Games that are more fun to read than to play

Plane Sailing

Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
A game which I loved to read, but sadly was pretty impossible to run adventures in (because as a campaign setting there was no drama, no secrets, no hooks) was Skyrealms of Jorune http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2010/03/retrospective-skyrealms-of-jorune.html

Another system which was a great read but the game system was awful was the version of Empire of the Petal Throne known as (I think) Swords and Glory. It is ironic that apparently Prof Barker runs a rules-lite game, and this was rules heavy, heavy, heavy! http://www.tekumel.com/gaming_rulesSAG.html

Cheers
 
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Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator
Staff member
Supporter
First, character creation is overwhelming to many.

I can believe that. I've seen that. Usually, that's when I- or another gamer in the group- steps up to lend a hand. (Doesn't always happen, though.)

Second, there are numerous numbers to track every round, including Endurance, Recovery, Stun, actions on which you go, whether you are stunned, et cetera.
Well...
END is just like PP or spell slots; REC is a constant # that you just need to make sure you add in at the appropriate time- e.g. when you are recovering- STUN (and BODY) are your HP.

Your GM should keep track of who goes when- he has the chart, after all- but its also circled on your character sheet.

Tracking conditions could be annoying, though again, its usually on the GM's shoulders moreso than on the players.

Finally, I know gamers who consider Shadowrun and D&D far too much math. The kind of players who find both games dead easy are the only ones I've found who were willing to touch Hero. That's three people besides me in the past 15 years in the groups I run, plus one group of guys who were running the game but I had to quit because the game was awful (not the system, their game).

Hmmm...I honestly have to wonder about what games they find math-lite enough to play.

Or am I missing the point- is it just that they don't want to have to do the "behind the curtain" style work that makes the system so powerful? As in, they'd rather just look in the book and pick something rather than design it themselves.

Which I TOTALLY understand, given that I use a Mac and drive an automatic...

Seriously, some people won't play HERO just because the character sheet looks too complex.

Can't say anyone has expressed that view to me. Not saying it isn't true, just saying.
 

jaerdaph

#UkraineStrong
GURPS. I have never been able to play GURPS to this day, but I own dozens of GURPS sourcebooks for various genres and settings and they are always top notch idea mines usable in any system.
 

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator
Staff member
Supporter
GURPS. I have never been able to play GURPS to this day, but I own dozens of GURPS sourcebooks for various genres and settings and they are always top notch idea mines usable in any system.
I got to play a lot of GURPS in the early 1990s, and I don't particularly care for it, but I agree that their supplements are among the best in the industry.
 

Nork

First Post
For me, the hands down winner for this one is Planescape.

Awesome to read. Can be fun to run. Usually horrible to play.

The basic problem is that in a setting where anything is possible, the players simply don't have any mental reference points that give them the capacity to 'expect' how the world will behave, and figure out how they should behave.

Even if the players 'go with it', it is nigh impossible to get everyone on the same mental page and everyone is out of synch as to what exactly is going on. At best, it seemed to devolve into the DM telling a story at the players and telling the players what their characters do to solve the problems since the players will almost never figure it out.



A strong second in this category is Shadowrun. The terrible terrible rules balance doesn't do the system any favors, but that isn't the real issue with it IMO.

Shadowrun is about espionage in a high tech information rich world, espionage means that intelligence needs to be gathered and a plan formulated upon it. Generating that much supporting material/props is too much work for GMs. So the "planning" is virtually always handwaved away since the players are usually lucky to even get a floor plan, resulting in the game becoming either the players sitting there while the GM tells them what their characters do to infiltrate some location, or a dungeon crawl style string of encounters against security guards (at which point the system's terrible terrible rules balance rears is ugly head).
 

prosfilaes

Adventurer
One of my complaints is about a particular GURPS book: GURPS IOU. It sets up a wacky and wild setting, a university where anything goes including a large amount of gun play and magical response. Fortunately, if you die, you'll raised the next morning. If you die too often, you'll get turned over to grad students to be returned to life experimentally--possibly as a daisy, if a botany student is on duty. So in an environment where anything goes, nothing really matters long-term and you can be turned in a rabbit (suggested adventure hook) or reincarnated as a daisy, why do we want to use something as complex as GURPS?
 

Sorrowdusk

First Post
Hero System.
Many Gurps settings, such as Voodoo and Illuminati.
Twilight 2000.
MERP.
Lord Of The Rings.
Warhammer FRP.
World Of Warcraft RPG d20.
Wheel Of Time.
Everquest RPG d20.
Aberrant d10.
Babylon 5 and Stargate SG 1 d20 RPG.
d20 Modern.
DC Heroes, any edition.
Palladium.

WoW? EQ? As tabletop? ...Why....in the world... :confused:

On the flipside I think I could actually play and enjoy Stargate-on concept alone of course I've not seen the sorcebooks.

People keep bringing up SR, but thus far I've been enjoying my first campaign. All the experience I have; YMMV.
 
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Anaesthesia

First Post
The Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men
Fighting Fantasy RPG- As in the Dungeoneer! trilogy of gaming books/d6 system and not the d20 system. I DM'd a game of this and a lot of the players struggled with the characters. It has a lot of weird quirks, to say the least. Otherwise, has a lot of fluff I use for my DND campaign.:p
 

Merkuri

Explorer
Sufficiently Advanced.

The basic problem is that in a setting where anything is possible, the players simply don't have any mental reference points that give them the capacity to 'expect' how the world will behave, and figure out how they should behave.

I had a similar experience when our group played Sufficiently Advanced. It's a little-known system that takes place in the far future where technology is so advanced and widespread that nearly anything is possible. When faced with a problem the party usually freezes for a moment, then somebody says, "Well, can we use <fictional technology I just came up with or heard of once> to get around it?" and the GM either just says yes or has the players make a roll of some sort which almost always succeeds.

The characters (and the world at large) are just so wildly powerful that any sort of "normal" challenge is laughable. It's a real task for a GM to come up with something that the players can't just blow through by applying technology. You need a different sort of challenge altogether. It's good for a one-shot, but the GM can only come up with so many dilemmas and logic challenges before he runs out of ideas.

And the mechanics themselves were wonky. The base mechanic was to roll 1d10 and multiply it by some score. It made it very difficult to estimate the target values for tasks (at least, for me).

Another major mechanic was "twists", which could be used to completely re-write the story. This was something that seemed cool, but nobody wanted to use it because we were all polite players and we didn't want to ruin the GM's carefully planned story, even though the GM kept encouraging us to not forget about our twists. It felt like the mechanic was built as a way for the players to formally say to the GM in-game, "We don't like this story."

But the fluff was awesome. There was a civilization where people always wore masks and changed them for different moods or different jobs. Another civilization lived in religious silence, communicating in sign language, because they believed that if you sat in the void of space and listened you'd hear God. In yet another civilization everyone has a mesh (think neural implant) that tells them how to think and feel - voluntary mind control. Another one was dedicated to replaying history, and citizens would live out their entire lives as samaurai or knights or 30s gangsters, using their technology to mock up these historical eras. One group has digitized themselves and they live entirely within computers. I could go on and on with the fascinating and unique civilizations for this game.

So, to summarize, crunch was iffy, fluff was awesome, but the fluff was also awkward to put into play. It would've made a great setting for a series of books.
 

GrimGent

First Post
WoW? EQ? As tabletop? ...Why....in the world... :confused:
It's possibly even more amusing when you realize that both of those tabletop versions were published by White Wolf (through their Sword & Sorcery imprint), whose first manual of WoW monsters was also partially written by the author of Nobilis.
 

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