Games that didn't survive first contact. . .

Oh, somehow you just gave me a truly stupid thought! Let's posit a role playing game where you do not play an individual character... you play a vehicle and its crew. And who had a wider variety of cool and kooky armored fighting vehicles than the Wehrmacht?!

Imagine the possibilities contained within the following statement:
"I'm a Level 5 SS Jadgpanther."

Heck yea, i'd play that in a heartbeat.

We could use Axis&Allies collectible minis and steal the new 4e rules set to glom on top of it.

ME: My Sherman is going to Cleave the mortar squad. *rolls* I got a 19 vs. their AC.

GM: OK, good job, your machine gun rakes through the mortar squad and does another 4 points of damage on the adjacent nebelwerfer. They are both dead. Its the bad guys turn and the 3 flammenpanzers are charging. *rolls*. You take 15 points of damage and are on fire.

BUDDY: My P51 uses his encounter power to grant a friendly vehicle a save.

ME: *rolls* Got it!

GM: OK, the P51 flies over your tank and drops a water bomb on it, putting the fire out.

DS
 

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Out of curiosity, why didn't you use the non-random character generation options (such as choosing your own occupation) or choose Shek Pvar spells/abilities more to your liking? :confused:

Two reasons, one possible and one certain.

1. This was 1990/1991 so the version we were playing may have not had that option.

2. I was just doing what the GM told me, as I had never read the book myself. When given options I made the best of them.

DS
 

1. This was 1990/1991 so the version we were playing may have not had that option.

Yeah, that was an option back then (though 'random' was and still is the default for many aspects of character creation).

I was just doing what the GM told me, as I had never read the book myself.

I wouldn't worry yourself too much -- it sounds like your GM didn't read it, either ;)
 

Green Adam...are you my cousin from another universe?

I kept wanting to like Exalted and just...couldn't. Ditto 4Ed- I'll play it, but I'll never run it and I'm not buying any more than I already have.

Really, though, there are precious few games I won't play in order to have some good times with my RPG buddies, even the ones listed above.
 

There was this homebrew I chucked together last year. Basically Conan d20 but with a few changes (eg: hit points got changed). Died a death. The group were fairly new to gaming and my changes to the basic rules just threw them. That and I wasn't really prepared for the campaign but got talked into starting before I was prepped.

Heh. Similar experience minus the noobs. I have no idea what went wrong cuz I've run Conan before.

My majors are:

Deadlands - A lot of this lays in the lap of the GM. It was a poorly conceived, poorly run game. When I finally got a good look at the rules I saw why. That game tried to cram so much into one idea thematically and mechanically that it was just a mess. Variable sized additive dice pools, mad science powered by undead plutonium, poker chips, Pinkertons. It was just too damn much. Runner up is Savage Worlds. Nobody has even wanted to try it so that's not even first contact.

Fuzion - This one's my fault. I set my sights and the dials too high. Before I knew it the whole session was out of hand. Moral of the story, don't allow a ballistic force field in a gritty Cthulhupunk game.

d6 Star Wars - This one gets a special award because although I've played it three times all of those occasions were with different groups and each time it died session unfinished. Twice it was because players were pissed their Jedi weren't bad-ass.

D&D 4e - Things we liked. Things we didn't. Nobody's too interested.

The Shining Host: Changeling the Dreaming LARP - Nobody could get into dressing up like faeries and comparing trait totals. To this day I am flabbergasted. ;) There was a fairy/pirate crossover event that went off like bugspray that I still rue not attending.
 


Wraith and Mage never worked out for us because the settings and foundations of both games were so nebulous that it was hard to conceptualize what was feasible in either setting; this made it hard to even describe or interact in let alone trying to establish a suspension of disbelief or sustainable verisimilitude.

That's funny... Wraith worked FANTASTIC for me. The character creation pretty much demands that a player have a backstory which IME made it extremely easy to run. I also had great success with Mage because unlike the other oWoD games, Mages had no built in prejudices. I ran the game very much like Sliders with the Mages going into the Umbra and getting into all kinds of trouble in other realms. If I had any problem at all with Mage the Ascension it was that the magic system was so open to personal interpretation that the players and storytellers would get into arguments over what Sphere combinations were needed to pull off an effect. This is one of the reasons I like the new Mage so much more.

Living Steel, RoleMaster, Gurps, and Shadowrun. Some people may not believe that I had a problem with Shadowrun but I got into Cyberpunk first and had a great GM. I was also a huge fan of Gibson so throwing fantasy creatures into a Cyberpunk game never felt right to me. The system also felt "forced" to me because of the writer's insistence on using only D6's.
 

D20 Future.

I was so excited about the product before it came out. I even prepared to run a campaign, until I noticed the large number of gaping holes in the rules. For many chapters, there was a different reason you couldn't use it as written.

The ship rules were so poor (parts of combat, but especially ship construction) that I would create a new set, and design a ship for the players. They insisted on designing the ship themselves, which meant I would have to make the massive set of ship construction house rules readable to people other than myself. That ended that campaign idea.

Another person in the group actually ran a campaign. He put very few restrictions on what we could be or do. So, for instance, we ended up with a ship and a mecha. Considering the speed difference, the mecha was worthless; the ship could land faster in a planetary atmosphere than the mecha. Why did we have mecha and combat spaceships in the same setting? That's probably more a campaign problem than a rules problem.

D20 Modern has broken Wealth rules, but since money is basically useless it wasn't a problem. (In a campaign I ran, the players got wealthy enough to buy a Swiss castle, but it wasn't hidden, the cops and crooks knew where they were, it didn't give any political advantage (they weren't nobles), it wasn't really more secure than a security-conscious house, etc.) Unfortunately, D20 Future made money useful (very useful) without fixing the ability to obtain sky-high Wealth. So we had one player buying a mecha, one player buying a ridiculously powerful robot with eight limbs (each of which was capable of attacking) and one player bought a secondary spaceship which, due to the broken spaceship design rules, was actually more powerful than the base ship. (This person played the main ship owner, which meant our commander wasn't even on our ship in combat).

The same spaceship buyer also "bought" a powerful robot, mainly a healer who had stats 24 around the board (there's no balancing robots). She wasn't deliberately designed to be a combat robot, but was as powerful as an NPC in her own right. (It was basically DnD 3.x's Leadership, but without a cost that can be balanced, and could exceed the PC's own power.) Note that this wasn't the eight-legged robot. Speaking of which, the eight-legged robot had a smaller robot "piloting" it. The small robot had high Dex, and would control the big robot's gun (and so get a much higher attack bonus than the small robot). The owner wasn't that great at combat (lots of Smart levels) which is why they did that.

We found the gadget system to be broken, mainly due to Modern's Wealth rules. Also, most of the non-combat gadgets were useless while most of the combat gadgets could do only two things: boost Defense, or boost damage by a lot. Considering the baseline wasn't changed (eg no more hit points, no higher massive damage threshold), combat got messed up. You couldn't hit often, but you could have a 3d12 rifle that, if it hit, would pretty much guarantee a forced massive damage save.

I forgot to bring the spaceship combat rules "supplement" (a post on this forum about how to make Pilot do something in combat) so the ship combat ended up being pretty boring, at least until the boarding action. (That's hard to screw up, I would think.)
 

Mage: the Ascension. Glad I never went back to that one.

Um. Can't think of any others. Most things I"ll give more of a chance, before refusing to play them.
 

I ran Werewolf the Forsaken for a few sessions until I realized that the game is not very suited to being played with 6 players (something most WoD games suffer from) and that although the combat was simple, with 6 players it would still take ages to resolve anything (either that or everybody went into warform and slaughtered everything in 1 round, after which we would be busy for 2 hours resolving failed rage checks)...

I would love to play Werewolf or Mage or Changeling with fewer players, but 6 is simply too much...
 

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