(I absolutely loathe PbtA. I think my loathing for it is (perhaps excessively) well documented over the history of the internet. Nothing personal against D. Vincent Baker, Ron Edwards lassoed him to help playtest my game one time, which was surreal in a kind of wonderful way, I just think that the PbtA system is terrible and has done terrible things to the hobby. I think its legacy of "success with a complication" or "fail forward" is a poison pill for the progress of game design in the long term. I think its popularity ruined or wasted practically a whole generation of game designers, who (understandably) used it because it was popular and trending, they templated off of it rather than making their own unique games.) Anyway all of these conclusions were reached just by reading the text and observing the market. I have never actually played *World, nor would I unless it was the absolute only form of gaming available and the people playing it were people whose company I enjoyed.)
That's not my answer, though.
I wanted so badly to like
Dungeon Crawl Classics because I love just about every adventure Goodman Games has ever published and even the world of Aereth they're set in. But when I saw that the game MANDATED the use of ANOTHER SEVEN KINDS of ever-more-obscure polyhedral dice, that alone was such a terrible design decision that I NOPED the heck out almost on principle in spite of having just bought the DCC corebook. I mean, I'm not ashamed to admit that yes, I owned the silly irregular dice. But a game actually
requiring their
use? That was a bridge too far. Also to me it's a red flag when a DM starts producing extensive critical fumble tables and a flip through the rulebook made it look like it was mostly a DM's critical fumble tables (albeit mainly for magic, not swinging a sword) so that kind of made me want to put it down immediately.
To whoever said they were turned away by the sex mechanics in Apocalypse World my GOD I get you, but whoever said they were turned away by the sexual themes of VtM, I don't get you AT ALL. And yes, I realize it might be the same person. See, I'm not inherently repelled by sex or sexual mechanics in games, but to me sex had absolutely no place in the mechanics (and it was very blatantly in the mechanics, as in "you bang someone and XYZ mechanical stuff happens") of a game called APOCALYPSE WORLD about malnourished illiterate starving filthy possibly mutant post-apocalyptic murder hobos. It was incredibly off-putting.
The sexualization of vampires is a cultural phenomenon I've accepted since I first read Anne Rice. To me, sexiness in Vampire inherently makes sense. Rules for screwing in a post-apocalyptic context are very offputting to me because that is a REALLY unsexy context.
Whoever said Eclipse Phase is dead on the money. When I tried to play that game from the book as written it failed miserably. When we sat down to play at a convention with a GM who was familiar enough with it to IGNORE HALF THE RULES, it happened to run smooth as butter. Go figure.
Oh, and I think it's probably more interesting than any system I'd never play after reading it that I DID play (GM, actually) RIFTS after reading it. I saw how terrible it was on paper, but there was a huge amount of narm charm and honestly I really liked the idea of the setting. Eventually I wound up, as some guy keeps suggesting
CONVERTING IT TO HERO SYSTEM and also modifying what I thought were dumber parts of the setting by melding with a homebrew post-apocalyptic setting of my own.
That's an interesting critique. Would you mind expanding on that?
+1 to this. There are at this point MANY editions of Shadowrun. Most of them are playable to one degree or another. Is it the setting you dislike? I mean, William Gibson hates Shadowrun (I think his exact commentary included the phrase "gag me with a spoon") and William Gibson is to Shadowrun as Howard, Moorcock, Lieber and Tolkien are collectively to D&D, so you wouldn't be alone there.
(Half-expecting to see one of my own games mentioned in here. Unsure if want or not want. It's nice to see people have heard of your stuff, but it does suck to have someone read it and leave it unplayed. I wouldn't have been as blunt about the above two if I thought D. Vincent Baker and other *World profiteers weren't comforted by the relatively large (for this industry) piles of money they presumably sleep on at night, or if I thought Goodman Games was in a position where it cared about my approval. In other words I wouldn't have been as blunt if I was talking smaller companies or less visible games.)
Ever heard, "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger?" Same thing with PbtA. It's pretty radical to me, which is a good thing for the hobby. I've read it, would play it, haven't though.
