Marvel Superheroes had me at hello, 'cause I've never *not* loved a super-hero game, from Villains & Vigilantes to Aberrant to GURPS Supers to HERO to Mutants & Masterminds, but zombie jeebus on a pogo stick, did MSH suck the life out of me. I was playing Cyclops, one of my favorite X-Men (the GM expressed surprise when he handed out the sheet for Wolverine and everyone at the table just scowled at him. He thought we'd be fighting to play the loser...), and every single round was an exercise in pain and futility. Ugh. I really, really wanted to love the game, 'cause, *super-heroes!*, but I ended up walking out of a game I'd paid to play, and it wasn't a bad GM or anything like that, it was just system incompatibility with me.
GURPS, on the other hand, was introduced to me in college, lo those centuries back, by Steffan O'Sullivan, soon to go on to write the Bestiary and Swashbuckler, and perhaps having a GM that got it helped there, because it kicked all sorts of ass for a group of players who knew nothing but AD&D and weren't exactly hopped up to play something else. I expected to hate it, and ended up playing for over a decade fairly religiously, following it through three editions. (That fourth edition, 'though? They lost me. And quite a few other not-so-hardcore players, I suspect.)
Vampire the Masquerade was another game I expected not to like at all. (Everyone's a vampire? We sleep all day? We freak out and lose control of our character at the sight of matches, other vampires, being embarassed?) And it turned out to be awesome, despite a clunky rules mechanic, with far more versatility than I would have expected.
The exact opposite happened with the new World of Darkness, which I really really wanted to like, and which I played at a demo run by WW staffers, and got to experience the delight of failing to do anything over the course of six die rolls (including the one thing that my character was actually good at!), and then getting turned into a vampire and, along with four other vampires, completely and utterly schooled and sent running by a *DOG.*
"Fear me puny mortals, I have lived a thousand years sucking the blood of your... AHHHHH, get it off, get it off! Bad dog! Down! Sit! Stay! AHHHH!"
Aeon Trinity, has the best world concept and I loved the history, flavor, and all the little details that went into making the game seem really submersive. However the battle mechanic completely ruined the only game of it I actually ran.
Best damn game
to read ever. The dice mechanics pretty much bit.
'Kay, I have five d10, and I need *three* of them to roll 7 or higher to make my single solitary super-power work. And if it works, it'll do 3 dice of effect, all of which will be soaked by a half-drowned rat. Or I can use this gun, which anyone can use, with which I need only 1 success on 9d10 and it does 5+ damage... Why are Psions not extinct again?'
The Player's Guide went a long way towards making it better, but it was too late in the day, I guess.
