I had never heard of this lawsuit before! Good grief, that's an abuse of our legal system if I ever heard one (no pun intended).
Games with "terrible" follow-up editions
DarkCrisis
Reeks of Jedi
The only thing I recommend is having 1 normal GM and not some kind of player input system, that just leads to insanity.
eyeheartawk
#1 Enworld Jerk™
Good one!
This one I don't think was as "controversial" since it didn't replace anything it was just kinda a one and done book.
But I love the idea that Monte Cook went "hold my beer" and showed us the world of darkness we really wanted.
A supernatural post-apocalypse Minneapolis.
DarkCrisis
Reeks of Jedi
Where the player monsters all got along. Want a group of A werewolf, vampire, and a mage? Done.
eyeheartawk
#1 Enworld Jerk™
And you guys all went down to one of the 10,000 lakes, ate some salt cod and Minnesota hot dish and you were best friends forever.
PS. And then, you guys all went down to see the Vikings be the best football team to ever football. SKOL!
It really is just glorious.
It's kind of like if White Wolf made Milwaukee By Night their default setting or something. The jokes just write themselves.
Note: You cannot convince me that hot dish isn't just a casserole with tater tots in it. Many Minnesotan friends have tried.
Oh yah, and then you can go over to the Lutheran's for the lukefish bake if you have a strong enough stomach.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Yeah from the thread title I was like "Well Shadowrun..."
And specifically I'd say every Shadowrun edition after 3rd has provoked a lot of "this sucks..." with some good reason. I definitely regret being talked into running 5E a few years ago.
Other notables from my experience:
1) The "Revised" editions of the World of Darkness the very late '90s.
Pretty much every "Revised" WoD setting was "the downer version", of what was already a fairly depressing group of settings, and the rules of certainly Mage and Vampire (I don't know about Werewolf) were revised to match - everyone was less capable with their supernatural powers, everything was harder to do and less cool. There was this memorable post which I attributed to Justin Achilli for years but I'm no longer sure that's true, on the then-White Wolf site, which basically amounted to "You guys were having badwrongfun, so we changed the lore and rules so you can't have badwrongfun anymore! Welcome to Revised!".
Which was very actually kind of hilariously in-tune with a lot of the unfortunate zeitgeist in RPGs in general back then - the attempt to force people into playing games certain ways to avoid "badwrongfun" and the demented idea that this was legitimate. I think it's notable that the term emerged shortly thereafter, sometime seemingly after about 2000 but before 2004.
This would be like D&D's designers deciding anyone who played anything but Good-aligned groups who crawled dungeons was "doing it wrong", and actively changes both the settings and rules to try and convince everyone that D&D is solely about Good-aligned groups killing orcs in 10' wide corridors, and nothing else. Roleplaying? Sandbox? Scenarios? Non-Good PCs? Down with all of that! Oh and simultaneously making every class worse at everything at the same time to boot!
2) Cybergeneration and Cyberpunk V3.
I'm sure someone has mentioned these masterpieces of accidental (?) trolling (haven't read back through the thread yet).
Cyberpunk 2020 was one of the most beloved RPGs of the 1990s, to the point where CDPR spend $120m and nearly five years making a videogame inspired by it (albeit that kind of ended in tears). But it seems like Mike and the crew just got bored as hell with 2020 by the middle of the 1990s, and whilst no-one could accuse them of "phoning it in" with the last two adventures for 2020, and it went out with a (very literal) bang, they clearly wanted to be done. The amount of teeth-grinding you can hear behind Mike putting one (1) new gun in the gun book is hilarious, and even as far back as Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads it was clear Mike was not super-happy with the sheer amount of badwrongfun people were having (Mike got there earlier than others). Why have you taken Mike's RPG about trying to live some kind of life in the dark future, struggling to survive, make art, make a statement, and turned it into "CYBERSLAUGHTER '93", people, why?
So anyway Mike came back at us with Cybergeneration. A bizarrely 1970s-vibing RPG, despite very modern art, where hordes of latchkey kids (mostly aged 14-18, but I think you could play younger) all broke up into these bizarrely sharp-edged tribes (which, frankly, were utterly alien to any experience of childhood I've ever come across - in reality kids are always a complex venn diagram of such groups), and got nanite-based superpowers. Surely us numbskulls couldn't turn this into Cyberslaughter '94, right? I mean, the efforts were strong. It was very hard to get weapons, the game was really designed to be about sabotage and evasion, not killing (the "blaster"-type superpowers were basically tasers, for example), and yeah, perhaps Cyberslaughter '94 was avoided. But at what cost, Mike, at what cost? The cost being a game that was, well, pretty implausible and boring, especially to what might be presumed to be the target audience. I was 15 when it came out, the same age as the characters, and whilst we gave it a good go, and I really liked the visual style, it didn't work for us, and doesn't seem to have been at all popular generally.
V3 was the real kicker though.
From the mid-90s to 2005 seemed to be an eternity (oh to be young!), and people had been scared that there might never be a new/updated Cyberpunk. V3 was some perfect "and the monkey's paw curled" for all of us wanting that update. A bizarre mess from top to bottom, with terrible art (B&W photos of action figures...), a setting which was deep post-cyberpunk weirdness/boringness, and basically just pressed "delete" on both 2020 and Cybergeneration, and terrible vague rules to boot, when cyberpunk-genre games thrive on precision. Not so much controversial as roundly hated. I'd say it was the Alien3 of Cyberpunk, but it was even less liked than that.
Thankfully Cyberpunk Red basically says "Oooops, forget that!" and basically does "Cyberpunk 2020 II: This time we made the guns vague so you can't be obsessed with them", and is basically a solid game.
3) Traveller: The New Era
Whilst Umbran talked about 4E and edition wars earlier, 4E just was like the WW1 of edition wars, but games had had edition wars before, just never on that industrialized scale. As soon as I started playing RPGs, aged 10/11, I started getting edition-war talk. With 2E AD&D I was told I'd "bought the wrong edition" by a 1E player, for example, and he proceeded to tell me how awful it was - sadly I forget the details but I remember checking them and finding them to be untrue.
Traveller: The New Era was the second real edition-war I was on "the wrong side of". We'd heard about Traveller, and here was this new, cool, colourful, accessible-looking version of Traveller for us to buy! Great! Right?
Wrong! Well apparently. As soon as the internet arrived it was apparent that TNE was a "crime against Traveller" than no-one could possibly love. At least according to a lot of fans. Ooof. By then we had quite a lot of stuff for it too. Eventually I decided I didn't like it either - primarily because it utterly idolizes and lionizes space-imperialists (the Space Vikings), who, as I got older, I realized were likely not actually good people, no matter how many times the game insisted they were, given what they were doing.
4) SAGA - Both the Marvel Superheroes Adventure Game and Dragonlance.
Switching a setting literally based on D&D (Dragonlance) to a non-D&D rules-set was probably not the greatest move in history. I sympathize because Hickman/Weis had already totally ruined the setting, including doing weird stuff to magic, so doing a game for it was always going to be an uphill struggle, but really, it wasn't a good plan.
MSHAG on the other hand was a pretty great idea given FASERIP had lain forgotten for a long time at that point. It was modern, punchy, playable, and felt like a comic-book game, unlike 90% of superhero RPGs of the era (special shout-out to Champions and GURPS Supers for providing superhero games with actual negative superhero flavour, that literally felt like the opposite of a superhero game). But FASERIP was a really solid system, and this wasn't clearly better, and card-based resolution just doesn't please a lot of people, so no-one loved it.
SAGA was thus not popular.
I feel like I'm missing something pretty big here, but those are the ones I remember right now. Also can't remember whether it was 2E or 3E of Exalted that was a total car-crash, but it was one of them.
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eyeheartawk
#1 Enworld Jerk™
Ruin Explorer
Legend
God it's somehow worse than I remembered.
eyeheartawk
#1 Enworld Jerk™
The best part about this is that apparently this cost Mike Pondsmith a bunch of money, like alot alot.
I remember, god, this would have been like 15 years ago or something. A bunch of people were making fun of it online somewhere saying how cheap it looked and Mike showed up and told them that all that cost him like 15K or whatever to do.
Which, in addition to being even more hilarious, absolutely blew my mind.
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