What is, in your opinion, the single WORST RPG ever made, and why is it so bad?

[Umbran]

... and it's exactly that "satisfies ludonarrative verismilitude" that causes me to reject modern unified designs as the be all end all of good design.

Did anyone other than you claim it was a "be all end all of good design"?

I saw him say he "saw value" in a unified design, which is not the same as that claim.

Also, maybe this is rather far afield from the thread topic. Might want to bring it back in to talking about specific games you found were really bad....

 

[hgjertsen]

One game I would nominate for being very bad not because it is necessarily mechanically poor but because of what its theme is would be the Wendy's promotional RPG Feast of Legends, which is essentially 5E with a lot of rules removed, the serial numbers filed off, and product placement stuck in every nook and cranny.

Just a really vile thing to read, lol.

 

[MGibster]

One game I would nominate for being very bad not because it is necessarily mechanically poor but because of what its theme is would be the Wendy's promotional RPG Feast of Legends, which is essentially 5E with a lot of rules removed, the serial numbers filed off, and product placement stuck in every nook and cranny.

Whereas I thought it was hilarious. It's still better than Cyborg Commando.

 

[hgjertsen]

Whereas I thought it was hilarious. It's still better than Cyborg Commando.

Your mileage may vary of course!

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'd think Varg Vikernes' MYFAROG, with its racism, outdated mechanics, and heavy use of the Papyrus font, deserves a mention as the Worst.

I've never played it, but I regret buying this weighty tome:
View attachment 343495

One of the players in our group wanted to try DMing for the first time and chose Dark Souls. Being the most experienced with RPGs in the group, I said I would back him up and try to help with understanding rules. Well, the book was so widely panned by reviewers that we never bothered to crack open the book.

All thar being said; if you have a positive experience with this RPG, please share.

I played in a con game run by one of the writers, and it was phenomenal, evoking Dark Souls perfectly without just copying a section of the game.

Second vote goes to Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It's puerile, sadistically violent, and incredibly outdated, but hey, at least it's simple!

It's one of the many games that is built on a B/X chassis, so presentation is everything. And the presentation of LOTFP is as you said, puerile and edgelordy in the extreme. There have been plenty of other OSR games that deliberately evoke the sort of milieu a teenage metalhead would write, but LOFTP lacks the self-awareness that those generally have.

The single worst mechanic I've ever experienced though is the Megadamage in RIFTS where they thought they could integrate scale by just having two scales interact, where at the mega scale 1 point was 100 points at the ordinary scale. Most systems address scale very badly (D6 might be one of the few that doesn't completely fail at it) but this was an explicit recognition of scale that at the same time was absolutely worse than if they'd failed to address scale at all.

Megadamage, with its ability to paste anything that didn't have the matching MDC, made for a mess at the table, both mechanically and all the dead characters.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

1. Your favorite game.
2. @Whizbang Dustyboots ‘s favorite game.
3. @Umbran ‘s favorite game.

I am proud of my divisive tastes!

 

[jdrakeh]

OK, I heard it was bad, but mostly in terms of lore. How do you crit fail and crit succeed at the same time? I gotta know.

I don't recall the specifics as it has been a looooong time since I read the rules, but that bit stuck with me. I also believe that it was addressed/fixed in subsequent printings of the rulebook.

[Edit: After some investigation, it looks like beating a target number by 10 or more results in a critical success and if half of your rolled dice, rounded up come up with 1s, it's a critical failure. Both of these things can happen simultaneously. It's not extremely common, but the fact that it could happen at all was an issue. That said, again, I think this was addressed in later printings.]

 

[Celebrim]

Also, maybe this is rather far afield from the thread topic. Might want to bring it back in to talking about specific games you found were really bad....

Quoting the original post:

The purpose of this thread should be to discuss bad mechanics in RPGs and how they can best be avoided to develop better games in the future.

 

[hgjertsen]

Quoting the original post:

Of course, "bad mechanics" is very subjective and depends both upon what you're modeling and the intended tone of the system, but I think your post was definitely in the spirit of the thread!

 

[Umbran]

Quoting the original post:

You are free to ignore friendly advice, of course.