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

[mamba]

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.

yes, that is all. If you think a handful of games even approaches 1% you are very mistaken, and I already gave you 5-10, mostly depending on where we draw the outer edges though

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 stating they are not is at at best an assertion that needs some backing up

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.

it is neither pretty big, nor pretty popular. They do not stand out in popularity and market share wise we talk a handful of games when there are thousands

Don’t get me wrong, I am not claiming classes are necessarily better. All I am saying is that there is a ton of games influenced by D&D.

Personally I do not care either way about skill based vs class based in a CRPG, as the computer does the tracking. For a TTRPG I definitely prefer classes however, makes a balanced design much easier / possible

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

I think most versions of Cortex are a different beast here, because it (generally) assumes one of the different approaches will be involved in every die pool, its just a question of which, and often which is pretty obvious.

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.

It should be noted that by the standards of modern players (and this board in particular) I'm pretty far up the "not only tolerates complex systems, often actively wants them" scale, and I bounced right off Phoenix Command.

 

[Thomas Shey]

yes, that is all. If you think a handful of games even approaches 1% you are very mistaken, and I already gave you 5-10, mostly depending on where we draw the outer edges though



and stating they are not is at at best an assertion that needs some backing up

I don't believe I have. I've simply said that the commonality does not say the opposite, because the historical position of D&D relative to the first appearance of CRPGs is enough to explain that commonality by itself, and overextending from that is not supported.

it is neither pretty big, nor pretty popular. They do not stand out in popularity and market share wise we talk a handful of games when there are thousands

If your definition of "popular" includes neither Fallout nor their fantasy kin, I think I'm done here, as you appear to have a definition I disagree with from the start.

 

[GuardianLurker]

I really only have one candidate for WORST rpg (sorta). That's d20 future. Given it's stated design goal of being a toolkit to support any style/genre of science fiction/fantasy, I was a little suspicious as that's a VERY tall order. It failed in ALL of its attempts at its stated design goals. It is not fit for use.

Given its stated goals, I'd give it a limited pass if it could replicate any one of Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or any of the near-future sci-fi (like "Green Mars", or Total Recall). NOPE. It comes closest to the near-future sci-fi, but fails even there. It's biggest failure is lack of understanding of the scales involved - even at the interplanetary level, much less interstellar. Example: It's FASTEST listed ship drive is achieves 25x the speed of light. (In ST:TOS terms that's Warp 3.) For interplanetary travel, that's very speedy - Terra to Pluto is then somewhere between 10 to 15 minutes away. That same drive takes ~2 months (4/25 years) to travel to our nearest neighboring star. Doable - roughly equivalent to a modern day sea voyage across the Atlantic. But our next nearest neighbor is 3x that distance. Again, doable - roughly equivalent to cross-Atlantic voyages in the 1500's. But if you want galaxy-spanning (or at least fully interstellar) adventures, you need more than that. There's a reason Warp 4 is considered slow in Star Trek.

Conversely, even the slowest spaceship make space combat meaningless. Because space combat happens at fighter-jet speeds. Which means space combat only happens when 1) BOTH sides want it to happen, and 2) elimination of the combatting forces is the ENTIRETY of the goal. If the space combat is only incidental/an obstacle to the goal, one force just refuses engagement, and there's nothing to prevent that.

The ship-building system is barely functional, and frankly is so divorced from the rest of the system, that you'd probably be better off importing a ship-building subsystem from some other RPG.

One of the other goals is that d20 Future was also supposed to be interoperable with 3.x. It is, technically, but the power-scale is so much in 3.x's favor that it isn't practically. And it doesn't help that even if you just stay in the d20 Modern/Future system, the d20 Prestige Classes are unerwhelming/underpowered. Nor, frankly varied enough.

Some of these problems could have been fixed with an increase in page count. But more of them are just basic failures. Frankly, DragonSpace (a 3rd party supplement), despite it being a purely Fantasy-In-Space setting, does a better job for the 3.x era d20.

Space Hero, Spacemaster, Traveller (all versions), Fading Suns, Ashen Stars,.... are all better science fiction RPGs. And Space Hero is probably closer to actually being a multi-genre science-fiction RPG.

 

[mamba]

If your definition of "popular" includes neither Fallout nor their fantasy kin, I think I'm done here

of course it is popular, but so are many class based games. I said the skill based ones do not stick out in popularity, not that none of them are

Also, Skyrim (and I assume by extension Fallout) is an awful TTRPG system, you max out every single skill without breaking a sweat. That kinda works because you play one char, not in a group

 

[Thomas Shey]

of course it is popular, but so are many class based games. I said the skill based ones do not stick out in popularity, not that none of them are

Also, Skyrim (and I assume by extension Fallout) is an awful TTRPG system, you max out every single skill without breaking a sweat. That kinda works because you play one char, not in a group

I never saw that happen when playing Fallout, and can't say about Skyrim. But its not a necessity in any case, at worst that suggests they set the slope of advancement too high, not that the approach was faulty. After all, you can set levelling experience so people pop up like jack in the boxes too.

As to "not sticking out in popularity"...so what? As I've commented elsewhere, once you have first-arrival advantage, all you have to be is functional to keep that. It happens in all kinds of things. It tells you nothing about it being a particularly good approach, just that its not a particularly bad approach.

 

[Alzrius]

LotFP mechanically is just B/X with some spell list curation (and the addition of the bonkers summon spell) and some honestly very good house rules. Primarily the tweaks to the classes and the OD&D-derived skill system. The horror themes are really a matter of taste, but if we're talking mechanics it's not really fodder for this thread, IMO (aside from that Summon spell, debatably).

ACKS is much the same. While I can understand people not caring for the creator, or having objections to one or two elements they find distasteful (e.g. price lists for slaves), insofar as rules go it's fairly solid, being B/X with the mechanics much more tightly-knit. It's fairly heavy with regard to the underlying math, but I think that's a plus, and it goes to great length to make the mechanics fit the world (e.g. why do clerics eventually found temples and try to attract worshipers for their god? Because you can treat X number of worshipers as Y gold pieces for the purpose of magic item creation).

 

[mamba]

As to "not sticking out in popularity"...so what? As I've commented elsewhere, once you have first-arrival advantage, all you have to be is functional to keep that.

then what is your case for why skill based is better? Popularity cannot be it, yet it is what you brought up

 

[Sockfuzz]

I don't know about worst, but the Cypher System (the setting-agnostic version of the system that Numenera runs on) is the only system I've run that the players staged a mutiny over. I know the exact moment they decided to rebel, too:

For the uninitiated, your characters stats in Cypher are a pool of points that you can spend out of to, among other things, reduce the target number of a roll. One of my players was making a really important roll, so she spent like half of her pool to reduce the TN down to a ridiculously low number, then rolled her die and got an 18. Instead of cheering that she made it, she deflated, and went: "Oh. Well I guess I just wasted all those points."

It was such a feelbad moment that I wasn't surprised the next day when they basically all demanded to switch systems to anything else.

 

[Faolyn]

You might occasionally want something you could show images as too, but I tend to agree a VTT is overkill for most people with any game that doesn't care much about maps and positiioning.

We use discord, because you can upload pictures there.