RPGs that you feel trip over their own cool ideas

[jdrakeh]

Past editions of Savage Worlds kind of tripped over themselves re: exploding dice and the Shaken status. It was way too easy to build a glass jaw hero who couldn't take a blow of any kind without going down. I saw it time and again. Spirit was far too important as a stat in this regard and the previous way exploding dice worked just exaggerated the issue. I think they've since got a handle on this with revisions to how exploding dice work and handling of Shaken in general.

 

[The Soloist]

The other one is Green Ronin's AGE system. It's fine, but the endless stunt lists are just annoying. There's nothing wrong with granting a special effect on doubles, but make it simple and/or freeform. Really, filling a quarter of your book with stunt lists that the players have to choose from every other roll is worse than Rolemaster in grinding the game to a halt.

That is false.

In the 282 page 2e FAGE book, there are only four pages of Stunts, two of them are not even full pages. There are four pages of class stunts - of which you acquire only a few, slowly, as you gain levels. That is no where near 25%.

My group had no problem integrating stunt. In combat it's pretty obvious after a few games which ones you want to use given the situation. They make combat more fun and less predictable. The stunt system is perfectly fine as it is.

 

[jian]

My least favourite of these is probably (as others have mentioned) the character creation system in Cypher. This is partly because it seems so promising - you just pick a few descriptors and ta-da, you have a Curious Speaker Who Walks Between Worlds - but in reality you rarely get the character you want, and there’s so much poorly balanced crunch that it’s very easy to create PCs of hugely different power levels and effectiveness. I’ve thought about it quite hard but I don’t see any way to fix it. The fast play rules are a bit better because the fudges are more obvious and it’s easier to balance characters.

 

[DEFCON 1]

One system I thought was tripping over its own feet was 7th Sea (1st ed).

In an enthusiastic bit to emulate a “de cape et d’épée” fiction, the system introduced a lot of knacks (skills) such as defence-swigning (for when you swing on the rope of a chandelier), defence-footing (for fighting on ground), defence-boating (for fighting on a rocking boat), defence-balance (when tightrope walking or balancing on rafters) etc. (Going by memory here)

In effect, either you’d distribute your skill points to suck at all of them, or specialize in one that might come up once because the GM took pity on you…

Yeah, those defenses were definitely one thing that I could understand why they added them (because they wanted having to fence on a rocking ship be harder than just a standard swordfight and the game wanted to use Knacks for that rather than giving penalties to your standard Footwork or Parry defense)... but you are absolutely correct that it just forced a lot of quality swordsman to either suck in very odd circumstances, or have to spend all their XP to boost them... meaning that they all become acrobats as well (when all they wanted was the defense).

When I run 7th Sea 1E, I use Footwork for all those defenses, which solves the problem to a certain extent. The swordsmen still boost their Parry or Shield first and foremost (since that applies to most standard dueling), but Footwork is their secondary defense for when they are on ladders or rooftops or ship rigging etc. It's my compromise to the base rules.

 

[Breaking Star Games]

Ryuutama stands out because it was my first experience GMing a non-D&D 5e RPG and it was massively disappointing. The mechanics didn't execute on the premise at all. Beautiful warm art showing these pastoral and fun adventures of commoners - the whole book exudes "honobono" - heartwarming feelings. All these cute and useless spells and items. Cute looking creatures to encounter. Classes like merchant, artisan and farmer.

But the core gameplay is highly repetitive, and fairly brutal survival checks with the only thing breaking it up is the game telling you to "roleplay it out." You can just wake up with half your HP missing. Pretty significant punishment for missing rolls where you make no progress on travel. Highly detailed tracking of resources. Combat suffers from some of the worst HP bloat and felt like a real slog with how many misses there were. People describe it like Oregon Trail, but at the same time a lot of things make it trivial, like how hunting gets you insane amounts of food.

And for the GM, you really don't have much to structure adventures. You get one example of play and a list of monsters to fight and some mostly toothless mechanics around different playsets.

As my first foray from GMing a non-5e game, I actually felt prepared since I just followed its example play and didn't need to make my own adventure content (that I suspect I couldn't have done well). That experience almost made me give up on indie RPGs because it was (and still is) highly recommended as a great game for exploration and travel. I think you're better off with Wanderhome or Iron Valley for the light and fun. Ironsworn/Starforged (if you like the more narrative style) and Forbidden Lands (if you like the more traditional style) for mechanically supported exploration. Ryuutama is a 20-year-old RPG with 30-year-old mechanics - the US just got it translated 10 years ago and it got an ENNIE probably from people who just saw the cute art.

It's honestly a real shame how much attention it gets for amazing Indie RPGs from Japan when Golden Sky Stories and Tenra Bansho Zero feel to me on the cutting edge of innovative mechanics (in completely opposite themes) - things I'd love to see iterated on. GSS using animal-based mechanics/abilities to really feel that heartwarming tone of helping people with small stakes. And TBZ bringing highly dramatic fights where the more wounds you take, the stronger your character becomes into massive dice pools, plus one of the fascinating initiative systems I've seen.

 

[Gradine]

Every Game Group I Have Run Numenera: "This setting is awesome, but why do characters and character options feel so conceptually limiting?"

The problem is that they made the Verb part of the "Adjective Noun who Verbs" character design way too crunchy and character-defining while providing both (a) not nearly enough options in this regard and (b) no guidance on how to design your own

 

[Gorgon Zee]

The problem is that they made the Verb part of the "Adjective Noun who Verbs" character design way too crunchy and character-defining while providing both (a) not nearly enough options in this regard and (b) no guidance on how to design your own

Numenéra is not the best system if you want fine-grained control over your characters. On the other hand, I've run a couple of campaigns for people who liked a simple character-defining creation system and it works well off you want:

• A large, but not huge, number of options you choose at creation time and combine for a generally pretty unique character.
• Fewer mechanical decisions when leveling
• Your character to be defined by an even mix of role-play and mechanics.

D&D largely defines your characters by mechanics and appeals to people who like to make interesting builds and see how the mechanics lead to a fun character (this is me playing D&D4E). Fate appeals to people who are happy with very generic mechanics shared by everyone and who want to define their characters by narrative and descriptive choices. Numenéra is an interesting in-between point. Your mechanics do define a lot of what your character is like, but you cannot fine-tune it as much in other higher crunch games.

 

[billd91]

Shadowrun's dice pools. They're reasonably easy to work with and expected number of success is easy to calculate, but the large number of dice that can be involved becomes cumbersome pretty fast, particularly when you're rolling opposed pools.

 

[Fenris-77]

Shadowrun's dice pools. They're reasonably easy to work with and expected number of success is easy to calculate, but the large number of dice that can be involved becomes cumbersome pretty fast, particularly when you're rolling opposed pools.

I played an Ogre street samurai once and as a demonstration of the rules to the GM pulled the pin on a grenade and stuffed it down my pants. No ill effects whatsoever. Dum dee dum.

 

[Laurefindel]

I played an Ogre street samurai once and as a demonstration of the rules to the GM pulled the pin on a grenade and stuffed it down my pants. No ill effects whatsoever. Dum dee dum.

yeah but now you get an Ogre walking around without pants and slightly singed pubes... I wouldn't call that "no ill effects"!