Systems You Left after One Bad Experience

[Retreater]

I wonder if I'm unique in that I don't stick with games that don't work. I suppose this is because I have many other games to try.

I thought it would be fun to compare and contrast different game systems we've tried and left. It could be something you played once and decided it wasn't right for you. Or maybe you played a few games and one really bad experience made you put up the books for good.

Star Wars: Imperial Assault
We were excited to play the "new Descent" with Star Wars flavor. I bought the expensive starter set, learned the rules, and called up my group to play. We started the first mission, which was a slaughter in the favor of the Imperial player. The group, realizing how poorly designed the opening mission was refused to play the game again. I reboxed it while it was still fresh, and luckily got a good price at resale for it.

Kill Team
Assembled, painted and read up on the rules. Finally found a guy willing to play with me, and it ended up being a completely one-sided rout, showing how badly written the rules are.

Age of Sigmar
It's on me. My fiancee and I played using the quick play rules available in the starter set. Because point values weren't given, the two armies were completely lop-sided. One side destroyed another without losing a single figure.

Numenera
A nano with literally one usable power and one skill? Damage mechanics that unfairly punish other classes? No wonder this lasted one session.

Hollow Earth Expedition
Once players learned you could one-shot anything with a called shot to the head with minimal penalties, this game got tiring quickly.

Warhammer FRP 3e
Made two random characters. One was a ratcatcher who couldn't beat a goblin in combat. The other was a slayer dwarf who could kill a dragon single-handedly. Follow the mantra. Box it up, resell it quickly.

 

[Nagol]

Most game systems don't get as far as a single session. A few get played extensively because the mechanics do the job better than any other I've tried with the same game conceits. There are a few I can recall running/playing a single session of:

• Vampire the Masquerade: the system did not support the presented play expectations. I didn't want to keep applying force as the GM to make the play experience match expectations. Easier to emulate the universe in Hero (GURPS became easier after it published a source book for it). Shelved.
• Chill 1st ed: the system was stupendously lethal and really couldn't support campaign play (which is what the GM was pitching). I think it actually went 2 session each with 75%+ PC death. Shelved.
• Morrow Project: Session 1, a PC partially exposed in a APC was killed by a thrown rock inflicting hydrostatic shock. We already had Aftermath and went back to that. Shelved.
• MERP went maybe 3? sessions where I inflicted a TPK in each session because I could not stop rolling 96+ on the openly rolled dice -- except when the NPCs tried to use non-lethal capture tactics and I had trouble rolling as high as 10. Shelved.
• Rifts: One PC had a glitterboy. Another was a mundane hippie. Power level imbalance was too much. Fixing char gen looked harder than emulating the universe in Hero. Sold.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

HERO Fuzion. Couldn’t even bring myself to make characters.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Generally speaking, if the game mechanics are so bad that they would make me want to quit after the first session, then it's unlikely that the game will make it to the table in the first place. If it's really that bad, then I'll reject it while reading the book. If it's good enough to warrant a first session, then I'm inclined to give it a few more sessions to figure things out.

The one exception was a playtest, during the very first game I tried to seriously write. The math was not sound, the bookkeeping was obnoxious, and I was blind to everything until I'd seen it in play.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Robotech. The game was unplayable as the rules were written and you would think a 5yo wrote the books the editing was so horrible.

 

[Xaelvaen]

Numenera
A nano with literally one usable power and one skill? Damage mechanics that unfairly punish other classes? No wonder this lasted one session.

Sad to see this one - I really enjoyed Numenera, but I was a kickstarter backer and played through all the playtests, so when the core material came out, there was plenty of old material to keep and discard the more limited things you see in the final release.

As for my own one-session games, pretty much anything with ridiculously 'swingy' luck incorporated - like Savage Worlds and Warhammer FRP 1 (2 was a bit better, and 4 is pretty decent as well).

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Star Wars: Imperial Assault
We were excited to play the "new Descent" with Star Wars flavor. I bought the expensive starter set, learned the rules, and called up my group to play. We started the first mission, which was a slaughter in the favor of the Imperial player. The group, realizing how poorly designed the opening mission was refused to play the game again. I reboxed it while it was still fresh, and luckily got a good price at resale for it.

Well that just seems like a missed opportunity due to misplaced expectations, which is surprising since you suggest having some familiarity with "Descent". The two games play nearly the same, but I felt the Star Wars version had improved on a number of things, and not just thematically. The campaign structure is far more flexible allowing for more variety and greater repeatability. And while every expansion provides a new campaign or mini-campaign, each miniature expansion also offers a new mission that could be used in any of them. Personally, I don't want anyone to dismiss this game based only on your comments about a limited perspective/experience (no offense), so I'm just going to offer another perspective for balance.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Imperial player is not a GM. He/she is, in fact, another player who is actively opposing the others who are playing together as a team. And since they're not challenging a programmed or static environment, the experience can vary depending on the skill of the players involved on both sides. The Imperial player gains XP and power ups to improve abilities and options as the campaign progresses, just like the Rebel players do and regardless of the outcome of their last mission. The Imperial player enjoys more resources and abilities, obviously, but they are usually more expendable and thematically unique from the Rebel-perspective.

The Imperial player may also have the advantage of being more familiar with the rules, but that is not the fault of the game design. Players who want to be more skilled at the game should want to familiarize with the rules on their own, and strive for some level of mastery. Plus, they need to be able to work as a team. So a bunch of lone-wolf types trying to gain accomplish everything on their own is less likely to achieve good results. If the Imperial player loses, he only has himself to blame.

More importantly, the campaign doesn't end whenever one side wins or loses. It progresses with the winner selecting the next mission. There may be some other rewards, but all the players earn something regardless if they win or lose. If the Rebel players expect to win just because they are the "heroes", that is something that must be earned. They must learn to play better and that's not likely going to happen the first time they sit down to play. Maybe that is a flaw in the design that might not seem so appealing to everyone. In fact, we now see more app-driven games replacing similar adversarial roles in favor of more cooperative play styles.

Anyway, its a shame you didn't give it a really good chance, especially since the app came out and created a fully co-op game mode without the need for an Imperial player. Your group may still not have liked it, but I do feel the experience would have gotten better if you had been able to see how the campaign evolves and the players improved. Of course, it is no longer being reprinted now. I am glad I have most of the expansions and figures I want, but my intention is to finish the collection before its too late. And maybe someday I'll get to play through some of the other campaigns and expansions I haven't gotten around to yet.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Cosigned on both of those. As much as I love Tolkien, the rules just got in the way and it ended up feeling like just a weird, complicated D&D, rather than the world of Middle-Earth.

By the time Rifts came along, I was already souring on the Palladium system. It didn’t take much from that to push me over the edge.

For me, the most recent game that comes to mind is the Agon RPG. Character creation was the best part of it – we got to create these interesting Hellenistic heroes and communally tell stories of how they met and their legends. Then, once we actually started to play the game, we were all nearly killed by a desert, all our characters left as wretched weaklings. Hardly epic or fun.

• MERP went maybe 3? sessions where I inflicted a TPK in each session because I could not stop rolling 96+ on the openly rolled dice -- except when the NPCs tried to use non-lethal capture tactics and I had trouble rolling as high as 10. Shelved.
• Rifts: One PC had a glitterboy. Another was a mundane hippie. Power level imbalance was too much. Fixing char gen looked harder than emulating the universe in Hero. Sold.

 

[Umbran]

Dogs in the Vineyard. I found the drawn out and extremely metagame conflict resolution squashed any and all dramatic tension from play.

 

[Gradine]

FATE Accelerated. Ran as a one-shot at work; thought the system would be open and fun, ended up with players trying to come up with increasingly ludicrous reasons to apply their favored approach, an ultimately annoying metagame that the rules seemed to encourage. I might still try FATE itself at some point, but I'm a hard pass on FAE.