Why Do You Hate An RPG System?

[Manbearcat]

I rarely "hate" games, because if I strongly dislike one, I just don't play it, so I don't let the feeling bloom into hatred.
But there are things that make me say a hard "NO" to a game:

• Games that lie to me. This typically takes a form of the game being advertised or presenting itself in the book with "You can do X in this game" while the rules do not help do X or, in some cases, even get in the way of doing X. I "can" do anything, running a freeform. A game needs to offer significantly more to be worth my money and time.
• Games that want me to lie (me as a GM, not my NPCs). If a game advises me to bait and switch or to railroad players while giving them an illusion of choice, I won't even try running it.
• Games that offer a lot of options and expect me to balance them somehow. I don't want to review each character and make sure it's not too strong or too weak. If it is rules legal and fits the themes of the game, I expect it to work in play. Balancing things is the designer's job, not mine. And if someone does not want to put the effort into balancing their game, they should make is simple enough that balance is not a problem.

I'll just copy this brilliant post by @steenan and agree with it in full.

The only thing I could add to it is probably:

* Games that require a not-insignificant amount of "specific beats general" corner case mental overhead to run while the designers simultaneously overwhelmingly punt both the "specifics" to me to infer through multiple rules interactions (that may or may not be intentional) AND don't provide a robust set of GMing principles attached to a focused play premise, the substrate of which I can use to guide my inference.

That is sort of a combination of steenan's 1 and 3 though, so it may not be an altogether discrete category.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Fate points put me in my character's headspace even if I personally don't give a damn about a magical faberge egg (or whatever) and am only stealing because I think that's what my character might do. Whether they do it or not is contextual depending on how tempting that thing is.

If you were actually doing it because it's what you think the character would do, then it wouldn't matter whether or not you got a fate point for it. If you were actually role-playing, then you would care about the item because the character wants it.

 

[chaochou]

If you were actually doing it because it's what you think the character would do, then it wouldn't matter whether or not you got a fate point for it. If you were actually role-playing, then you would care about the item because the character wants it.

And if you were actually roll-playing in GURPS you wouldn't need a dice roll to tell you to roleplay.

 

[John Dallman]

Like many others, I don't usually hate games, because I don't play them if they seem defective. There was one game that I hated, and which my character hated for entirely different reasons:

I hated it because the action sequencing method (for fights, and any other fast-moving actions) was explicitly based on action movie conventions for cutting between characters. This was a homebrew system, and this point had not been clear in the GM's material about it. I have very poor sight, don't watch movies or TV and thus have no understanding of their conventions. The effect of this was that the sequencing seemed utterly arbitrary, tending to perverse, and I could not think about what I wanted to do (in a complex and unfamiliar game system) while other players were having their turns.

My character hated it because we'd been moved a few years (about ten) forward in time, by our chief opponent, but this had to remain utterly secret, so we could not contact our previous friends or families. From the character's point of view, they'd all been killed. The chief opponent also seemed utterly invincible, especially once he threw us back in time about 2,500 years, to a place where we seemed to have no significance and be utterly at the mercy of the (Greek) gods. The DM had not done any game mastering for about thirty years, and it rather showed: he was trying to run his game in a manner appropriate for rowdy teenagers, rather than adults in their late forties or early fifties.

All of the players protested about the latter aspect, although some of them could cope with the action-movie part. The GM finally accepted we were not enjoying it when I pointed out he'd given us a way to create a gigantic time paradox, and I was intending to use it. The whole impression the game was giving us was that human life had no importance or significance. Given that, why pander to cruel gods? Destroying the timestream at least denies them their fun.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

And if you were actually roll-playing in GURPS you wouldn't need a dice roll to tell you to roleplay.

Making a Willpower check (or whatever) is not a voluntary choice. You can no more resist doing this thing, than you can resist bleeding out when you've been shot. You don't want to do it, but you do it anyway, because you have no choice.

Role-playing is only concerned with the process of making choices.

 

[Manbearcat]

If you were actually doing it because it's what you think the character would do, then it wouldn't matter whether or not you got a fate point for it. If you were actually role-playing, then you would care about the item because the character wants it.

This is fundamentally misunderstanding how the brain works Saelorn.

Positive reinforcement (even "altruism") releases dopamine. The brain receives it and then associates the keying behavior with the good feeling.

Feedback loop complete.

This works with behavior that is (everything from a "fix", to how it engages with your life-system holistically, and from a base utility perspective) good for you and bad for you and behavior that is both simultaneously.

You feel your character's want while you simultaneously want-by-proxy (Fate Point), and even though you know it may cause you a downstream (or even immediate) problem, the agency-hijacking-machinery is potent. Maybe you exert your will over the machinery...maybe the machinery exerts its will over you. Fate (and games that use similar machinery) just works to simulate this agency-hijacking process and does it pretty damn well.

 

[Umbran]

Role-playing is only concerned with the process of making choices.

That seems to be either a poorly qualified or overly-restrictive statement, depending.

Whose choices are you talking about? Player or character?

 

[Manbearcat]

Making a Willpower check (or whatever) is not a voluntary choice. You can no more resist doing this thing, than you can resist bleeding out when you've been shot. You don't want to do it, but you do it anyway, because you have no choice.

Role-playing is only concerned with the process of making choices.

What about the process of having your agency hijacked by your biology?..which is pretty much fundamental to the human experience!

 

[Umbran]

What about the process of having your agency hijacked by your biology?..which is pretty much fundamental to the human experience!

There are cases where agency is hijacked. There are also cases... where you are fundamentally unaware of how much agency you actually have. If by "agency" we mean "knowing ability to make decisions and choices".

A whole lot of our positions and opinions, and thus our choices, are the result of brain action over which we have little or no control, as it is not conscious. We attach rationalizatiosn to many of our thoughts after the fact, and think of them as conscous chocies, when they really aren't.

The limbic system is a harsh master.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Umbran

Yup, neuroscience is revealing this to us more and more. That is pretty much the consensus position in the field at this point.

However, I figured that Saelorn was arguing from a position of agency:roleplaying so I didn't want to disagree with the premise and introduce a tangent. In order to make the conversation focused, I'll just allow for the premise he seems to be working under.