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

[Ralif Redhammer]

hmmm, I've never played the video game so I can't really provide that kind of experience. Maybe I can reskin it and try to pass it off as something new. (Hey guys, want to play this new rpg called Sark Douls?)
Eh, shennanigans for another day perhaps.

If you want to get a feel for Dark Souls (other than playing the games, which I love, but I get that they're not everyone's cup of tea), I'd recommend watching VaatiVidya's videos on YouTube.

 

[Kannik]

Yeah, I love Approaches in principle but they really don't work in practice.

That's interesting -- I've used Approaches in a couple of campaigns now (albeit using them in Cortex and not FATE) and they've worked very well at our table.

As for "worst" RPGs, I would add to the list Phoenix Command: purportedly an RPG though really it's a ballistic resolution system where the detail is dialed up to 11 (including one supplement that denotes 63 hit locations), with scant support for anything other than shooting.

 

[not-so-newguy]

If you want to get a feel for Dark Souls (other than playing the games, which I love, but I get that they're not everyone's cup of tea), I'd recommend watching VaatiVidya's videos on YouTube.

Thanks, I'll check it out.
For the record, the game seems cool to me from what i can tell. If I was still heavily invested in video game, then I would probably really enjoy playing it. I like the grimdark genre.

btw, my only real exposure to Dark Souls is the viva la dirt league you tube channel. Funny stuff:

 

[SteveC]

One of the things I love to do is play games I've never heard of at gaming conventions. I have played a ton of games in development with the designers and found out how they were intended to be played. For a lot of the games mentioned here that are new or recent, I really recommend trying that. When Blades in the Dark first came out, I didn't "get" it. And so I played a Con game of it and had a great time. I get what the designer was trying to do now. Perhaps some of the games people are saying are the worst, might actually be fun if they tried them out.

And for the record, I have run and played a few sessions of Synnibarr and it is both as bad as it reads and also as fun as you might expect. I still think it's a terrible game, but it is also a hoot.

 

[loverdrive]

That's interesting -- I've used Approaches in a couple of campaigns now (albeit using them in Cortex and not FATE) and they've worked very well at our table.

Cortex is a different beast, I think. There it's a) easier to adjust difficulty b) harder to bypass difficulty adjustment.

Approaches, in my opinion, just don't really mesh with how Fate works, but yeah I love them outside of Fate. In my fates+blades hybrid I use approaches, in the second best game I ever made there are approaches too.

Spoiler: Second best game I ever made

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

I'm not going to call out the whole game as bad, there's a lot of good stuff in it. But my single most disliked mechanic in a TTRPG is the Zealot Class's healing ability in Errant.

When the Zealot heals someone, they roll 2d6. If they roll a 3 or lower, they instantly kill their target instead of healing them. The zealot gets a resource to mitigate this! However, if they spend the resource to reduce or remove the chance of instantly killing their target, they have a % chance to never be able to heal that target again, permanently. Which, given that party members tend to stick around, is a bit of a problem...

 

[Thomas Shey]

None of which even remotely resemble how they work or ever worked in D&D.

I completely disagree. Levelling and level elevating hit points are virtually indistinguishable from that, unless you have a remarkably specific definition of "resemble" going on. Classes may vary somewhat more, but even classes themselves are a derivative of D&D and you almost never see anywhere in the hobby with games that are not carrying other D&Disms.

 

[Thomas Shey]

we are still talking about what, 5-10% of cRPGs and related games? These are outliers, they certainly are no indication that they found a better system, just like they are not for TTRPGs.

Is that all we're talking about? I can name at least a handful of more indie CRPGs that don't use classes once you get outside the fantasy end of it, and that's with my pretty limited experience.

Frankly, the assumption that classes are done because they're the best way to do it rather than its the way the early CRPGs imitating D&D did, and its just carried forward out of habit is just that--an assumption. And I think when you have a pretty big popular subset of them that seems to get by without it, trying to claim its the best way to go seems to require to explain how those games have gotten by so well without doing so.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would assume that the OP ban on RaHoWa and FATAL is also going to include dreck like MYFAROG, ACKS, LotFP, NuStar Frontiers, etc.

I'll get too honorable mentions out of the way first; the first of which is Numenera, which I wanted to love so much. My problem with the game isn't that it's bad, necessarily. It's not. It's just dull as dishwater. And it's just not quite modular enough to work out any character concepts that the game didn't come up with itself. Cypher has some good ideas in it, and I've even seen it done well (my daughter loves No Thank You, Evil!) but it's just... very not good.

I felt the same way about both it and The Strange; really wanted to like them, really couldn't find the system seemed to work that well (this is even more true with The Strange).

The crown jewel of bad games for me though is FATE Accelerated. I have my problems with FATE Core; it's incredibly crunchy for a game that purports to be so fiction forward, so I thought dialing back on that crunch would be the solution. To that, I say, hahahahahahahahahahahahaha, oh dear lord no. Players choosing what to roll by performing the mental gymnastics of "but I do it <insert adverb here>!" every damn action got old so fast. Blades in the Dark neatly solved the problem of players choosing what skill/stat to roll off of by giving the GM more leeway on the position and effect. FATE Accelerated never even brings up the possibility. It remains the worst game I've ever run.

This is part of the issue I have with Storypath.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would be curious to hear if others who have more experience than I do could speak to the relative verisimilitude of other systems with different or varied die resolution mechanics or maybe if you even think it matters at all!

I'd be the wrong one to ask, as I tend to find special-casing more than absolutely necessary actively annoying, but I know some people think you get a better result out of having different mechanics for different situations (I've just never found their arguments on that particularly compelling).