Games you were turned off of and why

[smilinggm]

I completly forgot about that but yea, we had to empty our pockets and the contents of the gaming bag during the 1st session. But, I supprised the rat bastard of the GM. In that bag I had a a book on wilderness survival and A chemestry book along with w/ full swiss army knife and flint and Steel. I had been helping out as a scout leader at the time and I was tuturing for some of the kids in the troup. I had no idea that the GM was about to spring this game on us. The look on his face was the only enjoyable part of that game.
But everything else about that game just sucked rocks. The GM actually convinced me to come to the 2nd session of the game. But It Sucked worse than the 1st session. I think that was the last time that I played with that GM. I moved onto much better games and DM's.

Is that the one where your equipment was, "whatever you, the player, actually brought to the game"?

I bought that. Read the rules. Re-read the rules. Decided I wouldn't be playing that game.

(Besides, who needs people bringing their granddad's WWII trophies to a game, just so their character would be well-equipped?)

 

[The Shaman]

And to weigh in on the Dragon-Slayer/Shaman debate. Both seem to be trying to turn this into a heated debate about what ENWorld is, isn't or possibly should be.

No, I'd like to see the thread stay on track - that was kind of the point of my reply - and no, there's no 'heat' over here - I'm just wondering why anyone who's name isn't Morrus is telling posters their opinions aren't welcome.

That's all I have to say on that.

Boot Hill was never an RPG. Boot Hill was a skirmish game at the one figure equals one man scale. You could roleplay in a Boot Hill game, but that was not its reason for existence.

First, in discussing Boot Hill in this context, it's a good idea to be specific as to edition. Second edition included basic, optional, and advanced rules - the basic game provided for a Wild West skirmish game in which roleplaying could be incidental to the action, but the optional and advanced rules made it every bit a roleplaying game.

Third edition Boot Hill was a roleplaying game from start to finish.

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

I liked Rifts. I still like Rifts. My group and I decided: "This book is for GM's only, this book is partially open, and this one is fully open" and we've kept the arms race down by mutual agreement. They don't try to play 13th level Temporal Warrior Adult Green Horned Dragons, I don't sick Vampire Intelligences on them. But the combat system BLOWS! Rifts involves a LOT of GM/Player discussion, as well as self-imposed limits from the GM and players both.

And Kevin Sembedia needs to realize he's not God's Gift to Gaming (that would be the inventor of dice) and frankly, he's worthy of a long, long rant.

HOL was a lot of fun, we'd get hammered and try to play. Every time you missed, or saw an orc, or eventually, just whenever, you had to take a shot. We usually woke up in the front yard.

Twilight 2000: Fun game, excruiciating mechanics.

For me, for games I can't stand:

• F.A.T.A.L. Whoever wrote that should be blugeoned with something heavy and stupid.
• Gamma World d20: When I saw Gamma World, I had certian expectations. This wasn't it. I had more fun taking my old Gamma World stuff, and mixing d20 Apocalypse and Darwin's World mechanics to support the setting.
• 20th Anniversary of Metamorphis Alpha: I LOVED the initial Metamorphis Alpah, and picked his up cheap. Read it. What the Hell? Seriously. WTH?
• Dragonlance: I absolutely HATED the setting. I hated the NPC's, I hated the Kender, and those ruined it for me. That, and module railroading made me seriously consider pounding a railroad spike through my tongue and into a stack of first print Dieties & Demigods rather than ever even walk buy one of those modules again. But, it's been pointed out that maybe it was the GM. A friend of mine has agreed to run the modules and if I can get through them without clawing out my own eyes, he'll give the campaign a shot. Strangely enough, I liked the old SSI computer games.
• Call of Cthullu: I KNOW this was the GM, but I didn't spend an hour with my fellow players carefully crafting a group only to look out my motel room window at what was making the noises and go insane and spend the rest of the night bored. Now I won't even consider this game unless I know the GM.
• Marvel Superheroes: The version with the "color band" power levels. It made me want to pound my head on the table.
• Did I mention F.A.T.A.L. already? Eh, it needs putting down twice. Can you HONESTLY picture your group's expressions if you wanted to run this? Unless you play in Death Row on Riker's Island, you're groups going to start giving you funny looks.
  [*]Cyborg Commando: All that work prepping for an Arctic mission. Down the tubes.
  [*]Gangbusters: Man, it had potential, but was there even anything for a followup?
  [*]Post 2E FR: Yup. Everything after Cyric the Incompetant became a God annoyed me. There were a lot of things that just began to annoy me more and more. Plus, new players saying: "That's now how it was in the novels!" got on my nerves to the point I just quit running FR. (I still buy it though, great ideas at times)
  [*]Post Azlan's Seizure Ravenloft: Way to ruin a cool setting.
  [*]Greyhawk, Pre-War: Of course, I haven't looked at it since the intial Peechee like thing they sold about 1983. It seemed like the whole place was already taken over. Gave us plenty of ideas, but every time I played there, it seemed like someone else had been there first, or arrives in the nick of time to save us. Gee, thanks Bigby, next time do it yourself. I have to admit, I bought the hardback, and got a lot of miles out of it. It just wasn't my thing, and I would recommend it.
  [*]Vampire: the Angst: I hate interprative dance, I've never been able to stand moping whiney crybabies. I HATED the Ann Rice books with Loui the Immortal Crybaby, why our group GM thought I'd like that, I had no idea. He should have just let me hang out at the strip club liked I'd planned to that night.

Yeah, some of my list is going to be unpopular with fans of those works. So what? *I* didn't like them. Probably a lot of people did. You can yell and scream and call me a heretic all you want, all it'll do is have me put one more mental tic mark next to the game as having rabid fans that can't stand to have anyone dislike thier favorite game.


On the weird stuff I liked:

Star Frontiers: I don't know why? It was fun.
Gamma World: Great game, fun, and you could play it drunk! Not even a NOD toward realism, just straight 1950's pulp post-apocalypse fiction!
Top Secret: It was fun. We often died, or got in a big enough shoot out the GM would put her hands over her face and tell us to give everything back, and quit GMing for a month, but WE had fun.
HOL Alcohol abuse and shoulder punches. I was "The Man with No Eyes"
Blue Box D&D: I had this book with a dragon on the cover that was about to roast some archer. LOTS of fond memories, and the fact because we only had rules for people up to like 4th level, when you topped 4th, you spontaneously combusted.
Rifts: Not recon, not Ninja's and Super-Midgets, not Phase World, we played humano-centric "Keep the DB's off Earth!" Rifts, usually siding with Coalition States and had a lot of fun. Once we'd laid down the house rules.
Bunnies & Burrows: Yeah, that game. LOL What can I say, I like bunnies.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

F.A.T.A.L. Whoever wrote that should be blugeoned with something heavy and stupid.

They were. Then they designed the game.

 

[Particle_Man]

[*]Gamma World d20: When I saw Gamma World, I had certian expectations. This wasn't it. I had more fun taking my old Gamma World stuff, and mixing d20 Apocalypse and Darwin's World mechanics to support the setting.

Gamma World: Great game, fun, and you could play it drunk! Not even a NOD toward realism, just straight 1950's pulp post-apocalypse fiction!

You might want to check out Omega World (by Jonathan Tweet), for that pulpy feel of gamma world translated into d20 form.

 

[Terwox]

Hey, bullets. neat.

Turn-offs:

• 2E. Non-sensical system, although the flavor of everything you could do with magic sounds good, better than 3.5, but it might just be the stories people tell.
• 3.0. 3.5 is a huge step forward, for me. In this thread I seem to be alone, but there it is. If someone would suggest playing 3.0 to me, I'd be really confused. If that's not you, that's cool, but I don't understand it personally.
• Star Wars d20 - I'm not a big Star Wars fan, but treating force powers like they're spells you can only get at certain levels... just, eh. d6 Star Wars was ok, but I had a good deal more fun w/ a freeform force system w/ two stats (control/release) a friend made.
• FATAL: 989 pages. Most of it isn't about freakish sex acts. There's half a page dedicated to telling you about how your character can make soap. Really. ...Really!
• Mage: the Awakening: It's Mage... with... pre-defined spells. Ug. Magic off the cuff was the selling point for me, and it became even less doable in Awakening. I think.
• d20 Modern, d20 Cthulhu: I don't like the way d20 works for Modern games. Cthulhu is weird when you can fight off beasties more easily by the defaults. (In my experience.) d20 has a set of expectations for myself and players, I guess. I liked d20 Cthulhu's system better than Modern, too.
• Shadowrun 3. Loved the setting, never got through the rules.
• Blue Rose. I even like romantic fantasy, but this setting was, well, romanticized in a way I'm not fond of.
• Warhammer 40k. I hate this game. I'd go and play some bit part just to hang out for awhile, but even that much aggravates me. Same with most "legion of figs" mini games.
  Eh, that's what I remember

Turn-ons:

• WoD, NWoD. The people do scare me, but when it comes down to it, <shame>I've got a little bit of closet angst-loving goth in me. </shame>
• Shadowrun 4. Setting plus a system that made sense -- and lots of sense -- on a single read through. Cyberpunk + fantasy is weird, and it comes together to make something that is nothing like either is while it's pure... but I don't like the heartless Cyberpunk world to play in, and I like the way Shadowrun went. And wow, the system makes sense... it's so odd, comparatively.
• True20. This is my recent "holy grail" system, although in actual play it's not quiiite as cool as I figured it would be. I still really like it... but I sorta just want to chuck classes into it. I might do just that.

 

[wingsandsword]

[*] Star Wars d20 - I'm not a big Star Wars fan, but treating force powers like they're spells you can only get at certain levels... just, eh.

Say what? Star Wars d20 didn't treat the Force like spells, or psionic powers, or anything from D&D, much less say that you had to be a certain level to get your powers, certainly not anymore than d6 Star Wars with how hard it was to learn and gain Force powers in it. Some were class abilities that you started with but got much better at higher levels (deflecting blasters), or were feat chains you could enter at a low level and improve later on (Force Speed), but almost all the force powers could be used at 1st level, if you wanted them. The few that weren't obtainable at low levels were things that were depicted as the domain of very powerful characters (Force Mind, Sith Sorcery).

[*] Mage: the Awakening: It's Mage... with... pre-defined spells. Ug. Magic off the cuff was the selling point for me, and it became even less doable in Awakening. I think.

"Off the cuff" magic still exists in M:tA, it's a little harder to do, and the pre-defined list exists to clarify what could be done with different levels of magic. The biggest problem with Mage IME was arguments between the GM and the players over exactly what could you do with certain levels of magic, which the basic pre-defined list was essentially a huge set of examples.

 

[eris404]

For us it was Mage, which is a real shame - I really wanted to play that game and it was completely ruined for me by a bad experience with an ego-tripping GM. Have you ever played in a game where the GM makes sure that there are always superior forces against which you are merely puny humans who will lose no matter what you do? Yeah, it was that guy.

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

For us it was Mage, which is a real shame - I really wanted to play that game and it was completely ruined for me by a bad experience with an ego-tripping GM. Have you ever played in a game where the GM makes sure that there are always superior forces against which you are merely puny humans who will lose no matter what you do? Yeah, it was that guy.

Dragonlance.

Rifts (the first time I played, after I leanred to GM it, everyone but the attention needy GM had a lot more fun)

 

[Dr. Harry]

Chill - I remember it sucking. We only played it once, but I suspect a lot of that had to do with the GM.

Hey, I'd forgotten Chill. Chaosium had a monster hit with the truly excellent Call of Cthulhu! So, every other games company rushed out a 'horror' game. Chill was one, and it was not good.

I loved the original Pacesetter game. The mechanics were fluid and yet covered enogh to make characters and mosters distint. I had a Chill game at my FLGS that ran for the better part of year. The flow was much more along the lines of "Masque of the Red Death" than CoC, though, and trying to run it like CoC would cause to collapse.

This was the original Pacesetter game though: In my opinion the second edition put out by Mayfair was abyssmal. I hated the art direction, the quick combat results table got all complicated up, and ... arrgh.