Worst Tabletop RPG

[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"

Spoiler: I've played rather a lot of games - these are the ones I recognised I've played from a great big Wikilist

Show

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.

[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.

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. 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.

[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).