Systems You'd Never Play after Reading Them

Fenris-77 · Jun 12, 2019

Gradine said:
How does it fare on a scale between Hackmaster 4e and Hackmaster 5e?

I never got the chance to get more than passingly familiar with Hackmaster, sadly. I just wasn't in groups with the right people at the right time.

Blue · Jun 13, 2019

MechaPilot said:
I also love Battletech.

The Mechwarrior RPG is a mess. I run the Mechwarrior RPG by replacing the entire system with the ruleset from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. The character to wargame conversion table for piloting and gunnery skills even matches up nicely with skill levels from BtVS.

I'm with both you and [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] on MechWarrior. Unfortunately it was nt just on read, but after we started the campaign. It turns out two of the players (myself and one other) made well rounded characters that would have interesting things to do in or out of a mech, and because of the priority system were decent mech pilots in starter mechs. And the other three players built characters to be superb mech pilots with good mechs and not much else.

Which ever way the GM ran it, mech heavy or balanced, would have half the table unhappy.

EDIT: If I recall, I took a Panther, a light mech with a PPC because then I could snipe at range and not die in such a light mech then most of the group. However, I hadn't read the rules about skills advancement at the time. If I recall, it had to do with rolling a 12 or something. Which means that mechs with lots of tiny weapons like machine guns would find their MW advancing in gunnery a heck of a lot faster than a mech with one big powerful weapon.

Blue · Jun 13, 2019

Elfcrusher said:
7th Sea

I've never read 7th Sea but I see others gushing about it, enough that it's on my list of "want to try" games. I'll take this as a warning though. Any specifics you can share about why it didn't work?

TarionzCousin · Jun 13, 2019

Fenris-77 said:
I never got the chance to get more than passingly familiar with Hackmaster, sadly. I just wasn't in groups with the right people at the right time.

Hackmaster 4E was AD&D 1E with stuff from the comic added. 5E was an entirely new system after Kenzerco lost the license to 1E. It was significantly different.

/not really helpful but I felt compelled to respond. :erm:

Fenris-77 · Jun 13, 2019

It's been many moons since I use the HoL mechanics for anything. Basically it's exploding 2d6 for everything - plus stat and (maybe) skill with difficulties set by the DM. After I scraped off the satire I found it to be a very compact and useful base mechanic that i use to run smaller adventures that didn't fit into our groups usual games. Some Lovecraftian horror and modern stuff mostly. My write up of the 'rules' was maybe two pages long (no more than four...) if I remember correctly, and that kind of portability can be useful.

Guest 6801328 · Jun 13, 2019

Blue said:
I've never read 7th Sea but I see others gushing about it, enough that it's on my list of "want to try" games. I'll take this as a warning though. Any specifics you can share about why it didn't work?

Bear in mind I didn't (as the title of the thread says) actually play it, and I had to go get it off the shelf and page through it to remember what the turn-offs were. In a nutshell it felt like you couldn't play the game without having a pretty thorough understanding of the setting, but the setting itself required too much work to grok. I paged through it and there's a bewildering array of nationalities, each of which is supposed to have a certain flavor. Honestly it would have been a ton easier if each one just had a real country after it, to help give it context. (E.g., "This is like Greece, ok?")

The genre really appealed to me so I backed the KS, but the book turned me off. You don't even see any rules for dozens of pages (or maybe I missed them), and when I tried to get a sense of "how does this game work?" it doesn't seem like that's in one place.

It may still be a great game: I didn't really give it a chance because it didn't grab me.

Greg K · Jun 13, 2019

These are off the top of my head and I may add more tomorrow. There are actually a few games on this list that I admire, but they are not for me. One system of games may have been interesting, but the formatting was too much of a chore to read through. Many of the games were just plain terrible, imo with some being returned to the local game store within 24hrs. Then, there were a few that either just did not did not impress me or were just not "my cup of tea".

d6 Adventure, Fantasy, Space (WEG)
The Adventures of Indiana Jones (TSR)
Alternity
DC Universe RPG (WEG)
Dungeons & Dragons 4e (TSR)
Dungeon World
Enforcers (21st Century Games)
Fate (Evil Hat)
Fiasco
Gamma World: 3e, 4e, 5e .6e. 7e
Heroes & Heroines (Excel Marketing)
Heroes Unlimited: Revised (Palladium Games)
Marvel Universe RPG (QED/Marvel)
Mercenaries, Spies, & Private Eyes (Flying Buffalo)
Pathfinder (Paizo)
SFX Roleplaying (Joshua Macy)
Tunnels & Trolls (Flying Buffalo)
Valiant Universe (Catalyst Games)
Villains & Vigilantes 1e

Dannyalcatraz · Jun 13, 2019

Now that you mention it, DC Universe RPG and Marvel Universe RPG are also both non-starters for me.

ccs · Jun 13, 2019

Fenris-77 said:
GURPS (dunno why, just felt icky about it),

Probably because in the back of your mind you're thinking:
""GURPs :erm:

You know, I'm playing a game named after the sound of a puking cat...."

Blue · Jun 13, 2019

Greg K said:
Heroes Unlimited: Revised (Palladium Games)

Oh geeze, I had blocked out the Palladium games. I had a bunch of them, from Robotech to TMNT as well as more traditional settings. The settings were interesting, but the percentile mechanics just did not look playable.