Systems You'd Never Play after Reading Them

[billd91]

Traveller: New Era - If you thought Classic Traveller and MegaTraveller were too militarized, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Traveller 5 - the big black tome - don't... just don't. Total waste of $75 for the worst organized, most propeller-headed RPG book I've ever seen
Dogs in the Vineyard - totally put off by the game's inherent milieu
Vampire - largely the same as DitV

 

[Sepulchrave II]

DnD: 2E, 4E, 5E, PF. Yuk.

Traveller: MT, TNE, T4, T5, GURPS, T20, Traveller 2300, 2320, MgT. The mechanics are all fiddly as hell, or inferior to - or just ported from - Classic Traveller, although there are plenty of ideas to mine.

CT is the most awesome game ever, however, so there would be no point in playing any other version.

I am also opinionated.

 

[Iron Sky]

Burning Wheel - some of the concepts are brilliant and inspired, but hearing GMs who have run several campaigns in it say "I still have a hard time with combat" or "I don't even touch Duel of Wits" makes me pretty leery of giving it a go.

 

[Scottius]

Human Occupied Landfill, aka HoL.

"Although HoL is playable, it was meant as a satire of RPGs. The pages of the books are written by hand, and the authors freely take stabs at other popular role-playing games, particularly Vampire: The Masquerade and Dungeons & Dragons, and those who play them." --Wikipedia

My copy of HOL still sits proudly on one of my dedicated rpg bookshelves. I actually did run a one off with it one time several years back. My players really gelled with the style of humor that game presented.

 

[Staffan]

Changeling: the Dreaming was this for me. Well, not in the sense of "who could possibly want to play this?", but more in the sense of "This is a game with a lot of cool ideas that I have no idea what to do with." I remember buying a copy at Lincon 1996 (convention in Linköping), and selling it at the auction at Sydcon a week later.

Also, Exalted 3e. It has many cool things in it, and looks like it fixes a lot of the problems with older versions. But the main problem originates in the fact that older editions had a really strong focus on combat charms (charms are basically magical powers you can use that let you use your skills in superhuman ways), simply because combat had detailed rules so there was lots of design space for combat charms, and not so much design space for "running a merchant empire" charms. In 3e, they fixed that by having detailed rules for everything, so they could make lots of charms for all the skills. But as a result, the game becomes extremely rules-heavy, and not for me.

 

[Celebrim]

Dogs in the Vineyard - totally put off by the game's inherent milieu

I nearly put DitV on my list as well, but I didn't because the OP specifically said "systems you'd never play". And the thing is, I can think of some games I might want to play where I'd use the system, even though I am, as you are, inherently turned off by the game's built in setting. For example, I would definitely consider running a Star Trek game with DitV's rule set or something close to it, or really any sort of game where the primary conflict was conversational, and fisticuffs, and combat were upping the stakes. DitV is one of the few Indy games that seems to me to be well designed.

And I'm going to stop there, because there are a ton of games I could add to my list, but I was afraid I would start a firestorm of controversy by writing negative reviews of them.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Human Occupied Landfill, aka HoL.

"Although HoL is playable, it was meant as a satire of RPGs. The pages of the books are written by hand, and the authors freely take stabs at other popular role-playing games, particularly Vampire: The Masquerade and Dungeons & Dragons, and those who play them." --Wikipedia

HERETIC!!!

Ok, so I never actually played it, either. But it was one of the few treasured tomes I kept when I thought I was quitting RPGs (ha!) and gave away almost my whole library.

 

[Gladius Legis]

PF2. Easy answer.

 

[Arilyn]

Numenera. There is nothing wrong with the system, perfectly servicable, but I just can't get excited about the player character generation system. I'm also not fond of fantasy that is littered with ancient tech. It's usually not executed well, and I'm afraid Numenera falls into this category.

 

[5ekyu]

There are do many because I enjoy reading different rpg systems and stealing the bits that seem cool.

But a few notables

Mage:The Ascension - I was z huge VtM mark and even incorporated WtA but Mage went too far into what I saw as unplayable for me.

Cypher/Numrnera: Saw dedicated stream plsy snd bought and read and nope, huh uh, not gonna. Too much of a sense of negotiation at table resolution for me to get into playing it.

STA Mophi 2d20 whatever - similar exposure to Cypher in that there was a lot of streaming, then reading and nope not for me. When the players are more excited (frequently) about the acquisition of the meta-currency than the actual "oh our characters won" then thsts not a game that has the in-character vs table-side division of focus I want. I mean, pretty sure the word momentum was actually used more than any other word - including the character or ship names.

That's just a few - and only ones I had hoped to run but then gave up on reading. There are still the ones I bought, wanted to run but never got the group who did too at the same time.