Lazer bears, god-slaying swords, & other atrocities oh my!

[KoDT69]

OK so maybe you all know what this is about. 3 games in particular among those said to be the worst RPGs ever to be seen. You know em, you love em, let's talk about em (if we keep that ONE under control). SenZar, World of Synnibarr, and FATAL (I can feel your hate brooding now). All of these are rancid piles of dung in the RPG world, but each one has some unique thing that's not so bad. From what I understand here is what I'm hearing:

SenZar - Has a superior magic item creation system to D&D. OK that's a bonus. You have all seen the "Help me forge an item" or whatever threads, I've made one myself. The D&D custom creation is lacking to say the least.

World of Synnibarr - Come on, who doesn't love flying grizzly bears with lazer vision and giant mutant fire-breathing clams? Sure, he's a bit off, but I kinda like Raven C.S. McCracken's style. He made all of his over-the-top calculations using his engineer's degree (to which I also have the same degree) and I can see where he's coming from. He tried to make it realistic in the sense of a 600 player level scale. Wizards deflecting photon beams from starships and stuff seems pretty reasonable when mixing fantasy and sci-fi. OK OK I know the storyline is filled with more holes than swiss cheese, but he had a workable idea and fumbled the implementation skill check. I still have my AD&D Hollow World boxed set, and that was, well, decent

FATAL - If you don't know what it is, don't bother. You'll want to soak your brain in acid if you go looking. Ignoring the filth and all that other offensive stuff, I kinda like the fact that a 1st level character has X HP and never gains more. The weapon attack chart shows that any hit with a real weapon can cause death. I also like the variance in the magic system. When a caster gains a new level, he might not get access to higher level spells. There is definitely no Batman Wizard in Neveria! OK this one is a touchy subject, if you can't discuss this one maturely and about the proper game mechanics, please ignore this entry. I'm sorry to anybody that never heard of it before, please don't go looking!

As a side note, I also found Violence RPG which focuses only on the bad stuff as well. While not as horrid as one of the above entries, it's an entertaining read (only 34 pages). I'm pretty sure this one was meant to be a joke. Check it out only if you're mature as well.

Have any of you actually played any of these steaming piles? Did you like it? Did your gaming group play it seriously or as a joke?

[daggaz]

No, but I read a long rant about FATAL once and it pretty much turned me off from the get go (especially about the PHB being like, what, 300+ pages long?).

But mention of some of these mechanics intrigues me, it would be interesting if some more knowledgable playgrounders (or yourself) could hash it out in a little more detail. Especially interested in the item creation stuff, as yeah, DnD 3.5 isnt exactly a thrilling system to use.

[Cubey]

Violence is probably the best from all these, because it is supposed to be a parody, doesn't take itself seriously in the slightest, isn't really supposed to be played and the author doesn't hide that he's making stuff up when he has no idea what to write to make sense, and that he's in it only for $$$. Plus, some... okay, most paragraphs are hilarious. It's mature and sometimes in bad taste, but still hilarious.

Now, I normally do not base my opinions on hearsay - I've only read a review of FATAL, and I do not want to touch the book itself with a 10-feet pole. Ignoring all the fluff which is extremely misogynistic and racist, masking it all as "realism" (the creator probably didn't get smacked enough), the crunch sounds extremely clunky. You have to roll 4-5 times for each hit, and make silly calculations for anything you do. HP not increasing with level? Play World of Darkness or Fading Suns. Every hit being potentially fatal? Fading Suns again. Only a random chance to get new spells to cast? That's not a good thing. Basing character development on random rolls is a very bad RPG decision - random HP in DnD, starting profession in Warhammer Fantasy, doesn't matter. It's bad, bad, bad.

I don't really know enough about the two other systems to comment on.

[Fhaolan]

I've played Synnabar, in a game run by McCracken himself at a con in the Seattle area...

It's really hard to get past the setting and the character generation system to see any advantages to the rest of the system. When one starting character is a human janitor with a mop, and another starting character is some kind of super tiger-man with thermonuclear projection nunchucks... it's a bit tricky to actually play. It's also very hard when the GM (Raven) is constantly reminding you how he's a real-life ninja so he knows exactly how many dice damage a fireball should do... He's a bit of a nutter, really.

[KoDT69]

Daggaz - The FATAL sourcebook is actually 977 pages in its entirety. And a huge portion of it revolves around mature content that may not even be suitable for most adults. I won't ever defend the author Byron Hall for that, but I will commend his skill system in which formulas were used that produced bell-curve results for what most closely resembles the general human populace. Choice of skills is a different story, though I digress.

Cubey - Yes I agree Violence comes right out and says what it intends to be and is true to it. FATAL claims historical accuracy and is defamed for not holding its claim, but if you consider the statement of exempted aspects of the real-world history, I think they did an alright job in that regard. They had to limit the history to one particular region being Europe, and target year 1335 AD for technology and social structure considerations. For obvious reasons, real-world religions and events associated with them were omitted. GitP also does not allow those kinds of subjects for good reason. Though I don't condone the remaining mentality that was portrayed into the finished product, I really can't argue that people back then were also hateful, corrupt, and mysogonistic.

Fhaolan - I would have loved to have the opportunity to meet the (crazy) man! Sometimes great genius can come from a devoid soul Seriously though, I have heard from others that did play (not with Raven) into higher levels that it did a bang-up job scaling power with the characters. Now of course, some stuff in there is just whacko, but I'm looking for the hidden gems in these rancid games.

One important thing to remember is that reviews on the internet are not necessarily written by professionals. A 13-year old kid in Mexico could be writing the review for all we know. The FATAL review focused on all bad aspects of the game while ignoring most of the actual mechanics. So there is a lot of bad, I'm not arguing that. I just think that a proper review would cover everything, and include more facts to justify the opinions. I would never say I hate something I have no clue about "just because". I reiterate that FATAL is a putrid game in all of the fluff it's built on, but I can see a few logic nuggets that mayhaps be spared for better use elsewhere.

[Fhaolan]

Fhaolan - I would have loved to have the opportunity to meet the (crazy) man! Sometimes great genius can come from a devoid soul Seriously though, I have heard from others that did play (not with Raven) into higher levels that it did a bang-up job scaling power with the characters. Now of course, some stuff in there is just whacko, but I'm looking for the hidden gems in these rancid games.

Oh, I fully admit that it's possible there's something worthwhile in there. I'm just saying that my personal experience made it impossible for me to find the worthwhile thing. Someone else might be able to find it, but not me.

[Serenity]

Actually, the review of FATAL examines a number of the mechanical aspects, and they were uniformly clunky, unnecessary, or just plain bad ideas. In FATAL, you could swing a sword at a cultist and stab his kidneys from the front without hitting anything else.

[KoDT69]

Clunky mechanics yes, BUT, they were not going for simple. The author expressly stated that he was going for mechanics that more realistically produced whatever results of his statistics research to which his method produced his desired effect. D20 in all of its greatness produces statistics curves more represented by a club shape. The power curve gets a bit out of control. Half of the builds on these boards prove that. Now for the random attacks in combat, the reviewer missed their version of Rule 0 that states if the result does not make logical sense, then reroll a new one. It is the intent that if your kidney is hit, the surrounding area will also suffer given the weapon used. The reviews did cover a bunch of mechanics but they skipped way more than they covered. Oh well, not that it matters much, I have the ability to look past the immaturity in the game and the reviews and look at the core game engine.

[Illiterate Scribe]

Synnabar has the Midnight Sunstone Bazooka, and those utterly random and arbitary fate rolls - it can't be all bad, or unrealistic.

[KoDT69]

Synnabar has the Midnight Sunstone Bazooka, and those utterly random and arbitary fate rolls - it can't be all bad, or unrealistic.

I never said the whole game was good. In fact I mentioned that they were all particularly steaming piles of doodie but that there may be nuggets of reasonable stuff amongst the pile. In defense of Synnibarr though, Warforged from Eberron are similar enough to the android/cyborg things that get the Midnight Sunstone Bazooka attack! And they seem pretty popular nonetheless.

Oh I also like the equipment list in Violence RPG. They basically have the bootleg knockoff jewelry and sneakers. I made an evil elf vendor in a D&D game once that basically sold bootleg stuff. It was always good for a laugh. He had a "bargain bin"!