Weekend Nonsense: Favorite Bad RPG

[UngainlyTitan]

Played a lot of Palladium back in the day and loved the idea of RIFTS but that was a step too far.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

The Street Fighter RPG from White Wolf was not only playable, was not only enjoyable, but supported a massive shared universe ongoing campaign among me and several of my friends and their groups.

The Street Fighter RPG is a phenomenal martial arts RPG that was unfortunately called the Street Fighter RPG.

 

[Geekrampage]

Calling any RPG bad is literally throwing shade at other people's preferences.

Saying something like "dice pools are bad" or "a fantasy post apocalypse is bad" or "roll under systems are terrible" or "this is based on a comic I dislike" is a different thing from saying "this is poorly written", "the layout is a mess", or "this lacks any kind of cohesive design principle or conceptual vision".

The former is throwing shade on a preference. The latter isn't about preference at all, it's commenting on bad game writing or design.

One can make a game that is poorly written or designed and it still be fabulous!

 

[Geekrampage]

The Street Fighter RPG is a phenomenal martial arts RPG that was unfortunately called the Street Fighter RPG.

When we first saw it at the game store we laughed, "Ha ha ha! What a stupid idea for an RPG!"

When my roommate bought it we teased him, "You bought that? Ha ha ha! You are so stupid for buying that!"

When we made fighters and had some fights, we were suddenly, "Hey, this is interesting and I enjoy this!"

When we created a huge shared campaign world with literally hundreds of fighters and ongoing storylines, we began saying, "This is epic! I'm having so much fun with this!"

Thirty years later, we now say, "You know what I miss? I miss our Street Fighter campaigns! We should really play that again! Why aren't we playing Street Fighter?"

 

[Jer]

I really wanted to like Heroes Unlimited. I kept going back to the book, fascinated by the random character generation. But, the different categories of hero just aren't balanced against each other. I ended up rolling up lots and lots of character ideas to port to Champions.

(I can't believe I'm going to defend Palladium or Kevin Seimbieda's game design choices here...)

The thing about Palladium's games is that they come from a particular era of RPGs where "balance" was a thing that was still being felt out. In the D&D/AD&D sphere there was a lot of talk about balance and a lot of things that were put into place and held there because of "game balance" (like racial class/level limits, wizards not wearing armor or using swords, etc.) and everyone who played for a while knew that those nods towards balance were kind of bunk and didn't actually balance much of anything. But while there were some folks who were highly concerned about the game providing mechanical balance between characters (and they'd go on to create games like Rolemaster, GURPS, Chaosium's BRP system, etc.) there were also other folks who saw the idea of mechanical balance as not a goal worth trying to pursue at the rules level and that balance was only a thing that individual GMs could manage at their own tables by setting up the game for the characters the players had created.

Palladium's games are firmly in that latter camp. There's no concern with mechanical balance - it's up to individual GMs to figure it out. In some ways its actually kind of liberating because you know there's no magic formula that you can use to create a "fair" encounter, so nobody should be expecting encounters to have some kind of fairness about them - every encounter could potentially be a cakewalk or something you need to run away from and even an experienced GM might very well not know which kind it is until a few rounds into the combat, so be prepared for anything (Now, it would be nice to have that spelled out in the actual rulebooks and maybe some advice on how to actually do that kind of thing for new GMs. Especially since we live in an era where every game designer worries about mechanical balance and at least tries to create systems that work towards it, so the further we get from the original Palladium publication date the less experience anyone has with the idea that a game shouldn't care about mechanical balance.)

 

[Grendel_Khan]

When we first saw it at the game store we laughed, "Ha ha ha! What a stupid idea for an RPG!"

When my roommate bought it we teased him, "You bought that? Ha ha ha! You are so stupid for buying that!"

When we made fighters and had some fights, we were suddenly, "Hey, this is interesting and I enjoy this!"

When we created a huge shared campaign world with literally hundreds of fighters and ongoing storylines, we began saying, "This is epic! I'm having so much fun with this!"

Thirty years later, we now say, "You know what I miss? I miss our Street Fighter campaigns! We should really play that again! Why aren't we playing Street Fighter?"

My main group at the time liked it so much that we wound up doing two Street Fighter campaigns at once (alternating every week or so). One was pretty standard stuff, but the other was set in ancient China, and boy did it work great for low-level Monkey King-style antics.

Only thing I've played since that captured at least some of that combat system's feel is Avatar Legends.

 

[overgeeked]

Not really? Although preference does factor strongly in it, there are also objective measures of game design.

Really? What objective measures are you talking about? Sales is about the only objective measure. Everything else is subjective.

Saying something like "dice pools are bad" or "a fantasy post apocalypse is bad" or "roll under systems are terrible" or "this is based on a comic I dislike" is a different thing from saying "this is poorly written", "the layout is a mess", or "this lacks any kind of cohesive design principle or conceptual vision".

The former is throwing shade on a preference. The latter isn't about preference at all, it's commenting on bad game writing or design.

And those are all still subjective things. Poorly written isn't an objective standard. Layout isn't objective, it's preference. Vision certainly is preferences. Poorly written and badly designed games sell gangbusters. Immaculately written games that are wonderfully designed disappear without notice.

I like this style of system, therefore I say a game using this style of system is well designed. I don't like that style of system, therefore I say a game using that style of system is poorly designed.

Same for art and layout. Unless you're talking about utterly basic stuff like art blocking text. Beyond that it's all preferences. Widows, orphans, rivers, white space, negative space, leading, kerning, font choice, paragraph styles, text lining up across columns...it's all preferences.

 

[Geekrampage]

I'm not suggesting that my criteria aren't subjective. They are, of course, subjective.

I'm saying that there are different subjective criteria - that a game can be subjectively described as "good" or "bad" based on certain criteria that are not based on preference but are instead based on more technical criteria such as spelling, presentation, and the ability to communicate the idea through language.

Yes, these are still subjective criteria, but its one thing to say "This game is bad because I don't like games that use a lot of made up jargon and terminology." vs. "this game is bad because, as written, I can't figure out how the game is played."

One is reader preference and one is poor design/writing. Both are subjective opinions, I agree with you 100%. But they are two different criteria.

 

[CleverNickName]

Saying something like "dice pools are bad" or "a fantasy post apocalypse is bad" or "roll under systems are terrible" or "this is based on a comic I dislike" is a different thing from saying "this is poorly written", "the layout is a mess", or "this lacks any kind of cohesive design principle or conceptual vision".

The former is throwing shade on a preference. The latter isn't about preference at all, it's commenting on bad game writing or design.

One can make a game that is poorly written or designed and it still be fabulous!

"But no, see, I only like things that are good. If it were good, then I would like it. Since I don't like it, everything about it must be bad. Why is that so hard for you?" -the Internet

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Same. Rifts was the exact point at which I stepped away from Palladium's games.

Played a lot of Palladium back in the day and loved the idea of RIFTS but that was a step too far.