Games that didn't survive first contact. . .

[TheSleepyKing]

I'll have to add my voice to the chorus of "Rolemaster". My experience with that game lasted literally about five minutes. It was a very long time ago, but I seem to recall the exchange going something like this:

DM (kicking off the first session): You’re standing outside a great pyramid. A dark entrance looms before you.
Player (me): I go in.
DM: As soon as you cross the threshold a trap goes off!
Player: Umm. OK.
DM: Roll for damage and possible crit.
Player: <Rolls>
DM: <Frowns as he looks at crit table.> It looks like your arm just got blown off.
Player: My character immediately decides that adventuring isn’t for him after all.

Thus began and ended my Rolemastery career.

 

[Psion]

Over the Edge: Loved the setting. The system was intriguing, but after running it a few times I came to realize: there's a point to all the detail I enjoy in other games. It's easier to breeze past detail I don't use than summon up detail I do.

Rolemaster: Some folks complain about D&D or Hero being complicated, but RM was the first game I played where all the players had to have me make the characters. That's a little beyond the call, I think.

 

[Deset Gled]

I'm going to have to be "that guy" and say... AD&D 2e. Maybe I was just too young (middle school), too impatient, or just not interested in it enough at the time, but the first time someone introduced it to me, it just seemed like a game of memorization based powergaming. It's worth noting that I had done some of the 1e red box version before this, and I had the impression that they had "advanced" it to the point of being unfun. To this day, I still haven't done much of anything with 2e at all.

 

[apoptosis]

Original Tunnels and Trolls. Combat was such that all players just added to the die pool which then went against the monsters total die pool.

As such there was not individual actions incombat per se and everything was group combat except for spellcasting.

My players HATED this.

 

[CaptainChaos]

Iron Heroes: Took an already complicated game and made it more complicated. A couple of sessions and the game fizzled.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Ravenstar. The game was dead before it started. Myself and the other players mutually agreed that the character creation system sucked and refused to make further preogress on them.

 

[Remathilis]

Palladium: Oh God, did I TRY to like Palladium games (TMNT, PFRPG, RIFTS, etc) but combat took forever, there were nonsensical rules, and the icing was when my TMNT mutant was rendered comatose and when he awoke, found he had become homosexual(!), it was done.

Lord of the Rings: Decipher's LotR RPG never made it past character generation, mostly because none of us could figure out how to design a PC!

 

[Lord Xtheth]

GURPS: Yeah, I couldn't get into this one... at all, no matter how hard I tried. Maybe it was the math, maybe it was the GM, maybe its just me but I don't like this game.

FUDGE: Just like GURPS, but with no rules... hooray!

Toon: Tried running this one, and loved the concept, but maybe a little "too wacky" for my group of friends I tried playing with, and every other group of friends I mentioned the game to.

Palladium fantacy RPG: "Why not play D&D instead?"

Nightspawn (Later Nightbane): Though the idea and concepts were pretty cool, no one I ever tried to play with could get into this game.

Every WoD game that wasn't Vampire: the Masquerade: Yeah I know they're all essentially the same game, but the only one my groups and I could realy get into was V:TM. I haven't tried the new edditions yet, so my opinion might change.

Any LARP: Yeah, there's geek life, then there's GEEK LIFE. LARP is a little too geek for me.

 

[Crothian]

Colonial Gothic: The character generation system seemed odd enough that making a character that was good at anything was impossible. I think one of the players as a side project min maxed a character and got a little over 50% success rate with one thing and completely terrible at everything else. Playing the game proved to be a game of chance between PCs and GM to see who go lucky on the dice first. No one had a good chance to succeed at anything.

It was a real pity, too. I liker the concepot very much.

 

[jdrakeh]

Toon: Tried running this one, and loved the concept, but maybe a little "too wacky" for my group of friends I tried playing with, and every other group of friends I mentioned the game to.

Oh, yes. A thousand times, YES. This was, I think, the first RPG I ever played or ran that didn't make it past the first session. I've experienced more false starts with Toon than any other game system under the sun. I have yet to play a single session of Toon through to completion.

Even if we (whoever sat down to play Toon at any given time) had a context framed for our game, the problem that always reared its head was that, without fail, for some at our table, the phrase "cartoon PCs" was always translated as "act as stupid and spastic as you possibly can"