Fun to Read... Boring/Bad to Play

[cdrcjsn]

I've had the reverse: boring to read, but fun to play.

That being 4e D&D Player's Handbook. Reads like a dry textbook, but the combats are way fun.

But going back to the OP's point, I remember Torg as falling into the "fun to read, but not so much fun to play" category.

 

[Azgulor]

Yeah, I've had similar experiences with reads-better-than-it-played, at least for me and my groups.

My List:
Vampire & Werewolf
Traveller: The New Era (1st Traveller game I played)
WEG Star Wars
Original Dark Sun setting.
Ravenloft Setting (have consistently had great experiences with the original Ravenloft modules, though)

 

[coyote6]

I found Exalted was, sadly, less fun to play as a campaign than I expected. It was more of a PITA to GM for, basically.

 

[fanboy2000]

I think White Wolf was the Queen of this back in the 90s.

Changeling: The first softcover edition was particularly fun to read, as were the other books in the line. It was kind of "emo lite" to things like Vampire.

The problems, however, are numerous. For example, in the soft cover book, you used cards to cast spells (glamour). The problem was that the book encouraged the Storyteller to make their own card, but provided few examples or guidance. You could buy cards, but they weren't carried in many places and were akin to trading cards sold in packs, IIRC.

The hardcover changed the glamour system around quite a bit to fix that problem, though.

White Wolf als published this awesome book called HoL: Human occupied Landfill. The book was hand written. Let me say that again, it was hand written. At one point, the author had the waitress sign the book to prove that he was at IHOP. Its in the book. Frankly, I don't remember there ever being any game mechanics in the book, despite it starting out saying that it was a roleplaying game.

TSR's Planescape was also, to some degree, more fun to read than to play as written. While not as bad as HoL, it lots of playable ideas, some of the proposed mechanics seemed a little off to me. I think this was because they had problems with things like the silver cord from from the regular game. Of all of TSR's games, I think it was the most White Wolf like. It's why I loved it. That said, I will always thank the Planescape team for giving us Sigil and the Lady of Pain.

 

[Verdande]

Palladium. I picked it up because there was so much to the books, and it all seemed so full of flavor and so interesting!

I tried to play it, and there were numerous, serious problems between me and playing nirvana. It just didn't click. It's still got some cool stuff in there that I can mine for ideas, but the basic gameplay is just so... wierd. It's like five different systems clanging together, like a clock made of sausages and coat hangers.

 

[tenkar]

I vote Rifts too. And I was there at the beginning, had my copy signed at GenCon when it was first released. It looked and smelled like gaming nirvanna.

It actually read pretty well if you allowed your imagination to gloss over the inconsistancies and didnt dwell on them (like i force myself to do with most cop movies / tv shows).

Played really bad, unbalanced and confusing as all hell to reference the books in play.

Still an amazing setting tho. Maybe someone can "savage" it

 

[pawsplay]

Rifts -- How can Thundarr versus Terminator suck? And yet it does.

Heroes Unlimited -- Not simply for sharing DNA with Rifts or the (mildly playable) Palladium fantasy game. For one thing, it seems like it would be fun to just roll up a random super heroes, but then you find out that Kevin expects you to calculate your Radio: Basic percentage, which is an occupational skill for some education levels but not when taken as a secondary skiiiiiilllll.... WHEEZE WHIRR KLUNK KLUNK ... Sorry about that! But anyway, if you try to play, you discover that most low level supers cannot withstand a bunch of gangsters with SMGs. And it preaches non-deadly solutions and consideration of PR and legal issues, but good luck finding ways to non-lethaly incapacitate people using the game system. Unless you want your supers game to play like a cross between Kick-Ass and Misfits of Science, you are looking at the wrong game.

Earthdawn -- I really thought it sounded cool. But I hated the essence mechanics, and I grew bored and disinterested with the setting.

Elfquest -- Look, flesh-shaping! Wicked. Look! I just killed my brother's PC in the first five minutes of the game thanks to a critical hit from an axe.

Marvel Universe -- Hmm, stones, abstract game play, freestyle resolution... could be cooler than Fudge. Wait, no, the rules the incomprehensible and character creation is an arbitrary process that really amounts to assigning whatever stones you want to whatever.

 

[Beginning of the End]

2) In the classic haunting, the dead character lives out his story in relative isolation. Classic haunting stories have one ghost, and possibly multiple people being haunted. Interactions between ghosts are rare and confined classicly to reliving the past. One of the biggest problems I see in well written RPG material is the failure to consider how the game plays out with multiple player characters. You simply can't expect to play out a haunting scenario with a group of ghosts with widely different backgrounds and differing motivations.

I've never played WtO, but that actually sounds like an interesting premise for an RPG: The group creates a single, history-laden location. All of their characters are ghosts in that location and may, or may not, have had any contact with each other during life. The trick here is that it's a competitive RPG: The PCs all have something they're trying to accomplish through their haunting, and these goals are likely to conflict with one another.

At one end of the scale this could provide fodder for some amazingly dark, gothic roleplaying. At the other end it can give you Beetlegeuse. Lots of range.

 

[Jhaelen]

My vote goes to Shadowrun. They managed to write even catalogues of high-tech equipment in an entertaining way. Creating characters was fun, as well, but whenever we tried to play it, it always capsized after a single unsatisfying session.

I really prefer reading the novels: light fare but entertaining and fun.

 

[Celebrim]

I've never played WtO, but that actually sounds like an interesting premise for an RPG: The group creates a single, history-laden location. All of their characters are ghosts in that location and may, or may not, have had any contact with each other during life. The trick here is that it's a competitive RPG: The PCs all have something they're trying to accomplish through their haunting, and these goals are likely to conflict with one another.

At one end of the scale this could provide fodder for some amazingly dark, gothic roleplaying. At the other end it can give you Beetlegeuse. Lots of range.

Well, that I assume was the inspiration for and the goal of the guy that wrote WtO. Certainly it read like that in the fluff. But the sort of game that plays out under that premise is a little bit abstract, heavy on theatre, probably involves low melodrama, and doesn't have any of the traditional RPG play that you'd get from D&D, Star Wars, Chill, etc. I mean, essentially you are dealing with every player in sort of a quasi-Storyteller role and the DM acting more like the director in a Nar game. I just don't think that there are alot of groups that can both pull that off and enjoy it, and it to me certainly doesn't lend itself to more than 6-12 hours of play.

For me, a game like RIFTS is just a bad game. It might not be that obvious to someone who doesn't rulesmith alot, but to me the problems just leap off the page (that might have something to do with me also not liking the fluff much). But a game like WtO or 'Monsters and Other Childish Things' are not bad games in the sense of having extremely bad mechanics. I don't even know that you can objectively say that they are 'bad games' or 'boring to play'. I think that what you are dealing with is a game that can actually be played successfully by a very small segment of the market, and which the author has failed to provide sufficient guidance on how to play the game in the typical scenario of 4-7 friends looking to entertain themselves for a few evenings.

I think that's what is really going on when I hear people select things like 'Ravenloft' or 'WEG Star Wars' (!!!). It's not that these are bad or boring games, it's that the skills to play them may not have been available. WEG Star Wars is one of my favorite systems and to me does an amazing job of capturing the movie feel. And I know I'm not alone in that. I've known of other successful long running WEG Star Wars groups. But it may be simply that the game master didn't have a skill set suited to the game and didn't know how to make or run a Star Wars scenario successfully. That is still partly the games fault for not making it clearer and providing more examples, but partly that's just a simple personality conflict.

The classic case of that for me is 'Paranoia', which is a great game but which I haven't got a hope of being able to run successfully. It takes a game master with a particular skill set to do it, and I don't have it.