Number47 said:
Well, thankfully I haven't played very many bad game systems. The worst that I played was Marvel Superheroes. Fun game, overall, but very annoying that not all heroes are created equal. Hmm, bad guy has Incredible rank body armor. Hmm, my character sheet has nothing over Remarkable...nope, can't hurt him a bit. Add to that the fact that your characer would never, ever get any better.
TSR's Marvel Super Heroes is what got me into gaming. I'd played AD&D, but didn't get much from the experience, mainly due to the cookie-cutter classes.
Marvel's mechanics had a simple elegance that allowed you to make up any character with absolutely any power you could think of. No calculator necessary. It was a great game for young kids to pick up and start playing right away.
True, not all heroes were created equal...but all super heroes
aren't created equal. When Spider-Man first encountered the Hulk and tried slugging him, he realized that the big green guy's Monstrous Body Armor eclipsed his Incredible Strength. My group thought that was actually an advantage over Champions, where the normal human martial artist/detective and the 100-ton-bench-pressing demigod seem to hit for roughly the same amount of damage.
To MSH's credit, I played in a campaign that lasted about 5 years, but ultimately I wound up agreeing with you, that the attack-versus-defense system was flawed to a point where a conflict between Mandarin and Iron Man was a stalemate from the get-go.
Kanegrundar said:
Anything Palladium: I love the Rifts setting, I think it's great, but the rules are an uneven mish-mash so horribly thrown together that it's unplayable. I think I know why Kevin Siembieda doesn't want D20 conversions of his game to come out: He'll finally have proof how horrible he is at game design!
Oh man, has he taken that position publicly? That's really a shame. RIFTS is the one game I'd most love to see get the d20 treatment.
Yeah, Palladium is a horribly clumsy system with no sense of scale. You have a powerful class like Dragon or Mind Melter and a more-often-than-not useless class like Vagabond or City Rat running around side-by-side, supposedly balanced by the fact that it takes a bit more XP for the former to advance a level than the latter (and it's never so much XP that it makes more than a level's worth of difference).
Meanwhile you have some poor guy who picked the Ley Line Walker because of all the awesome picks of the walkers wielding cool-looking arcance energies, and he's getting depressed because he's looking through the spell list and seeing there are no such spells in the game. Instead, he finds an eigth-level spell that gives your opponent flatulence for a few rounds.
But we had great fun. We played every Saturday night. Ah, the good old days... 
