades long refusal to (try to) play GURPS ever again. Making a character is such a fun and involved experience, then as soon as you interact with the rules you realise you can't do anything because there is a skill you haven't got, and those things you can do, you are not very good at, because you spread yourself too thin trying to avoid the first problem. I reckon I tried it 5 or 6 times (Fantasy, Superheroes, Espionage, even effing Bunnies and Burrows), and never made it past session 1.

I've never had that problem, even with 100 point characters. Are you sure you were using the skill default rules correctly?

[Xervous]

That sounds to me like a DM problem rather than a system problem. 5th edition actually has fairly clear DCs compared to 3.5, they don't go up as you level up, and if you have a good attribute you have a reasonable chance of succeeding whether or not you are proficient.

Dare I ask what the DC to climb a tree is?

[Anonymouswizard]

Dare I ask what the DC to climb a tree is?

Anywhere between 5 and 31 depending on the tree, the time of day, whether or not the GM thinks your race tends to climb trees, and if you were flirting with the GM's girlfriend earlier.

In all seriousness, 5e is rather loose in it's DCs, with whether that counts as a feature or a bug depends on who you are. It can also very much depend on the system, I don't mind it in Fate or Fantasy AGE but find that 5e has so many rules elsewhere that it's skill DCs being so simple is a bad thing.

[Jason]

A starting character in FFG Star Wars is Luke on the farm, or Anakin as a child during the first 1/2 of The Phantom Menace. A starting Force User doesn't even necessarily have a lightsaber. A beginning Jedi Knight is stated in the rulebooks as 150 xp past character creation which is a long time. The game offers a low base that players can build up from. Many people think they can be a Han Solo type since he appears early in the movie. No, Han is clearly a badass. He is an outlaw and smuggler who shoots first.
But shouldn't the point of having a licensed game be to let you do the stuff you see in the movies?
Sure, Luke on the farm got beat when the sand people surprised him. But by the middle of the movie he was successfully infiltrating the most secure facility the Empire has, and by the end of the movie he was blowing up the Death Star with Darth Vader, the best pilot the Empire had, unable to stop him.
The base is too low and even at the 500xp level you still can't do many of the things they do in the movies, because the system doesn't let you do those things. Ever. I finished our campaign somewhere north of 3000 XP with four or five full talent trees and still couldn't deflect blaster bolts like they do in the movies because the system doesn't let you do that.
Saga edition and WEG were much better at feeling like the movies. The original WOTC version less so, but it was better than FFG.

[Lord Torath]

Systems I've played:
D&D B/X
D&D BECMI
AD&D 2E
Rolemaster (one-shot)
Runequest (I think - one-shot combat scenario)
Shadowrun 2E
Deathwatch

I don't feel I have enough experience to comment on either Rolemaster or Runequest. Rolemaster was so long ago I barely remember it. I do remember that your armor determined your Armor Class (or whatever it was called), and for monsters, their AC determined their armor. A triceratops, for example had the same AC as someone wearing full plate. But even though it wasn't actually wearing any metal, it still got the same bad save vs lightning that someone in metal armor got. Had fun, though.

Runequest, I don't even know what edition it was.

I'd have to say Shadowrun 2E was probably the worst RPG I've played. I loved it, but as everyone know, all the Shadowrun versions have their problems.

[Ajustusdaniel]

But shouldn't the point of having a licensed game be to let you do the stuff you see in the movies?

Well, there probably is a market for Star Wars: Moisture Farmer Adventures where the most critical crisis points are avoiding letting the Jawas fob off a defective droid on you, but yeah, it's a niche one.

[Telok]

Paranoia

Learned the hard way how it's supposed to be played. Tried again with that in mind. So not for me.

Fantasy Warhammer

Awww. That's a shame. I've run Paranoia sessions that turned people from skeptics into... well not "fans", but quite willing to play it again. That said, it does require the GM to keep an eye out for potential humor, puns, and gonzo at all times. Plus the players need to buy into the mix of silly and dark humor.

Old WHFRP though really did depend on both some good rolls in character generation plus a good GM who knew the system and had a grasp on probability. Lots of rolls were supposed to get a fair bit of bonuses or else you were playing a game of "The Three Stooges Get Horribly Killed". Been there, got the scars, feel your pain.

[Friv]

A starting character in FFG Star Wars is Luke on the farm, or Anakin as a child during the first 1/2 of The Phantom Menace. A starting Force User doesn't even necessarily have a lightsaber. A beginning Jedi Knight is stated in the rulebooks as 150 xp past character creation which is a long time. The game offers a low base that players can build up from. Many people think they can be a Han Solo type since he appears early in the movie. No, Han is clearly a badass. He is an outlaw and smuggler who shoots first.

So I have two thoughts. My first thought its: if my Star Wars game does not allow me to build a party made up of Luke, Han, Chewbacca, R2-D2 and one player playing Obi-Wan Kenobi and then changing to Princess Leia midway through the first campaign, it is a failed Star Wars game. You may say "well, Han is clearly a badass" but Han is also clearly a main character from the beginning of the movie. Chewbacca is also clearly a badass. R2-D2 is frankly a badass. You can't build any of them as a starting FFG Star Wars character.

And those three movies aren't the only ones. You can't build anyone from the prequels, you can't build anyone from Rebels, you can't build The Mandalorian or the cast of Rogue One... who can you build, exactly?

My second thought is that Luke is a very accomplished character. He's not a good Jedi at the start of the first movie, but he's a ridiculously skilled pilot, he can shoot down TIE fighters from a gunnery cockpit that he's never seen before, he's a great shot with a blaster, and by twenty minutes into the movie he's blocking blaster bolts blindfolded and infiltrating Death Stars without major problems. I'd be kind of surprised if you could successfully build him as a starting character.

[Jason]

Awww. That's a shame. I've run Paranoia sessions that turned people from skeptics into... well not "fans", but quite willing to play it again. That said, it does require the GM to keep an eye out for potential humor, puns, and gonzo at all times. Plus the players need to buy into the mix of silly and dark humor.
Paranoia is so different from every other RPG that if you're unprepared for it you probably won't like it. It's also nearly impossible to play a lengthy campaign with it. It's great for the occasional one-shots, though, and my Paranoia games at the local gaming convention were always very popular.

[awa]

I very much agree with this general principle. Any game based on an existing media property should let you start the game at roughly the power level the character in the media property starts at.
I have seen a lot of games where they expect you to spend months or years striving to reach the point the characters start at.

I'm also not certain if we should judge a game that is unfinished (unless they charge money for it) you should only judge a game for the rules they have written not the ones they are still getting around to. Now based on that metric fatal has a lot of rules few of them good.

That said like most people I have never played Fatal. The "worst" game I actually played was In Nomine, however I tend to blame the gamemaster, we as demons frankly did not know what we were supposed to be doing the story teller just kinda stuck us down in USA with no further instructions. So barring any input we decided that starting a forest fire would be a good idea I only vaguely recall why. Its possible we were doing some aspect of the system wrong but we literally never succeeded at anything that required a roll.
This felt a lot more of a problem based on his failures rather than the games. He was the kind of person who wanted to run story teller social games but then did not give us any kind of direction or interesting NPcs to interact with. But still worst game Ive played.

[stack]

So I have two thoughts. My first thought its: if my Star Wars game does not allow me to build a party made up of Luke, Han, Chewbacca, R2-D2 and one player playing Obi-Wan Kenobi and then changing to Princess Leia midway through the first campaign, it is a failed Star Wars game. You may say "well, Han is clearly a badass" but Han is also clearly a main character from the beginning of the movie. Chewbacca is also clearly a badass. R2-D2 is frankly a badass. You can't build any of them as a starting FFG Star Wars character.

And those three movies aren't the only ones. You can't build anyone from the prequels, you can't build anyone from Rebels, you can't build The Mandalorian or the cast of Rogue One... who can you build, exactly?

My second thought is that Luke is a very accomplished character. He's not a good Jedi at the start of the first movie, but he's a ridiculously skilled pilot, he can shoot down TIE fighters from a gunnery cockpit that he's never seen before, he's a great shot with a blaster, and by twenty minutes into the movie he's blocking blaster bolts blindfolded and infiltrating Death Stars without major problems. I'd be kind of surprised if you could successfully build him as a starting character.

I seem to recall the old WEG Star Wars having a fair bit of space devoted to the idea that the PCs are HEROES on a BIG ADVENTURE. That they should be doing larger than life, space opera things, because that was the whole point. Guess not all licensees felt the same way.

[Cygnia]

Paranoia is so different from every other RPG that if you're unprepared for it you probably won't like it. It's also nearly impossible to play a lengthy campaign with it. It's great for the occasional one-shots, though, and my Paranoia games at the local gaming convention were always very popular.

Every year at Origins there was a MegaPARANOIA LARP Saturday Night at midnight that had some crazy themes like Game of Thrones ("You know nothing, Jon Clone") and Scooby-Doo.

[Pex]

Awww. That's a shame. I've run Paranoia sessions that turned people from skeptics into... well not "fans", but quite willing to play it again. That said, it does require the GM to keep an eye out for potential humor, puns, and gonzo at all times. Plus the players need to buy into the mix of silly and dark humor.

Old WHFRP though really did depend on both some good rolls in character generation plus a good GM who knew the system and had a grasp on probability. Lots of rolls were supposed to get a fair bit of bonuses or else you were playing a game of "The Three Stooges Get Horribly Killed". Been there, got the scars, feel your pain.

Just to clarify my problem isn't with the game system. Don't remember how it works, frankly. Rather it's the genre/atmosphere. I was very new to RPGs. It was a high school gaming club. I just played a little D&D (might have been 1E) when a Paranoia game started. I thought it was the same type of game. It . . . wasn't. Tried a new game to get in the spirit. Didn't work. It's not for me. Maybe this doesn't qualify for the thread topic, but it does for me.

[Jason]

I seem to recall the old WEG Star Wars having a fair bit of space devoted to the idea that the PCs are HEROES on a BIG ADVENTURE. That they should be doing larger than life, space opera things, because that was the whole point. Guess not all licensees felt the same way.

The WEG Star Wars core book had some of the best advice on GMing a space opera and making it look like Star Wars ever. Those West End Games guys new their stuff.


Star Wars is huge. We're dealing with space opera, here. Star Wars characters eat planets for breakfast and play billiards with comets in the afternoon. Everything is always five miles long, or as big as a small moon, or seven million years old. The odds are always 7000 to 1, and you never blow up a landspeeder if you can blow up a planet.
That's the section just before the section where they encourage the GM to make funny noises. Really, if you are interested in playing a Star Wars RPG and don't have the original WEG book, go pick up the reprint that FFG put out a few years ago. You might never play the game, but the GMing advice is still good stuff.

[GrayDeath]

The worst Games are something else entirely than the worst TTRPG Rules.

I have played and DM`d absolutely grand Scion 1st Edition games (once even without ANY houserules, yyeah we learned).
I would not call it a bad game per se, btw.
Just one that makes 3.5`s choice list seem balanced.^^

As long as you do some house ruling and paly with people you know and share a general paly style with, it can work.


On the other Hand, GURPS, in all its incarnations, is a dry, overtly complex, but very well made and WORKING system.

And I can only remember having horrible to bad sessions playing it (one time because we were all dropped into palying it in the last few hours on the day before we played, given premade characters to avoid having to spend the night building, and still it all sucked. College Groups, sigh....).




In general though, I was lucky and had very few "truly bad" RPg experiences.

I will however add a pet pieve of mine. Savage Worlds.
It has some great settings, and its a system that works okayish to well.

However a lot of the specific versions (ergo not the rule set, but setting books with included rules) were made by people who didnt understand the system goals were "Keep It Simple, Stupid!, with fluff and such being done via very generic "paint the stuff green, its Mad Science, paint it red, its Lost tech, püaint it blue, its Nanotech" and similar.
Instead they ad enough equipment and extra feats to make 3.5 look over your shoulder in curiosity.

Probably thanks to the short lived wave of "Savage evyrything", which wiorked about as well as the "D20 everything" movement ^^


Agreed regarding deathwatch btw. Horribly done, but thena gain, the abse system was aimed at "characters that suck", so making SPace MArines in that, well^^


I will open up another category: Combination of "like/love" the Setting and hate the Rules.

Which for me is DSA/The BLack Eye from 4th edition onwards (2mnd and 3rd was jsut a worse/clunkier D&D clone for really low power, but worked vry well, 4th ....people decry 3.5 as a game of too many books, but for DSA 4.x, you NEED 5-8 books, at 25+ Euros a piece if youre lucky, to build a "Cleric" ....yah, NEED).

[EggKookoo]

My worst experience with a combat mechanic has to be World of Darkness 2.0, the stuff released mid-late 90s. The to-hit mechanic is an obnoxious, distracting minigame. You have a number of points ("dots") which represents how good you are at the thing you're trying to do. It ranged from 1 or 2 up to maybe 10 if you were phenomenal. Let's say you had 5. The GM would set a Difficulty which I think defaulted to 7, but could be altered to account for situational stuff. You'd roll a d10 for each point you had, so in our example 5d10. Then you'd count up the number of results that met or exceeded the Difficulty. Those would be your "successes." Sounds simple, right?

Okay, if you roll a natural 10, you get to keep that "success" and re-roll. But if you roll a natural 1, you have to deduct one "success" you may have earned. And if you re-roll a 10 and that re-roll comes up a 1, you basically lose that 10. So you have to roll all these dice, figure out if you get to re-roll or deduct successes. All to give you a "success" set result.

Oh, and if you want to attack twice or something, you just split the dice pools. So you might attack once with 3d10 and then again with the remaining 2d10. That in and of itself is a fairly elegant way to handle multiple attacks, but with this system it just clogs things up further.

And after all this is done, the number of successes doesn't matter. As long as you get just one, you hit. It feels like the system was designed to account for degrees of success but at the last minute they simplified it into a binary success-fail mechanic.

This is jut the to-hit roll. Then for damage you did the same exact thing all over again. I never understood why they didn't just roll the to-hit successes into the damage result, since damage was a degrees-of thing with health levels. But no, getting a ton of "successes" on your to-hit roll had no bearing on your subsequent damage roll. You could get a ton of to-hit successes only to get no damage successes. It was one frustrating system.

[Unavenger]

RaHoWa is slightly worse. It's just as offensive as FATAL, although in a different way, but doesn't even have a complete ruleset.

Apart from melee damage not quite working, RaHoWa is playable (I remember having a fairly in-detail check with a friend who was trying to make a game based on some of the mechanics, removing them from their awful premise). FATAL I'm not sure, but I actually count being unplayable as a point in FATAL's favour.

Another contender is MyFaRoG, although apparently some of the setting details are quite neat, there is also a lot of racism and such, and the modern setting for the same system is full of conspiracy theory junk.



As far as things I've actually played... none were that bad. I will complain about 5e until the end of days but I don't think it's that bad, just a disappointment. I'm not a massive fan of GURPS either I guess. Neither is actually bad though. Maybe one of them wins the title of "Least good" I guess.

[Quertus]

Freeform: "bang, you're dead" "no I'm not". I'm sure most anyone who had a childhood can relate.

ShadowRun: in a game with X PCs (or, at least, X distinct archetypes) expect to sit and twiddle your thumbs (x-1)/x of the time. Through rather slow and sketchy mechanics.

And I'm sure I'd get voted out as an imposter if I didn't take the opportunity to complain about 4e (D&D).

[PhoenixPhyre]

ShadowRun: in a game with X PCs (or, at least, X distinct archetypes) expect to sit and twiddle your thumbs (x-1)/x of the time.



I've heard that this is a best case. Instead, certain parts (IIRC decking? astral stuff?) generally ate the majority of the time, so anyone who wasn't able to do things during those phases (ie all but one player) were doing nothing. If they came up at all. So a decker might get anywhere between 0% and 95% of the playtime in a given session.

But then again, I've never played it.

I've only really played a couple games, and mostly of the D&D variety. Of the three that I've played for any length of time, the worst was PF1e. My only memories were
* The DM having to spend several minutes minimum reading and cross-referencing stat blocks. Pretty much every turn. Part of that was likely being new, but the adventure path (Rise of the Runelords) didn't make it easier.
* Everything taking forever. At very low level even.
* My totally-unoptimized oracle and the party witch shutting down a boss fight with one spell each. At level 6. At that point, it was clear that it was only going to get worse.
* Spending most of a day, with a specialized piece of software building a character. Who wasn't even that good.

Basically, using the system felt like wading through muck. The obvious answers were crap. The right answers were :wtf_owl:. The math assumed very specific capabilities and broke badly outside those. Etc. Likely a lot of that was a group of people who weren't experts. But for a new player to the game (not to D&D-esque games, I'd been DM'ing for years at that point), it was painful.

[zarionofarabel]

I think one of the problems with the new FFG Star Wars is that it was made by a bunch of D&D nerds. As others have said it does an extremely poor job emulating the media it is based on. You can't make characters that anywhere near resemble the characters seen in any Star Wars media. The resaon for that is because, like D&D, the point is to start out as a noob that can't do anything and gain KEWL POWERZ until you are a badass. This trope is a true D&Dism as I have never personally encountered it in any other media or TTRPG I have encountered. Yes some characters in media do become somewhat more competent over time, and most TTRPGs do have some form of mechanical character growth, but none to the degree I see in D&D. Only the D&D franchise literally has you start out as a peep that can be killed by a rat, to eventually become so powerful that you can slaughter thousands of regular human guardsman without breaking a sweat. FFG does a very poor job of emulating the Star Wars I see on screen.

[sktarq]

Worst I played.
FATAL
yeah I played it in a game club in a hardheaded attempt to prove it could be done RAW to mess with some of the really creepy, pain-in-bum, offensive-as-attention-seeking-behavior club members....and good grief was it SLOW. it was annoying. it was offensive just to play. nobody had fun and after 2 weeks of building characters and 3 weeks to play and have one tiny skirmish that killed half the party we just gave up.

Some of the above:
Rifts: Rifts has an issue. TOO MUCH STUFF. which combines in a million and five loopholes to blow things up. It can cover massive variation in difficulty level but has no clear way of gauging that difficulty level really. So GM skill becomes everything. A good/great GM can do some of the most amazing gaming...a mediocre to bad GM will lead to a HORRIDgame. and also Editing...any GM will have to cut out huge amount of the rules for a given campaign to make things work.

oWoD 2e: The whole DC thing....was meh a lot of the time...problem was is you kinda need a ST to know something about everything in order to judge this. . . which some people do. I just found the combat to a math knot that was therefore slow....armour, dodge, situation, weapon, etc all modifying the attack role, same for damage....and for soaking that damage...repeat if you have multiple attacks per round (esp if you have celerity which any combat monster would seek)....so that just was a huge drain. . . then again I didn't really like the setting which I actually thought was worse. As for the botch rules....well...difference of opinion I guess....we loved that rule. My players loved it so much they insisted I import that edition's version in the nWoD system as a houserule. we generally thought they were a major boost to the fun at the table. A botch hit the dice box and everyone leaned in to see what shenanigans ensued...and this didn't matter who pulled off the botch. And as the enemy was just as prone to them it generally balanced over time. Sure our games could have a major comedy of errors and a very dark comedy of the absurd twist to them. . . But we thought it added to the flavor.

WoD...Requiem, Ascension, Lost, etc.....the whole social thing is kinda the point. many of the WoD games are much more social ones. trying to do that game style with many other systems is far worse IME.

D&D 4e.....god I hated this game. bored me right out of TTRPG's for a time.

[Jason]

I think one of the problems with the new FFG Star Wars is that it was made by a bunch of D&D nerds. As others have said it does an extremely poor job emulating the media it is based on. You can't make characters that anywhere near resemble the characters seen in any Star Wars media. The resaon for that is because, like D&D, the point is to start out as a noob that can't do anything and gain KEWL POWERZ until you are a badass. This trope is a true D&Dism as I have never personally encountered it in any other media or TTRPG I have encountered. Yes some characters in media do become somewhat more competent over time, and most TTRPGs do have some form of mechanical character growth, but none to the degree I see in D&D. Only the D&D franchise literally has you start out as a peep that can be killed by a rat, to eventually become so powerful that you can slaughter thousands of regular human guardsman without breaking a sweat. FFG does a very poor job of emulating the Star Wars I see on screen.

Starting as a slave, farmboy, or scavenger and developing over three movies into the most powerful Force user in the galaxy is actually very Star Wars.

[Azuresun]

That I've played? Probably Exalted 2e--the system was slow, clunky, unbalanced, and I never really understood how to make it work. I also rolled up a standard wizard type in a game where the was tons of background lore I (as a player) just didn't know and where spellcasting took literally twice as long as anything else in combat for no good return. On the other hand, that game yielded two good friends and a bunch of wonderful RPG moments, so <shrug>.

Exalted is notable for having had three attempts at coming up with a rules system for "swords-n-sorcery demigods saving and / or destroying the world", and messing it up in an entirely different way every time, turning it into a tangled mess of hundreds of CCG powers, the system cracking at high power levels and the only thing more broken than the 2e combat system being the 2e social systems. Supposedly there is a "light" version coming out in the near future, but I don't have high expectations.

Oddly enough, I found the OSR game Godbound (which is awesome, and you should check out the free version right now) to emulate Exalted far better than any of the actual Exalted games--it was about 80% of the feel with 20% of the workload.

[aglondier]

The system that ****s me the most is Palladium. The whole system just seems poorly thought out and badly implemented.

4th ed D&D was just a mistake all round.

I love Shadowrun, I love the setting, the mechanics are okay, but...if you go raw it can really get bogged down. Fortunately, most GMs I've played with would reduce matrix/astral/rigger dungeons down to the couple of rolls needed to keep pace with the rest of the action. The one campaign I played in that did run raw was a complete cf, half the players walked after the 3rd session, the rest of us after the 5th.

Rolemaster (or should that be Rollmaster) is just too damn heavy...even if it is sometimes fun to port the tables to other games.

[Anonymouswizard]

Starting as a slave, farmboy, or scavenger and developing over three movies into the most powerful Force user in the galaxy is actually very Star Wars.

The problem is that the power level scales too slowly, and even kid Anakin was arguably a better pilot than a starting character, not to mention how good a shot Han or Luke were in ANH. The starting skill cap of I believe 2 is fairly crippling, my nearly minmaxed out the wazoo mechanic droid felt like they could barely repair a swoop bike. Okay, half of that was an unlucky roll, but I was often only getting a single success on five dice, I hate to think of what the non-droids had to deal with.


Exalted is notable for having had three attempts at coming up with a rules system for "swords-n-sorcery demigods saving and / or destroying the world", and messing it up in an entirely different way every time, turning it into a tangled mess of hundreds of CCG powers, the system cracking at high power levels and the only thing more broken than the 2e combat system being the 2e social systems. Supposedly there is a "light" version coming out in the near future, but I don't have high expectations.

Oddly enough, I found the OSR game Godbound (which is awesome, and you should check out the free version right now) to emulate Exalted far better than any of the actual Exalted games--it was about 80% of the feel with 20% of the workload.

I like the idea of Exalted, but each version I've looked at has seemed more broken than Scion, and that's saying something.

Godbound is cool though, even if I've never had the chance to play it. You can also get a decent feel with stuff like Wild Talents and other supers systems, or correctly-calibrated Fudge/Fate.


4th ed D&D was just a mistake all round.

The problem with 4e was calling it Dungeons & Dragons. It's a good game, if a little too crunchy, but it was such a massive step to the side that it just wasn't what people wanted.

[Luccan]

Starting as a slave, farmboy, or scavenger and developing over three movies into the most powerful Force user in the galaxy is actually very Star Wars.

I don't have experience with the system, but Luke, Anakin, and Rey were all fairly skilled as youths/young adults at the beginning of their journeys, being some combination of ace pilot/expert mechanic/competent fighter without much or any training. Most of the non-force-users that get any focus are in some way prodigies. Because Star Wars isn't about nobody losers or average joes, even if the characters start out thinking that's what they are. They're about heroes and villains. Every focus character who isn't comic relief is in some way skilled and if they don't know they are at first, they find out pretty quick. If the system fails to deliver on even "astoundingly competent" for most beginning characters, it doesn't sound like it does Star Wars very well.

[Pex]

There's also 2E D&D but not exactly. It was fine when it first came out. I played it. I enjoyed it. However, after years of playing 3E and Pathfinder I tried a 2E game for nostalgia sake. I felt stifled. Gaining levels gave me no choices to make. Playing the game there was stuff I wanted to do but couldn't because there was no game mechanic for it. If the DM allowed it he had to make stuff up how to resolve it. I was playing a cleric, and I relearned how ineffective many spells were at least compared to their 3E version if not of itself. I couldn't have fun with the system anymore.

Before the Virus Apocalypse after having played 5E for many years I joined a Pathfinder game. It was fun, but there were annoyances in things that didn't bother me before. I liked the fiddly bits way back when. During the game it was irksome keeping track of all the bonuses I accumulated from various things. I was screaming in my head I couldn't do things if I move more than 5 ft let alone be unable to move, do something, then move again. I wasn't bothered by the power level increase compared to 5E, but it was noticeable and I had to readjust. For the record I was relieved to have been using skill DC tables again. I was all for that. :smallwink::smallbiggrin: Still, part of me was missing 5E, just a little.

[Luccan]

Still, part of me was missing 5E, just a little.

The end times are upon us

I haven't played a lot of games and none of the truly horrible. That said, I'm not terribly fond of what I did get from FATE Accelerated. It's just a bit too loose for my taste, even though I'd gladly play it if we didn't have a more concrete system that fit the setting.

I haven't played it, but from reading it I don't understand what people get from Dungeon World.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I haven't played it, but from reading it I don't understand what people get from Dungeon World.

Yeah. I wasn't impressed with any of the PbtA games on a read through. For all the fanatic hype, it just didn't seem like it was anything special, at least for the type of game I want. Very opinionated system as well--This is the Way to Play, all others are Bad was the message I got. Never played it though.

And on a different tack (but both games I've only read, not played) Savage Worlds, to me, read like someone who tried to make 3e D&D, but "rules light"...and without a clear understanding of what that means. So you got both the loose, narrative mechanics and a cluster of stacking, very nit-picky (applies here but not there, and only under those conditions) bonuses that you need to chase to be good. But again, only read, never played.

[Jason]

The problem is that the power level scales too slowly, and even kid Anakin was arguably a better pilot than a starting character, not to mention how good a shot Han or Luke were in ANH. The starting skill cap of I believe 2 is fairly crippling, my nearly minmaxed out the wazoo mechanic droid felt like they could barely repair a swoop bike. Okay, half of that was an unlucky roll, but I was often only getting a single success on five dice, I hate to think of what the non-droids had to deal with.
Starting characters being too underpowered is about a third of the problem. I remember my GM asking me if I wanted him to house rule on a defensive talent to make it maybe useful. My response was "no, I want the NPCs to suck as much on defense as I do."
The second third is the two-axis dice that give you confusing results half the time ("Knowledge check: okay, you rolled a Triumph but you didn't roll enough successes so you failed your check, so you don't know what you were trying to remember...and you've got 5 advantage and that Triumph to spend on...er...something...not on getting more detailed information, because you failed the check...ummmm...") and are still a pain to decipher even after a year of playing with them.
The third part is the Jedi, which are both underpowered and overpowered at the same time. Underpowered compared to the Jedi in the films, overpowered in two or three specific powers compared to other players.

[RifleAvenger]

The problem with 4e was calling it Dungeons & Dragons. It's a good game, if a little too crunchy, but it was such a massive step to the side that it just wasn't what people wanted.

I'm inclined to agree, but I also think it has to do with the system not being honest with its players about what it is. I really like Lancer, which like D&D 4e has very stringent rules for how anything works in tactical combat, while disjuncting tactical combat mechanics from how something might work out of combat.

In open-play, your railgun might have a range on the order of double or triple digit kilometers (work it out with the GM). In tactical-play, a railgun has a range of twenty hexes. How much distance is twenty hexes? Whatever makes sense for the GM's battlemap.

Lancer is open and unapologetic about this lack of diegetic consistency across the two play modes. It's how the game works, and yes for some players it's like being dunked in acid. Fortunately, Lancer clearly labels itself as not for them. D&D 4e, on the other hand, positioned itself as the natural iteration of a preexisting game with a different focus and a lot of baked in expectations.

------------------------------------------------
Anyways, worst system I've actually played in is the Warhammer 40K bunch, because of serially incompetent stooge syndrome. I'll admit, I'm a bit inconsistent on that one, since I'm way more tolerant of it in Call of Cthulhu.

The various editions of Final Fantasy RPGs looked so poorly designed and underdone that I chose to run a D&D 5e game using an in-playtesting homebrew compendium instead.

Ironclaw 2e wins "best mechanics hampered by a horribly organized rulebook."

Obviously FATAL and its ilk win "I'm sorry I've even heard of this."

[Mechalich]

I like the idea of Exalted, but each version I've looked at has seemed more broken than Scion, and that's saying something.

The White-Wolf 'storyteller system' is a mechanistically poor system from the start, but it's into that turns into a disaster once you bring in dicepools that regularly exceed ten dice for both mathematical reasons - you start to get wildly variant results on a regular basis that renders the whole point of dicepools useless - and logistical reasons - it's simply ridiculous to actually role and count the results on 20+ physical dice for roll after roll (this is somewhat ameliorated by using dice roller programs).

White-Wolf made three separate attempts to try and graft high-powered play onto the storyteller system, Aberrant, Exalted, and Scion. All of them were massive failures as systems. I'd say Scion is the worst of the three, but that's mostly because it's fluff is just...bleh, it's uninteresting, uninspired, and unoriginal. Aberrant and Exalted at least have ideas, even if those ideas have all the usual problems of White-Wolf fluff.

[icefractal]

The problem with 4e was calling it Dungeons & Dragons. It's a good game, if a little too crunchy, but it was such a massive step to the side that it just wasn't what people wanted.If it wasn't called D&D it would have gotten less hate, but also much less players. And I don't think that it's that much more different than other editions are from each-other, besides 1E/2E.

Actually, now that I'm also seeing 5E and PF2, I have to conclude that 3.x (in which I'm including PF1) was the aberrant edition, making possible a playstyle that the designers never really intended and that they later 'fixed'. Too bad, since I do like it, but it doesn't seem to be a popular one, judging by the lack of new games pursuing it.

[Dienekes]

So I have two thoughts. My first thought its: if my Star Wars game does not allow me to build a party made up of Luke, Han, Chewbacca, R2-D2 and one player playing Obi-Wan Kenobi and then changing to Princess Leia midway through the first campaign, it is a failed Star Wars game. You may say "well, Han is clearly a badass" but Han is also clearly a main character from the beginning of the movie. Chewbacca is also clearly a badass. R2-D2 is frankly a badass. You can't build any of them as a starting FFG Star Wars character.

And those three movies aren't the only ones. You can't build anyone from the prequels, you can't build anyone from Rebels, you can't build The Mandalorian or the cast of Rogue One... who can you build, exactly?

My second thought is that Luke is a very accomplished character. He's not a good Jedi at the start of the first movie, but he's a ridiculously skilled pilot, he can shoot down TIE fighters from a gunnery cockpit that he's never seen before, he's a great shot with a blaster, and by twenty minutes into the movie he's blocking blaster bolts blindfolded and infiltrating Death Stars without major problems. I'd be kind of surprised if you could successfully build him as a starting character.

This is an interesting thing.

Take Luke, we know by the end of the movie that he was a great pilot the entire time. But at the beginning of the movie we never see it. All we see is Luke losing... a lot. Knocked unconscious by raiders, nearly killed by some drunk miscreants, failed to use the force to deflect basters in his training, and has to cower and hide and rely on Han to get the shooting done when things go down in the detention level.

Then he -very quickly- becomes the star of the show. One-shotting stormtroopers, showing off those ace pilot skills they established in Act 1 but never actually showed, and culminating in successfully using the Force to make the impossible shot.

And all the main characters seem to have a base skill-set of what they can accomplish. Leia handles a gun just fine, and can fly the ship when needed and helps repair it when needed. Han can well fail at every Charisma check he tries, but other than that is a crack shot and ace pilot and mechanic. And Chewie is also a warrior and a pilot and a mechanic.

So how would one portray this in a game?

I kind of think the system would have to have a weird start, where you're essentially level 0. And the GM is expected to pull the punches from actually killing you. If you are killed you are instead captured. Would have crashed your ship? You make it through but it will cost repairs.

Then once you get to level 1 you have a huge jump in competence with just about everything and get to pick one or two things to specialize in and maybe one of the main pillars of play to dump. And this jump should happen not particularly long in the game. Maybe only a session should be spent in this Level 0 mode. It's not as long as Luke's time as a wimp was, but this is a game not a movie.

Then from that point you just get better and by the end of movie three you're pretty much a demi-god in your specialization. You're the diplomatic character? You can convince an entire culture to fight for you pretty easily. The gunslinger? You can take shots without looking. The strategist? You can lead an army of unequipped savage midgets against the greatest army in the galaxy and win only suffering minor losses. And if you choose Jedi, you can walk into the enemy base duel the biggest badass in the galaxy with ease and then convince him to turn good.

[zarionofarabel]

This is an interesting thing.

Take Luke, we know by the end of the movie that he was a great pilot the entire time. But at the beginning of the movie we never see it. All we see is Luke losing... a lot. Knocked unconscious by raiders, nearly killed by some drunk miscreants, failed to use the force to deflect basters in his training, and has to cower and hide and rely on Han to get the shooting down when things go down in the detention level.

Then he -very quickly- becomes the star of the show. One-shotting stormtroopers, showing off those ace pilot skills they established in Act 1 but never actually showed, and culminating in successfully using the Force to make the impossible shot.

And all the main characters seem to have a base skill-set of what they can accomplish. Leia handles a gun just fine, and can fly the ship when needed and helps repair it when needed. Han can well fail at every Charisma check he tries, but other than that is a crack shot and ace pilot and mechanic. And Chewie is also a warrior and a pilot and a mechanic.

So how would one portray this in a game?

I kind of think the system would have to have a weird start, where you're essentially level 0. And the GM is expected to pull the punches from actually killing you. If you are killed you are instead captured. Would have crashed your ship? You make it through but it will cost repairs.

Then once you get to level 1 you have a huge jump in competence with just about everything and get to pick one or two things to specialize in and maybe one of the main pillars of play to dump. And this jump should happen not particularly long in the game. Maybe only a session should be spent in this Level 0 mode. It's not as long as Luke's time as a wimp was, but this is a game not a movie.

Then from that point you just get better and by the end of movie three you're pretty much a demi-god in your specialization. You're the diplomatic character? You can convince an entire culture to fight for you pretty easily. The gunslinger? You can take shots without looking. The strategist? You can lead an army of unequipped savage midgets against the greatest army in the galaxy and win only suffering minor losses. And if you choose Jedi, you can walk into the enemy base duel the biggest badass in the galaxy with ease and then convince him to turn good.
Hahahahaha! You just made my day! You are awesome!

[gijoemike]

That sounds to me like a DM problem rather than a system problem. 5th edition actually has fairly clear DCs compared to 3.5, they don't go up as you level up, and if you have a good attribute you have a reasonable chance of succeeding whether or not you are proficient.


I had a GM rule the Jump spell wouldn't assist me in jumping. Others would. In D&D 3.5 there are explicit rules that allow the jump spell to remove damage dice when falling if it is a controlled fall. IIRC, DC15 to remove a d6 and +1d6 for every +5. In 3.5 this meant the jump spell could let you do a superhero landing from 3 stories up. Anyway I had a 5E GM rule i could do something similar. I had another rule that didn't work at all and I took full damage. Thus, I had to ask the absurd question "Does the Jump spell help me to jump?"

Needless to say, I have a bad taste in my mouth from that. From how popular 5E is I know it has to be a good game. I just haven't found the right game yet.

[Luccan]

I had a GM rule the Jump spell wouldn't assist me in jumping. Others would. In D&D 3.5 there are explicit rules that allow the jump spell to remove damage dice when falling if it is a controlled fall. IIRC, DC15 to remove a d6 and +1d6 for every +5. In 3.5 this meant the jump spell could let you do a superhero landing from 3 stories up. Anyway I had a 5E GM rule i could do something similar. I had another rule that didn't work at all and I took full damage. Thus, I had to ask the absurd question "Does the Jump spell help me to jump?"

Needless to say, I have a bad taste in my mouth from that. From how popular 5E is I know it has to be a good game. I just haven't found the right game yet.

If you had a DM rule the spell wouldn't do what it says it does, that's a straight up houserule, not a system issue. 5e has "missing" rules to complain about. Jumping is not one of them.

5e has rules for jumping (like, explicit "this is how far/high your character can jump" rules, not even changeable DCs). It also has rules for the Jump spell. What seems to have happened here is that in 3.5 the Jump skill (which the spell improved) could negate some fall damage and the Jump spell improved the skill. As a result, you rolled and avoided the damage. Although AFAIK, the skill could only negate the first 10ft, so I don't know why you were allowed to jump three stories with no damage. Regardless, in 5e no such rules exist, so the spell doesn't help negate fall damage, just lets you jump farther.

[gijoemike]

I don't have experience with the system, but Luke, Anakin, and Rey were all fairly skilled as youths/young adults at the beginning of their journeys, being some combination of ace pilot/expert mechanic/competent fighter without much or any training. Most of the non-force-users that get any focus are in some way prodigies. Because Star Wars isn't about nobody losers or average joes, even if the characters start out thinking that's what they are. They're about heroes and villains. Every focus character who isn't comic relief is in some way skilled and if they don't know they are at first, they find out pretty quick. If the system fails to deliver on even "astoundingly competent" for most beginning characters, it doesn't sound like it does Star Wars very well.

Finn is a stormtrooper. He cannot shoot that well. His accuracy is not that great for the whole trilogy. Being a main character it is better than some but not all. He cannot pilot at ALL in ep 7, that is why he has to rescue Poe. Leia is taken out by one shot and is great at diplomacy, but we don't see that in the entire ep 4. kid anankin has some mechanics, and pilot. He has no knowledge, weapons, or visible force skills when he starts out. Han started out working for Jabba and lost his cargo. He had 1 job, and he cocked it up. Han when we see him in ANH, he has several adventures under his belt.

Star Wars characters have great potential but they aren't competent. They get awesome later.

[gijoemike]

If you had a DM rule the spell wouldn't do what it says it does, that's a straight up houserule, not a system issue. 5e has "missing" rules to complain about. Jumping is not one of them.

5e has rules for jumping (like, explicit "this is how far/high your character can jump" rules, not even changeable DCs). It also has rules for the Jump spell. What seems to have happened here is that in 3.5 the Jump skill (which the spell improved) could negate some fall damage and the Jump spell improved the skill. As a result, you rolled and avoided the damage. Although AFAIK, the skill could only negate the first 10ft, so I don't know why you were allowed to jump three stories with no damage. Regardless, in 5e no such rules exist, so the spell doesn't help negate fall damage, just lets you jump farther.

Yes, the jump skill negated some damage. And turned some to subdual damage.

In 5e the Jump spell triples the jump distance. So if I can now jump 12 feet into the air and land without damage shouldn't I be able to jump down the same 12 feet without damage, like at the edge of a pit? One invokes jumping with the athletics skill. So if I jump with triple distance shouldn't that do SOMETHING concerning jump? The GM rule no.

[Vahnavoi]

@Friv: The problem you describe is largely caused by the attitude that games in established settings are fanfiction, and implicitly bad fanfiction. In practice, this means the game's designers think the "canonical" characters are just way too cool for players to be allowed to play them or anything like them.

This attitude doesn't originate from the RPG hobby nor is it restricted to it, but it has been present in the hobby since very earliest days when Gygax (Ernie or Gary, I forgot which) statted Conan as this impossibly cool multiclass character that'd be nearly or completely impossible to achieve through actual play.

[Morty]

I haven't played it, but from reading it I don't understand what people get from Dungeon World.

Having run a Dungeon World campaign, I definitely like it a lot less than I did when I first became familiar with it. I like what it tries to accomplish, but its attempt to marry D&D-style gameplay with PbtA mechanics is poor. Using D&D-style hit points in particular ends badly. But even otherwise it often feels less like a fiction-first system and more like old-school D&D (which is bad to begin with) with various elements filed off so you have to figure things out yourself. A better attempt to create a D&D-like game in this style would need to start with seriously considering how to transplant the experience of D&D into a PbtA system, rather than just shoehorning classes, hit points and prepared spells into it.

Of course, we all did have fun with that campaign, which just goes to show that while system does matter, ultimately players can have fun with just about anything - even if the system is bad and/or wildly unsuited to the game's premise. Which is the source of D&D's enduring popularity.


The problem with 4e was calling it Dungeons & Dragons. It's a good game, if a little too crunchy, but it was such a massive step to the side that it just wasn't what people wanted.

I don't see what else you could call a game with races, classes, levels, a d20 task resolution system, fighters, clerics and wizards.

[Glorthindel]

I think one of the problems with the new FFG Star Wars is that it was made by a bunch of D&D nerds. As others have said it does an extremely poor job emulating the media it is based on. You can't make characters that anywhere near resemble the characters seen in any Star Wars media. The resaon for that is because, like D&D, the point is to start out as a noob that can't do anything and gain KEWL POWERZ until you are a badass. This trope is a true D&Dism as I have never personally encountered it in any other media or TTRPG I have encountered. Yes some characters in media do become somewhat more competent over time, and most TTRPGs do have some form of mechanical character growth, but none to the degree I see in D&D. Only the D&D franchise literally has you start out as a peep that can be killed by a rat, to eventually become so powerful that you can slaughter thousands of regular human guardsman without breaking a sweat. FFG does a very poor job of emulating the Star Wars I see on screen.

Worse; a chunk of the writers were ex Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay writers (when FFG bought the license off Black Industries/Games Workshop, a lot of the staff went over, and were still there when Star Wars released), and while I absolutely love that game, parties trend to the absolute low-end of fantasy archetypes (when your characters start as Rat Catchers, Dung Collectors, and Camp Followers, you aren't clearing rooms of orcs day 1).

Following the thread of games that don't match the source material, MERP (Middle-Earth Roleplaying). MERP is a light-version of Rolemaster, which while I absolutely love it as a system, it is terrifyingly lethal as systems go, with characters dying with little to no warning and sometimes despite taking every effort to stay alive (random crits kill, bleeding nearly always kills at low levels, and god forbid you ever get outnumbered). Add to the fact that half the character classes can do magic (which is very not Tolkien), and it is really hard to get an authentic Fellowship experience (except Boromir, you can do a very convincing Boromir, just not quite so far into the book).

[RifleAvenger]

I don't see what else you could call a game with races, classes, levels, a d20 task resolution system, fighters, clerics and wizards.

Ask all the retroclones and heartbreakers, whole host of names over there.

Ultimately, there were aspects of 4e that differed substantially from what came before to the point it became a "lost generation" edition. Those aspects have proven to be enjoyable in other games, at least when used in part. It could be that 4e just handled its unique aspects badly, I haven't played it myself to formulate an opinion, but the general gist from listening to people seems to be that it lost something else people felt D&D had in prior editions.

[Glorthindel]

Ask all the retroclones and heartbreakers, whole host of names over there.

Ultimately, there were aspects of 4e that differed substantially from what came before to the point it became a "lost generation" edition. Those aspects have proven to be enjoyable in other games, at least when used in part. It could be that 4e just handled its unique aspects badly, I haven't played it myself to formulate an opinion, but the general gist from listening to people seems to be that it lost something else people felt D&D had in prior editions.

Frankly, if they didn't want to lose the IP connection to D&D, they could have just done like some of the JRPG's have done with turn-based strategy versions of their games and called it something like "Dungeons and Dragons: Tactics". A lot of people would have still bought it on brand recognition alone (and knowing it is something a bit different while also having familiar touchstones), and been a lot more prepared and willing to roll with the more radical departures.

[Elysiume]

Lets see, within the past decade... Starfinder was pretty darned bad once you saw past the glossy art and numbers inflation, D&D 4e had serious issues that led to the players staging a game group coup, 5e D&D played like a weird 1e AD&D/Toon combo and had the fastest 'new DM' rage quit and melt down I've ever seen, and a good & experienced Shadowrun DM said "if you buy me the new SR book as a present we will stop being friends." I think he was talking about 5 but it could have been 6.Starfinder was a surprising disappointment for me. I really like Pathfinder 1e, and what little I've played of Pathfinder 2e I've enjoyed. Starfinder feels like a halfbaked 2e playtest — there are several mechanics that clearly exist in between the 1e and 2e implementations or are simply the 2e version (like flat-footed). The mechanics didn't have the depth of 1e or the simplicity of 2e, the story failed to grab me, and the itemization was terrible. e: Oh, and ship combat was terrible in several ways. The group I was playing Starfinder with abandoned the campaign and we ended up doing a 5e campaign.

4e was my introduction to roleplaying games in a couple campaigns that burnt out very quickly, so I actually have a pretty positive memory of 4e because I had nothing to compare it to and the campaigns died too quickly for me to get tired of any part of the system! :smallbiggrin:

[Zombimode]

Of course, we all did have fun with that campaign, which just goes to show that while system does matter, ultimately players can have fun with just about anything - even if the system is bad and/or wildly unsuited to the game's premise. Which is the source of D&D's enduring popularity.

Morty, seriously. Are you really psychologically incapable of accepting that some (many?) peoples preferences are aligned in a way that they actually genuinely like what game systems like D&D and Pathfinder as well as CRPGs that are based of those system offer?

[Delta]

I like the idea of Exalted, but each version I've looked at has seemed more broken than Scion, and that's saying something.

I have to massively disagree with this. While yes, every edition of Exalted has its share of huge mechanical problems, even the most broken of them (probably Ex2.0) doesn't even come close that is the utter and total brokenness that is Scion 1e, and I've played quiet a bit of all of them.

[DrMartin]

Aside from truly disfunctional and gross games, the "worst" game I´ve played are the ones where the system doesn´t encourage, or actively opposes, the kind of stories the game is supposed to tell.

My personal cake goes to the old vampire: the masquerade - a game that should be about personal stories of troubled people that have to deal with being turned into monsters and how they manage to cling to what shreds still stands of their humanity - and sets off to do it with a humanity stat, which is essentially just a second set of health for your conscience. You lose Humanity when you do something horrible, when you get to 0, you become an NPC.

Humanity´s problem is that it´s not central to the system at all, you could forget about it or strip it entirely from the game and very little would change. One suggested use is for the storyteller to inflict Humanity loss to punish player´s bad roleplaying behaviour. Great advice!

Even when not used as a stick to bonk badwrongplayers, the rules for it are hazy and unclear. There is a list of horrible acts that should trigger a Humanity loss, but they are very generic, one word examples left to the storyteller to adjudicate.

Add to this that, as far as I remember, none of the different kind of vampire abilities interact with humanity - at all - they are all about being a combat beast, turn invisible or into a wolf, or throwing fireballs around.
Since those are the things that you get to pick and invest your xp on as a player, those are, in my experience at least, also what you tend to focus on at the table - and the abilities and traits that somehow fit the mold of a game that focus on stories of personal horror and moral dilemmas are few and far between.

Contrast Call of Chtulhu - which has a second set of health in the form of sanity as well - but is directly tied into the Chtulhu Mythos skill, casting spells takes sanity, investigating the mythos costs sanity, etc. You can take the sanity rules away and you can still play the game (and that game would now be called BRP), but is not Chtulhu anymore. Everything that makes CoC, well, CoC, ties with Sanity in one form or another. If you take the Humanity rules out of Vampires, you are still left with a Vampire game (arguably a better one).

Aside from the details about humanity, very little in the system supports the "narrative" gameplay it supposedly wants to encourage - it´s a pretty crunchy (and cluncky) system, with a definitely more simulationist than narrative approach to skill use, a separate system for solving combat encounters, no player agency on narrative elements and in short all the expected characteristic of a traditional rpg.


Second place would go to Amber if played by the books, including the openly hostile GM advice from the author - but the group I played Amber with back in the late 90s had a GM who threw out most of what is written in the book and houseruled heavily, and it was actually a really fun game to play in that context. (Truth be told, "throw this book out" is more or less what the author states in the rulebook itself, towards the end of it - so I guess it´s only partially bad?)

There are tons of other bad games out there but I didn´t have the chance to try them. Having only limited amount ot time in a day has a silver lining after all :D

But neverhteless, to add to Fatal and RaHoWa, I think we should at least add a note to Hybrid, which includes gems like:


Rule # 550: There are 5 parts to this rule. Based on my Rule # 3 & Rule # 6, this: {(0,0) END} is a human, usually a male human, at least in this rpg HYBRID, since women are too complicated to make in my rpg, since creating women in my rpg requires politically incorrect math, but to return to what I was saying before I digressed, is as follows:

[Anonymouswizard]

Starting characters being too underpowered is about a third of the problem. I remember my GM asking me if I wanted him to house rule on a defensive talent to make it maybe useful. My response was "no, I want the NPCs to suck as much on defense as I do."
The second third is the two-axis dice that give you confusing results half the time ("Knowledge check: okay, you rolled a Triumph but you didn't roll enough successes so you failed your check, so you don't know what you were trying to remember...and ytjhetou've got 5 advantage and that Triumph to spend on...er...something...not on getting more detailed information, because you failed the check...ummmm...") and are still a pain to decipher even after a year of playing with them.
The third part is the Jedi, which are both underpowered and overpowered at the same time. Underpowered compared to the Jedi in the films, overpowered in two or three specific powers compared to other players.

Isn't a Triumph a success?

Honestly, my main memory of it is the time I tried to alter a swoop bike to take up less room (collapse or come apart, we'd work out the details when it was important). I had a pool of like two great dice, three good dice, and one or more Boost dice, and managed to roll no successes or Triumphs but five Advantage.

Of course I immediately used the five advantages to attach the engines to myself. Unfortunately I never got anything out of that, because I missed the next session due to family engagements and the GM allowed another player to take them off (bah! they were clearly going to burn out after 1d6 uses).


If it wasn't called D&D it would have gotten less hate, but also much less players. And I don't think that it's that much more different than other editions are from each-other, besides 1E/2E.

Actually, now that I'm also seeing 5E and PF2, I have to conclude that 3.x (in which I'm including PF1) was the aberrant edition, making possible a playstyle that the designers never really intended and that they later 'fixed'. Too bad, since I do like it, but it doesn't seem to be a popular one, judging by the lack of new games pursuing it.

Oh, 3.5 is definitely the odd man out. But 5e at least looks more like 3.5 to satisfy most of the 3.5 fans.


Finn is a stormtrooper. He cannot shoot that well. His accuracy is not that great for the whole trilogy.

Did we watch the same films? I can't remember Finn missing a single shot in the entire trilogy. In fact the films seem to go out of their way to avoid giving him a blaster.


I don't see what else you could call a game with races, classes, levels, a d20 task resolution system, fighters, clerics and wizards.

Devil Slayer. Big Jeff's Dungeon Adventure. Magical Adventures In Elfland. The Black Eye. I can think of many examples.

[Vahnavoi]

Dungeon World is hardly the worst game I've played, but every session of it that I've played has felt like Basic D&D with training wheels... and I could play Basic D&D without those wheels when I was 10. Worse is when GMs in those games have suddenly made me do something that's normally the job of the GM in Basic D&D, like describe the environment (etc.). I don't know how much of it comes from the game system, but it seriously ruins the feel of playing. I don't want to be inventing the place I'm escaping from while I'm escaping it.

[Glorthindel]

Isn't a Triumph a success?

Honestly, my main memory of it is the time I tried to alter a swoop bike to take up less room (collapse or come apart, we'd work out the details when it was important). I had a pool of like two great dice, three good dice, and one or more Boost dice, and managed to roll no successes or Triumphs but five Advantage.

I couldn't shake the feeling that the Star Wars dice were actually dice for a different game, that just got reused or repurposed for the game (obviously the dice themselves were game-specific, I mean more the design of the dice, including the numbers of each type of pip on each side), because when I looked over them, there just seemed to be too many Advantage/Disadvantage pips on each dice, and too few Success/Failures. Surely, Success/Failure should be the majority result, and Advantage/Disadvantage (and Despair/Triumph) a secondary resource, but all too often, I found results for dice pools heavily stacked in the rollers advantage accrueing large number of Advantage but struggling to get that vital Success result.

Given the number of FFG games out there, I would be unsurprised to find the exact same dice (just with different symbols for the pips and in different colours) in some of their other games (I know their X-Wing tabletop game was a big hit, do they have similar dice?)

[Yora]

D&D 3.5 is definitely the worst I've had the misfortune to play, even if I didn't realize it at the time. Which was simply because it was my first RPG and I just didn't realize you can do things differently and so much better.

Not only that, it's also the worst game I was stupid enough to run. For well over 10 years. But sitting in the platonic cave of D&D, you have no point of reference to tell that your game is awful. You think that it doesn't live up to your expectations can only be down to the GM needing more experience.

[aglondier]

I've played a few different games over the years.

D&D - becmi, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3.5, pf, 5th.
Star Wars - weg d6, d20
Star Trek
Babylon 5
Ghostbusters
White Wolf - vtm 1st & 2nd, wta, mta, ctd, wto, adventure, aeon, aberrant, vampire and werewolf larp
Shadowrun - 1st, 2nd, 3rd
Palladium - TMNT
Call of Cthulhu - 4th or 5th, not sure
Middle Earth Role Play System - 2nd i think
Dark Heresy - 1st
Buffy the Vampire Slayer rpg
Tales From The Floating Vagabond
A homebrewed Harry Potter rpg
Mechwarrior rpg
DC Heroes rpg
Heroes Unlimited
7th Sea
In Nomine
Underground
and a few dozen others I no longer recall...

The thing is, most of them have design elements that fall over completely, but can still lead to brilliant games. If a particular game is too aggravating to play, it might be the players and gm that are making it so...

[Anonymouswizard]

I couldn't shake the feeling that the Star Wars dice were actually dice for a different game, that just got reused or repurposed for the game (obviously the dice themselves were game-specific, I mean more the design of the dice, including the numbers of each type of pip on each side), because when I looked over them, there just seemed to be too many Advantage/Disadvantage pips on each dice, and too few Success/Failures. Surely, Success/Failure should be the majority result, and Advantage/Disadvantage (and Despair/Triumph) a secondary resource, but all too often, I found results for dice pools heavily stacked in the rollers advantage accrueing large number of Advantage but struggling to get that vital Success result.

Given the number of FFG games out there, I would be unsurprised to find the exact same dice (just with different symbols for the pips and in different colours) in some of their other games (I know their X-Wing tabletop game was a big hit, do they have similar dice?)

I wouldn't be shocked if they were from WFRP3e, that the Advantages had been your successes and the Successes gave you bonuses like Armour Penetration or taking less time. I'm just glad my my experience with WFRP is 'ready my dad's copy of 1e or 2e as a kid, jumped straight to 4e when I saw it in a shop'.

But yeah, the system works, but the dice make it not work well at all. It's probably just better to run WEG's Star Wars or d6Space, they might not be amazing and have a couple of bits I dislike, like spending XP to get more dice on rolls, but they at least work.

[Telwar]

Oh, someone mentioned Amber. I think I had three sessions of that sophomore year, and it was terrible. The GM clearly wasn't remembering rules, and maybe some of it was a mismatch between my expectations and the GM's expectations. I think the game was still going, with a new gm and mostly new group, two years later if I remember correctly.

And I think that a lot of the problems people have with games relates to the GM's understanding of the game. I enjoyed the hell out of FFG Star Wars, and would play it again in a second, but it demands the group, on the fly, be able to figure out what happens with Advantage and Threat, which took us a while. It also doesn't really allow for omnicompetent PCs that can individually lead armies, fly rings around enemies, and engage in awesome lightsaber duels without a toooon of xp. Instead you specialize, like in most other games.

(Also, starship combat bothers me because it's a single point of failure...oh, the minion group rolled super well and cored your transport with a turbo laser with a big crit? But that's system agnostic, and bothered me in d20 Star Wars as well)

SR6 bothers me because I can see what they were trying to do with the whole Edge thing, but it adds another exchange to any set of die rolling. If we play again it'll be SR4. We did the starter set as our first pandemic over-the-internet game, and it was okay.

I still dislike 5e, because it's a lazy system ("we'll empower the DM by making them make stuff up without guidance!" "Great, let's go play Xbox!") and the idea that you get less competent out of your specialty as you gain experience seems bad. And what's the difference between a Charisma save and a Wisdom save? But it's simple and brought a lot of new people into the hobby so they can eventually find a real system.

[EggKookoo]

And what's the difference between a Charisma save and a Wisdom save?

Charisma = force of personality, presence, and sense of self/identity
Wisdom = perception and intuitive comprehension/awareness

So a charisma save is when you overcome something through sheer force of will. A wisdom save is when you overcome something by seeing its true nature or by not being fooled by it. If WotC wasn't averse to updating game mechanic terms, charisma should have been renamed something like "presence," and wisdom should have become something like "perception" in 5e. But we're stuck with those old terms, along with hit dice and armor class.

[Morty]

Not only that, it's also the worst game I was stupid enough to run. For well over 10 years. But sitting in the platonic cave of D&D, you have no point of reference to tell that your game is awful. You think that it doesn't live up to your expectations can only be down to the GM needing more experience.

I guess it's a rite of passage for an RPG player to realize that the RPG we started out with doesn't have all the answers and we can do better. Or just differently and better-suited to certain styles of games. Then again, is it really a rite of passage if a tremendous number of players refuse to even consider it?

[Yora]

Somehow I feel that all the RPGs that were really popular in the late 90s and early 2000s were all beloved only for their setting but had really bad rules.

Dungeons & Dragons, World of Darkness, Exalted, Shadowrun, Legend of the Five Rings, Call of Cthulhu, and DSA in Germany. I've never encountered a single person who made any claims that any of these had a great system.
(There was of course also GURPS, which lived entirely on the merits as a system and was at least popular enough to be a name people know and recognize.)

[EggKookoo]

Somehow I feel that all the RPGs that were really popular in the late 90s and early 2000s were all beloved only for their setting but had really bad rules.

I can't disagree with that for the most part. It really just an artifact of how evolution works, but it seems like there was this progression, especially in D&D, from "the mechanical mess is the game's personality" to "let's see if we can apply some design philosophy to these mechanics while keeping some personality" to "design philosophy is ALL! screw personality" and we've actually backpedaled a bit to a balance of design philosophy and quirky personality.


Dungeons & Dragons, World of Darkness, Exalted, Shadowrun, Legend of the Five Rings, Call of Cthulhu, and DSA in Germany. I've never encountered a single person who made any claims that any of these had a great system.

In my experience, Cthulhu is a perfectly fine system if you play that game as intended. Unfortunately for us, we played CoC by way of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which meant we put an emphasis on action and combat that the mechanics simply weren't designed for. It was okay for a long time as it was our only game for years, but then one of our players got into D&D (2e, this was back in the 90s) and invited us to his campaign. As primitive as some might see 2e today, its combat system is way smoother than CoC's (unsurprisingly, of course) but it highlighted what we were missing from that game.

I know this thread is about the worst system, but probably the best system fit to its setting and subject matter I've played was Mayfair Games DC Heroes. For a game focused almost entirely on superpower-based urban combat, the system fit like a glove.

[Morty]

Somehow I feel that all the RPGs that were really popular in the late 90s and early 2000s were all beloved only for their setting but had really bad rules.

Dungeons & Dragons, World of Darkness, Exalted, Shadowrun, Legend of the Five Rings, Call of Cthulhu, and DSA in Germany. I've never encountered a single person who made any claims that any of these had a great system.
(There was of course also GURPS, which lived entirely on the merits as a system and was at least popular enough to be a name people know and recognize.)

I think you'll find many people arguing that 90s/2000s D&D rules are excellent. Aside from that, RPG rules evolve, like everything else. Those rules felt good back then, but now designers and players alike (not that there's not a significant overlap between those) have discovered how to do things better.

[Pex]

@Friv: The problem you describe is largely caused by the attitude that games in established settings are fanfiction, and implicitly bad fanfiction. In practice, this means the game's designers think the "canonical" characters are just way too cool for players to be allowed to play them or anything like them.

This attitude doesn't originate from the RPG hobby nor is it restricted to it, but it has been present in the hobby since very earliest days when Gygax (Ernie or Gary, I forgot which) statted Conan as this impossibly cool multiclass character that'd be nearly or completely impossible to achieve through actual play.

I can agree with this, but maybe the idea of character levels plays a part. If high level is to mean something then low level must mean you aren't so competent at what you do. Games that don't use levels don't have this issue. In Ars Magica you can cast powerful spells from game session 1. You are a Mage. GURPS Supers it specificaly says you use a high number of build points, 500, to make your character to do Cool Powers from session 1. You are a Superhero. The various Star Wars games made you grow in power, so you can never be a true Jedi. The game will end long before you get to be Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Level-based games are fine. Suit to taste, but starting low in power and gradually get to be demigods has its appeal. However, maybe a level-based game system just doesn't work to emulate a specific popular story.

[Ajustusdaniel]

Well, now that raises a question: should an RPG be considered bad if it concerns a subject that you find personally offensive, regardless of whether the system works well or not?

Without being familiar with the specific systems raised here (except FATAL by reputation) I'd say that if a system successfully promotes an ideology I consider bad, I would be comfortable describing that as a bad system even if it is not a poorly designed one.

[Vahnavoi]

I can agree with this, but maybe the idea of character levels plays a part.

Yes and no.

Let's start with "no" part: there's nothing inherent to either concept or mechanics of level systems that require the model characters to be forever out of reach. Nothing prevents a game from existing where you're (for example) Conan from level 1 (or a game where you become Conan by level 5 and solidly pass him by level 10, or whatever other configuration).

As for the "yes" part, it's because who codified the level system (Gygax & Co) also set the example that you need to be level gazillion million to be Conan.

That's why the association exists. The people who made Y also said X, other people assumed Y and X must go together, and perpetuated it in later designs.

At least in this case, we know it was the same guys who said Y and X.

---

EDIT: as to all the people invoking "evolution" and "progress", neither mechanics nor settings for tabletop games have gotten strictly better, certainly not if you begin counting from the 90s. Compared to leaps made in computer gaming, tabletop RPGs are quaint and archaic. And this is factoring in that most mainstream computer games keep rehashing the same set of ideas that were all present in that industry by mid 90s at latest.

[EggKookoo]

EDIT: as to all the people invoking "evolution" and "progress", neither mechanics nor settings for tabletop games have gotten strictly better, certainly not if you begin counting from the 90s. Compared to leaps made in computer gaming, tabletop RPGs are quaint and archaic. And this is factoring in that most mainstream computer games keep rehashing the same set of ideas that were all present in that industry by mid 90s at latest.

It's a little apple-orangey. CRPGs have benefitted from massive increases in computer power since the 90s. TTRPGs rely on slow wetware that hasn't really changed all that much.

Although I also disagree with the premise. Or rather the assumption behind the premise. Mechanics and settings evolve to suit player tastes, but there's no objective way to determine if they've gotten strictly better (or worse) in ~40 years. The only real metric of that is player acceptance and adoption, subjective as it is.

[AvatarVecna]

FATAL, easily. Did it solo just to see how the mechanics shake out and it's honestly just the opposite of fun. The combat and magic system are just as much of a boring slog as the chargen, and twice as nonsensical.


Well, now that raises a question: should an RPG be considered bad if it concerns a subject that you find personally offensive, regardless of whether the system works well or not?

There are plenty of systems out there that I am not interested in playing because they cover subjects I am not interested in. Does that mean they are bad systems?

FATAL's most infamous sin is being an offensive pile of garbage. FATAL's biggest flaw as a game is being a boring pile of garbage. FATAL is the equivalent of having the option to google scat-snuff-rape porn, and instead deciding they're going to figure out how to draw such a scene themselves using only quadratic formulas and a TI-84 calculator. It's the more tedious aspects of AD&D and GURPS rammed together, with a liberal sprinkling of *****, poop, rape, and heresy, so that when somebody points out that they've just made an objectively awful system they can say "lol ur just so offended". Somebody further up in the thread said chargen took their club two weeks, and I believe him. I cracked my PDF open again to manually confirm, and...

FATAL CharGen:
Race: 1d100, 16 outcomes.
Anaxim will roll 1d10 traits, each of which is its own 1d100 roll.
Elves will roll 1d8 for maximum age/forest size, with 8 possible results. No, I don't know why this is in the race section instead of the age section.
Sex: 1d100, 2 outcomes. It's worth mentioning this is one of the only rolls where the game is written under the assumption that you choose which option you want instead of rolling randomly.
Starting Age: Either a 1d1000 (dwarf), a nonroll for elves (who start at young adulthood, based on the age roll in the race section), or a 4d100 roll for everyone else. For nonelves, there are 7 possible outcomes to these rolls.
Height: 6d4, 8d4, 6d6, 8d6, 6d8, 4d10, or 2d20 roll, based on race/sex.
Weight: 1d100, 2d100, 3d100, 6d20, 6d12, 4d10, 6d6, 3d6, 2d6, or 2d4 roll, based on race/sex.
Most Attractive Feature: 1d100, 12 outcomes.
Most Repulsive Feature: 1d100, 11 outcomes (since you reroll if you get the same thing as for the previous roll).
Skin Color: 1d100, 5 results. 10/16 races don't roll skin color, and the ones that do can't roll lower than "tan (the skin of a laborer)".
Hair Color: 1d100. 8 results for most races, 5 results for some.
Hair Length: 1d6 for bugbears (fur length in inches), otherwise 1d100 with 7 outcomes.
Hair Thickness/Type: 1d100, 22 outcomes.
Eye Color: 1d100, 5 outcomes.
Vision Type: 1d100, 19 outcomes. This is nearsightedness vs farsightedness. There's penalties for the former, and no mechanical change for the latter.
Facial Features: 1d100, 55 outcomes. I guess you only have one notable facial feature per character?
Freak Of Nature: 1d1000000, 2 outcomes (if you get a 1, you are, if you roll anything else, you aren't). Roll 1d100, 5 outcomes, if you rolled that 1. I guess there's only 5 kinds of freaks.
Areola Diameter: 1d100/5 outcomes based on race.
Areola Hue: 1d100/4 outcomes to determine color, although this only mechanically matters for females.
Cup Size: 1d100/6 outcomes. Age factors in, but not sex.
Nipple Length: 1d100, 2 outcomes (if you get a 1, inverted nipples, otherwise 1d100/5 outcomes based on race).
Female Genitals:
Vaginal Circumference Potential: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Vaginal Depth Potential: 2d20 roll based on height.
Tongue Size: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Anal Circumference Potential: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Male Genitals:
Manhood Length: 5d100/33 outcomes, based on height.
Manhood Circumference: 5d100/33 outcomes, based on height.
Foot Size/Fist Circumference: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Handedness: 1d100/2 outcomes.
Head Circumference: This is 3 rolls. First, 1d100/7 outcomes. Second, 1d100/2 outcomes. Third 1d100/100 outcomes.
Sub-Abilities. Each one has 50 outcomes as far as how it affects other stats:
Physical Fitness: 10d100/5 -1
Strength: 10d100/5 -1
Bodily Attractiveness: 10d100/5 -1
Health: 10d100/5 -1
Facial Charisma: 10d100/5 -1
Vocal Charisma: 10d100/5 -1
Kinetic Charisma: 10d100/5 -1
Rhetorical Charisma: 10d100/5 -1. This determines average words-spoken-per-minute.
Hand-Eye Coordination: 10d100/5 -1
Agility: 10d100/5 -1
Reaction Speed: 10d100/5 -1
Enunciation: 10d100/5 -1. This determines maximum words-spoken-per-minute. This is one of the neater things about the system actually: a gradually-increasing stat that relates directly to the action economy of the magic system. The approach FATAL takes is one of the better ones I've seen towards balancing this kind of magic subsystem, and I kinda wish I had the brainpower to properly integrate it into a 3.5 setup or similar to limit how often high-level mages are pumping out spells.
Language Intelligence: 10d100/5 -1. I'm also not the first to point out: it's weird how unconnected Rhetorical Charisma, Enunciation, and Language Intelligence are from each other. It's entirely possible to have a faster average WPM than your max WPM, all while being incapable of speaking any language at all.
Math Intelligence: 10d100/5 -1
Analytical Intelligence: 10d100/5 -1
Spatial Intelligence: 10d100/5 -1
Drive: 10d100/5 -1
Intuition: 10d100/5 -1
Common Sense: 10d100/5 -1
Reflection: 10d100/5 -1
Retard Strength: If your overall Intelligence is super-low, roll 1d100/2 outcomes based on overall Intelligence. If you end up rolling a Yes, roll 2d10 to factor into your Strength.
Piety: 1d100/7 results.
Ethicality "Disposition": 1d100/7 results. This is a barely-disguised ripoff of D&D's Law-Chaos alignment axis.
Morality "Disposition": 1d100/7 results. This is a barely-disguised ripoff of D&D's Good-Evil alignment axis. It's also worth mentioning: they provide a pie chart indicating how common each overall "Disposition" is, but because it's all in grayscale, they try to differentiate the slices with patterns instead of colors and it's just a mess. And I know I'm looking at the cleaned-up version too.
Temperment, four humors style baby! Only the two biggest rolls will matter.
Sanguine: 1d100
Choleric: 1d100
Melancholic: 1d100
Phlegmatic: 1d100
Name: 1d100/ ha I'm just kidding you actually get to pick this instead of rolling randomly.
Birthday: This, however, is rolled randomly. Month 1d20 (reroll until you get 1-13) / Day [(1d12+1d20) -1] / Year [5100 - age]
Birth Status: 1d100/2 results. 1/5 chance you're a bastard child.
Social Class: 1d100/5 outcomes based on race.
Birthplace: 1d100, 2-5 outcomes based on race/social class.
Siblings: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Marital Status: 1d100/5 outcomes, or 4 outcomes if you're gay. Specifically, gay people can be married, but not happily married.
Sexuality: 1d100/5 results. I think their statistics are solid here, although I would hazard a guess that the mechanic where a girl's cup size affects her odds of being one sexuality vs another is probably not based on much scientific data.
Female Debauchery: 1d100/20 results.
Male Debauchery: 1d100/18 results. I'm not sure if it's sexist "women aren't into porn" or just self-awareness that guys are in general more likely to be down for a given thing than girls are. At the very least I don't suspect the FATAL designers of having conducted much research on this topic.


That's 63 rolls at minimum for any given character. You'll be rolling 502d10+2d20+1d12, at minimum. If you actually own a d100, you can cut the number of d10 rolls in half!

Here's a FATAL chargen simulator: roll d10s until your wrist ****ing falls off. Write down all the numbers, and then consult the 60+ charts you just rolled on to find out what half-dozen stats that roll affected.

And it's boring. You basically don't choose anything during chargen. You roll everything about your body randomly. You roll your personality randomly. You roll your goddamn birthday randomly. And basically everything could be ignored in favor of just rolling your stats, like a normal game works, and choosing everything else. But no. FATAL has to make chargen a series of boring easy math problems with a liberal sprinkling of *****. And the combat/magic/legal systems are equally long and boring and 'god why are we rolling so much it doesn't even ****ing matter'.

FATAL is the RPG equivalent of a shock-comic where every punchline is "and then I **** my pants". FATAL is the RPG equivalent of a horror movie that's "oops all jump scares". If you take out the shock value, if you're not grossed out or offended or shocked, there's nothing else you're gonna get out of this. If you came for the rape or whatever, if that's your thing, there are other systems that deliver better without wasting so much of your time rolling dice for +/-0.01% difference in result. You can whip up a naked 5e barbarian in just a few minutes and start pillaging away, you don't need all this nonsense.

[Friv]

Dungeon World is hardly the worst game I've played, but every session of it that I've played has felt like Basic D&D with training wheels... and I could play Basic D&D without those wheels when I was 10. Worse is when GMs in those games have suddenly made me do something that's normally the job of the GM in Basic D&D, like describe the environment (etc.). I don't know how much of it comes from the game system, but it seriously ruins the feel of playing. I don't want to be inventing the place I'm escaping from while I'm escaping it.

I think a lot of this is a type mismatch situation. While I generally feel that Dungeon World is one of the weaker PbtA games out there, the game's explicit goal is to replicate the feel of OD&D while giving a lot more control over worldbuilding and narrative to the players; giving everyone a bit of the GM's job is a goal, rather than a mistake. This obviously works very well with people who like that, and very badly with people who prefer character-focused play with the GM controlling the environment. It's nearly impossible to play most PbtA games with that kind of strict delineation, because the rules keep trying to hand that control back to the players.


I couldn't shake the feeling that the Star Wars dice were actually dice for a different game, that just got reused or repurposed for the game (obviously the dice themselves were game-specific, I mean more the design of the dice, including the numbers of each type of pip on each side), because when I looked over them, there just seemed to be too many Advantage/Disadvantage pips on each dice, and too few Success/Failures. Surely, Success/Failure should be the majority result, and Advantage/Disadvantage (and Despair/Triumph) a secondary resource, but all too often, I found results for dice pools heavily stacked in the rollers advantage accrueing large number of Advantage but struggling to get that vital Success result.

Given the number of FFG games out there, I would be unsurprised to find the exact same dice (just with different symbols for the pips and in different colours) in some of their other games (I know their X-Wing tabletop game was a big hit, do they have similar dice?)

Nope, Star Wars came first, but they've now used those dice for all their other RPGs based on it. I think it's just a case of (a) not enough playtesting, and (b) no clear communication between writers. The rules initially suggest that you're normally rolling against two purple, which would mean that having a decent stat and a skill gives you a solid chance of success. But then all the examples have enemies routinely upgrading their purple dice to red and tons of tasks that are three or four purple dice. Meanwhile, the examples of difficulty state that "average" tasks are ones that most people can generally succeed on, while "hard" tasks are ones that skilled people can usually succeed on, and that's just not true under the stats that you're handed.

One thing that I do like is that the "good" dice are designed to have more Successes and fewer Advantages, while the "bad" dice are designed to have more Threats and fewer Failures, which should lean things towards "Success at a Cost". But yes, because the numbers are off-kilter you end up with "if your good dice are the same type and number as your bad dice your chances of success are under 50%, and if you do succeed there is probably a cost", which is not good design.


Finn is a stormtrooper. He cannot shoot that well. His accuracy is not that great for the whole trilogy. Being a main character it is better than some but not all. He cannot pilot at ALL in ep 7, that is why he has to rescue Poe. Leia is taken out by one shot and is great at diplomacy, but we don't see that in the entire ep 4. kid anankin has some mechanics, and pilot. He has no knowledge, weapons, or visible force skills when he starts out. Han started out working for Jabba and lost his cargo. He had 1 job, and he cocked it up. Han when we see him in ANH, he has several adventures under his belt.

Star Wars characters have great potential but they aren't competent. They get awesome later.

I'm going to argue against all three of these examples, but I'm going to do it in spoiler blocks because I feel like the wordcount is going to get up a bit.

Let's start with Leia.
When we first see Leia, she is successfully evading stormtroopers in order to smuggle rebel plans into R2-D2 and get him to an escape pod; she is caught only after succeeding on this stealth task, and then stunned. Mechanically, that seems to represent stunning as a success with complications, rather than a direct combat. She then fails a ludicrously difficult roll to convince Vader she's innocent.

In her next appearance, she is totally controlled through torture and gives up no information, and then when placed under tremendous stress she successfully lies to Tarkin about the location of the rebel base. She is then freed, shoots several stormtroopers, handles some athletic maneuvers into the garbage chute and successfully organizes the Rebels for the Death Star attack.

So we're looking at someone who has decent Agility, very good Willpower, solid Cunning and Presence and generally displays good Intellect (although you can dump that if you need to.) We'll give her Willpower 4, Cunning and Presence 3, and assume that her Agility tricks are a bit of skill training. Of course that takes her to 130 XP so she's already not a legal character. Whoops. For skills she has demonstrated good Stealth, very good Deception and Discipline, some decent Perception, Charm, and Negotiation, and consistent Light Ranged, plus her general Education and knowledge of the Core Worlds. But whoops that's one more skill than she gets to buy as a starting character even if you take them all at 1 (and she's definitely past that) and she's already 10 XP over, and then she gets no interesting Talents or die tricks.

Now, how about Anakin?
When we meet Anakin, he's a little kid who's really smart and generally quite agile. Of course, you can't build "human child" in FFG, but if we say the GM houseruled that he could take Brawn 1, Agility 3 and have 100 XP we can muck with it. 100 XP gets him to Intellect 4, Presence 3, for a final spread of Brawn 1, Agility 3, Cunning 2, Intellect 4, Willpower 2, Presence 3 at the cost of all his XP.

For skills - Anakin is a phenomenal mechanic who built his own droid from spare parts and can repair a pod racer on the fly mid-race. He's also a pilot capable of winning a race that humans have never successfully finished. But we're limited to Skill 2 so hopefully the GM will be nice with results. He only demonstrates skill with planetary objects to start, so I'll be nice and say that he gets his space piloting later. He is good with computers, understands how to get things from the street and negotiate with people, and is also good at charming minor characters and PCs alike, and he repeatedly demonstrates general knowledge of the Outer Rim but we can assume his high Intellect is covering that, so we're looking at Mechanics 2, Pilot (Planetary) 2, Computers 1, Streetwise 1, Negotiate 1, Charm 1. You can just barely manage that with starting skills, if there's a career that manages it (I didn't bother to check.)

But Anakin also starts off as a Force Emergent, and theoretically an extremely powerful one. He needs to spend 20 XP to be a Force Emergent, and mechanically he won't be particularly powerful because he only gets a Force Rating of 1; there's no way to start with it higher without spending 75+ XP on Force Talents. He also won't be able to start with any powers, but he doesn't really use any that you can't explain away as Advantages so I'll let that slide.

So our Anakin - a literal child who is demonstrably weaker than every other main character in the prequels - still can't be built as a starting character, although by paring away literally everything that is not provably shown as a success on screen during the first twenty minutes of his activity and also being kind of wobbly about how good he actually is, you can get him to "a character after 2-3 sessions."

And finally, Finn.
You define Finn as "a stormtrooper who can't shoot or fly", which is not accurate. Finn is a janitor who has been pressed into service as a stormtrooper. From the get-go, Finn is demonstrated as being tougher than the other main characters - he takes hits and doesn't particularly stagger, he's pretty strong. He's also pretty quick on his feet, and he's both charming and cunning. I'm going to set his stats at Brawn 3, Agility 3, Intellect 2, Cunning 3, Willpower 2, Presence 3 - nothing outstanding, but lots of decent stats. This takes all of his XP, assuming he bought Duty out of his duty to Poe.

For skills - Finn is very charming; he routinely convinces hostile people that he's on their side. He is a skilled mechanic, decent at picking locks and hacking systems, and very good at stealth. He's good with a blaster and with bigger guns and quite good in a turret (he shoots down other TIEs chasing the ship with ease) and he's quite athletic. He has knowledge of the First Order, their systems, and their society, which he demonstrates repeatedly. So we're looking at Mechanics, Ranged (Light), Ranged (Heavy), Gunnery, Skulduggery, Stealth, Athletics, Charm, Deception, and Knowledge: First Order (their version of Outer Rim.) Whoops, that's too many skills even if he takes them all at 1, which he probably shouldn't because he's a very good mechanic who is very charming. And once again, he gets no special talents or abilities to reflect fun things that players might want to do.

[Saint-Just]

FATAL, easily. Did it solo just to see how the mechanics shake out and it's honestly just the opposite of fun. The combat and magic system are just as much of a boring slog as the chargen, and twice as nonsensical.

Goddamn, I have read two long scathing reviews of the FATAL, but they were focusing attention on the most offensive and\or absurd tidbits. Now this? Exhaustively listing all rolls during the chargen? This made me laugh for at least two minutes, and it also is no worse put down of the mechanics as those very long reviews.

[Morty]

I think a lot of this is a type mismatch situation. While I generally feel that Dungeon World is one of the weaker PbtA games out there, the game's explicit goal is to replicate the feel of OD&D while giving a lot more control over worldbuilding and narrative to the players; giving everyone a bit of the GM's job is a goal, rather than a mistake. This obviously works very well with people who like that, and very badly with people who prefer character-focused play with the GM controlling the environment. It's nearly impossible to play most PbtA games with that kind of strict delineation, because the rules keep trying to hand that control back to the players.

Dungeon World's weakness is that it doesn't really properly get into a proper fiction-first attitude and mixes it in with various D&D-isms. So it ends up straddling the fence and doesn't really guide players towards the playstyle it wants to encourage.

[Anonymouswizard]

FATAL, easily. Did it solo just to see how the mechanics shake out and it's honestly just the opposite of fun. The combat and magic system are just as much of a boring slog as the chargen, and twice as nonsensical.



FATAL's most infamous sin is being an offensive pile of garbage. FATAL's biggest flaw as a game is being a boring pile of garbage. FATAL is the equivalent of having the option to google scat-snuff-rape porn, and instead deciding they're going to figure out how to draw such a scene themselves using only quadratic formulas and a TI-84 calculator. It's the more tedious aspects of AD&D and GURPS rammed together, with a liberal sprinkling of *****, poop, rape, and heresy, so that when somebody points out that they've just made an objectively awful system they can say "lol ur just so offended". Somebody further up in the thread said chargen took their club two weeks, and I believe him. I cracked my PDF open again to manually confirm, and...

FATAL CharGen:
Race: 1d100, 16 outcomes.
Anaxim will roll 1d10 traits, each of which is its own 1d100 roll.
Elves will roll 1d8 for maximum age/forest size, with 8 possible results. No, I don't know why this is in the race section instead of the age section.
Sex: 1d100, 2 outcomes. It's worth mentioning this is one of the only rolls where the game is written under the assumption that you choose which option you want instead of rolling randomly.
Starting Age: Either a 1d1000 (dwarf), a nonroll for elves (who start at young adulthood, based on the age roll in the race section), or a 4d100 roll for everyone else. For nonelves, there are 7 possible outcomes to these rolls.
Height: 6d4, 8d4, 6d6, 8d6, 6d8, 4d10, or 2d20 roll, based on race/sex.
Weight: 1d100, 2d100, 3d100, 6d20, 6d12, 4d10, 6d6, 3d6, 2d6, or 2d4 roll, based on race/sex.
Most Attractive Feature: 1d100, 12 outcomes.
Most Repulsive Feature: 1d100, 11 outcomes (since you reroll if you get the same thing as for the previous roll).
Skin Color: 1d100, 5 results. 10/16 races don't roll skin color, and the ones that do can't roll lower than "tan (the skin of a laborer)".
Hair Color: 1d100. 8 results for most races, 5 results for some.
Hair Length: 1d6 for bugbears (fur length in inches), otherwise 1d100 with 7 outcomes.
Hair Thickness/Type: 1d100, 22 outcomes.
Eye Color: 1d100, 5 outcomes.
Vision Type: 1d100, 19 outcomes. This is nearsightedness vs farsightedness. There's penalties for the former, and no mechanical change for the latter.
Facial Features: 1d100, 55 outcomes. I guess you only have one notable facial feature per character?
Freak Of Nature: 1d1000000, 2 outcomes (if you get a 1, you are, if you roll anything else, you aren't). Roll 1d100, 5 outcomes, if you rolled that 1. I guess there's only 5 kinds of freaks.
Areola Diameter: 1d100/5 outcomes based on race.
Areola Hue: 1d100/4 outcomes to determine color, although this only mechanically matters for females.
Cup Size: 1d100/6 outcomes. Age factors in, but not sex.
Nipple Length: 1d100, 2 outcomes (if you get a 1, inverted nipples, otherwise 1d100/5 outcomes based on race).
Female Genitals:
Vaginal Circumference Potential: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Vaginal Depth Potential: 2d20 roll based on height.
Tongue Size: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Anal Circumference Potential: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Male Genitals:
Manhood Length: 5d100/33 outcomes, based on height.
Manhood Circumference: 5d100/33 outcomes, based on height.
Foot Size/Fist Circumference: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Handedness: 1d100/2 outcomes.
Head Circumference: This is 3 rolls. First, 1d100/7 outcomes. Second, 1d100/2 outcomes. Third 1d100/100 outcomes.
Sub-Abilities. Each one has 50 outcomes as far as how it affects other stats:
Physical Fitness: 10d100/5 -1
Strength: 10d100/5 -1
Bodily Attractiveness: 10d100/5 -1
Health: 10d100/5 -1
Facial Charisma: 10d100/5 -1
Vocal Charisma: 10d100/5 -1
Kinetic Charisma: 10d100/5 -1
Rhetorical Charisma: 10d100/5 -1. This determines average words-spoken-per-minute.
Hand-Eye Coordination: 10d100/5 -1
Agility: 10d100/5 -1
Reaction Speed: 10d100/5 -1
Enunciation: 10d100/5 -1. This determines maximum words-spoken-per-minute. This is one of the neater things about the system actually: a gradually-increasing stat that relates directly to the action economy of the magic system. The approach FATAL takes is one of the better ones I've seen towards balancing this kind of magic subsystem, and I kinda wish I had the brainpower to properly integrate it into a 3.5 setup or similar to limit how often high-level mages are pumping out spells.
Language Intelligence: 10d100/5 -1. I'm also not the first to point out: it's weird how unconnected Rhetorical Charisma, Enunciation, and Language Intelligence are from each other. It's entirely possible to have a faster average WPM than your max WPM, all while being incapable of speaking any language at all.
Math Intelligence: 10d100/5 -1
Analytical Intelligence: 10d100/5 -1
Spatial Intelligence: 10d100/5 -1
Drive: 10d100/5 -1
Intuition: 10d100/5 -1
Common Sense: 10d100/5 -1
Reflection: 10d100/5 -1
Retard Strength: If your overall Intelligence is super-low, roll 1d100/2 outcomes based on overall Intelligence. If you end up rolling a Yes, roll 2d10 to factor into your Strength.
Piety: 1d100/7 results.
Ethicality "Disposition": 1d100/7 results. This is a barely-disguised ripoff of D&D's Law-Chaos alignment axis.
Morality "Disposition": 1d100/7 results. This is a barely-disguised ripoff of D&D's Good-Evil alignment axis. It's also worth mentioning: they provide a pie chart indicating how common each overall "Disposition" is, but because it's all in grayscale, they try to differentiate the slices with patterns instead of colors and it's just a mess. And I know I'm looking at the cleaned-up version too.
Temperment, four humors style baby! Only the two biggest rolls will matter.
Sanguine: 1d100
Choleric: 1d100
Melancholic: 1d100
Phlegmatic: 1d100
Name: 1d100/ ha I'm just kidding you actually get to pick this instead of rolling randomly.
Birthday: This, however, is rolled randomly. Month 1d20 (reroll until you get 1-13) / Day [(1d12+1d20) -1] / Year [5100 - age]
Birth Status: 1d100/2 results. 1/5 chance you're a bastard child.
Social Class: 1d100/5 outcomes based on race.
Birthplace: 1d100, 2-5 outcomes based on race/social class.
Siblings: 1d100/6 outcomes.
Marital Status: 1d100/5 outcomes, or 4 outcomes if you're gay. Specifically, gay people can be married, but not happily married.
Sexuality: 1d100/5 results. I think their statistics are solid here, although I would hazard a guess that the mechanic where a girl's cup size affects her odds of being one sexuality vs another is probably not based on much scientific data.
Female Debauchery: 1d100/20 results.
Male Debauchery: 1d100/18 results. I'm not sure if it's sexist "women aren't into porn" or just self-awareness that guys are in general more likely to be down for a given thing than girls are. At the very least I don't suspect the FATAL designers of having conducted much research on this topic.


That's 63 rolls at minimum for any given character. You'll be rolling 502d10+2d20+1d12, at minimum. If you actually own a d100, you can cut the number of d10 rolls in half!

Here's a FATAL chargen simulator: roll d10s until your wrist ****ing falls off. Write down all the numbers, and then consult the 60+ charts you just rolled on to find out what half-dozen stats that roll affected.

And it's boring. You basically don't choose anything during chargen. You roll everything about your body randomly. You roll your personality randomly. You roll your goddamn birthday randomly. And basically everything could be ignored in favor of just rolling your stats, like a normal game works, and choosing everything else. But no. FATAL has to make chargen a series of boring easy math problems with a liberal sprinkling of *****. And the combat/magic/legal systems are equally long and boring and 'god why are we rolling so much it doesn't even ****ing matter'.

FATAL is the RPG equivalent of a shock-comic where every punchline is "and then I **** my pants". FATAL is the RPG equivalent of a horror movie that's "oops all jump scares". If you take out the shock value, if you're not grossed out or offended or shocked, there's nothing else you're gonna get out of this. If you came for the rape or whatever, if that's your thing, there are other systems that deliver better without wasting so much of your time rolling dice for +/-0.01% difference in result. You can whip up a naked 5e barbarian in just a few minutes and start pillaging away, you don't need all this nonsense.

You forgot a bit.
I was going to bring up hymen resistance, but when I double checked that's apparently optional.
Depending on your age roll you might have to randomly roll your profession, another d1000 roll but only if you've hit the 'puberty' age category.
And I'm not sure if Racial Hatred counts, it's optional to roll at character creation but you have to roll it immediately upon meeting a member of that race. So you might have to roll it immediately upon the start of the game, depending on what other players rolled for their race. Hope nobody rolls a troll, they'll probably hate everybody.
Randomly determine the number of skill points you have, which varies by race and age category, from d4-1 to d12-1, per year of your age. Oh, and d100% of skill points must go towards 'occupational' skills.
Oh, arguably roll (Occupation Level-1)d10 for more occupational skill points.
Starting funds must be rolled based on social class, but this is fairly normal.

Yes, the book is so poorly written it's hard to tell what rolls are required.

[Vahnavoi]

I think a lot of this is a type mismatch situation. While I generally feel that Dungeon World is one of the weaker PbtA games out there, the game's explicit goal is to replicate the feel of OD&D while giving a lot more control over worldbuilding and narrative to the players.

Well see, this here is a clear case of their explicit goal being self-contradictory rubbish.

Because OD&D and B/X are hidden map games and that is important part of the feel. You cannot have a functional hidden map game where the player exploring the map is also inventing it.

EDIT: to explain a bit more, I play a lot of Old School games (primarily Lamentations of the Flame Princess), but I also play a lot of freeform. And players in freeform, when they want to do a dungeon crawl, tend to naturally and easily agree on one player playing the environment while they focus on their character, similar to conventional split between players and a GM. Where Dungeon World gets in the way of such division of labor, it is worse at capturing feel of OD&D than freeform.

[Friv]

Well see, this here is a clear case of their explicit goal being self-contradictory rubbish.

Because OD&D and B/X are hidden map games and that is important part of the feel. You cannot have a functional hidden map game where the player exploring the map is also inventing it.
You're not wrong.

Dungeon World attempts to replicate the emotional feeling of a hidden-map game, through its use of Discern Realities and the ability of the GM to make hard moves in response to the players taking insufficient care when exploring areas. You can run a pretty fun dungeon crawl in it. However, because the dungeon essentially develops traps and problems in response to the players' actions, it is not replicating the effective tactical feeling of a hidden-map game. The map is being hidden not just from the players, but from the GM.

Similarly, the classes in Dungeon World decided to hew to Linear Fighter, Quadratic Wizard, which is a huge mistake in a game with narrative consequences for bad rolls. The wizard and cleric get substantially more ways to interact with failure than the other classes as they gain levels, which makes failure less risky and messes with the game's core mechanics in a way that I don't think the original designers intended.

I've played some fun Dungeon World games, but usually we do this by not playing it as D&D, and instead playing it as a more generic heroic fantasy game.

[Yora]

I think the problems of Dungeon World already begin with the fact that its whole concept is to take a core mechanic, that is designed to create an experience completely different from D&D dungeon crawling, to replicate D&D dungeon crawling. It's defeating it's own purpose.

[DrMartin]

You forgot a bit.
[speaking of FATAL]

Yes, the book is so poorly written it's hard to tell what rolls are required.

The pdf to the second edition is almost a 1000 pages, let´s not forget. Of those, 200 are spells, and there are no stats for monsters - except for a set of 10 arrays of stats for each race, apparently randomly generated, which if anything tell us that the assumption is that NPCs are created with the same process as PCs, so good luck with that.

Also, the character sheet is 10 pages long (if you are not a spellcaster), half of it to track about 500 individual skills. The clear stand out has to be the skill Urinating, which is based on your Health and Hand-Eye-Coordination stats, which makes it a thing for which one has to roll (and so, possibly, fail at it).

[DrMartin]

I think the problems of Dungeon World already begin with the fact that its whole concept is to take a core mechanic, that is designed to create an experience completely different from D&D dungeon crawling, to replicate D&D dungeon crawling. It's defeating it's own purpose.

I agree - one thing that helps immensely with that are the "dungeons as monsters" rules from the Planarc Codex. A dungeon gets then represented by a set of instincts, moves, and damage sources. You can make a map of it if you want but is really more about the atmosphere it presents, its risks and rewards - as a monster is more a challenge to be overcome, avoided and/or interacted with, then a location to be explored like in classic OD&D - which is a better fit for the game style that dungeon world encourages.

[Anonymouswizard]

The pdf to the second edition is almost a 1000 pages, let´s not forget. Of those, 200 are spells, and there are no stats for monsters - except for a set of 10 arrays of stats for each race, apparently randomly generated, which if anything tell us that the assumption is that NPCs are created with the same process as PCs, so good luck with that.

Oh, I wasn't forgetting, I was pointing out that another sin is that you have to come through the book to determine what to roll in character creation, which is already a sin for a 50 page book let alone a 977 page one. Should we realy be shocked at any aspect of FATAL's bad design?


Also, the character sheet is 10 pages long (if you are not a spellcaster), half of it to track about 500 individual skills. The clear stand out has to be the skill Urinating, which is based on your Health and Hand-Eye-Coordination stats, which makes it a thing for which one has to roll (and so, possibly, fail at it).

Don't forget that one of the 28 Divination skills lets you use it to predict the future.

Yeah, I'm going to stick to Gyromancy.

[Telok]

4e was my introduction to roleplaying games in a couple campaigns that burnt out very quickly, so I actually have a pretty positive memory of 4e because I had nothing to compare it to and the campaigns died too quickly for me to get tired of any part of the system! :smallbiggrin:

For us the final end was that at level 10 the combats (like 5 pcs vs 4 gnolls and 4 large heyenas) were taking 4+ hours, character generation and level-up were hideous torture without the online tools subscription, and half the group didn't like any of the paragon paths available to them. My turns took less than a minute because I never had more than 4 easy decisions. I was literally reading Machiavelli between my turns because of the boredom.

There were other issues, math breaking at some points, etc. But the sloggy combat was the biggest issue.

[Duff]

Rolemaster. You mean Rollmaster

[Duff]

Well, now that raises a question: should an RPG be considered bad if it concerns a subject that you find personally offensive, regardless of whether the system works well or not?

There are plenty of systems out there that I am not interested in playing because they cover subjects I am not interested in. Does that mean they are bad systems?

If playing enjoying a game says you are a bad person, then the subject matter is making the game bad.

[Luccan]

The pdf to the second edition is almost a 1000 pages, let´s not forget. Of those, 200 are spells, and there are no stats for monsters - except for a set of 10 arrays of stats for each race, apparently randomly generated, which if anything tell us that the assumption is that NPCs are created with the same process as PCs, so good luck with that.

Also, the character sheet is 10 pages long (if you are not a spellcaster), half of it to track about 500 individual skills. The clear stand out has to be the skill Urinating, which is based on your Health and Hand-Eye-Coordination stats, which makes it a thing for which one has to roll (and so, possibly, fail at it).

Is FATAL supposed to be a joke? A horrible, racist, sexist joke? Because setting aside the poor mechanical implementation, plenty of dead serious designers have made crappy mechanics, that such a skill exists sounds like it's taking the piss* out of RPGs more than trying to be one. Like if an Onion ripoff was trying to do D&D jokes but the writer didn't actually know anything about the game.

*I will never apologize for that pun

[Anonymouswizard]

Is FATAL supposed to be a joke? A horrible, racist, sexist joke? Because setting aside the poor mechanical implementation, plenty of dead serious designers have made crappy mechanics, that such a skill exists sounds like it's taking the piss out of RPGs more than trying to be one. Like if an Onion ripoff was trying to do D&D jokes but the writer didn't actually know anything about the game.

*There shall be no repentance for removing this section from the quote.

Sadly I think most of the RPG.net threads are gone, although their rebuttal to the review is still around. That's what convinces me that it was sincere, the arguments of the writers sound exactly like those of game developers who played second edition AD&D and GURPS and decided that they now knew how to make the perfect RPG. Oh, and apparently the primary author had an ex-model chemist girlfriend (yeah, that was a claim).

Plus, you know, a 977 page rulebook. If I was making a troll game I'd have stopped at maybe 300 pages. More likely I'd have got bored before 100 sides of A4.

The fact is that there's been research put into some weird areas of the game. Like a few bizarre details they got right but not completely, or occasionally the mechanics work together to cause interesting effects (growing out of allergies, for example). It really feels like a fantasy heartbreaker with a lot of overcomplicating and far too much focus on private cuddles of various kinds. To the point where the optional combat strategy involves using the Wrestling rules to cuddle. There's authenticity here, the rules are too unintentionally bad for me to believe it wasn't real.

[Duff]

kid anankin has some mechanics, and pilot.

"Some mechanics" He built a winning podracer from scratch out of stuff he could, as a slave, beg borrow, barter or steal. Then he beat professional pilots on his first race. More than a little bit of piloting as well

also


Well, now that raises a question: should an RPG be considered bad if it concerns a subject that you find personally offensive, regardless of whether the system works well or not?

There are plenty of systems out there that I am not interested in playing because they cover subjects I am not interested in. Does that mean they are bad systems?

If playing enjoying a game says you are a bad person, then the subject matter is making the game bad.

[Luccan]

Sadly I think most of the RPG.net threads are gone, although their rebuttal to the review is still around. That's what convinces me that it was sincere, the arguments of the writers sound exactly like those of game developers who played second edition AD&D and GURPS and decided that they now knew how to make the perfect RPG. Oh, and apparently the primary author had an ex-model chemist girlfriend (yeah, that was a claim).

Plus, you know, a 977 page rulebook. If I was making a troll game I'd have stopped at maybe 300 pages. More likely I'd have got bored before 100 sides of A4.

The fact is that there's been research put into some weird areas of the game. Like a few bizarre details they got right but not completely, or occasionally the mechanics work together to cause interesting effects (growing out of allergies, for example). It really feels like a fantasy heartbreaker with a lot of overcomplicating and far too much focus on private cuddles of various kinds. To the point where the optional combat strategy involves using the Wrestling rules to cuddle. There's authenticity here, the rules are too unintentionally bad for me to believe it wasn't real.

I feel a strange mixture of pity and defeat. But that's a good point. You'd have to be dead serious to write that much.

[Duff]

I don't see what else you could call a game with races, classes, levels, a d20 task resolution system, fighters, clerics and wizards.

From memory, TORG. But you probably shouldn't

[Luccan]

I don't see what else you could call a game with races, classes, levels, a d20 task resolution system, fighters, clerics and wizards.

Assuming the system works (and there seems to be debate over whether it does in this thread) the last three are totally unnecessary beyond describing particular mechanical packages and the first can be replaced or ignored. A d20 system with classes and levels will naturally seem derivative of D&D but if the overall fluff is for, say, a space opera type game with Planetary Backgrounds instead of race and the class system is Spacers, Scientists, Techies, and Marines, it wouldn't exactly scream "D&D" (particularly with the way class abilities worked). Had WotC released such a game it may well have succeeded as a beloved niche tactical game as opposed to being ill-regarded by most previous fans of D&D. Or it would have failed hard. But it would've done so on its own merits.

[Duff]

Somehow I feel that all the RPGs that were really popular in the late 90s and early 2000s were all beloved only for their setting but had really bad rules.

Dungeons & Dragons, World of Darkness, Exalted, Shadowrun, Legend of the Five Rings, Call of Cthulhu, and DSA in Germany. I've never encountered a single person who made any claims that any of these had a great system.
(There was of course also GURPS, which lived entirely on the merits as a system and was at least popular enough to be a name people know and recognize.)

Feng Shui might be the exception that proves the rule. I may be prejudiced by the fun I had with the characters, the stories and the groups, and we all knew our way around a rulebook.
But it seemed to have enough crunch to make choices in combat meaningful while explicitly encouraging "rule of cool" hijinks. Battles stayed fun right through.
The setting was interesting, had a nice mix of "makes sense" and "weird and wonderful"

D&D – BECMI ->4th ed
D20 Modern (spies setting)
The d20 Starwars game
Pathfinder
Traveler (2-3 editions, but I don’t remember which. One was the one where your character may not survive creation – probably 1st ed?)
Ringworld, carwars, Bunnies and Burrows and fantasy by Gurps
TORG
Mechwarrior
Ars Magica
Dragonquest . I ran it for years and I’d scrounged the internet for house rules, combined editions and flat out made up rules enough that in the end it was called Duffquest by my players
Stormbringer
Call of Cthulu
Pendragon
Runequest
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
Darksword RPG
Twilight 2000
Tunnels and Trolls
Dark Conspiracy
Delta Green
Toon
Paranoia
Tales of the floating Vagabond
Hunter planet
Teenagers from Outer Space
Castle Falkenstein
Feng Shui
Inominae
Buffy the vampire slayer
Firefly
Witchcraft
Ironclaw
Victoriana
C’Punk
Shadowrun
Rolemaster (rollmaster) and it’s ancestor MERP -
and it is really hard to get an authentic Fellowship experience (except Boromir, you can do a very convincing Boromir, just not quite so far into the book).
Vampire/mage/changeling/werewolf – modern and dark ages. And LARP
Dr Who RPG
Game of Thrones
Killer
SLA
Over the edge
A superhero one with a very Marvel-y feel., but I can’t remember the name

[Ignimortis]

Actually, now that I'm also seeing 5E and PF2, I have to conclude that 3.x (in which I'm including PF1) was the aberrant edition, making possible a playstyle that the designers never really intended and that they later 'fixed'. Too bad, since I do like it, but it doesn't seem to be a popular one, judging by the lack of new games pursuing it.

I have this feeling as well. PF2e attempts to match 3.5/PF1e at higher levels, but it steps on basically all of the landmines 4e did, including trying way too hard to balance everything. 5e is literally 3.5's first seven levels stretched over 20, except when it comes to magic, which still gets the big guns of Wish and such (though nerfed somewhat, but still setting-breakingly powerful).


@Friv: The problem you describe is largely caused by the attitude that games in established settings are fanfiction, and implicitly bad fanfiction. In practice, this means the game's designers think the "canonical" characters are just way too cool for players to be allowed to play them or anything like them.

This attitude doesn't originate from the RPG hobby nor is it restricted to it, but it has been present in the hobby since very earliest days when Gygax (Ernie or Gary, I forgot which) statted Conan as this impossibly cool multiclass character that'd be nearly or completely impossible to achieve through actual play.

Oh yes. I've never seen a game which would allow you to play an actual protagonist from standard chargen or whatever is assumed to be the standard chargen. God forbid you can build Adam Jensen or Major from GitS in a cyberpunk game by default, or even come close to Dracula in VtM.


Aside from truly disfunctional and gross games, the "worst" game I´ve played are the ones where the system doesn´t encourage, or actively opposes, the kind of stories the game is supposed to tell.

My personal cake goes to the old vampire: the masquerade - a game that should be about personal stories of troubled people that have to deal with being turned into monsters and how they manage to cling to what shreds still stands of their humanity - and sets off to do it with a humanity stat, which is essentially just a second set of health for your conscience. You lose Humanity when you do something horrible, when you get to 0, you become an NPC.

My personal problem with Humanity is that it's, basically, an anti-game mechanic. You want players to be proactive, to go out there and do things, and the world being WoD, this is going to involve violence and unsavoury acts like theft and at least some form mind control, and the best way to preserve Humanity is to sit home, sipping a blood bag, and watch some sitcoms, never doing anything worth noticing. So it's either an XP sink (which is very odd, since you don't get a lot of XP anyway), or just a countdown to when your active actions lower your Humanity enough for the Beast to take over often enough that it has a chance of lowering it even further. It's a morality death spiral.


Somehow I feel that all the RPGs that were really popular in the late 90s and early 2000s were all beloved only for their setting but had really bad rules.

Dungeons & Dragons, World of Darkness, Exalted, Shadowrun, Legend of the Five Rings, Call of Cthulhu, and DSA in Germany. I've never encountered a single person who made any claims that any of these had a great system.
(There was of course also GURPS, which lived entirely on the merits as a system and was at least popular enough to be a name people know and recognize.)

Most of these went through a major rewrite in the early 2000s.

D&D and Shadowrun definitely improved a lot in their 3rd and 4th editions respectively, even if in hindsight, they made a lot of mistakes. Personally, I still would insist that D&D 3.5 was the peak of what D&D ever achieved. It could use a real cleanup and retooling (not like Pathfinder), but the foundation is still more solid than any other edition. Same with Shadowrun, really - 4e and 5e have their issues, but if the publisher actually cared and took the time to keep the good and throw out the bad, they could be great (sadly, they don't, which is why 6e exists).
World of Darkness was built on a somewhat faulty foundation (basic premise is that you eventually fail, and the dice system is messy), and NWoD was met with mixed reception because most WoD players did actually keep playing for the setting and just wallpapered over all the bad rules — even though Requiem, by 2e, had better rules (if, perhaps, not good ones).
Exalted didn't get the memo until the 2010s, but 3e seems (I've only read the rulebooks) rather more passable than 2e.
Never touched those other ones, though I've heard that one of the latest Lot5R editions (4e or 5e?) is alright mechanically, and keeps the ludonarrative sync well.


Frankly, I do believe that games did actually evolve and become better in the 2000s. However, 2010s took the simplification bait, and I haven't seen a game where it's done well enough to keep the game deep enough for repeated campaigns. D&D 5e is a poor man's 3.5 with some fixes and 90% problems unsolved, Shadowrun 6e is a mess, V5 turned the setting on its' head again and the mechanics are questionable, and I don't know how others have fared.

[NichG]

The worst system at least by my particular tastes that I've actually played and not just heard of or theory-crafted? In terms of how the system felt to play independent of the campaign it was attached to?

Probably FATE actually... I tend to want to take the fluff of the game seriously 'as if it were crunch', and FATE has a universal mechanic that tends to render things and their consequences into generic stacking numbers on a die roll at the moment that they get tagged, unless the GM is really pushing hard against that tendency of the system. It was a oneshot with a good GM so it wasn't by any means my worst gaming experience, but it was probably the gaming experience I had where the system's contribution felt the most detrimental.

For context, other systems I've played would be AD&D, 3.5ed D&D, BESM, a few all-systems World of Darkness crossovers, 7th Sea, L5R, Nobilis, Paranoia, Elder Scrolls RPG (a problematic system, but quirky at least!), Cypher System (specifically The Strange), Call of Cthulhu, a few sessions of MERP, a GURPS one-shot, a Savage Worlds oneshot (if I remember correctly), a single session of 4ed D&D, and a bunch of different homebrew things.

[Velaryon]

Star Wars

There were two kinds. I don't remember what the version names are. The first one I had to lose hit points to use Force Powers. I was literally killing myself being a Jedi. Even the DM saw how dumb it was. He let me have max hit points just so I could do Jedi things.

That sounds like the old d20 Star Wars (not Saga Edition, the one before it). Force users burning health to use Force powers was one of many problems that system had. Other big problems included:

Most Force powers were skills, meaning Jedi were always starved for skill points, had to pick just a couple Force powers to be competent at, and had few if any skill points to spare for any non-Force skills
The blaster deflecting rules only allowed you to deflect shots that missed you anyway, and even then only if the attack roll was within a few points of your Defense (i.e. if you have a Defense of 18 you can only deflect shots that rolled between a 14-17 for the attack roll, or something like that)
The game used a Vitality/Wounds system of two pools of HP, one to represent fatigue and one to represent actual damage. Critical hits bypassing vitality and went straight to wounds, meaning that crits were very lethal.
Jedi got bonus dice to lightsaber damage, which no other classes got, making them A) far and away the best weapons, and B) pretty guaranteed to kill absolutely anything on a critical hit
Class balance was horrible, with several classes being completely worthless (Fringer) or only good for 3-4 levels (Tech Specialist, arguably Scoundrel)
all non-Jedi/Sith Force users got lumped into the decidedly subpar Force Adept class


My friends and I actually had some really fun games with that system, but we had to house-rule the hell out of it to make it playable. Saga Edition was a massive improvement in pretty much every single way.

[Batcathat]

Jedi got bonus dice to lightsaber damage, which no other classes got, making them A) far and away the best weapons, and B) pretty guaranteed to kill absolutely anything on a critical hit


To be fair, these two are at least pretty accurate to the movies even if it can't be great for game balance.

[Delta]

To be fair, these two are at least pretty accurate to the movies even if it can't be great for game balance.

I think that sums up a huge problem of making a Star Wars game. If we go by the canon, fully trained Jedi are simply so ridiculously overpowered it becomes hard balancing other non force using characters against them. The FFG systems try to do that by basically starting Force Users at a veeeeeeery low level, which of course leads to the other problems being discussed here, that playing a Force User in these systems does not feel like what you expect a Jedi to be.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I think that sums up a huge problem of making a Star Wars game. If we go by the canon, fully trained Jedi are simply so ridiculously overpowered it becomes hard balancing other non force using characters against them. The FFG systems try to do that by basically starting Force Users at a veeeeeeery low level, which of course leads to the other problems being discussed here, that playing a Force User in these systems does not feel like what you expect a Jedi to be.

It's not, I think, just Star Wars. It's a major difficulty in adapting any movie or book IP into a game. Movies and books don't have to worry about balance at all, and tend to have substantial imbalance between characters--not always physical capabilities, but you've got your Protagonists/Antagonists who are the focus and who have, if nothing else, the plot armor. Making good games out of those IPs tend to mean that you can't really emulate the fiction, because authored fiction and TTRPGs require different handling, different takes on tropes, and different takes on character design.

[Delta]

Fair enough, it's just that Star Wars seems to be a very obvious case of this since the Jedi are just so far beyond anyone else, and the most prominent "character class" the setting is known for at the same time.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Fair enough, it's just that Star Wars seems to be a very obvious case of this since the Jedi are just so far beyond anyone else, and the most prominent "character class" the setting is known for at the same time.

That I can definitely agree with. A wheel of time game set in the later books would have similar issues with channelers.

[Faily]

I think some of the things to keep in mind for the FFG Star Wars is that:

the main-body of the game is set in the Rebellion era (everything between episode 3 and 4, and up to episode 6 and the period after). Hence why Force Users are much more low-tier than the Jedi seen in the prequels, because the Force Emergent, Force Exile, and careers in Force & Destiny are meant to represent people who had minimal to no training with the Force but figured out how to do things on their own. We have a change to this with the introduction of the Jedi career in the Clone Wars books (Rise of the Separatists, Collapse of the Republic, Dawn of Rebellion), which also introduced the Clone Trooper career, and a Universal spec for Death Watch Warrior (and if anyone wanted to recreate The Mandalorian, that would for sure be a spec to take).

characters in the movies are not nescessarily starting characters. Kid Anakin is, imo, clearly an NPC with extra abilities because the GM has appointed him to a Macguffin/Chosen One role (and gets to be a PC in episode 2 and 3, then is back to NPC in the original trilogy). Luke is probably the only one I'd say is arguably a starting character in that he hasn't done anything before his appearance in A New Hope, and I think that his feats in ANH is pretty much in line with what I'd expect from characters that are 1) doing cooperative rolls and 2) players that are frequently using Destiny to upgrade their dicepool or having narrative control of the scene.


FFG certainly leaned hard towards trying to balance Force-characters with regular characters (and Force-characters still come out on top in many ways, depending on how they specialize), because tbh, it was never balanced well in any previous games (WEG Force rules were horribly unbalanced and the game was much better off without any Force users at all, d20 crippled Force users by making them spend HP to use their powers and putting it on the skillpoints-system while making lightsabers ultra-deadly, and Saga just put it to one skill making it a non-brainer to max out).

Having played my fair share of FFG Star Wars the past years, I'd say that the trick to building characters similarly to what we see in the movies is that you don't always need spectacular characteristics. You don't *have* to have Presence, Willpower, and/or Cunning 4 to be something like Princess Leia. Talents that downgrade difficulties for certain rolls, high skills, gear, use of Destiny, Talents that upgrade your own dicepool or add successes/Triumphs/advantages/Boosts, etc... there's so much more to building up a character that isn't only hinging on their characteristics.

[Delta]

I fully agree with all of that. If you want to run an FFG Star Wars with full fledged Jedi, the game does give you the tools necessary to do that, you just need to start with a bunch of XP.

Now, the starting point is a bit on the lower side but otoh, I've found that it's quite possible to play a character in EotE who is pretty competent in their field of expertise, with the Force being the one exception, and that's a compromise that I can fully understand from a balance perspective. I definitely wouldn't list those games anywhere close to the "worst" I've ever played, for sure.

[Pauly]

That sounds like the old d20 Star Wars (not Saga Edition, the one before it). Force users burning health to use Force powers was one of many problems that system had. Other big problems included:

Most Force powers were skills, meaning Jedi were always starved for skill points, had to pick just a couple Force powers to be competent at, and had few if any skill points to spare for any non-Force skills
The blaster deflecting rules only allowed you to deflect shots that missed you anyway, and even then only if the attack roll was within a few points of your Defense (i.e. if you have a Defense of 18 you can only deflect shots that rolled between a 14-17 for the attack roll, or something like that)
The game used a Vitality/Wounds system of two pools of HP, one to represent fatigue and one to represent actual damage. Critical hits bypassing vitality and went straight to wounds, meaning that crits were very lethal.
Jedi got bonus dice to lightsaber damage, which no other classes got, making them A) far and away the best weapons, and B) pretty guaranteed to kill absolutely anything on a critical hit
Class balance was horrible, with several classes being completely worthless (Fringer) or only good for 3-4 levels (Tech Specialist, arguably Scoundrel)
all non-Jedi/Sith Force users got lumped into the decidedly subpar Force Adept class


My friends and I actually had some really fun games with that system, but we had to house-rule the hell out of it to make it playable. Saga Edition was a massive improvement in pretty much every single way.

I had some fun times playing that system. However we played in a non-jedi environment because as a group we agreed the Force users rules were hopelessly bonkers.

[Cluedrew]

I'm just going to stick to my least favourite systems that I have played.

Do we include the early drafts of the systems I was working on myself? Then those, especially the ones where I was trying to build new dice mechanics. If we don't count those than D&D 3.5. 4e and 5e lie on separate sides of that perfect awkward middle but aren't far behind in creating braindead slugfest combats (OK maybe not quite that bad) which keep me from getting to the interesting stuff which I pretty much do without any help from the system. Give me freeform over this.

And I've played systems with far more mechanical problems but nothing that just took up so much time.

[AvatarVecna]

I feel like the Inheritance Cycle is represented well enough by truenaming: the magic system sucks pretty hard unless you've got a high-HD dragon friend doing the heavy lifting for you. :smalltongue:

[Luccan]

I feel like the Inheritance Cycle is represented well enough by truenaming: the magic system sucks pretty hard unless you've got a high-HD dragon friend doing the heavy lifting for you. :smalltongue:

At least Truenamers respect the action economy

[zarionofarabel]

It's not, I think, just Star Wars. It's a major difficulty in adapting any movie or book IP into a game. Movies and books don't have to worry about balance at all, and tend to have substantial imbalance between characters--not always physical capabilities, but you've got your Protagonists/Antagonists who are the focus and who have, if nothing else, the plot armor. Making good games out of those IPs tend to mean that you can't really emulate the fiction, because authored fiction and TTRPGs require different handling, different takes on tropes, and different takes on character design.
I disagree, with conditions. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying did a fantastic job of allowing me to emulate the IP it is using. However, my experience with the system is limited, and the level of abstraction required probably doesn't suit most people. That being said, it is IMHO the best supers system I have encountered because it really did allow me to run earth shaking characters in the same group as mundane ones without relegating the mundane ones to supporting roles.

[Morty]

World of Darkness was built on a somewhat faulty foundation (basic premise is that you eventually fail, and the dice system is messy), and NWoD was met with mixed reception because most WoD players did actually keep playing for the setting and just wallpapered over all the bad rules — even though Requiem, by 2e, had better rules (if, perhaps, not good ones).

I've certainly never regretted jumping onto nWoD without ever looking back at the old WoD. I even managed to avoid the whole V5 drama this way. A win-win, really.


Fair enough, it's just that Star Wars seems to be a very obvious case of this since the Jedi are just so far beyond anyone else, and the most prominent "character class" the setting is known for at the same time.

It would be easier if Star Wars had more Force-users who aren't two groups of warrior-monks with differently-colored robes and lightsabers. I do agree that judging SW RPGs in terms of emulating the movies isn't the right way to go about it.

[NigelWalmsley]

Oh yes. I've never seen a game which would allow you to play an actual protagonist from standard chargen or whatever is assumed to be the standard chargen. God forbid you can build Adam Jensen or Major from GitS in a cyberpunk game by default, or even come close to Dracula in VtM.

Adam Jensen starts out with most of his cyberware disabled in the game. Before you start unlocking upgrades, you're basically a dude who is slightly tough and can gank people in melee. Insofar as there's an issue with doing that in Shadowrun it's that the game isn't kind to melee combatants, not that it's particularly a larger level of badass than you are supposed to be as a starting character. Vampire's problems with letting you play vampires you care about are about are well known.


My personal problem with Humanity is that it's, basically, an anti-game mechanic.

Humanity is emblematic of the difference between the game people writing Vampire (and WoD in general) want you to play and the game people playing those games want to play. White Wolf wants you to sit around lamenting your inhumanity and generally goth-ing it up. But the vampire stories people actually like are things like Angel, where vampires get to run around kicking people's asses. The unwillingness to square that circle (and the fact that the mechanics are just awful) is the reason I have no real interest in playing WoD. There was a fan remake I saw called I think "After Sundown" that seemed pretty compelling, but I've never been able to convince people to try it.


It could use a real cleanup and retooling (not like Pathfinder), but the foundation is still more solid than any other edition.

Yeah. Which always made the decision to radically redesign the game for 4e baffling to me. People in 2007 did not want a radical redesign of D&D. It wasn't even a question of 4e being bad (though it was bad), it was that people wanted the game to iterate on the ideas people liked in 3e, not throw everything out with the bathwater. Pathfinder had the opposite problem of not really fixing anything and mostly just moving numbers around (which is why I never really got into it).


Same with Shadowrun, really - 4e and 5e have their issues, but if the publisher actually cared and took the time to keep the good and throw out the bad, they could be great (sadly, they don't, which is why 6e exists).

Didn't the company making Shadowrun go through some massive embezzlement scandal that lead to writers not getting paid and the talented people leaving? I feel like I remember hearing about that, and it would support my thesis that the reason RPG rules are bad is that RPG companies don't make enough money to retain to talent.

[Delta]

Humanity is emblematic of the difference between the game people writing Vampire (and WoD in general) want you to play and the game people playing those games want to play. White Wolf wants you to sit around lamenting your inhumanity and generally goth-ing it up. But the vampire stories people actually like are things like Angel, where vampires get to run around kicking people's asses. The unwillingness to square that circle (and the fact that the mechanics are just awful) is the reason I have no real interest in playing WoD. There was a fan remake I saw called I think "After Sundown" that seemed pretty compelling, but I've never been able to convince people to try it.

It's even worse than that since it seems even the people writing the game were split about what kind of game they wanted to make. While indeed, the core book is a very low powered game about personal horror and trying to preserve your humanity in an eventually hopeless fight against your inner beast, a lot of the books that came after where pretty much "superheroes with fangs fighting conspiracies in the night". The simplest example are clan books filled with discipline powers for levels 6+, which, by definition, the "default style" PCs of Camarilla vampires cannot ever realistically have.

Like, if you fill every book with cool superpowers you shouldn't be surprised that people want to play characters using those powers.


Didn't the company making Shadowrun go through some massive embezzlement scandal that lead to writers not getting paid and the talented people leaving? I feel like I remember hearing about that, and it would support my thesis that the reason RPG rules are bad is that RPG companies don't make enough money to retain to talent.

Yeah, the boss of CGL allegedly took over a million dollars from the company and had people build an extension to his house on company money. This stuff never got to court or anything so no one really knows what was really true or not but a lot of people left CGL on really bad terms back then, CGL publically acknowledged that some shady stuff had gone down and then of course made sure there were consequences for all invol-... um, yeah, they basically said "oopsie, yeah we screwed up. We'll do better from now on, promise." and that was it so that left a lot of people very unhappy.

[Anonymouswizard]

I think part of the reason Requiem 2e works is because it delves into the superheroes with fangs aspects more, and that was something the designers wanted. Humanity is less restrictive, vampires are tougher by default, Disciplines got a boost (but mostly the lower powered ones), Blood Potency gives the ability to spend more vitae much faster, and combat was moved further away from rocket tag. Heck most of the splats got a boost in 2e, although a vampire or changeling should still run from an Uratha.

[Faily]

I fully agree with all of that. If you want to run an FFG Star Wars with full fledged Jedi, the game does give you the tools necessary to do that, you just need to start with a bunch of XP.

Now, the starting point is a bit on the lower side but otoh, I've found that it's quite possible to play a character in EotE who is pretty competent in their field of expertise, with the Force being the one exception, and that's a compromise that I can fully understand from a balance perspective. I definitely wouldn't list those games anywhere close to the "worst" I've ever played, for sure.


Yeah, it does need more XP to hit the level of full-fledged jedi. Force & Destiny I think introduces the Knight Level Play, iirc, which is giving characters 150-200XP to be jedi that have successfully completed their training and become knights. From the characters I've seen on that XP level, you can accomplish some pretty badass builds with that.

Also agreed that they start a bit on the lower side, but likewise I've had pretty competent starting-level characters. :smallsmile: If FFG Star Wars is the "worst" game someone's played, I guess I will say they've been pretty lucky to avoid some really terrible games. :smallbiggrin:

[NigelWalmsley]

Like, if you fill every book with cool superpowers you shouldn't be surprised that people want to play characters using those powers.

I dunno. The impression I got from the transition to nWoD was that their reaction to how people used the content they printed was a mixture of "you're doing it wrong!" and *shocked pikachu*. Also, things like "awesome powers PCs never get" aren't really so much "power creep" as "ways for the DM to play out his power fantasy". You may not be able to get six-dot powers, but NPCs sure can, and the Storyteller is going to use that to tell the story of you getting smacked around by clan elders.


Yeah, the boss of CGL allegedly took over a million dollars from the company and had people build an extension to his house on company money. This stuff never got to court or anything so no one really knows what was really true or not but a lot of people left CGL on really bad terms back then, CGL publically acknowledged that some shady stuff had gone down and then of course made sure there were consequences for all invol-... um, yeah, they basically said "oopsie, yeah we screwed up. We'll do better from now on, promise." and that was it so that left a lot of people very unhappy.

Yeah, that sounds like exactly what I remember. And people wonder why Shadowrun 5e and 6e were a step down from 4e. It turns out, if you stiff your writers, talented people stop working for you. I mean, who could have guessed?

[Jason]

Sadly I think most of the RPG.net threads are gone, although their rebuttal to the review is still around. That's what convinces me that it was sincere, the arguments of the writers sound exactly like those of game developers who played second edition AD&D and GURPS and decided that they now knew how to make the perfect RPG. Oh, and apparently the primary author had an ex-model chemist girlfriend (yeah, that was a claim).
I admit, I've only heard if it, and I won't be downloading it, but wouldn't arguments of how great it is when it was first released, complete with the old "Canadian girlfriend" gamer stereotype be part of the joke/troll?


Plus, you know, a 977 page rulebook. If I was making a troll game I'd have stopped at maybe 300 pages. More likely I'd have got bored before 100 sides of A4.Some people are willing to put a lot of effort into their jokes. Alternately, it might have started as a serious project to which the parody elements were added before release.

[Ignimortis]

Adam Jensen starts out with most of his cyberware disabled in the game. Before you start unlocking upgrades, you're basically a dude who is slightly tough and can gank people in melee. Insofar as there's an issue with doing that in Shadowrun it's that the game isn't kind to melee combatants, not that it's particularly a larger level of badass than you are supposed to be as a starting character. Vampire's problems with letting you play vampires you care about are about are well known.

Yep, but he starts with it disabled because he can't handle using all of it at once so soon, so he has to break it in somewhat. I find that Shadowrun lets you do precisely one thing that would never fly in a videogame - shrug off bullets like they're nothing, almost forever, and that's because a game needs to present a challenge in core gameplay. Everything else, Jensen, with all the videogame limitations, does better by the midpoint of HR (there are actually social augs and hacking aid augs, for starters, and breaking concrete walls in one punch is hard to achieve, and don't even start on the cloaking device that doesn't exist in Shadowrun for some reason), and I haven't even played MD to see what new stuff he gets.

But that's mostly because Shadowrun still pretends that it's not about supercriminals/superhuman mercenaries, and instead about gutterpunks who are trying to survive the harsh world of The Man, despite the rules playing out very differently.



Didn't the company making Shadowrun go through some massive embezzlement scandal that lead to writers not getting paid and the talented people leaving? I feel like I remember hearing about that, and it would support my thesis that the reason RPG rules are bad is that RPG companies don't make enough money to retain to talent.

Yep. CGL's boss, Loren Coleman, stole about a million dollars that were supposed to go to writers and editors and artists, and built a new bathroom or something with them. Nobody got punished, nobody got fired, and that's why most people who cared about Shadowrun just up and left then.

Basically, they lost all of their good talent right before WAR!, and the quality drop is immense and easily noticeable. After that debacle, CGL have been scrambling by, using freelancer work (who get paid next to nothing, as they have said themselves), and those freelancers are a small group of people who sometimes don't even know the rules or how they're supposed to interact with things they've written. And 6e outright used stolen art at least on one occasion, and some other pictures look like poorly photoshopped photos of real people.

I still am debating internally whether Shadowrun 5e or VtM V20 was the worst game I ever played and managed to have fun with. I suppose Vampire would win in the end, because the only reason it was playable was the GM who did his best to run the game in the way players would prefer, while not bending over backwards for them. I still lost at least two humanity points, but each time I felt like that was deserved.

[Tectorman]

My worst tabletop RPG experience would have to be with Iron Kingdoms, with the caveats that my only experience was as a GM and that the bulk of my issues were that I didn't know what to do or expect and didn't feel like the rulebooks gave good guidance in that regard.

I started out with D&D (3.5 and onwards), so I'm familiar with the idea of an XP budget for an encounter. I'm also familiar with the idea of mooks, regular bad guys, and boss monsters, and the key difference being how much of a grind they're meant to be (kobolds are mooks/one-shot dead, orcs are regular/few hits dead, and trolls are boss/all party members need to attack for a few turns; adjust of course for level).

But with Iron Kingdoms, I didn't know if I was doing my job right. How many bad guys do I put out at a time and how do I tell the difference between fodder and monsters with staying power? Not to mention the gameplay of how damage is resolved. It felt like (on both sides of the screen) things were too swingy; you might hit or not and the damage might be entirely mitigated or drop the recipient (not a problem for mooks, but I didn't think I was using mook bad guys). Iron Kingdoms had a decent number of feats or edges or whatever they're called to do things besides straight damage, but when there's no semi-predictable grind for bad guys to go from pristine to hurt to down, if just seems like so much wasted text.

Which is a shame because I liked a lot of what the gameplay looked like it was doing, so maybe it was a matter of execution (not that I know whose execution did thr failing).

[DrMartin]

It's not, I think, just Star Wars. It's a major difficulty in adapting any movie or book IP into a game. Movies and books don't have to worry about balance at all, and tend to have substantial imbalance between characters--not always physical capabilities, but you've got your Protagonists/Antagonists who are the focus and who have, if nothing else, the plot armor. Making good games out of those IPs tend to mean that you can't really emulate the fiction, because authored fiction and TTRPGs require different handling, different takes on tropes, and different takes on character design.

For me the poster child for this is the Hokuto no Ken RPG. It has rules for being a badass supernatural martial artist, and has you begin at the power level of more or less the village militiaman who gets killed by the bandits within the first 5 minutes of the episode.

(Weak characters from the show are in the 100 xp range, and you start with 15...and are supposed to earn 1 or 2 per session. The titular ken is just unreachable in actual play, as the system requires you to learn and improve the knowledge of each individual martial art strike as a separate skill...and he flat-out knows all of them)

[Morty]

I think part of the reason Requiem 2e works is because it delves into the superheroes with fangs aspects more, and that was something the designers wanted. Humanity is less restrictive, vampires are tougher by default, Disciplines got a boost (but mostly the lower powered ones), Blood Potency gives the ability to spend more vitae much faster, and combat was moved further away from rocket tag. Heck most of the splats got a boost in 2e, although a vampire or changeling should still run from an Uratha.

Does it really delve into it? Requiem 2E is a considerable improvement over both Masquerade and Requiem 1E, but I don't know if it supports superheroes with fangs that much more. Maybe I'm biased because my Requiem 2E games had one combat scene between them (something that might come as a shock to some people here).

[Anonymouswizard]

Does it really delve into it? Requiem 2E is a considerable improvement over both Masquerade and Requiem 1E, but I don't know if it supports superheroes with fangs that much more. Maybe I'm biased because my Requiem 2E games had one combat scene between them (something that might come as a shock to some people here).

It depends on frequency of Willpower and Vitae refreshes. It is still meant to be grim, gritty, and social focused, and for true superheroes with fangs you want to start with a good whack if XP (20; will give you enough for five more dots of Disciplines).

It doesn't go fully into it, but it didn't try to stop you anywhere near as much as earlier editions did.


The thing that annoys me about CofD/WoD is that, desire the heavy focus on social interaction, they don't bother giving any kind of system for ruining debates. But I like both systems anyway, with CtL2e being my favourite of the pack.

[Morty]

It depends on frequency of Willpower and Vitae refreshes. It is still meant to be grim, gritty, and social focused, and for true superheroes with fangs you want to start with a good whack if XP (20; will give you enough for five more dots of Disciplines).

It doesn't go fully into it, but it didn't try to stop you anywhere near as much as earlier editions did.


The thing that annoys me about CofD/WoD is that, desire the heavy focus on social interaction, they don't bother giving any kind of system for ruining debates. But I like both systems anyway, with CtL2e being my favourite of the pack.

CofD does have the social interaction system, but it's modelled for trying to get something to do what you want, often over days or weeks of interacting with them. It's difficult to have a one-size-fits-all social system, though. Exalted 3E probably does the best job of it that I've seen.

Requiem 2E does definitely beef vampires up, after 1E had massively over-corrected for Masquerade and made them pretty wimpy. But I feel like it really didn't need to make Dominate as powerful as it did; it's borderline chronicle-derailing.

[RifleAvenger]

Requiem 2E does definitely beef vampires up, after 1E had massively over-corrected for Masquerade and made them pretty wimpy.

I've never touched Vampire, but having started with nWoD, I actually miss the weaker werewolves of nWoD/CoD 1e.

I get that people coming off Apocalypse didn't want that at all. However, the game had a different vibe that I enjoyed, when you couldn't pop gauru and become nigh-invincible to anything without silver or high-level magic (or a personal bane when imbalanced to spirit). Most of the rest of the 2e changes I agree with.

On the other hand, I enjoy Mage the Awakening 2e, a game that wants players to actually use the full spell system, WAY MORE than 1e, which demanded the use of covert spells even when sleepers weren't watching, on just about every level.

[Morty]

I've never touched Vampire, but having started with nWoD, I actually miss the weaker werewolves of nWoD/CoD 1e.

I get that people coming off Apocalypse didn't want that at all. However, the game had a different vibe that I enjoyed, when you couldn't pop gauru and become nigh-invincible to anything without silver or high-level magic (or a personal bane when imbalanced to spirit). Most of the rest of the 2e changes I agree with.

On the other hand, I enjoy Mage the Awakening 2e, a game that wants players to actually use the full spell system, WAY MORE than 1e, which demanded the use of covert spells even when sleepers weren't watching, on just about every level.

I'm admittedly coming from Vampire and never tried Werewolf, but the 1E Requiem powers just didn't feel very good or fun to use. 2E gave them a punch or, to make the obvious joke, a bite. But I do see the appeal of the lower power level. While 2E/CofD is an improvement on the whole, it kind of moved towards an oWoD-style "mortals are chumps" setup and I'm not fond of that.

[Delta]

The one thing were I think nWoD in general and Requiem in particular was just better which got lost for a lot of people because their starting point of discussing anything Requiem was already at "It's not Masquerade anymore so it sucks and everything is ruined forever!" is that it acknowledged "There are different things you might want from playing vampires in a modern setting, so we made a setting that allows you to do different things with your vampires" while Masquerade was all "THIS is how we want the game to be played", while at the same time I never had the feeling even the people writing the books were ever really on the same page as to what they actually wanted to game to look like.

And having tried my hand at another online convention round of SR6 yesterday I have to stick by my earlier statement. While I'm not sure I'd classify it as "the worst RPG I've ever played", it's for sure one of the worst new editions I've ever played.

[Unavenger]

I feel like the Inheritance Cycle is represented well enough by truenaming: the magic system sucks pretty hard unless you've got a high-HD dragon friend doing the heavy lifting for you. :smalltongue:

I would point out that mages in Inheritance are actually extremely powerful, to the point that going to war without a spellcaster of some kind on your side is basically pointless.

The "You can't spend more energy than you could get from a living source except that gems can be used to store power" restriction is actually more of a benefit than a drawback against unshielded enemies, as you can just drain all of their energy into you. Even terrible spellcasters - like Eragon at the start of the first book, or the random nobodies with a smidge of magical power that Trianna keeps pulling out of gutters somewhere - are still ridiculously powerful, because all you have to do is teach them one of the twelve (I think it's twelve?) words that instantly kill someone with a tiny bit of magical power by snipping a random vein which would only take a tiny bit of energy to cut if you could actually reach it.

(Trianna's not even restricted by the limit, but it's never really explained how her magic actually works except that if she does it too much she becomes a shade - and in fact yeah, there's all the shades, who were sorcerers, and it's implied that they have basically unlimited power, meaning that Trianna (who doesn't have a dragon) is only not personally kicking butt on the battlefield because (a) Nasuada told her to do something else and (b) if she messes up she turns into a shade, and Durza (who also doesn't have a dragon) only loses to Eragon because the latter has plot armour (and also Durza has no understanding of threat assessment))

Also, the reason that Saphira, Thorn and Glaedr are all Pretty Good, Actually is that they are also spellcasters, just like riders are. Shuriken, OTOH, is Pretty Bad, Actually because he sacrificed (not by choice) spellcasting ability (and general intelligence) for bigness.

Finally, the dragons being big and strong and breathing fire isn't even as much of an edge as you might think - a nice weapon, quick reflexes, and being just a little bit better at magic than them is good enouch to kill them, which is why random elves with dauthdaertra kept on doing just that when the two were still at war.

[Velaryon]

To be fair, these two are at least pretty accurate to the movies even if it can't be great for game balance.

Did I mention that the rules for severing limbs (which may have been optional house-rules, I don't really remember anymore) relied on the relatively improbable occurrence of someone surviving a critical hit to the wound points? Something like Vader chopping off Luke's hand without killing him would have been extraordinarily unlikely given the level disparity between them (they statted Vader at level 18 and Luke at no higher than 8 during the events of ESB). I don't have my old books handy, but Vader would have been doing at least 6d8 + Str vs. Luke having at most 18 wound points, probably less.

Using the rules as written, Jedi past level 10 or so vs. literally anyone looks like Mace Windu vs. Jango Fett. Even a duel between a Jedi Master vs. a Sith Lord comes down to who gets the first nat 20 and insta-kills the opponent.



I had some fun times playing that system. However we played in a non-jedi environment because as a group we agreed the Force users rules were hopelessly bonkers.

The most fun I ever had with that game was a campaign where everyone was a Jedi so we could go hog wild with it. Also, the GM instituted several much-needed house rules, like giving characters +1 wound point per character level so that PCs had a prayer of surviving critical hits.

[Kazyan]

There are a bunch of little niche fangames where the entire draw is that you get to play in the universe of an established media franchise, and as such, they tend to skimp out heavily on the whole "make the game actually fun" part, since they assume you're supplying the fun by just seeing the franchise name.

To be more specific, this is a Star Wars post. I don't remember what the system was actually called, though.

[Telwar]

My worst tabletop RPG experience would have to be with Iron Kingdoms, with the caveats that my only experience was as a GM and that the bulk of my issues were that I didn't know what to do or expect and didn't feel like the rulebooks gave good guidance in that regard.

I started out with D&D (3.5 and onwards), so I'm familiar with the idea of an XP budget for an encounter. I'm also familiar with the idea of mooks, regular bad guys, and boss monsters, and the key difference being how much of a grind they're meant to be (kobolds are mooks/one-shot dead, orcs are regular/few hits dead, and trolls are boss/all party members need to attack for a few turns; adjust of course for level).

But with Iron Kingdoms, I didn't know if I was doing my job right. How many bad guys do I put out at a time and how do I tell the difference between fodder and monsters with staying power? Not to mention the gameplay of how damage is resolved. It felt like (on both sides of the screen) things were too swingy; you might hit or not and the damage might be entirely mitigated or drop the recipient (not a problem for mooks, but I didn't think I was using mook bad guys). Iron Kingdoms had a decent number of feats or edges or whatever they're called to do things besides straight damage, but when there's no semi-predictable grind for bad guys to go from pristine to hurt to down, if just seems like so much wasted text.

Which is a shame because I liked a lot of what the gameplay looked like it was doing, so maybe it was a matter of execution (not that I know whose execution did thr failing).

I actually enjoyed that game, but I agree with you; it did not have very much guidance for the GM at all, and the encounter building is probably best eyeballed based on party composition, which is in turn based on the party's system mastery.

The good thing is it does bounded accuracy much better than 5e, since it uses 2d6 as the base mechanic and that produces a natural curve. Like, my gobber pistoleer had meh soak but high defense, so he could usually run around shooting things without too much trouble, but if something actually connected more than once or twice I was in trouble. Otoh, our human man-at-arms took almost every hit but tanked almost all of the damage.

It also paid to realize there was a death spiral, since as your aspects fill up you suffer fairly severe penalties. It took some of our group a while to notice that. Otoh, once players could target npc aspects, that made monsters a lot easier to deal with.

It also would have really helped if there had been more non-combat stuff to use. All those spells were all focused on combat to one extent or another, would it have killed them to add out of combat utility spells and slots for those?

In the end, the GM ran out of their published materials, and decided to end the campaign and go back to 5e. And if course, the new version of the IKRPG is going to be 5e, with a Kickstarter in Q1 21. Which is appropriate, since it started with 3e.

[NigelWalmsley]

There are a bunch of little niche fangames where the entire draw is that you get to play in the universe of an established media franchise, and as such, they tend to skimp out heavily on the whole "make the game actually fun" part, since they assume you're supplying the fun by just seeing the franchise name.

Beyond that, established universes often also have problems that make them bad TTRPG settings. The needs of single-author fiction are fundamentally different from the needs of multi-author fiction, and established universes are often structured around a single story that is of finite scope. This is one of the big problems LotR games have. The story of LotR is A) complete and B) not about your characters, which makes it difficult to write a satisfying LotR game.

[Anonymouswizard]

There are a bunch of little niche fangames where the entire draw is that you get to play in the universe of an established media franchise, and as such, they tend to skimp out heavily on the whole "make the game actually fun" part, since they assume you're supplying the fun by just seeing the franchise name.

To be more specific, this is a Star Wars post. I don't remember what the system was actually called, though.

I've seen some surprisingly good systems as well where fans have tried to stimulate a setting with as few rules as possible, especially if the makers do iterate in the design over time. It tends to be those that yeast the setting as a starting point, and going ' this is meant to let you okay games like Magical Dream Ship, bit but actually play the story of Magical Dream Ship'.

But they are rarer than systems which just use 'you can play Magical Dream Ship'.

It's also why Call of Cthulhu works better when you're not playing it as a purist. Humourously Lovecraft's works are so well known that they don't work for true Lovecraftian horror anymore (Lovecraftian Science Fiction still works, but you can argue how well).

[Vahnavoi]

Beyond that, established universes often also have problems that make them bad TTRPG settings. The needs of single-author fiction are fundamentally different from the needs of multi-author fiction, and established universes are often structured around a single story that is of finite scope. This is one of the big problems LotR games have. The story of LotR is A) complete and B) not about your characters, which makes it difficult to write a satisfying LotR game.

Well it's difficult if you ignore the plain possibility of players playing members of the Fellowship, like you do in, you know, myriad LotR games that are not roleplaying games.

The only reason for roleplayers to neglect such obvious solution is because they have The Stupid about playing established characters.

[Saint-Just]

Beyond that, established universes often also have problems that make them bad TTRPG settings. The needs of single-author fiction are fundamentally different from the needs of multi-author fiction, and established universes are often structured around a single story that is of finite scope. This is one of the big problems LotR games have. The story of LotR is A) complete and B) not about your characters, which makes it difficult to write a satisfying LotR game.

I have never played a LotR RPG (even CRPG, though I have played other PC games set in Middle-Earth) but I have known people who role-played (both TT and LA) the Tolkien's setting. The most obvious problem is the laser focus on LotR game instead of Middle-Earth game. Middle-earth can accommodate much more, just like a historical game is incredibly broader idea than the First Crusade (or Norman Conquest, or whatnot).

[Jason]

Well it's difficult if you ignore the plain possibility of players playing members of the Fellowship, like you do in, you know, myriad LotR games that are not roleplaying games.

The only reason for roleplayers to neglect such obvious solution is because they have The Stupid about playing established characters.

Creating your own character is part of what role-playing is about for many people. Playing pre-established characters with known destinies takes a lot of the fun out of creating your own story.

MERP set most of its action more than a thousand years before the end of the Third Age. They also took liberties with allowing more spellcasters in the game. You could meet a Ringwraith an interact with some of the characters in the appendices, and that was about it.

The One Ring sets its action between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, so the players can meet characters like Radagast, Beorn, Bard, or even Bilbo or a very young Aragorn, but the Ring is hidden in the Shire throughout the period the game covers. There is an excellent campaign called the Darkening of Mirkwood that runs through about 30 years of history and involves the players doing all sorts of significant things to slow down the advance of the Shadow. Sure, they won't be in the Fellowship trying to destroy the Ring, but my players enjoyed it.

[Delta]

Creating your own character is part of what role-playing is about for many people. Playing pre-established characters with known destinies takes a lot of the fun out of creating your own story.

This so much. I'd have absolutely zero interest in a game where I'd be playing such a well-established character, that would take all the fun out of RPGing for me.

[Vahnavoi]

Creating your own character is part of what role-playing is about for many people.

I get that. It's not, however, fundamental to actually making or playing a roleplaying game.


Playing pre-established characters with known destinies takes a lot of the fun out of creating your own story.

But the destiny of those characters is not necessarily known in context of a game.

You know the Ring is thrown into Mount Doom in the book. But if you take basically any board game (for example) where you play Frodo and friends, getting the Ring to Mount Doom hinges on your active effort, skill and luck. Frodo as played by you might never get there. Sometimes, you get unlucky and Sauron wins. Sometimes, you really do die in Shelob's lair and Samwise has to make the final stretch on his own. So on and so forth.

Even if you manage to replicate the book's events exactly, acting as Frodo (etc.) can still be as rewarding as, well, acting as Frodo in a play or movie. A lot of people would like to do that. It wouldn't be hard to implement on a tabletop.

[Celestia]

I get that. It's not, however, fundamental to actually making or playing a roleplaying game.



But the destiny of those characters is not necessarily known in context of a game.

You know the Ring is thrown into Mount Doom in the book. But if you take basically any board game (for example) where you play Frodo and friends, getting the Ring to Mount Doom hinges on your active effort, skill and luck. Frodo as played by you might never get there. Sometimes, you get unlucky and Sauron wins. Sometimes, you really do die in Shelob's lair and Samwise has to make the final stretch on his own. So on and so forth.

Even if you manage to replicate the book's events exactly, acting as Frodo (etc.) can still be as rewarding as, well, acting as Frodo in a play or movie. A lot of people would like to do that. It wouldn't be hard to implement on a tabletop.
The problem is that there is a significant difference between board games and rpgs. In a board game, the focus is entirely on mechanics. What you're trying to achieve is irrelevant; all that matters is how you achieve it, whether or not the game, itself, is fun. One of my favorite games is centered on the concept of being a city planner, and I can scarcely imagine a more boring job. Yet, that doesn't matter because you're not trying to live the life of a city planner. You're acquiring and organizing tiles to synergize with one another and earn you points. It's basically a competitive puzzle game, and that's fun regardless of the coat of paint used.

An rpg, however, puts the focus on character, reaction, interaction, and decision-making. So, you know, playing a role. One of the main draws of an rpg is, inherently, customization and choice. If you are handed a pre-existing character with a pre-defined personality and a pre-determined fate, what is left for you to role play? You're just filling a seat in a pictureless movie. Now, sure, if the mechanics of the game are good, you can still have fun with those, but that's not roleplaying; that's playing a tactical combat game with extra steps. Of course, those games can be fun, but you didn't come here for that; you came to roleplay.

[Anonymouswizard]

From having participated in am dram, I can see how it could be fun. It's not why I pay RPGs, if I wanted to follow a script while improvising occasional lines and set pieces I'd find a really terrible play to be in.

Now purely mechanical pretend can be fine, but they're generally not the kinds of build I want to play.

[Jason]

I get that. It's not, however, fundamental to actually making or playing a roleplaying game.I'm not so sure. It might in fact be fundamental. Are there any successful RPGs that don't include some form of character generation rules? I can't think of one that doesn't, even games like TSR's Marvel Superheroes, where the main attraction was to play a pre-established character and the modules all assumed you would.


You know the Ring is thrown into Mount Doom in the book. But if you take basically any board game (for example) where you play Frodo and friends, getting the Ring to Mount Doom hinges on your active effort, skill and luck. Frodo as played by you might never get there. Sometimes, you get unlucky and Sauron wins. Sometimes, you really do die in Shelob's lair and Samwise has to make the final stretch on his own. So on and so forth.

Even if you manage to replicate the book's events exactly, acting as Frodo (etc.) can still be as rewarding as, well, acting as Frodo in a play or movie. A lot of people would like to do that. It wouldn't be hard to implement on a tabletop.

Granted, such activities can be fun, but as others have already pointed out, they are a different sort of activity from an RPG.
A board game where you play the Fellowship is not quite the same experience as an RPG where you play the Fellowship. Your actions are restricted to what is possible in the rather limited engine of the board game.
There are no RPGs I know of that have fixed scripts that you have to play out in their entirety as with a play or movie. Acting can indeed be fun and challenging, and improvisational acting is almost the same thing as playing a character in an RPG, but not quite.

[Friv]

I'm not so sure. It might in fact be fundamental. Are there any successful RPGs that don't include some form of character generation rules? I can't think of one that doesn't, even games like TSR's Marvel Superheroes, where the main attraction was to play a pre-established character and the modules all assumed you would.

I mean, one of the best ways to start a fight in smaller RPG communities is to ask whether Marvel Heroic Roleplay has a character generation system.

More generally - there are a lot of RPG campaigns that come pre-packaged with existing characters, who have tie-ins to the storyline in the campaign. For all intents and purposes, that's a situation in which both the characters and the campaign are the same outline for everyone. These campaigns frequently include the main adventure path or quickstart for a lot of big players, including the D&D starter sets and most White Wolf products. I would hesitate to say that you're not roleplaying if you play The Lost Mines of Phandelver.

[Jason]

I mean, one of the best ways to start a fight in smaller RPG communities is to ask whether Marvel Heroic Roleplay has a character generation system.
I did qualify my statement with "successful".


More generally - there are a lot of RPG campaigns that come pre-packaged with existing characters, who have tie-ins to the storyline in the campaign. For all intents and purposes, that's a situation in which both the characters and the campaign are the same outline for everyone. These campaigns frequently include the main adventure path or quickstart for a lot of big players, including the D&D starter sets and most White Wolf products. I would hesitate to say that you're not roleplaying if you play The Lost Mines of Phandelver.
The games those specific sets tie into do have character generation rules, even if the actual starter boxed set doesn't.

[Drascin]

All RPGs I know have character creation rules, but plenty are made with the idea of supporting playing existing characters as well.

Like, for example, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine has a whole cast of very detailed characters that you can and are kind of expected to play if you're doing the official "modules". These include the titular Chuubo (a boy who made a Wish Granting Engine), Jade Irinka (who is the actual Sun), Leonardo de Montreal (a mad scientist with the DRAMA dial stuck at 12), and etcetera. Much of the writing for these supplements kind of assumes you're playing them.

And outside of the more "standard" dice throwing, I've been in plenty of roleplays with pre-existing characters. One, for example, was a years-long game based on Super Robot Wars. If you know Super Robot Wars, the whole fun of the games is taking a bunch of preexisting mecha characters, throwing them together, putting them in a new situation, and seeing what comes out. So a lot of the fun is, in fact, in playing characters that already do exist, and trying to think how they'd react to different situations.

[Friv]

I did qualify my statement with "successful".

Well, in that case I think I have several questions before I can give you a satisfactory answer.

#1: What's your bar for "successful"?

I would have thought of MHRP as a 'successful' RPG; it only ran for a year, but it put out five books, won five awards, and still has a community to this day. Are we limiting ourselves to 'games that put out books for several years' as a successful measure, or are one-time books that sold well highly counted?

#2: What's your bar for "character generation"?

Is it sufficient to have a playbook that asks a couple of questions for you and places you in an archetype, or do you need to be able to make a major mechanical or story decision? If you have set characters as the default, with optional rules at the back for players who like that kind of thing, does that count, or does any form of generation render the game invalid?

#3: What's your bar for "RPG"?

Do you consider "How to Host a Mystery" to be an RPG? I kind of would, but that's a topic rife with disagreement as well. What about games like Ghost Court, where the players are taking on specific roles with specific goals but played out as much like a party game as like a more traditional one-shot?

[Saint-Just]

#3: What's your bar for "RPG"?



What about "Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf"?

[Jason]

Well, in that case I think I have several questions before I can give you a satisfactory answer.I'm tempted to say "we're already in a thread that is almost entirely subjective with it's 'worst' criteria, use your own bars," but I'm willing to say what I think might be acceptable criteria.


#1: What's your bar for "successful"?Hmmm. How about a game with any two of the following: Widely played in its day, had material produced for it for more than one year, had more than three books produced for it.

I don't generally consider awards to be useful criteria for "successful".
A game that only ever had one book produced for it and was still widely played for years might be considered "successful", but I can't think of such a game.


#2: What's your bar for "character generation"?Off the top of my head: The player must be able to make decisions about the character he or she will be playing in the game that are more than cosmetic. That is, they must result in real mechanical benefits or drawbacks in the game. And the player should be able to make at least some cosmetic decisions as well.

Entirely cosmetic choices like "which Monopoly token do I play" don't count.
Entirely random character generation that does have a definite mechanical effect on the game, like drawing a card to determine if you are the murderer, doesn't count. There has to be some player choice.
Having pre-existing characters available ready for play is acceptable, as long as there is also a system to create your own.


#3: What's your bar for "RPG"?A game that uses a human game master/referee as the ultimate arbitrator of the rules, does not require physical props or maps (but can use them) beyond one or more randomizers like dice or cards to determine success. It tells a story and allows the players to make decisions that affect the outcome of the story. For starters.

[Vahnavoi]

The problem is that there is a significant difference between board games and rpgs. In a board game, the focus is entirely on mechanics. What you're trying to achieve is irrelevant; all that matters is how you achieve it, whether or not the game, itself, is fun.

You're getting sidetracked by a distinction that doesn't actually matter. RPGs can and frequently do have mechanical depth and framework to board games, and more involved board games (including some LotR games) start to approach roleplaying games in intricacy. Crossing mechanics between board games and roleplaying games has never been a big issue.


An rpg, however, puts the focus on character, reaction, interaction, and decision-making. So, you know, playing a role. One of the main draws of an rpg is, inherently, customization and choice. If you are handed a pre-existing character with a pre-defined personality and a pre-determined fate , what is left for you to role play?

The entire actual trip to Mount Doom. I slashed over "pre-determined fate" because the single most important point I'm making here is that playing established characters doesn't require exact replication of the actions they take in source material, consequently meaning their fate can differ based on what players do in a game.

The basic premise of a roleplaying game is that a player decides from viewpoint of a specific character what to do in a virtual scenario, and how, and why. The basic concept and process of play doesn't change just because the character was not made by their player. The basic concept and process of play doesn't need to change either just because the scenario is familiar.

This shouldn't be so hard to grasp.

---

@Jason:

Video game industry says hi.

I know there are a lot of tabletop gamers who are irrationally opposed to the idea of CRPGs actually succeesing at being RPGs. I don't know if you are one of those, I'm bringing them up just to point out how their opinions don't matter on this point. The genre of CRPGs was founded on emulating tabletop games to whatever degree computers just could. This includes character customization. Plenty of CRPGs, going to the very dawn of computer games, offer custom character creation as intricate as any tabletop game.

However, somewhere along the line, more strongly predetermined characters were introduced to the genre, like in, to give one example, the Baldur's Gate series. These didn't make CRPGs unsuccesfull or unrecognizable as a genre, on the contrary many of them became beloved selling points for their franchises, and so in the video game world, premade and custom characters both happily exist.

Because, again, the actual process of play doesn't change and doesn't need to change because the characters are set and the situation is familiar. The player still needs to make decisions. They have to, with their own brain and skill, think of who their character is and what they should do in any given situation. They have to form opinions and take actions, and again, if they make a mistake somewhere, knowing how things went in the source material will no longer tell them exactly how things will go in the game, and they will have to use their own understanding of their character and the situation to perform in their roles, exactly as they would with a custom character.

[Jason]

@Jason:
Video game industry says hi.
Video games are almost RPGs. They'll have reached that point when artificial intelligence reaches the point where the GM can allow the players the same freedom they have in a table-top RPG.
A good GM in a tabletop game can deal with literally anything the players can come up with.
Video games are still limited by what the programmers thought to include as options.

[Vahnavoi]

Human GMs often can't deal with anything their players could come up with - that is the chief reason for common pitfalls in tabletop scenario design, chiefly, railroading.

There have been video games for almost three decades now with branching game paths which allow a player to have more impact on the course of the game than railroading GMs allow players to have on the tabletop. If the standard for being an RPG hinges on having an answer to anything, many human held games fail to qualify and contemporary computer games outdo them.

[Jason]

Human GMs often can't deal with anything their players could come up with - that is the chief reason for common pitfalls in tabletop scenario design, chiefly, railroading.

There have been video games for almost three decades now with branching game paths which allow a player to have more impact on the course of the game than railroading GMs allow players to have on the tabletop. If the standard for being an RPG hinges on having an answer to anything, many human held games fail to qualify and contemporary computer games outdo them.

The best human GMs provide far more player freedom than a CRPG can at this point. The worst human GMs do not.

[Vahnavoi]

The worst GMs were outdone by computers at latest by 1992 when Star Control 2: Ur-Quan Masters was published, and even today it'd take a pretty good human GM to do Star Control 2 equivalent. I'll be holding that as a benchmark for a simple computer game that qualifies as a roleplaying game.

[EggKookoo]

There have been video games for almost three decades now with branching game paths which allow a player to have more impact on the course of the game than railroading GMs allow players to have on the tabletop. If the standard for being an RPG hinges on having an answer to anything, many human held games fail to qualify and contemporary computer games outdo them.

Maybe. Each TTRPG counts as a unique game. Whereas multiple people playing a particular cRPG really counts as the same game. Given that, you'll get large absolute numbers of undeniably horrible TTRPG experiences, but you'll also get a large absolute number of great TTRPG experiences that are way better than anything a computer can do.

And truthfully, the majority of cRPGs are pure railroading experiences. The best TTRPGs don't just provide player freedom, but player choices will then inform future GM decisions. That back and forth, where the GM presents a situation, the players respond in a way the GM didn't anticipate, and the GM modifies the setting and environment to account for it, is something we've never seen in a cRPG. I would pay quite a bit of money to play a game like WoW where I could make actual choices that caused the game world to react as though it were run by a creative human mind. We may get there someday, but it's not this day!

[Cluedrew]

I'm not so sure. It might in fact be fundamental. Are there any successful RPGs that don't include some form of character generation rules?Why does the system have to be popular to count? Unpopular RPGs are still RPGs. Bad RPGs are still RPGs. I have read this entire thread and I recall a single statement of "No that one is so bad it doesn't count as an RPG anymore."

So one hand I can't name any successful RPGs that don't include character creation rules. On the other hand I have played an RPG where character creation is writing down a fixed stat line and heard of another where character creation is more character selection and I consider both of those to be RPGs even if not many people like them.

[Jason]

Why does the system have to be popular to count? Unpopular RPGs are still RPGs.
Not popular, successful. The main reason is that there are probably thousands of home brewed systems out there that don't include character generation, but nobody outside their immediate group would recognize or play them.

[Cluedrew]

Not popular, successful. The main reason is that there are probably thousands of home brewed systems out there that don't include character generation, but nobody outside their immediate group would recognize or play them.I had a bunch of stuff about popularity vs. success, a few things that really got into your working and a some other points but then I realized it all come down to this:

Any fundamental feature of a role-playing game would be in all role-playing games and I know role-playing games that don't have character creation rules.* Therefore character creation is not a fundamental features of role-playing games.

The fact that some subgroups of role-playing games do all have that feature (even a significant group like the ones people enjoy playing**) is irrelevant. Put a different way would I - knowing nothing about a new in-progress system - recommend it contains character creation rules? Yes. Would I say it has to? No.

* Unless we get really generous with what character creation rules can mean.
** And honestly even that group isn't without exception unless we put a minimum on the number of people.

[Quertus]

If a community theater puts on a play with well-known movie characters, the play might (and likely will) deviate from the movie, at least somewhat. You might hear, "her performance as Aragorn was excellent", or "her take on Aslan was novel (lions don't wear clothes, after all)". But it is unlikely that the *acting* will be *better* than that of professional actors.

If SNL puts on a skit, you might be able to imagine Sean Connery asking Alex for "swords for $400", or the Avengers coming down on Hawkeye. But they are highly unlikely to do *better* than the real thing.

Now realize that your typical RPG table isn't anywhere their level. Nor do they spend hours/weeks/months rehearsing in preparation for their performance. So, for me, running a "known" character is just going to come off badly - and that's even ignoring "so and so wouldn't do that!"

About the only time I can enjoy it is when someone (not me) is playing a character that someone else (could be me) isn't familiar with, and gets to interact with them "honest". "That's a nice glowing sword you've got there. Say your 'Jed's eye', eh? Sounds like 'Religious freak' to me. It is a religion? Well, don't try and convert me - I ain't having none of that religious stuff. Religious, with a sword… you like being up front? Maybe talking to folk? Yeah? OK, cool - welcome to the party." Watching that kind of exchange, where the *player* genuinely doesn't get the reference, makes the bad acting worth it.

And I can kinda see wanting to ask "what if" questions ("what if we mapped out 'Determinator' logic for D&D, then back ported it to the LotR party?", "What if Obi-Wan had died to Darth Maul?", "What if Dr. Strange had used the Time Gem, looked ahead, and fought Thanos *before* he had the gems?"). But most of those seem like a cross between bad acting and scene stealing that would seem better suited to single author fiction than an RPG, IMO.

If you ask me, I'd probably say that the best thing about SNL skits, or HISHE, or fan fiction, is that it gives us *more*. More of something that we know that we like. Is that the draw of playing an existing character, that hope of getting more of them? Because, for me, role-playing isn't about continuing (or offshooting) *their* stories, but writing our own stories almost as a byproduct of (role)playing characters that we know. That is, just as actors try to get to know their character, we can roleplay better the characters that we know better - and what characters could we know better than the ones that we have ourselves made, where we already know the answer to "what's my motivation?".

[Jason]

Any fundamental feature of a role-playing game would be in all role-playing games and I know role-playing games that don't have character creation rules.* Therefore character creation is not a fundamental features of role-playing games.So could I ask which games you're thinking of? Because I can't think of any that I would call an RPG that don't have character generation, but I obviously haven't played everything,

[Vahnavoi]

Now realize that your typical RPG table isn't anywhere their level. Nor do they spend hours/weeks/months rehearsing in preparation for their performance. So, for me, running a "known" character is just going to come off badly - and that's even ignoring "so and so wouldn't do that!"

See, now, this is what I meant when I said roleplayers have The Stupid about playing established characters.

Mastery is not required to play an established character, you don't need to be Elijah Wood to play Frodo any more than you need to be David Beckham to play a fun game of soccer. Worrying about not doing well is just stage fright. Other players raising a fuss because they think you aren't doing justice to a character is just them getting their art critic on at the wrong moment.

Remember, both of these happen with custom characters. The sort of people who would whine "That's not what Frodo would do!" are the sort who also whine "That's not what a Paladin would do!" or "I don't think a real war veteran would think like that" or "I don't think you as a Non-Japanese person have any business portraying a Japanese-inspired character". I've had a player get cold feet and quit on me because another player was giving them a hard time for playing an Irish character when the player wasn't Irish.

The solution is for people to silence their inner art critics for duration of a game and give their fellow player a modicum of good faith and interpretative freedom... and for the fellow player to get over their stage fright because screwing up your portrayal of Frodo Baggins in a game is the least consequential mistake you can make. :smalltongue::smallwink:

---


So could I ask which games you're thinking of? Because I can't think of any that I would call an RPG that don't have character generation, but I obviously haven't played everything,

I've been a judge and a contest GM in convention quickplay scenario design contest. The constraints of the contest are such that a GM has to be able to run the scenario with no other material than it and be able to learn and prep it in 15 minutes. A lot of submitted games involve preset characters to save time. Ruleswise, they are RPGs as much as OD&D or any other rules-lite system. (Some of the scenarios are archived and licensed for free distribution, you can get dozens of them from Ropecon's website, to give an example.)

Are they successful? Within context of the contest, they often are, and winners and popular favorites survive to be played in later conventions and hobby clubs. They usually aren't commercially succesful for the same reasons a local cooking contest winner usually doesn't kick off a franchise capable of competing with McDonalds: they're more likely to be employed by McDonalds.

[Anonymouswizard]

So could I ask which games you're thinking of? Because I can't think of any that I would call an RPG that don't have character generation, but I obviously haven't played everything,

I know if at least one that didn't have it in the initial release (Time Lord, and I want to say MHRP but I'm working from secondhand information). But not of any that have never had some kind of a system, even if it's 'pick a playbook and make one or two choices*'.

* Those do the to have more to do, but it's fluff stuff that you'll probably want to sleep on.

[VoxRationis]

The worst RPG I've actually played would be the Palladium superhero game (whose title I have forgotten). The game's terminology (in what I understand to be Palladium form) was excessively fond of acronyms, all with unnecessary periods to boot. The book was poorly laid out, to the extent that it wasn't clear to my group that references to "levels" sporadically appearing in the rules referred to character levels because the only tables detailing XP and advancement were on the very last page of the book. The game allowed for characters of vastly differing power levels from session one, and not only did not warn prospective players sufficiently about that*, but encouraged parties of such disparate abilities by emphasizing character generation via rolling randomly on a large array of tables. Options were sometimes given that were purely inferior to others (e.g., when playing a psychic character, one is given the choice of playing a "developed talent" or a "latent talent," with the former being better in every respect, with no drawback). The rulebook had no sample statistics for NPCs or monsters and no guidance on how to structure an effective adventure at the level of game mechanics. The combat system encourages simply dual-wielding SMGs and unloading both upon the enemy at the first opportunity, because such an approach, due to either the lack or impotence (I forget which) of mechanical penalties to trying such a thing, is almost guaranteed to deal triple-digit damage to the opponent. Lastly, the book never stops shilling other Palladium games and even lists them in bold font so as to emphasize that they desire you to buy one of their other shoddily-written texts.


*Strictly speaking, there were disclaimers about power imbalances in the section on "mega-heroes," but even discounting that chapter entirely, the remainder of the character creation system was completely unbalanced.

[Cluedrew]

So could I ask which games you're thinking of?The "write down a fixed stat line" one is Roll for Shoes and the "pick a character" one is Lady Blackbird (also the one I haven't played).


The worst RPG I've actually played would be the Palladium superhero game (whose title I have forgotten).Heroes Unlimited, also the subject of MegaDumbCast season 2 if you want to go over it page-by-page (I've listened to it twice).

[Jason]

The worst RPG I've actually played would be the Palladium superhero game (whose title I have forgotten). The game's terminology (in what I understand to be Palladium form) was excessively fond of acronyms, all with unnecessary periods to boot. The book was poorly laid out, to the extent that it wasn't clear to my group that references to "levels" sporadically appearing in the rules referred to character levels because the only tables detailing XP and advancement were on the very last page of the book. The game allowed for characters of vastly differing power levels from session one, and not only did not warn prospective players sufficiently about that*, but encouraged parties of such disparate abilities by emphasizing character generation via rolling randomly on a large array of tables. Options were sometimes given that were purely inferior to others (e.g., when playing a psychic character, one is given the choice of playing a "developed talent" or a "latent talent," with the former being better in every respect, with no drawback). The rulebook had no sample statistics for NPCs or monsters and no guidance on how to structure an effective adventure at the level of game mechanics. The combat system encourages simply dual-wielding SMGs and unloading both upon the enemy at the first opportunity, because such an approach, due to either the lack or impotence (I forget which) of mechanical penalties to trying such a thing, is almost guaranteed to deal triple-digit damage to the opponent. Lastly, the book never stops shilling other Palladium games and even lists them in bold font so as to emphasize that they desire you to buy one of their other shoddily-written texts.


*Strictly speaking, there were disclaimers about power imbalances in the section on "mega-heroes," but even discounting that chapter entirely, the remainder of the character creation system was completely unbalanced.
Congratulations, you have just described all of Palladium's games, not just Heroes Unlimited.

The basic mechanics haven't changed much since the early '80s, when they were Siembieda's house rules for D&D. Some of the text of the rules hasn't changed either, since each game just re-uses stuff like the alignment rules word-for-word. Game balance is something Palladium has never really concerned itself with. Acronyms abound, and they all have the periods.

And yet they still sell. They have a certain exuberant charm to them that makes me occasionally flip through the books i still have, though I haven't played any of them since shortly after high school. Maybe there's a nostalgia factor for me, though I never actually played them more than a few sessions. I had a friend who was always planning his next Rifts game and generating characters.
The artwork is nice.

[Quertus]

See, now, this is what I meant when I said roleplayers have The Stupid about playing established characters.

The solution is for people to silence their inner art critics for duration of a game

And if you simply cannot enjoy ice cream that is gritty, oatmeal that is cold, cereal that is soggy, or known characters who are portrayed poorly? I don't think "taste" is a matter of "the stupid".


Congratulations, you have just described all of Palladium's games, not just Heroes Unlimited.

Yeah, when I describe Paradox as "Rifts, but good", that's (a small part of) what I'm talking about.

At least the Palladium systems are consistent?

[Jason]

The "write down a fixed stat line" one is Roll for Shoes and the "pick a character" one is Lady Blackbird (also the one I haven't played).
I had to look those up.
From what I can see, I could be argued that Roll for Shoes does have character generation, through its character advancement system, since you chose what to attempt and then gain relevant skills through success. Your skill choices are your character generation.

Lady Blackbird describes itself as an "adventure module", not a complete role-playing game. I agree.

[Ottriman]

On the other Hand, GURPS, in all its incarnations, is a dry, overtly complex, but very well made and WORKING system.

And I can only remember having horrible to bad sessions playing it (one time because we were all dropped into palying it in the last few hours on the day before we played, given premade characters to avoid having to spend the night building, and still it all sucked. College Groups, sigh....).


Agreed regarding deathwatch btw. Horribly done, but thena gain, the abse system was aimed at "characters that suck", so making SPace MArines in that, well^^




Having played Deathwatch, it's hard to disagree. Taking the base Dark Heresy system and scaling it up to Space Marines did not go well.


I'm inclined to agree, but I also think it has to do with the system not being honest with its players about what it is. I really like Lancer, which like D&D 4e has very stringent rules for how anything works in tactical combat, while disjuncting tactical combat mechanics from how something might work out of combat.

In open-play, your railgun might have a range on the order of double or triple digit kilometers (work it out with the GM). In tactical-play, a railgun has a range of twenty hexes. How much distance is twenty hexes? Whatever makes sense for the GM's battlemap.

Lancer is open and unapologetic about this lack of diegetic consistency across the two play modes. It's how the game works, and yes for some players it's like being dunked in acid. Fortunately, Lancer clearly labels itself as not for them. D&D 4e, on the other hand, positioned itself as the natural iteration of a preexisting game with a different focus and a lot of baked in expectations.

------------------------------------------------
Anyways, worst system I've actually played in is the Warhammer 40K bunch, because of serially incompetent stooge syndrome. I'll admit, I'm a bit inconsistent on that one, since I'm way more tolerant of it in Call of Cthulhu.


Happy to not be the only one who thinks those 40k systems have deep dysfunctions in their basic rules.

I left in the bits about GURPS and Lancer there because I've played the former and tweaked it so much as to be running a custom edition, and because I have some interest in the latter.

For GURPS I definitely know what you refer to as the problems of character creation and competencies, part of why I made skills much broader, stopped building based on character points and more. Even if I love the system I can appreciate peoples reasons for why it doesn't work for them.

As to Lancer there, the part I bolded would have made my brain hurt until a year or two ago, I've chilled on not needing to measure everything accurately since. I still have some players who would still be brain-seared by the disparity haha.


Starfinder was a surprising disappointment for me. I really like Pathfinder 1e, and what little I've played of Pathfinder 2e I've enjoyed. Starfinder feels like a halfbaked 2e playtest — there are several mechanics that clearly exist in between the 1e and 2e implementations or are simply the 2e version (like flat-footed). The mechanics didn't have the depth of 1e or the simplicity of 2e, the story failed to grab me, and the itemization was terrible. e: Oh, and ship combat was terrible in several ways. The group I was playing Starfinder with abandoned the campaign and we ended up doing a 5e campaign.


I was handed the Starfinder pdf once and though it was shiny I ended up declining the offer to play it. I felt that cool stuff was missing or comically nerfed. Reading about peoples experiences (such as yours) has only vindicated that decision.


Not only that, it's also the worst game I was stupid enough to run. For well over 10 years. But sitting in the platonic cave of D&D, you have no point of reference to tell that your game is awful. You think that it doesn't live up to your expectations can only be down to the GM needing more experience.


I guess it's a rite of passage for an RPG player to realize that the RPG we started out with doesn't have all the answers and we can do better. Or just differently and better-suited to certain styles of games. Then again, is it really a rite of passage if a tremendous number of players refuse to even consider it?

Oh man I feel this. First it was me being blind to the bad parts and weaknesses of D&D. Then I switched to GURPS and became obsessed with mechanical rigor and simulation and felt it'd do everything great. Only over the past few years have I learned to appreciate a variety of RPG systems and styles I'd have dismissed in those earlier times.

[Vahnavoi]

And if you simply cannot enjoy ice cream that is gritty, oatmeal that is cold, cereal that is soggy, or known characters who are portrayed poorly? I don't think "taste" is a matter of "the stupid".

Those, like poor player performance, are externalities. Your control over them is limited, but you do control your reaction to them (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/179). :smallamused: That's where The Stupid actually is in practice - namely, people getting into a nerd fight over how a character should or shouldn't act in the middle of a game, or never even playing because they're afraid of reactions of others. It's like arguing with your spouse about your oatmeal being cold - someone with modicum of virtue is perfectly capable of eating the damn oatmeal and moving on with their life without raising a fuss, regardless of little they enjoy the taste. :smalltongue:

[noob]

A game that uses a human game master/referee as the ultimate arbitrator of the rules, does not require physical props or maps (but can use them) beyond one or more randomizers like dice or cards to determine success. It tells a story and allows the players to make decisions that affect the outcome of the story. For starters.

There is rpgs with a symmetrical structure that have no players with a specific gm role and they are often narrative oriented.
It is a completely different style of rpg but it is rpgs: you impersonate characters and take decisions as if you were them.

[Batcathat]

There is rpgs with a symmetrical structure that have no players with a specific gm role and they are often narrative oriented.
It is a completely different style of rpg but it is rpgs: you impersonate characters and take decisions as if you were them.

That's true. Maybe a workable definition of roleplaying game is something along the lines of "playing a character and making decisions as them, within some sort of rules". I would argue that rules - however loose - has to exist for it to be a roleplaying game, rather than improv or playing pretend.

[Vahnavoi]

A roleplaying game is a game where a player decides what to do, and how, and why, from the viewpoint of a specific character in a staged or virtual scenario.

There is no point in tacking on "oh, and it must have rules". Think for two seconds of how you're supposed to have a staged or virtual scenario without rules. You can't, it's natural requirement of having such a scenario. This applies to improv and playing pretend, by the way. They have rules, they can be analyzed and approached as games, sometimes they qualify as roleplaying games.

The reason why tabletop players are resistant to this is because tabletop players are often irrationally partisan about tabletop conceits. But a general definition of a roleplaying game isn't interested with just the tabletop, just like general definition of a ball game isn't just interested with soccer. Soccer and volleyball players do obviously different things and there's limited overlap between soccer players and volleyball players, but you don't see soccer players saying volleyball isn't a real ball game. :smalltongue:

[EggKookoo]

A roleplaying game is a game where a player decides what to do, and how, and why, from the viewpoint of a specific character in a staged or virtual scenario.

There is no point in tacking on "oh, and it must have rules". Think for two seconds of how you're supposed to have a staged or virtual scenario without rules. You can't, it's natural requirement of having such a scenario. This applies to improv and playing pretend, by the way. They have rules, they can be analyzed and approached as games, sometimes they qualify as roleplaying games.

Also, there's roleplaying, and there are roleplaying games. Games need rules, else they're not games. So simply taking on the role of and acting as a character by itself is not sufficient to make a roleplaying game. You need some kind of rules.

Now, those rules will cover how characters interact. By extension, those rules will determine how those characters are crafted, since that kind of goes hand-in-hand. Therefore, all roleplaying games will have character-creation rules, if only by implication.

[Vahnavoi]

That's a sort of technical point that has no relevance for what my original statement was about: players playing characters they didn't make. Because implied character creation rules of the sort you outline are only necessary for the person setting up the game, such as a game master. A player doesn't need to have anything to do with them.

[Jason]

Also, there's roleplaying, and there are roleplaying games. Games need rules, else they're not games. So simply taking on the role of and acting as a character by itself is not sufficient to make a roleplaying game. You need some kind of rules.
Yep. It needs rules or it's just role-playing, not a role-playing game. How many rules you need before it's a game and not a role-playing exercise is open to debate.


Now, those rules will cover how characters interact. By extension, those rules will determine how those characters are crafted, since that kind of goes hand-in-hand. Therefore, all roleplaying games will have character-creation rules, if only by implication.
Also yep. Even Lady Blackbird has an obvious format that all of its pre-generated characters follow, implying that there were rules used in creating them, even if those rules were not published.

[Quertus]

Those, like poor player performance, are externalities. Your control over them is limited, but you do control your reaction to them (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/179). :smallamused: That's where The Stupid actually is in practice - namely, people getting into a nerd fight over how a character should or shouldn't act in the middle of a game, or never even playing because they're afraid of reactions of others. It's like arguing with your spouse about your oatmeal being cold - someone with modicum of virtue is perfectly capable of eating the damn oatmeal and moving on with their life without raising a fuss, regardless of little they enjoy the taste. :smalltongue:

If people can criticize a movie for bad acting, and not want to watch it because that, I cannot see how not wanting to participate in a much more time-intensive version because of similar criteria can reasonably be called into question.

Oatmeal is sustenance. Children mixing oatmeal, cereal, and ice cream into a gritty ice cream / soggy cereal / cold oatmeal creation… could be sustenance that one soldiers through, or it could be trash. But, like a (non-date) movie, an RPG is purely for enjoyment. Something that kills the enjoyment of such is a hard… dagnabbit, I lost the word… no sale (or something. Darn senility).

Of course, you are free to control your reaction, and watch the worst movies, and eat "whatever's in the fridge, all mixed together". But my time (and pallet) are more valuable to me than that.

[Delta]

Those, like poor player performance, are externalities. Your control over them is limited, but you do control your reaction to them (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/179). :smallamused: That's where The Stupid actually is in practice - namely, people getting into a nerd fight over how a character should or shouldn't act in the middle of a game, or never even playing because they're afraid of reactions of others. It's like arguing with your spouse about your oatmeal being cold - someone with modicum of virtue is perfectly capable of eating the damn oatmeal and moving on with their life without raising a fuss, regardless of little they enjoy the taste. :smalltongue:

Well, I can only speak for myself obviously, but I can't believe I'm alone with this opinion: I absolutely believe I could play Aragorn in a LotR based RPG group if I had to (let's be honest, Tolkien did a lot of great stuff, but it's not like his characters are insanely complex riddles no one but him will ever be able to understand), but I have absolutely zero interest in doing so because I'm absolutely sure it just wouldn't be any fun for me, at all, so I'm still not sure where exactly you're going with this whole argument.

[Batcathat]

Well, I can only speak for myself obviously, but I can't believe I'm alone with this opinion: I absolutely believe I could play Aragorn in a LotR based RPG group if I had to (let's be honest, Tolkien did a lot of great stuff, but it's not like his characters are insanely complex riddles no one but him will ever be able to understand), but I have absolutely zero interest in doing so because I'm absolutely sure it just wouldn't be any fun for me, at all, so I'm still not sure where exactly you're going with this whole argument.

I agree. I don't really like playing premade characters to begin with (even if I can see the point of it in some situations) and playing a character that's not only premade but that's in a story that's already "played out" in a certain way? Of course "my" Aragon could act differently than the original and the story would probably end up quite different too (assuming no railroading) but it would be even harder than normal to ignore meta-knowledge.

[Satinavian]

Same with me. Will avoid premades whenever possible.

Not that i can't portray them. But it tends to be harder to get into them and that takes all the fun out of playing. It feels a bit like playing NPCs as the GM. Sure, you can portray them but you generally don't care about them even remotely as much as a typical player does about his own created PC.


It sometimes can't be helped with oneshots trying out new systems or convention games but i try to make my own character even for a oneshot of a system i don't know, if i can and i have kinda lost interest in convention games over the years partly because of this.

[Vahnavoi]

If people can criticize a movie for bad acting, and not want to watch it because that, I cannot see how not wanting to participate in a much more time-intensive version because of similar criteria can reasonably be called into question.

There's a difference to critiquing a movie after you've seen it and not wanting to watch it again, which is fine, and standing up in the theater and shouting "this movie is rubbish!", which is not fine and is equivalent to what a lot of people actually do when they get into an argument about how a character should or shouldn't act midgame.

There's also a difference between complaining about movies you've seen and movies you haven't, and a lot of the people who are opposed to playing established characters are doing the latter. They approach the very idea in bad faith, which also means confirmation bias kicks in if they ever do try it: they go in expecting it to be bad, see only the bad and then conclude the thing is bad.


Oatmeal is sustenance. He Children mixing oatmeal, cereal, and ice cream into a gritty ice cream / soggy cereal / cold oatmeal creation… could be sustenance that one soldiers through, or it could be trash. But, like a (non-date) movie, an RPG is purely for enjoyment. Something that kills the enjoyment of such is a hard… dagnabbit, I lost the word… no sale (or something. Darn senility).

Well that's what you get for bringing in unnecessary analogies. :smalltongue: But I disagree with your... I don't know if it's your conclusion or premise. Roleplaying games aren't for "pure enjoyment" any more than food, movies or other pursuits. Maybe you do them for pure enjoyment, but if that's the case I honestly suggest you forget about games entirely and just do drugs. :smalltongue:

See, the thing is that playing any game requires skill, and both your ability and mine to have a pool of capable players relies on someone soldiering through the poor first attempts. And mimicry is one way through which people learn. Even when you do have custom character creation, the first instinct of many players is to play something like their favorite fictional character... so if playing Frodo or Aragorn is off the table, they'll just play Clone-Frodo or Clone-Aragorn.

The point I've been making in this thread is that you can just cut the middle and have them play Frodo or Aragorn. The things they would do when playing Clone-Frodo or Clone-Aragorn are fundamentally what they'd do just playing Frodo or Aragorn. If you are willing to suffer through that and give them constructive criticism instead of just being a Negative Nelly about their ability and shutting the endeavor down, you will eventually get a player who is capable of playing Aragorn in a way that's enjoyable to both of you. By focusing on being virtuous instead of how much your enjoying the current situation, you eventually create a world that has more things to enjoy in it. (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/253) :smallwink:

And that's why it's a crying shame when games about established settings bar you from playing established characters, or even characters like the established characters, because the game authors think You Are Not Cool Enough to play them. Not only is it a betrayal of player expectations, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: if, effectively, no-one is allowed to play established characters, no-one will get any good at it. And then people take the observation that they're no good at it as further justification to never do it.


Of course, you are free to control your reaction, and watch the worst movies, and eat "whatever's in the fridge, all mixed together". But my time (and pallet) are more valuable to me than that.

If my argument was just about your time, I wouldn't waste mine. :smalltongue:

---


Well, I can only speak for myself obviously, but I can't believe I'm alone with this opinion: I absolutely believe I could play Aragorn in a LotR based RPG group if I had to (let's be honest, Tolkien did a lot of great stuff, but it's not like his characters are insanely complex riddles no one but him will ever be able to understand), but I have absolutely zero interest in doing so because I'm absolutely sure it just wouldn't be any fun for me, at all, so I'm still not sure where exactly you're going with this whole argument.

I'm not really going anywhere so much as elaborating my earlier stated stance that games set in established settings often fail because they approach what the players are doing as fan fiction, and implicitly bad fan fiction at that. Related is my stance that hobbyists are often irrationally opposed to playing established character, or even any preset characters, hence the tangent about character creation.

As for your statement about playing Aragorn? I'm categorically skeptical of absolute statements about preferences, because human preferences in general are not absolute. There are non-absolute arguments you could raise in defense of either, and empirical evidence you could bring up in support, that I'd accept. You aren't doing either right now and neither do most other people making statements such as this. That is The Stupid. There isn't a good reason to give such opinions much time of the day when designing a game meant for general consumption. It's about as useful as a rock musician saying they could do pop, but don't because they find no satisfaction in it, when you're designing a band game.

[icefractal]

Soggy oatmeal is assuming it's bad and can only be tolerated or not. Rather, I'd call it Cilantro Salad (https://www.chinasichuanfood.com/chinese-coriander-salad/) - tasty side dish for some, literally tastes like soap for others.

I'm kind of surprised at the level of surprise that games could exist without char-gen. Most convention games don't have char-gen (because they use pre-gen characters) even if the system they're being run in normally does have it. I don't know that I'd like that style for a whole campaign, but for a one-shot it's fine and sometimes preferable.

[Batcathat]

See, the thing is that playing any game requires skill, and both your ability and mine to have a pool of capable players relies on someone soldiering through the poor first attempts. And mimicry is one way through which people learn. Even when you do have custom character creation, the first instinct of many players is to play something like their favorite fictional character... so if playing Frodo or Aragorn is off the table, they'll just play Clone-Frodo or Clone-Aragorn.

The point I've been making in this thread is that you can just cut the middle and have them play Frodo or Aragorn. The things they would do when playing Clone-Frodo or Clone-Aragorn are fundamentally what they'd do just playing Frodo or Aragorn.

At least to me, the issue wouldn't be so much about playing existing characters (even though I don't like it myself) but about playing existing characters with an existing story attached. We don't just know how Frodo and Aragorn are as people, we know what happens to them and how they react to that. Even a player who's great at avoiding metagaming will make pretty much any decision knowing what the "original" one was. Even if the game's story take place after or before the original story (which might be hard in itself, since those stories usually have a natural beginning and end) the character still comes with so much baggage.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done. Some people would probably even enjoy it. But I think there's a good reason it's not usually done.

[Delta]

As for your statement about playing Aragorn? I'm categorically skeptical of absolute statements about preferences, because human preferences in general are not absolute.

And you express that skepticism by making lots of absolute statements about the preferences of other people? That sounds just the slightest bit hypocritical.


There are non-absolute arguments you could raise in defense of either, and empirical evidence you could bring up in support, that I'd accept.

Which has been done plenty and which you have not accepted.

[Vahnavoi]

At least to me, the issue wouldn't be so much about playing existing characters (even though I don't like it myself) but about playing existing characters with an existing story attached. We don't just know how Frodo and Aragorn are as people, we know what happens to them and how they react to that. Even a player who's great at avoiding metagaming will make pretty much any decision knowing what the "original" one was. Even if the game's story take place after or before the original story (which might be hard in itself, since those stories usually have a natural beginning and end) the character still comes with so much baggage.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done. Some people would probably even enjoy it. But I think there's a good reason it's not usually done.

I thought I already addresses this, but here we go again...

Knowing what happens in a book isn't the same as knowing what happens in a game. You can metagame all you like and it doesn't necessarily make the game any easier or less interesting. Again, board games and video games test this all the time. Knowing Aragorn survives in the book doesn't actually spare you the effort of dodging orc arrows in video game rendition of Return of the King, etc.

For a particular implementation of how to avoid metagaming, I'll point out an old Spectrum Alien game. It has the same ship, same characters and the same enemy. The twist? Who the face-hugger impregnates varies by the game, as does who is the android. So if you try to metagame based on what you saw in the movie instead of paying attention to what happens in the game you're playing, you get eaten by xenomorph.

So I do agree avoiding metagaming is a chief reason tabletop players don't play established characters, but I'm skeptical if it's actually a good reason.

---


And you express that skepticism by making lots of absolute statements about the preferences of other people? That sounds just the slightest bit hypocritical.

You had the option to substantiate your clain, including quoting where I do what you claim. Instead you resorted to classic "tu quoque". This is why we can't have nice things. :smalltongue:


Which has been done plenty and which you have not accepted.

I said there are arguments and evidence you could've given, but didn't, and continue to do so. As for others? For example, Satinavian, above, was writing as the same time as me, so I didn't see it and couldn't comment. I can accept Satinavian's argument for why they don't enjoy preset characters - chiefly because they say they've tried it and I can take that in good faith. However, whether Satinavian's experiences generalize is an open question.

[Batcathat]

Knowing what happens in a book isn't the same as knowing what happens in a game. You can metagame all you like and it doesn't necessarily make the game any easier or less interesting. Again, board games and video games test this all the time. Knowing Aragorn survives in the book doesn't actually spare you the effort of dodging orc arrows in video game rendition of Return of the King, etc.

Sure, I guess. A game where I knew the basic story could still be challenging and interesting — but I almost guarantee it would be less so. I love rereading books and replaying games but it's not the same as doing it the first time. Again, I'm not saying it couldn't be done but I don't really see any interest in it personally and considering how rare it seems in general, I'm leaning towards most people agreeing with me.


For a particular implementation of how to avoid metagaming, I'll point out an old Spectrum Alien game. It has the same ship, same characters and the same enemy. The twist? Who the face-hugger impregnates varies by the game, as does who is the android. So if you try to metagame based on what you saw in the movie instead of paying attention to what happens in the game you're playing, you get eaten by xenomorph.

So what would the equivalent be in our hypothetical Lord of the Rings game? The GM having to change around the story enough that it feels fresh? A good GM could certainly pull that off but at that point, why not just make an entirely new story that's your own instead of a frankensteinian mix of Tolkien's ideas and your own?

[Vahnavoi]

So what would the equivalent be in our hypothetical Lord of the Rings game? The GM having to change around the story enough that it feels fresh? A good GM could certainly pull that off but at that point, why not just make an entirely new story that's your own instead of a frankensteinian mix of Tolkien's ideas and your own?

We can be more concrete than thar. The equivalent would be varying when the Ring Wraiths arrive at Hobbitton, and from which direction. So all the decisions the players make exist in advancing time frame, but they don't know when and where the Ring Wraiths are at the start. (The characters in the book don't know either; the exact time frame is laid out in appendices, IIRC.) This means the characters may have to leave at different time and take a different route than planned, which naturally has ripple effects through the story.

The point, here, really is that Tolkien has done most of the work for you, the peoples and locations the characters are laid out, you and your players know what the goal is and they have an example of how they could succeed... now they just have to do it. Or, shortly, the point and appeal is largely the same as with any other game set in Middle-Earth.

Obviously, you can go off a tangent and do your own thing, but it's not generally speaking any easier or lead to better results. We know this, because ripping off Tolkien has been favorite past time of both fiction writers and tabletop GMs alike and LotR and games set in Middle-Earth still exist and stand on their own.

[King of Nowhere]

i never heard about fatal or rahowa before. i had a few good laughs reading recensions.

fatal looks like it could be fun for a while, as long as nobody comes in with the wrong expectations. just like there are people who watch the worst b-movies to have fun at how crappy they are, the same could be doable here*. i wonder if someone can share experiences along that avenue?


*the main obstacle to trying it is the manual, since i would never want to actually give money to the guy who made that stuff. but i'm sure it can be found on the internet for free.

[JNAProductions]

i never heard about fatal or rahowa before. i had a few good laughs reading recensions.

fatal looks like it could be fun for a while, as long as nobody comes in with the wrong expectations. just like there are people who watch the worst b-movies to have fun at how crappy they are, the same could be doable here*. i wonder if someone can share experiences along that avenue?


*the main obstacle to trying it is the manual, since i would never want to actually give money to the guy who made that stuff. but i'm sure it can be found on the internet for free.

Eh... There's two issues with that, the way I see it.

1) The ideas behind it are so bad. It's not "Look at that cheesy acting!" it's wallowing in despair at how cruel, petty, and bigoted someone can be.

2) The mechanics are utter garbage too.

[Batcathat]

We can be more concrete than thar. The equivalent would be varying when the Ring Wraiths arrive at Hobbitton, and from which direction. So all the decisions the players make exist in advancing time frame, but they don't know when and where the Ring Wraiths are at the start. (The characters in the book don't know either; the exact time frame is laid out in appendices, IIRC.) This means the characters may have to leave at different time and take a different route than planned, which naturally has ripple effects through the story.

So either we get basically Lord of the Rings with some details changed or we have something that's actually different, which means basically the same amount of work as using something entirely original but with meta knowledge of how it "should" happen still influencing everyone. Neither version seems preferable to an actual original campaign.


Obviously, you can go off a tangent and do your own thing, but it's not generally speaking any easier or lead to better results. We know this, because ripping off Tolkien has been favorite past time of both fiction writers and tabletop GMs alike and LotR and games set in Middle-Earth still exist and stand on their own.

Yes, Tolkien rip-offs are rarely as good as the original and that would apply to playing out Lord of the Rings too. I much rather play an original adventure with original characters (even a Frodo clone is preferable to a player trying to act as Frodo) that's not overshadowed by the original.

[Vahnavoi]

There's two thing I can say to that, which I already said in respect to players playing established characters, just applied to GMs running settings:

First, metagaming and being overshadowed by earlier works happens even when you're doing original work. These aren't unique problems for games in established settings and have a lot to do with player attitudes.

Second, mimicry is a way of learning. Looking at and running established settings is potential stepping stone to learning how to make your own. It's exceptional for anyone to crap out good original work in a void. We could be having this same discussion about music, painting etc.. Setting the bar at original work that cannot be overshadowed is really, really high. The ability of any individual person to get there is always suspect.

Shortly, originality is overrated.

[Batcathat]

First, metagaming and being overshadowed by earlier works happens even when you're doing original work. These aren't unique problems for games in established settings and have a lot to do with player attitudes.

Sure, but don't you think that the issues might be more noticeable if you're playing the exact same characters in a very similar story compared to original characters in an original story? If I were to create a piece of art, odds are it would be overshadowed by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci no matter what I painted. But if I attempted to paint my own version of the Mona Lisa, I'd say the overshadowing would be much more noticeable.


Second, mimicry is a way of learning. Looking at and running established settings is potential stepping stone to learning how to make your own. It's exceptional for anyone to crap out good original work in a void. We could be having this same discussion about music, painting etc.. Setting the bar at original work that cannot be overshadowed is really, really high. The ability of any individual person to get there is always suspect.

That is true, but I think that creating your own character or writing your own story inspired by the greats is much more educational than trying to make an almost-copy. Playing a clone of Frodo or Batman or Drizzt might not be very original but I think it's a better learning experience than playing the actual Frodo, Batman or Drizzt.

[Jason]

I ran a very successful Star Wars game a few years ago that sort of re-told the original trilogy plot, with the players finding R2-D2 with the Death Star Plans, finding an old Jedi Knight to train one of them (a one-armed Mace Windu in this case, rather than Obi-Wan), and being intercepted on their way to the Rebels by the Death Star. The Jedi Knight was killed in a fight with Darth Vader that allowed them to escape, and then they analyzed the plans and performed the trench run that destroyed the Death Star.

We followed with the Battle of Hoth and the Jedi going off to Dagobah to train with Yoda while the rest of the group found refuge in Cloud City, only to be betrayed by Lando Calrissian. Boba Fett found the Jedi on Dagobah and killed Yoda, but was killed himself, and the Jedi raced off to Cloud City in disguise as Boba Fett to save his friends from the evil Darth Vixis (aka Leia Skywalker). He fought a duel with Darth Vader in which Vader was destroyed and the traitor Lando killed.

After interludes with Jaba the Hutt, redeeming Leia Skywalker, and gaining the help of Imperial star destroyer captain Han Solo, the players managed to convince the Mon Calmari to raise a Rebel fleet to keep the Empire's fleet busy while they infiltrated Coruscant to face the Emperor and his apprentice Mara Jade. They turned Mara against her master and destroyed the Emperor, winning the Rebellion.

Yeah, it was only loosely the plot of the original trilogy (notably Return of the Jedi ended up being very different, with no Second Death Star and no Ewoks). My players took the story-roles of the power trio without playing the same characters. They were playing a farm boy with Jedi potential, a smuggler, and a noble who becomes a leader of the Rebels, but were not playing Luke, Han, and Leia, but characters of their own design that filled similar story roles.

It was awesome.

So yes, you can have fun playing a story that was mostly known, if it has twists, and if you let the players make their own characters rather than playing exactly the same story with the same characters.

[King of Nowhere]

Eh... There's two issues with that, the way I see it.

1) The ideas behind it are so bad. It's not "Look at that cheesy acting!" it's wallowing in despair at how cruel, petty, and bigoted someone can be.

2) The mechanics are utter garbage too.

yes, i see that problem. while i can look forward to rolling my anal circumference while joking with my friends that a high roll there may save my life in case my magic will accidentally summon a gang of sodomitic ogres, i'd not want to go through 11 pages of character creation and a 900 pages manual just for it.

[KineticDiplomat]

Well, worst has it’s definitions. For worst-playing, most cringe inducing, and so forth, people have listed most of them.

For worst effect on the hobby, I still go D&D every time. In a world of good-to-great range RPGs covering virtually anything you could want, D&D remains a spectacularly mediocre one that appeals to the worst traits of munchkinerry and yet has become nearly synonymous with the entire genre.

It’s like watching a world where Milawaukee’s Best is hailed as the exemplar of beer.

[Jason]

Well, worst has it’s definitions. For worst-playing, most cringe inducing, and so forth, people have listed most of them.

For worst effect on the hobby, I still go D&D every time. In a world of good-to-great range RPGs covering virtually anything you could want, D&D remains a spectacularly mediocre one that appeals to the worst traits of munchkinerry and yet has become nearly synonymous with the entire genre.

It’s like watching a world where Milawaukee’s Best is hailed as the exemplar of beer.

Would there be a role-playing hobby if there had been no D&D?

It is the most successful and popular RPG, and has been from the beginning. The only thing that has come close to dethroning it was Pathfinder during the 4th edition years, and Pathfinder is an explicit copy of D&D.

[ImNotTrevor]

Would there be a role-playing hobby if there had been no D&D?
Probably yeah, eventually.

It wouldn't have its wargaming roots, and it might not have been what we're used to now, but the idea of roleplaying with a group was not first invented by Gygax and crew.



It is the most successful and popular RPG, and has been from the beginning. The only thing that has come close to dethroning it was Pathfinder during the 4th edition years, and Pathfinder is an explicit copy of D&D.

Popularity isn't synonymous with quality, a statement any Cardi B song stands as evidence for.

[EggKookoo]

Probably yeah, eventually.

I would say if TTRPGs didn't materialize or catch on by the late 80s, they probably wouldn't exists as we think of them at all. Computer games would have taken over.

It's interesting to try to imagine how cRPGs would have evolved in the absence of TTRPGs.

[King of Nowhere]

D&D remains a spectacularly mediocre one that appeals to the worst traits of munchkinerry

i believe this forum can give this opinion, but the forum is not representative of how most people plays the game.

i've said it times and again, but the good thing of d&d is that, with a mixture of homebrewing, houseruing and session 0 agreements, you can mold it to do almost anything. and by the time you could branch out and learn new games, you are proficient enough at d&d that you can mold it to your needs, and you'd rather do that than learn an entirely new system completely from scratch.

[NigelWalmsley]

In a world of good-to-great range RPGs covering virtually anything you could want, D&D remains a spectacularly mediocre one that appeals to the worst traits of munchkinerry and yet has become nearly synonymous with the entire genre.

The people who think "D&D" and "TTRPGs" are the same thing were never going to play whatever indy game you think is the best. Blaming D&D for the fact that Apocalypse World or FATE isn't a household name is like blaming the Hunger Games for crowding out the Midnighters Trilogy.


Would there be a role-playing hobby if there had been no D&D?

Would there have been D&D if there wasn't a role-play hobby? Initially, the terms referred to the same thing. It wasn't until Gygax started demanding that everyone accept that he owned D&D that the terms diverged.


It is the most successful and popular RPG, and has been from the beginning. The only thing that has come close to dethroning it was Pathfinder during the 4th edition years, and Pathfinder is an explicit copy of D&D.

Vampire also beat it in the late 90s. That said, you are broadly correct that D&D has a level of presumptive dominance similar to WoW among MMOs or Star Wars in movies.

[Satinavian]

Would there be a role-playing hobby if there had been no D&D?

It is the most successful and popular RPG, and has been from the beginning. The only thing that has come close to dethroning it was Pathfinder during the 4th edition years, and Pathfinder is an explicit copy of D&D.
Only in markets where it came first.

In countries where early D&D was translated late and other local offerings came earlier, it had and still has significant problems.

It is just that whatever is already established has a huge market advantage for group finding, older players recruiting newer ones etc. Turns out that D&D, without this particular advantage, is not more successful/popular than the others.

[Friv]

Would there be roleplaying without D&D? Absolutely. Wargaming existed already. The SCA existed already. Various people were already experimenting with story games. Something would have blended together.

Would it look like what we got? Much harder to say.

[Anonymouswizard]

Would there be a role-playing hobby if there had been no D&D?

It is the most successful and popular RPG, and has been from the beginning. The only thing that has come close to dethroning it was Pathfinder during the 4th edition years, and Pathfinder is an explicit copy of D&D.

D&D is a victim of it's own success, and differs from not being very good for where the hobby has moved to. More it would be unfair to say that D&D have been updating itself with the times, but it's generally been rather far behind the industry.

This wouldn't be a problem if people went forcing D&D into forms it wasn't meant to be payed in. The TSR editions were designed to be dungeon exploration games, 4e is a very good dungeon skirmish game, while 3.X and 5e are somewhere in between. And when used for those purposes they work really well, but they're very much not storytelling games, that's more the domain of Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World.


Plus you know, it's so unnecessarily fight to get people to play anything that isn't D&F. I'd love to play more Fate or Unknown Armies.

[Vahnavoi]

Would there be a role-playing hobby if there had been no D&D?

Yes, but it would've evolved more directly from historical re-enaction and military pedagogic tools (kind reminder: modern wargame evolved from Kriegsspiel, which was invented to train military officers). It wouldn't have had such strong ties to speculative fiction and consequently the entire field of modern genre fiction would be different.


I would say if TTRPGs didn't materialize or catch on by the late 80s, they probably wouldn't exists as we think of them at all. Computer games would have taken over.

It's interesting to try to imagine how cRPGs would have evolved in the absence of TTRPGs.

It is very hard to imagine how computer games would've evolved, because both early and current game designers were massive D&D nerds (computers and D&D first got popular in the same place and earliest attempts to computerize D&D date to 70s). D&D and computer games based on D&D have had disproportionate effect on computer game design. Just to give some idea of the ripple effects... without D&D, Zelda and Pokemon franchises as we know them would have never become a thing. DOOM wouldn't exist either.

[Satinavian]

Yes, but it would've evolved more directly from historical re-enaction and military pedagogic tools (kind reminder: modern wargame evolved from Kriegsspiel, which was invented to train military officers). It wouldn't have had such strong ties to speculative fiction and consequently the entire field of modern genre fiction would be different. Wargaming had evolved in the direction of fiction and entertainment for decades already.

What might have changed is the kind of fiction and/or wargaming that would have been at the core. Maybe instead of plundering ruins we would have gotten a more world- and story focussed game like the Warhammer RPGs (which kinda also evolved from Wargaming). Or maybe the first successful RPG would have been written by someone inspired by Arthurian Legends or the tales of Charlemagnes Paladins and we would have gotten something like Pendragon first. Or maybe the first RPGs would not have been about Fntasy and more about SF and something like traveller would have been first.

[Vahnavoi]

Not denying that - what I mean is that Chainmail and D&D were sort of unique in that they stole ideas from pretty nearly everyone, from national mythologies to Tolkien, Lovecraft, Anderson & all and put them in the same game and eventually same fictional setting. D&D was pretty important in popularizing and codifying several speculative fiction tropes for tabletop and computer games alike. Warhammer, as we know it, could not exist either without D&D.

[Satinavian]

Yes, that is true. Instead of stealing everywhere and putting it all together, no matter what, we might have gotten something more focussed and with some proper worldbuilding first. Maybe then expansions/supplements for other inspirations. And then maybe something like Gurps for the first "take everything" approach.

[EggKookoo]

Also, when Gygax was creating the game, he was a LotR fan during a time that LotR was not very well known in the broader culture. People knew The Hobbit, of course, but LotR was obscure. I mean it was so obscure to the general pop that Terry Brooks could rip off Fellowship almost chapter-for-chapter and character-for-character and Del Rey successfully gambled that they could get away with it. It's likely that LotR itself got its 80s surge in popularity because of D&D, and without it we probably wouldn't have had the Jackson films.

In 1977, Star Wars came along and dominated how Hollywood viewed SF and space opera for well over a decade. If the market-equivalent of D&D happened at that point, it would have almost certainly been a space opera game. We would have ended up with something more akin to Gamma World or Star Frontiers as the basis for the TTRPGs that came later.

[King of Nowhere]

Yes, that is true. Instead of stealing everywhere and putting it all together, no matter what, we might have gotten something more focussed and with some proper worldbuilding first.
i doubt it.
as the first roleplaying game, d&d stole from what was collective culture at the time. and it tried to cater to different styles, since it was the only rpg available - i think the very concept of rpg didn't even exhist yet. and same goes for worldbuilding. admittedly, i'm not the greatest expert, but from what media i know of the time, i'm not aware there was any modern concept of worldbuilding anywhere*.
the first rpg was pretty much guaranteed to end up like this disjoined mess. more modern concepts are only possible because we already have other rpg, we already have the disjoined mess, and we learned from there, and we developed new needs.



* we're talking of the seventies, what I know of the time is star wars and star trek, which are alternate worlds, and as far as i'm aware, they had a very simplified general framework, then they introduced new elements whenever they needed them for the plot, and let them fade into the background later. tolkien was probably the first to do serious worldbuilding, i.e. explore elements that are not related to the plot. Modern star wars and star trek also evolved to have the modern worldbuilding, but only in later years. possibly the Aasimov books also had worldbuilding, but i'm not familiar enough with them; anyway, it was something isolated, done by few authors.

[Jason]

Also, when Gygax was creating the game, he was a LotR fan during a time that LotR was not very well known in the broader culture. People knew The Hobbit, of course, but LotR was obscure. I mean it was so obscure to the general pop that Terry Brooks could rip off Fellowship almost chapter-for-chapter and character-for-character and Del Rey successfully gambled that they could get away with it. It's likely that LotR itself got its 80s surge in popularity because of D&D, and without it we probably wouldn't have had the Jackson films.

In 1977, Star Wars came along and dominated how Hollywood viewed SF and space opera for well over a decade. If the market-equivalent of D&D happened at that point, it would have almost certainly been a space opera game. We would have ended up with something more akin to Gamma World or Star Frontiers as the basis for the TTRPGs that came later.

Um, no. The Lord of the Rings was somewhat obscure in the '50s, when it was first published in England, but it was very popular from '65 onward when it first appeared in America in the unauthorized Ace edition. The National Lampoon Bored of the Rings parody came out in '69. Tolkien was quite wealthy when he died in '73 precisely because LotR was so popular. The Silmarillion was published in '77 because the demand for more Tolkien was so high. Ralph Bakshi's movie came out n '78, and the BBC radio version was a big hit in '81.

The Lord of the Rings was very popular, not obscure, when D&D was put together.

Brooks could successfully copy the general structure of the series with The Sword of Shannara in '77 precisely because there were so many fans eager for more Tolkienesque works.

Lord of the Rings was popular before D&D and therefore would have been popular without it (although there probably is some cross-fertilization going on). If anything, the movies helped 3rd edition D&D become more popular rather than the reverse.

The market-equivalent to D&D that came out in '77 is Traveller, a game that was popular in its own right as the first sci-fi RPG (not entirely true, but close enough). I love Traveller, but it has never been as successful as D&D and is rather obscure now by comparison.

EDIT: Star Wars (and its dark brother Alien) still utterly dominates sci-fi film. That's why nearly every sci-fi film is also either an action or a horror movie.

[WanderingMist]

Um, no. The Lord of the Rings was somewhat obscure in the '50s, when it was first published in England, but it was very popular from '65 onward when it first appeared in America in the unauthorized Ace edition. The National Lampoon Bored of the Rings parody came out in '69. Tolkien was quite wealthy when he died in '73 precisely because LotR was so popular. The Silmarillion was published in '77 because the demand for more Tolkien was so high. Ralph Bakshi's movie came out n '78, and the BBC radio version was a big hit in '81.

The Lord of the Rings was very popular, not obscure, when D&D was put together.

Brooks could successfully copy the general structure of the series with The Sword of Shannara in '77 precisely because there were so many fans eager for more Tolkienesque works.

Lord of the Rings was popular before D&D and therefore would have been popular without it (although there probably is some cross-fertilization going on). If anything, the movies helped 3rd edition D&D become more popular rather than the reverse.

The market-equivalent to D&D that came out in '77 is Traveller, a game that was popular in its own right as the first sci-fi RPG (not entirely true, but close enough). I love Traveller, but it has never been as successful as D&D and is rather obscure now.

I wonder how much of D&D's success is due to that whole moral panic over it. Sure, it existed before then, but the whole "It's a Satanic cult" got it spread nationally on panicking local news stations and that sort of thing.

[SwordCoastTaxi]

HERO System:

It's far more complicated than it needs to be. As far as "point-buy Supers" goes, M&M 2nd edition does everything Champions does only easier. For non-Supers, GURPS 4e again does point-buy easier than HERO.

[Jason]

I wonder how much of D&D's success is due to that whole moral panic over it. Sure, it existed before then, but the whole "It's a Satanic cult" got it spread nationally on panicking local news stations and that sort of thing.
D&D certainly benefited from the bad publicity, but there wouldn't have been a moral panic if it hadn't already been fairly popular on campuses.

[Quertus]

EDIT: Star Wars (and its dark brother Alien) still utterly dominates sci-fi film. That's why nearly every sci-fi film is also either an action or a horror movie.

Quick - name a sci-fi romcom. A sci-fi whodunnit. A sci-fi coming of age film.


HERO System:

It's far more complicated than it needs to be. As far as "point-buy Supers" goes, M&M 2nd edition does everything Champions does only easier. For non-Supers, GURPS 4e again does point-buy easier than HERO.

M&M, at least, doesn't give the visceral satisfaction of throwing handfuls of dice at a problem the way Hero does.

And I used Hero as the base for a Naruto game - I'm not sure either of the others would be quite as easy, or work quite as well / feel right.

But generally, yeah, M&M seems vastly superior.

[EggKookoo]

Um, no.

Hm. I wonder how I got my decades mixed up. The dangers of recalling conversations from too many years ago without verification.

[WanderingMist]

Quick - name a sci-fi romcom. A sci-fi whodunnit. A sci-fi coming of age film.

Does Alien not fit all 3, if viewed from the aliens' perspective?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Though, if you want serious answers,

Closest thing I can think for a rom-com is Futurama.

"Little Lost Robot" from I, Robot (novel, not film) mostly fits for a whodunnit.

Maybe Pendragon series for coming-of-age.

[ImNotTrevor]

Quick - name a sci-fi romcom. A sci-fi whodunnit. A sci-fi coming of age film.

scifi romcom: I can't name a fantasy romcom, either. Maybe Back To The Future III could count.

Scifi Whodunnit: Minority Report, Bladerunner (both), Arrival (a mystery, at least), Altered Carbon (TV series), i,robot (film), A Scanner Darkly, The Prestige, 12 Monkeys

Scifi Coming-of-age: Starwars, Super 8, Donnie Darko, The Giver, See You Yesterday, THE BACK TO THE FUTURE TRILOGY

[Batcathat]

Maybe Her could qualify as a sci-fi romcom? Possibly a little light on the comedy, but it has its moments.

Or maybe Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind? Also a little on the dark side but certainly with funny moments.

[Anonymouswizard]

Quick - name a sci-fi romcom. A sci-fi whodunnit. A sci-fi coming of age film.

I don't have time to search through every Doctor Who serial/episode, but there's almost certainly one of each in there (due to the large periods in which it played genre roulette, even if there's also years long stretches of military stories or gothic horror or whatever). Okay, I'm not 100% certain about the coming of age story, we might need Big Finish for that. Heck, most of 60s Who is investigation focused, it was over it's action-genre years by the time Star Wars was out, and I believe had passed it's horror phase by the time Alien had come out.

Not that Doctor Who is a trend setter, it mostly just ignores trends. It's also the big science fiction franchise over here, definitely dominating popular culture compared to Star Trek, Star Wars, or Alien. It dominates the small screen as Star Wars does the big screen, and honestly in the coming years that might be more important for how people view genres (which could lead to us sliding back towards 60s talky sci-fi more, which I'd love as I love 60s SF).

[Mechalich]

"Sci-Fi rom-com" includes a huge chunk of the planetary romance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_romance) subgenre, including almost everything ever written by Anne McCaffery. Also if Isekai's qualify as science fiction (there's a fairly strong case for some, not so much for others), then a huge fraction of that subgenre is much more focused on the romantic elements than anything else.

[Anonymouswizard]

Portal Fantasy!

[Jason]

Hm. I wonder how I got my decades mixed up. The dangers of recalling conversations from too many years ago without verification.
Well I was there for some of it. I remember listening to the BBC radio version in bed when it was broadcast in the US and being freaked out during the "Weathertop" episode where the ringwraiths come and stab Frodo. I think I was 9 at the time, and I believe I was reading the book for the first time at about the same time (I did read the Weathertop chapter before I heard the radio play). I wasn't introduced to D&D until I got the redbox Basic set for Christmas in '83 a year or two later.

[WanderingMist]

"Sci-Fi rom-com" includes a huge chunk of the planetary romance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_romance) subgenre, including almost everything ever written by Anne McCaffery. Also if Isekai's qualify as science fiction (there's a fairly strong case for some, not so much for others), then a huge fraction of that subgenre is much more focused on the romantic elements than anything else.

I've read a few of the Pern books, and I don't think they qualify as comedies. Specifically, Dragon's Dawn and Moreta are the ones I remember, but I read one or two more.

Also, just realized WALL-E probably counts as a sci-fi rom-com.

[NigelWalmsley]

Amazon's Uploaded might count. I would argue that Palm Springs and (maybe kinda) Happy Death Day count. If you accept straight up romances, there's plenty of stuff. But I think the question is somewhat flawed, because it's not like there are particularly less Sci-Fi RomComs than Fantasy RomComs. It's just that "genre fiction RomCom" is not a particularly common premise.

[InvisibleBison]

If we're considering books, I'd say A Civil Campaign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Campaign) is definitely a sci-fi romcom.