What are bad ideas in RPGs?

[Gort]

Economic systems that are so incredibly non-sensical that a +6 magic item costs SIX THOUSAND TIMES what a +2 item costs. No one in their right mind would see that this makes any economic sense.

Well, I can pay $500 for this .357 revolver, or I can pay $3 million for a high capacity .308. Let me think about that for a minute or two...

or

This wand will cost me a relative pittance and give me a 10% better chance of hitting my opponent. This other wand will give me a 30% better chance, but it will bankrupt the entire kingdom. Well, screw the peasants, I like nuking things...

Yes, 4e, I'm looking at YOU.

This is entirely unchanged from 3rd ed, just so you know.

And 2nd ed.

And the only reason they didn't have it before then was because they hadn't tied money to magic items yet.

 

[Janx]

I have never liked the "players characters are captured" scenario. Hate it as a player. Refuse to use it as a GM.

that's actually one of my top advice items to new GMs. Avoid capturing the party, NEVER plan to capture the party.

It leads to rail-roading if you plan to capture the party (because the GM's brain gets into the route of foiling all PC actions).

If you do capture the party, the PCs will want to escape. This means they need to know what supplies they have, guard schedules, door locks, guard postings, etc. Additionally, they will want all their stuff back.They will need to know about details during transport, tying up methods while being held, as well as the final destination. It's a ton of work.

The exception for capturing seems to be, when you're other choice is TPK, a capture can save them. But in turn, you want to plan for a quick escape.

Captured PCs aren't much fun.

I also don't advocate stripping the PCs down. A) they'll want their stuff back. B) players don't like feeling emasculated/having no sense of power (the opposite goal of why they play). C) female games may be especially sensitive as some GMs think a naked PC is a raped PC. 1 in 5 women in america have been raped. It's a sensitive subject, and odds are good it hits close to home with your players.


Adventures that state "NPC will do THIS to the party" lead to rail-roading. The correct form is "NPC will TRY to do THIS to the party. If he succeed Y happens, else X". Games should not assume success of NPC or PC action.

 

[Delta]

#1 on the bad design list is any RPG that puts the GM in an adversarial role against the players. GM wins. Game over. Boring.

I see the GM role as at least three-fold:
(1) World & adventure design (off-line)
(2) Adjudication of rules (at table)
(3) Roleplaying villains/NPCs (at table)

In role #3, the GM must indeed roleplay evil adversaries (hopefully motivating players to defeat them). To completely eliminate that I would call a "bad design".

 

[Krensky]

1) Subsystems that mandate 'splitting the party.' The classic example of this is the decker/hacker in Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. Interestingly both games came up with the same solution and tried to integrate the cyber-world with the larger reality.

And largely failed. The issue with this isn't that the computer guy is seperate from the party, it's that the GM didn't handle the issue right. Granted both of these systems don't explain how to do it very well, but the answer involves planning around it, and flipping back and forth between the hacker and the rest of the party.

Systems that are wed to vehicle combat - MECHWARRIOR and especially MECHWARRIOR II I'm lookin' at you.

Conversely systems that are supposed to have or emulate vehicle combat and try to do so with a universal system as it applies to everything from fleas to 300 ton skyscraper sized killbots - HERO SYSTEM, stand forth as you are guilty!

Mekton Z handled this fine (other then the Interlock REF issue) and it does both.

As someone else noted, in-built utter hopelessness. TWILIGHT:2000 edges there, as do the aforementioned offerings from FASA (although by the time of MECHWARRIOR II it seemed that everybody and his brother had a brand new battlemech factory on their planet - hell they even introduced force fields in a couple of instances). But yeah, TRIBE 8 is very guilty of this, as is CYBERPUNK 2020. Let me the GM, decide whether or not the world is salvagable by the PCs, thanks.

Cyberpunk 2020 wasn't hopeless or close to it. Nothing stops the GM from letting the players salvage the world. In fact there was at least one source book that did so explicitly (Hardwired). CP2020 is probably the best game I've come across for emulating the genre, and one of the central elements of the genre is hope. The game setting had three 'sequels', each of which improve on this:

CyberGeneration: The world was more dystopian, but the characters and their goals were far more noble, and the published adventures strongly showed that the good guys were achieving their goals.

Cyberpunk v3: It's more post apocolyptic, but is actually less dystopic (since it's really more post-cyberpunk then cyberpunk).

Starblade Battalion: A Mekton Z setting set in 2180 where man has righted the wrongs of the CP2020 world. Sure, there's new ones, but it's obvious that Alt, Morgan, and Johnny (and Rache, I suppose) succeeded.

These futures are mutually exclusive to varying degrees, but if you look at the CP2020 book and see hopelessness and inability to change the world, that's you, not the game.

 

[billd91]

This is entirely unchanged from 3rd ed, just so you know.

And 2nd ed.

And the only reason they didn't have it before then was because they hadn't tied money to magic items yet.

Entirely unchanged? I don't think so. The rapidly rising expense of magic items, yes, has been around a while. But if you see this as a problem, then the problem is a couple of orders of magnitude worse in 4e than even in 3e.

 

[Halivar]

Entirely unchanged? I don't think so. The rapidly rising expense of magic items, yes, has been around a while. But if you see this as a problem, then the problem is a couple of orders of magnitude worse in 4e than even in 3e.

The solution, in my game, is that PC's can neither buy nor sell magic items. They're special.

 

[Intense_Interest]

Magic Items are tied to an Adventurer's health, and should be compared to the Price of Health and/or Life Insurance for skydivers and airplane test-pilots. Going from +1 to +6 isn't even laughably the same as choosing which mass-produced style of ammunition you want to use at the range.

Further, it isn't the price of a weapon, it is how much it costs for a mortal to make it in the current era- slight difference. Gods and Master Mages of the Past Era had a leg up on the "modern" D&D Artisan-Mage.

1. System-mandated game-changes. Going from "Dungeoneer" to "High-Level Diplomat" or "Lord of Castle Podunk" with separate skill-testing subsystems for each is a strange reward for accruing XP. Seen in 2E when players became high-level accountants for their Mercenary and Fortress business.

2. Combat Dice-Pools: giving a certain number of "combat dice" that can be used for either attack or defense. In single-combat situations it encourages an all-out-attack or "spike" damage so as to finish the fight- it is better to win than to not-lose- and further, it prioritizes the power of any "initiative roll" to get the all-important alpha-strike. Secondly it creates hard-to-balance outnumbering problems; a dice has to be held for every defense roll, reducing the ability of the defender to attack, creating a positive loop into defeat.

 

[justanobody]

that's actually one of my top advice items to new GMs. Avoid capturing the party, NEVER plan to capture the party.

I do it quite often. Works better than a bunch of drunks sitting in a bar, and gives characters a reason to start out working together when they have to break out of prison.

Also one of the better things to do to annoying characters. give them some time to be missed, as absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that jazz.

TPC isn't fun much after the beginning, but it is better than having the characters die in a TPK.

 

[wingsandsword]

Well, here are some Bad Ideas for licensed RPG's:

1. The game is not able to accurately model the main characters of the setting. Worse, the game does not include stats for any of the main characters.

2. The game does not include rules for major parts of the adventures of the setting. If this is a space RPG, it has no rules for space combat (or they are extremely paltry).

3. The game takes great liberties with the canon of the setting in the interests of making the setting better for RPG's, or just because the writers thought it was cool. Not so much an issue anymore with licensors being more careful, but I've seen this happen a few times with older licensed games.

4. The game is designed to need another game to be fully playable. I'm looking at you, old d20 STL RPG's that needed the D&D PHB for distinctly non-D&D games, but it's happened a few other times too.

5. Your RPG is released before the core canon of the setting is even finished, so you have huge gaps in your narrative and setting information. The first two d20 incarnations of Star Wars were guilty of this, missing two of the prequels. I really won't hold the d6 version to this, since the releases of the core rules for this was before the prequels really even began production so they had no way to know. The new Battlestar Galactica RPG also has this problem, the series isn't over yet and when it was produced we didn't know if it was set in the future or the past relative to Earth, what the status of Earth was or so on.

 

[Najo]

Well, here are some Bad Ideas for licensed RPG's:

4. The game is designed to need another game to be fully playable. I'm looking at you, old d20 STL RPG's that needed the D&D PHB for distinctly non-D&D games, but it's happened a few other times too.

5. Your RPG is released before the core canon of the setting is even finished, so you have huge gaps in your narrative and setting information. The first two d20 incarnations of Star Wars were guilty of this, missing two of the prequels. I really won't hold the d6 version to this, since the releases of the core rules for this was before the prequels really even began production so they had no way to know. The new Battlestar Galactica RPG also has this problem, the series isn't over yet and when it was produced we didn't know if it was set in the future or the past relative to Earth, what the status of Earth was or so on.

4. The PHB being needed was required by WOTC. The idea was any book with the D20 logo was a rules add-on to the D&D PHB (and later the D20 modern book). Not having this feature would mean people could make d20 branded books and have no tie back to the core rulebooks but still reference them. That would have been even worse for WOTC.

5. When d20 Starwars 1 and 2 released, the put all of the materials they had at the time in the books. Those RPGs were released before all of the movies were out, so they couldn't work with the materials as they didn't exist. Lucas Film specifically has stated that those time periods were off limits to licensed products until the movies were completed and released.