Games you were turned off of and why

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Well, they didn't pawn them off to the rebels.

Are you sure? I mean, Han was in it for the money ... And they had them when they took off from the Death Star, but didn't once they made it to Yavin ...

And I could be wrong, but don't you get XP for killing guys (overcoming challenges) just like in D&D?

Well, yeah. But "overcoming obstacles" also includes things like, "jam a radio transmission" or "convince the Hutts not to raid a particular bacta shipment."

My SW d20 experience has been really, really good on the ground (although, to make a small disclaimer, we were bankrolled heavily enough by our trading operations that the nickel-dime credits for looting the bodies weren't important - except for lightsabers!); we fought droid soldiers, convinced a corporation to invest in a new tibanna gas mining operation (some backwater world - Bepin, was it? ), neutered a separatist plot to choke the Republic's bacta supply lines, and captured or killed several Dark Jedi. Totally Star Warsy stuff.

It's just the space combat - which, to me, is a huge part of what Star Wars is - that didn't work so well. I even put a lot of effort in developing some spaceship-specific character sheets (by ship's position) and action tables (what's the DC for a quick turn?) for my group, and it still kinda just ... dragged.

I want, in the future, to run a "Wraith Squadron" style game, where everyone is a Gestalt Soldier / Something, and have the first session be a starship combat training mission. I just fear that making the rules work more ... cleanly ... might be beyond my meagre talents.

 

[nato]

Lets see....

Vampire (or really any WOD game) - the tone I game at, whether Supers, Fantasy or SF is the "bright and shiny heroes" kind of game - in a supers setting it's all Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Spidey. No Cable, no Spawn. the WoD just does not fit my playstyle tone.

Had to reply to this: its just what I like too! I feel like its hard to find people with the same inclination. Its usually all the dark angsty thinks-they're-misunderstood crowd.

The other thing I'd like to note is its surprising to me how many people are disavowing any interest in Magic. Seems way out of proportion to what I witnessed at the time to me.

 

[Imret]

Ooooh boy. There are a few of these...

The first would be the Palladium system in general, Rifts in particular. Don't get me wrong, they may write some really really cool material and I'm scavenging it for bits and pieces for my homebrew, but you could drive a Star Destroyer through the holes in the combat system and never graze the edges. On the other hand, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness was a great concept.

Magic: The Gathering suffered in my eyes from an almost utter inability to be really fun for the casual player. This may be because everyone else I know supported their habit by careful trades and outright scams and sales and had been playing it from the moment the first starter deck hit the shelves, whereas I played from two editions before Ice Age up until Ice Age and only spent about $200. I had no interest in card-by-card deck construction, analyzing all the cards for usefulness, trading like a 13th century spice merchant, and generally expending most of my brain power on it. As a result, I -always- lost.

The WoD games turned me off, each for their own reason:
* Werewolf, because I couldn't find anybody who didn't just want to play D&D with werewolves (Kill wyrm creatures! Kill Garou! Take their things!).
* Vampire, because I met people who played Vampire.
* Mage, because it took the better part of two hours to explain it to a group, and they still sucked up Paradox like Lik-M-Aid.
* Wraith, because no-one has ever played Wraith. It looks like it would be awesome, though. I guess that doesn't count?
* Changeling, because it's just "Happy Bouncy D&D in the shadow of the World of Darkness" and doesn't make them alien enough.

Star Fleet Battles, for the "One of us has played 10,000 hours of it, knows every single rule in the game, and insists on -playing- rather than helping us learn it first" reason...and the fact a skirmish between three ships took six hours before we had to quit for the night and write down where we were on the hex map.

Legend of the Burning Sands, because if you're not playing the Moto you're gonna lose.

Shadowrun and its half-breed illegitimate child Cybergen, because I prefer my gritty cyberpunk RPGs WITHOUT magic, thank you very much. Also, as far as Shadowrun goes, I've never held so many d6's in my hand and failed to kill something with them.

As a side note....

And you got "XP" by doing neat stuff, dramatic stuff, and (especially) heroic stuff.

While I recognize it's kind of house-rulesy, there would be nothing preventing a given GM from changing the d20 SW game to work that way; might make a better game. Just saying, is all.

 

[CarlZog]

Bunnies and Burrows. I have actually from heard from people who took this game seriously and enjoyed it. I pray for their souls.

Top Secret S/I At the time it came out I was furious at what they'd done to Top Secret. I've forgotten most of the details about it, but I'd be curious to see it again today; I suspect I'd better appreciate its approach.

Cribbage. Much to my wife's chagrin, I've just never enjoyed this game -- or most similar scoring-type games.


Carl

 

[jdrakeh]

RIFTs is the only game that falls into this category for me. It lacks direction, mechanical balance, setting consistency, and pretty much everything else I like in a game. It's like Kevin just sat down and said 'Let's throw all of the gonzo stuff we can into a blender without rhyme or reason, set it to puree, and call it a game!'.

I still, to this day, can't figure out why it's so rediculously popular (it usually places in the Top 5 best-selling RPGs among retailers). I'm even more puzzled as to why games like SenZar and World of Synnibarr get such a bad rap, when they're nearly identical to Rifts in every respect. I mean, what is it that can make RIFTS insanely popular, yet condemn nearly identical games to a being the RPG world's leperous heathen?

 

[mythusmage]

Forge, Out of Chaos. Produced as an act of spite and written by people who either do not know how to communicate, or who have no desire to communicate. Not only is the system too complicated, the explanation is too complicated. Add the fact its reason for being is that it's not D&D and you've pretty much got the reason why I'm not at all interested in playing it.

 

[mythusmage]

RIFTs is the only game that falls into this category for me. It lacks direction, mechanical balance, setting consistency, and pretty much everything else I like in a game. It's like Kevin just sat down and said 'Let's throw all of the gonzo stuff we can into a blender without rhyme or reason, set it to puree, and call it a game!'.

I still, to this day, can't figure out why it's so rediculously popular (it usually places in the Top 5 best-selling RPGs among retailers). I'm even more puzzled as to why games like SenZar and World of Synnibarr get such a bad rap, when they're nearly identical to Rifts in every respect. I mean, what is it that can make RIFTS insanely popular, yet condemn nearly identical games to a being the RPG world's leperous heathen?

Why? Because, for all his numerous faults, Kevin Siembeda has great ideas, and he knows how to write. He comes up with great stuff, and he presents it well. If he wrote fiction for a living he'd do well. It's in the field of game mechanics he has problems. When Kevin is in the groove he can get your attention and keep it. But he has a tendency to not think things through.

He also understands the male adolescent mind. It's all about wish fulfillment fantasies, and Rifts does a beautiful job of vicariously satisfying those fantasies. Teenaged boys have no real control over their lives. Rifts gives them the illusion of control, and that suffices to make them happy.

Look at it this way, Rifts is Vampire: The Masquerade for younger adolescents. Vampire: The Masquerade is Rifts for older adolescents.

 

[Imret]

He also understands the male adolescent mind. It's all about wish fulfillment fantasies, and Rifts does a beautiful job of vicariously satisfying those fantasies.

You know, I hadn't thought much about Rifts in more than a decade, but that does make a lot of sense. There was something truly awesome about books full of giant robots, crazy magical abilities, and mind-numbingly powerful entities at 14. You felt like you could blow the out of anything when you were browsing through those wonderful Sears catalogs of power-gaming.

It's also the system that, IMO, saw the most homebrew "Jedi" ever. :\

 

[Torm]

Star Fleet Battles, for the "One of us has played 10,000 hours of it, knows every single rule in the game, and insists on -playing- rather than helping us learn it first" reason...and the fact a skirmish between three ships took six hours before we had to quit for the night and write down where we were on the hex map.

Ditto. Also, the lack of a roleplaying element.

My Mr-Know-It-All, who was supposed to be the lead ship in our group of three Federation vessels (his smarmy son was running the other one), kept telling me what to do and not explaining anything to me until I finally got fed up, and while he and his son had gone in the kitchen at one point, I added my own roleplaying element. I hailed the other groups' ships, negotiated to share the technologies aboard the advanced vessel we were supposed to be fighting over, and then flank attacked the other ships in my own group when they got back. MUCH more fun that the way that game seemed to be played normally.

 

[Wombat]

I will only give opinions here on games I have actually played. Most of the systems that I don't like have exceptions...

I have never been fond of GURPS -- too crunchy, too granular in its resolution, and suffers from what one of my friends refers to as "the hunchback albino dwarf syndrome" (a game where you can make a character fairly powerful, but you have to cripple that character so much that it is not even worth the bother). There is a also an inherent bias in the game that all worlds subscribe to modern physics and biology, which is something that I dislike -- magical worlds will have very different explanations for how the world operates (such is my opinion only -- I welcome counters to it, but not in games that I am running). That being said, as I have said before on these boards, I was involved in a great game of GURPS Tekumel -- a good GM and the right mix of people can get me beyond the shortcomings of almost any system.

World of Darkness -- the system in and of itself does not bother me, as I am rather fond of intuitive "rulez lite" systems. The settings, however, for Vampire, Werewolf, and Wraith were ridiculous. I do not see vampires as romantic doomed figures -- they are leeches with legs and if I had had to put up with Louis' whining, I would have given him a bottle of SPF 3 sunblock and a one-way ticket to San Diego in the summer -- end of whining. And, as some other people have mentioned, the people who play Vampire have turned me off to the game as much as anything, especially the LARPers. I have found too many of them to be pretentious and posing, putting on a false superior air that I find in equal measures comical and nauseating. Again, that being said, I was in a decent Mage game and a very charming Changeling game, although both of these cut way back on the angst from the core rules. The GMs in both cases were quite innovative, willing to cut out much of the background dross, and find the interesting themes embedded within the rules -- lots of fun at that point!

Palladium always struck me as the worst aspects of earlier versions of D&D with more added in. This coupled with the weird double bonus to impact weapons (maces, for example, tend to do more damage in Palladium than in D&D, yet finding armour that protects against impact weapons is pretty challenging) makes one wonder why all the world is not armed with clubs and staves -- they are obviously the most effective weapons in the world! Unlike the other two systems, I have yet to find a redeeming GM for this game.

And the only ccg that I ever seriously got into was On The Edge, and that was because of the rpg.

Finally, there are miniatures battles -- WRG, ancient TSR games, and dozens of others from the early 70s through the mid-80s. Been there, done that, and please, please, please never again, especially with anything involving WWII. RPG Rules Lawyers have nothing on people discussing WWII tank armour sloping, ability to spot enemies, and the persnickettiness of measurements and angles. The add to this the Monday morning quarterbacking, the bad blood between winners and losers, the convention circuit rivalries, and suchlike and I can only remember such matters with despair. I found the whole tenor of such gaming so depressing that I swore of miniatures combat forever. This is the major reason that I dislike the increased miniatures-centric aspect of current D&D -- too many foul memories.