The worst Roleplaying game ever!!!

[Knight of Neraka]

MERP was pretty rough. You would spend hours making a character and then you would have your first encounter. Of course the encounter would get a successful critical against you and hours of character development/buildig would be down the tubes.

Then there was Palladium's stuff.... MDC v. SDC. Their rationale was don't worry no one would use an MDC weapon against a SDC target because if they blew the target to smithereens they wouldn't be able to investigate that target. YEAH RIGHT!!!

 

[Tetsubo]

How about deadearth or ReichStar? Both are just so cheery...

And other than Fatal I think I own a copy of every game mentioned here so far.

 

[NiTessine]

FATAL. I've actually read passages of it. I had it on my hard drive for a time. Then I deleted it, and just in case they were contaminated, the entire folder and the rest of its contents. *Shiver*

 

[psychognome]

I just read some passages from FATAL, and it gets my vote for the worst RPG ever. I think I've been scarred for life by that game...

 

[Impeesa]

I challenge this board's greatest intellectuals to pool their collective mental powers and actually play Hybrid. I have a conjecture that it is possible, but a rigorous proof has so far remained remarkably elusive.

Now Rolemaster, on the other hand.... I'm fairly new to it, it's my only regular game right now, and I actually quite enjoy it. Maybe that's because we use an incredibly thorough spreadsheet for all aspects of character creation, and we have a pair of of highly experienced players (one of whom is the GM).

--Impeesa--

 

[maddman75]

Not only is FATAL the Worst RPG Evar, it is the worst possible RPG. No matter what kind of crap gets put out in the future, we'll always be able to say 'at least it wasn't as bad as FATAL'. And no, the fact that its free in no way midigates its craptitude. The $20 or $30 I'd spend on a worthless system is much better than the loss of SAN and hope for humanity that I suffered while reading FATAL.

Not only is it racist, mysogynistic, and sophomoric, but it has horrible, mind numbing mechanics to back it up. Such as 4d100/2 -1 to roll stats, and there's a 1d10,000,000 roll in there somewhere.

To make it even worse, the author defends all these horrid features as 'realism'. People were racist and mysogynistic in history, so he makes his game as if all people are that way. He defends the mechanics as being needed for a 'realistic' game, though he cleary has no real understanding of game design or stastics.

Not only am I angry that I wasted time reading it, I am angered that any member of my species took time to read it, much less write it. The author claims to have players, who will occasionally pop into online Fora to defend it, but many suspect these to be alts.

 

[Zappo]

FATAL, Synnibar, Hybrid, any of these. They are all below ranking.

Among those I played, the one I most personally disliked is Vampire (don't like goth). It's good, but I don't like it.

The worst one I played is (IMO) Star Wars WEG, just for the horrible system.

The most doomed to failure is Ancestry, a nice self-published fantasy game I played at a con (the author even gave me a copy). It had an interesting concept of scalable combat rules complexity - basically, the same system can be as fast & simple as D&D (hit, deal damage), or as complex & realistic as GURPS (hit in the eye, roll for head hit points damage, bleeding damage, blindness...), or something in between (hit the head, roll damage and stunning), and you could easily switch complexity level whenever you wanted. So you could do minor battles quickly and important battles in detail, or even use the fast system for mooks and the detailed system for PCs in the same battle. Sadly, it was its only good idea; the rest just made you think "cool, but I can just play D&D instead". Plus, the illos were truly horrible. The author presented it as an attempt to fix AD&D's flaws. Unfortunately, it was the con where D&D 3E was presented, too.

 

[senodam]

My vote is a tie between the oh-so overwrought Vampire which just tries to damn hard to be hip and cool, and SenZar- which I actually ran in a moment of madness. Dear lord, you have never seen munchkinism until you've read and played SenZar. Role playing for the next millenium? My @$$.

 

[DonAdam]

That was DragonRaid, a copy of which is still sitting, dusty, on my gaming shelf.

It's worth noting that the creators didn't see it as a "game," but as a biblical study tool.

Oh man I want a copy of that now (this coming from a catholic theology major).

Edit: Is this it? I sure hope so...

 

[Tetsubo]

Oh man I want a copy of that now (this coming from a catholic theology major).

Edit: Is this it? I sure hope so...

That's it. I had a room mate that owned a copy. Her parents were hard line Catholics and were trying to get her away from RPG's.