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

[Nikosandros]

To help distinguish, you know, between those officers who are great at "forward observer," but terrible at "military identification."

You don't know the intricacies of each!? Is it because we left all that whitespace on the page, or because you didn't take enough skill in "intelligence?"

I'm not defending that skill list, but a "forward observer" would presumably provide fire direction and guidance, for example to artillery, while "military identification" sounds like the capability of distinguishing different tanks, planes, ships, etc.

 

[Theory of Games]

Thread rules: No FATAL or Racial Holy War because, well, duh.

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.

Apocalypse World (and games 'powered by' including 'forged in the dark'): Utter TRASH.

• Why do people make fun of Uncle Gary's "High-Gygaxian" but no one points out Baker's uber-pretentious tone in AW? 'Play to see what happens!" Really? No sh*t. Like everytime anyone anywhere has ever played a game we were ALWAYS playing to see what happened. Baker even out-peacocked White Wolf's narcissistic narrative style
• The "Let's become BFFLs in a post-apocalyptic hellscape" makes zero sense
• Moves. Tabletop rpgs are really fun because we can play any kind of character in any kind of setting and do just about anything we want as that character. They're simultaneously insane and therapeutic. 'Moves' change how we RP by saying "OK in this situation you can do X or Y or maybe Z but that's it. No you can't do things the other characters can do because your class playbook limits you to X, Y and maybe Z. The spotlight is now on your character! Everyone is watching! Aaaaaand ACTION!" This is "The Theater Kids RPG". You just read the pre-written lines explained in your Moves and you now get to pretend you're roleplaying. The whole scheme of how the game is designed makes me nauseous.

FATE (all of it): this one's already been jabbed at above and is trash in all its forms. Sure, it's an rpg but the rules lack real definition. This game. If someone told me they had a set of house-rules for playing Risus, I would immediately think "FATE".

Marvel Heroic Role-playing: one of the worst superhero rpgs ever and that's doing something impressive considering how many of them there are. Dice Pools? Using d4s and d6s? For superheroes? It felt so LAME playing that game. Plus it came with no in-depth rules for creating your own character. If my group's running a campaign who TF wants to play Marvel characters? Wait I know: NOBODY. Compared to Champions handful of d6s and Mutants and Masterminds' d20 Heroic's dice-pool played more like a KIDDIE-pool. The best superhero rpgs make you feel like a superhero. MHRPG missed the mark badly.

Burning Wheel: IF tabletop role-playing is all about the exploration of character depth rather than combat and dice why do you need SIX-HUNDRED PAGES to explain what roleplaying is? Wait I know: you need room to explain how the d6 dice pools provide notes on my acting. Yeah I get it.

 

[pemerton]

I don't know what the worst RPG ever made is. I think @SteveC is right to say that we're past the era of such a thing - maybe Man, Myth and Magic is the worst that I own and have read?

But seeing as this thread seems to have drifted into commenting on RPGs posters don't enjoy, I'll get in on that action: the worst RPG I've played in that sense is AD&D 2nd ed. The PC build is arbitrary; what action resolution rules there are are mostly just carried over from classic D&D; and the only way to actually resolve actions and events in the sorts of scenarios the game purports to deal with is to have the GM make stuff up, perhaps guided or prompted by some player die roll. In my experience, the mechanical system doesn't do anything that couldn't be done by just sticking half-a-dozen descriptors on the PC sheet, and having the GM refer to those to tell everyone what happens next.

 

[mamba]

the worst RPG I've played in that sense is AD&D 2nd ed. The PC build is arbitrary; what action resolution rules there are are mostly just carried over from classic D&D; and the only way to actually resolve actions and events in the sorts of scenarios the game purports to deal with is to have the GM make stuff up, perhaps guided or prompted by some player die roll. In my experience, the mechanical system doesn't do anything that couldn't be done by just sticking half-a-dozen descriptors on the PC sheet, and having the GM refer to those to tell everyone what happens next.

is that different from BX / 1e, or did you just not play those?

 

[Bedrockgames]

I have already defended 2E elsewhere, but one point worth considering when evaluating the system is AD&D second edition was designed to be backwards compatible with 1E. There were still a lot of 1E adventure books, supplements and setting books on shelves and it was relatively easy to run those using 2nd edition. I considered that a strong point because 1E had a lot of good material. I remember going to B Dalton or Walden Books and just being surrounded by stacks and stacks of AD&D books for both editions. Really helped when you had something coming up and needed a map or an adventure idea (or specific setting element to bring in for flavor)

 

[MNblockhead]

Uh, the money supply remains fixed. Players must lose money to progress the game, so the bank, you guessed it, always wins.

Monopoly must be at least a decent board game, given that it's still in print. But we should note for this thread: it's a horrible role -playing game! Who wants to play an old, leather shoe?!

Actually, this is the first argument that has made we want to play Monopoly!

When my kids were young, perhaps the most painful part of being a parent having to play mind-numbingly boring board games (for me): Candy Land, Life, Monopoly Junior, etc. I quickly got my kids into playing games above their age group, letting my wife play the games I couldn't stand when they wanted to play them. Also, I was lucky to have kids at a time when there were some very clever and fun young children's board games. But when I couldn't get out of playing Candy Land, I basically turned it into a role-playing game, with not non-played colors acting like cheer-leaders on the side, making up back stories and narrating the what the charaters (I mean "pieces") saw when they landed on a square. Sneaking in homemade cards with stupid, cheating rules just to keep the kids on their toes.

And playing with lego quickly became a miniature war games. The duplo elphant would have, say four red health blocks on his back, were lesser animals would have fewer. Each animal had a movement and attack value. Movement was halved on difficult terrain. It got to the point where I could happily play legos with my toddlers for a couple hours, usually until mom decided she needed the living room floor space back.

 

[MNblockhead]

Monopoly's biggest problem is the long tail. Everyone knows who's going to win long before it tends to actually happen. That's not a unique problem with Monopoly, mind; a lot of strategy games suffer from it as well.

Yeah, it's why I find Risk and even Catan to not be particularly fun.

 

[Ulfgeir]

My candidate for bad game from a rules perspective is Chill 1e (I am still sad though that I got rid of it. Only game I have ever gotten rid of).
You basically had to have the power "Prophetic dreams" to be able to defeat most monsters. Without it, you had no way of getting the info needed. Not to mention that the way to generate stats were just weird.

And two candidates for badly written rules:
* Darksword adventures - confusing system. I loved the novels it was based on, but the rules here appeared unplayable.

* the Swedish game Götterdämmerung. It would have benefitted form a lot more proof-reading and play-testing. One thing they make a big thing of, is how fashionable your clothes were, and well let's just say that the rules for that was very very confusing. The examples they gave didn't explain how they got the values they used, and they then didn't explain how the results were to be used. I noticed this as I did a character for the game in a "Make a character per day in January"-challenge at a Swedish rpg-forum...

 

[SteveC]

Yeah, it's why I find Risk and even Catan to not be particularly fun.

I think these games helped me to do a summary/clean up when combats enter this same phase. Yes, we could do a few more rounds of combat where we absolutely finish every monster but the threat of the combat is gone, so ... here's some narration.

 

[SteveC]

If I can use an analogy for what's a bad game, I frequently hear the notion that a big mainstream movie was the worst one ever. When I was in college, I joined the film society and we received a ton of movies hoping for us to have a showing (we did movie showings in a big lecture hall a couple of times per week). If you think that a Transformers film is "the worst film ever" you haven't seen truly bad films. I've had to watch some films that were partially out of focus, had sound you couldn't understand, randomly ended and started scenes with no explanation and had acting that would make Shatner's angry Kirk look Shakespearian. I didn't watch the whole things most of the time, but I did know people who did. I would joke that if we ever got a "King in Yellow" film, we probably shouldn't watch it. Those are truly bad films.

I get that people don't like, say, PbtA games or Burning Wheel or a ton of other games, but they aren't in the same universe as Spawn of Fashan or Synnibarr. By the way, to check the spelling of Fashan, I did a google search and found there's a 40th anniversary edition you can order now.

I guess I'm not trying to Yum anyone's Yuck, but I'd suggest taking unplayable and incomprehensible as a status for true "worst" games.