What is, in your opinion, the single WORST RPG ever made, and why is it so bad?

[loverdrive]

Second is Dungeon World, which should have been an mix of PbtA and classic D&D and instead was a mix of classic D&D and PbtA. I know it has its fans so I can't call it a bad game either, but boy was it ever not at all the thing I was looking for when I first found it. I can recognize that's on me though.

I can! It is a bad game that is chock full of just completely baffling decisions. Playbooks are weird, bonds are an asinine mechanic that works infinitely worse than Hx, but the most obvious: why the hell there is randomized damage in a game that already has a mechanic for partial successes?!

The crown jewel of bad games for me though is FATE Accelerated. I have my problems with FATE Core; it's incredibly crunchy for a game that purports to be so fiction forward, so I thought dialing back on that crunch would be the solution. To that, I say, hahahahahahahahahahahahaha, oh dear lord no. Players choosing what to roll by performing the mental gymnastics of "but I do it <insert adverb here>!" every damn action got old so fast. Blades in the Dark neatly solved the problem of players choosing what skill/stat to roll off of by giving the GM more leeway on the position and effect. FATE Accelerated never even brings up the possibility. It remains the worst game I've ever run.

Yeah, I love Approaches in principle but they really don't work in practice.

 

[Gradine]

Nearly all computer and video game RPGs can trace their lineage, directly or indirectly, back towards pretty much two points: Wizardry and Ultima, two games full of D&Disms as well as D&Disms with the serial numbers filed off. The two most influential console game RPG series, both throughout history and still today, are Dragon Quest (which was Enix saying "we can do our own Ultima") and Final Fantasy (which was Square saying "we can make our own Dragon Quest, only ours will be pretty much exactly AD&D")

 

[hgjertsen]

I would assume that the OP ban on RaHoWa and FATAL is also going to include dreck like MYFAROG, ACKS, LotFP, NuStar Frontiers, etc.

I'll get too honorable mentions out of the way first; the first of which is Numenera, which I wanted to love so much. My problem with the game isn't that it's bad, necessarily. It's not. It's just dull as dishwater. And it's just not quite modular enough to work out any character concepts that the game didn't come up with itself. Cypher has some good ideas in it, and I've even seen it done well (my daughter loves No Thank You, Evil!) but it's just... very not good.

Second is Dungeon World, which should have been an mix of PbtA and classic D&D and instead was a mix of classic D&D and PbtA. I know it has its fans so I can't call it a bad game either, but boy was it ever not at all the thing I was looking for when I first found it. I can recognize that's on me though.

The crown jewel of bad games for me though is FATE Accelerated. I have my problems with FATE Core; it's incredibly crunchy for a game that purports to be so fiction forward, so I thought dialing back on that crunch would be the solution. To that, I say, hahahahahahahahahahahahaha, oh dear lord no. Players choosing what to roll by performing the mental gymnastics of "but I do it <insert adverb here>!" every damn action got old so fast. Blades in the Dark neatly solved the problem of players choosing what skill/stat to roll off of by giving the GM more leeway on the position and effect. FATE Accelerated never even brings up the possibility. It remains the worst game I've ever run.

Definitely would have banned MYFAROG if I had known what it was, same goes for NuStar Frontiers. I actually mentioned LotFP in one of my posts because it's one the worst eamples of a BECMI game. Extremely puerile and edgy with heavy use of ultra-misogynistic themes which would have made Lovecraft blush.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don’t. I think that licensed RPGs are often just part of determinedly mediocre. None of seriously, horribly, impressively failures in the RPG world are licensed. Games like Spawn of Fashan, SenZar, World of Synibarr, and deadEarth never get close to licensing.

I think if we're just looking at a very narrow time window when design was very naive, then you'll pick some bland heartbreakers as the worst RPGs ever made, and I don't think that's very informative myself.

 

[Umbran]

I find this funny because it feels like the biggest attraction of PbtA is hipsterism. It's what the cool kids are playing (that and Blades).

Mod Note:
So, I just ejected someone for being rude, but this still remains to be addressed.

"Hipster" is basically a pejorative for someone who is more concerned with appearing trendy than with actual content, and you say as much. Which means this is basically an insult, with a side order of condescension.

While it is a ways back in the thread, let us not see more of this going forward. If we do see it, folks are asked to report the post, rather than make a public scene out of it. Thanks.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Nearly all computer and video game RPGs can trace their lineage, directly or indirectly, back towards pretty much two points: Wizardry and Ultima, two games full of D&Disms as well as D&Disms with the serial numbers filed off. The two most influential console game RPG series, both throughout history and still today, are Dragon Quest (which was Enix saying "we can do our own Ultima") and Final Fantasy (which was Square saying "we can make our own Dragon Quest, only ours will be pretty much exactly AD&D")

I have no idea what you're talking about...

 

[Gradine]

I have no idea what you're talking about...

View attachment 343729
View attachment 343730

It's a mystery

 

[Mannahnin]

Definitely would have banned MYFAROG if I had known what it was, same goes for NuStar Frontiers. I actually mentioned LotFP in one of my posts because it's one the worst eamples of a BECMI game. Extremely puerile and edgy with heavy use of ultra-misogynistic themes which would have made Lovecraft blush.

LotFP mechanically is just B/X with some spell list curation (and the addition of the bonkers summon spell) and some honestly very good house rules. Primarily the tweaks to the classes and the OD&D-derived skill system. The horror themes are really a matter of taste, but if we're talking mechanics it's not really fodder for this thread, IMO (aside from that Summon spell, debatably).

 

[hgjertsen]

LotFP mechanically is just B/X with some spell list curation (and the addition of the bonkers summon spell) and some honestly very good house rules. Primarily the tweaks to the classes and the OD&D-derived skill system. The horror themes are really a matter of taste, but if we're talking mechanics it's not really fodder for this thread, IMO (aside from that Summon spell, debatably).

I have very poor opinions of B/X in general but I won't go into those here. If I'm being honest, I think its inclusion would probably speak more to my distaste for unclear and bizarre spell descriptions (such as the summon spell you mentioned) but also to my distaste for its theming, which you would be correct to say does not exactly fit with the spirit of the thread.

 

[hgjertsen]

I think one of the more interesting discussions pertaining to good RPG design is the length one is willing to go to in order to achieve narrative and mechanic cohesion and what the proper midpoint between those things would be. Obviously, there is a great level of subjectivity involved in this, as there is in any discussion of whether or not something is "too complicated" or how well one method of rolling dice stacks up against another in terms of verisimilitude, but I have personally found that something like the d20 system which has been adopted by many games, having a common action resolution baseline tied to a single die with many augmentations provided by features and circumstances, feels the best to me.

I would be curious to hear if others who have more experience than I do could speak to the relative verisimilitude of other systems with different or varied die resolution mechanics or maybe if you even think it matters at all!