Worst Tabletop RPG

[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. 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!

[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?)