What are bad ideas in RPGs?

[Frostmarrow]

Any system with too low chance of success on die rolls. Take WFRP as an example; a starting character is likely to have 30% chance of success on any given task. This makes you feel like a clumpsy moron when you can't even accomplish easy tasks. It gets ridiculous when all party members fail all the time at everything like a bunch of clowns.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I see the GM role as at least three-fold:
(1) World & adventure design (off-line)
(2) Adjudication of rules (at table)
(3) Roleplaying villains/NPCs (at table)

In role #3, the GM must indeed roleplay evil adversaries (hopefully motivating players to defeat them). To completely eliminate that I would call a "bad design".

You got it right. #3 involves getting to play the role of NPC's (not the DM)who simply live to bring down the characters (not the players). Any DM who IS trying to defeat the players (not the characters) and is also in charge of #2 is simply being an ass.

 

[roguerouge]

The solution, in my game, is that PC's can neither buy nor sell magic items. They're special.

It's your game, of course, but to the extent that they're special is to the extent that there's a high demand for something and a limited supply of it, then you've got an exceptionally lucrative market. I admire your players' restraint; that restriction would break the world for me.

 

[roguerouge]

2. The game does not include rules for major parts of the adventures of the setting. If this is a space RPG, it has no rules for space combat (or they are extremely paltry).

I can't tell you how frustrating it is that it took until Stormwrack for there to be even minimal 3e core support for naval combat and Heroes of Battle for mass combat. Not that those present particularly elegant solutions, mind you, but it is a reminder that DnD falls down on this point.

 

[Orryn Emrys]

I once toyed with the idea of an old retired adventurer - an extremely high level character 30 years ago - who was starting out back at low level because he'd forgotten (muscle memory, etc) his old abilities.

I had a player back in the early 90s (who was generally not known for his creativity) who came up with the idea of an 81-year-old 17th-level psionicist who seriously pissed off an archmage and managed to get reverted to 18 years of age (and 1st level) with no memory of his past. It played out as one of the coolest concepts I'd seen at the time, as I slowly introduced elements that teased his broken memory. His leveling was technically his subconscious slowly regaining access to and control of his psionic abilities.

It turned out to be a lot of fun.

 

[steenan]

Things that I see as very bad in RPG design:

1. Too strong influence of possesions and/or social position on characters' power and playability. It often makes taking away/destroying equipment and killing background NPCs a taboo or forcec MG to let players regain everything they lost. The game should keep being fun to players after the characters have been robbed, accused of treachery, arrested and sent to another continent.

2. Non-adventurer NPCs modelled by game mechanics as in all respects worse, weaker and less skilled than player characters. I don't expect a farmer or a lawyer to be a dangerous combatant - but the first one should be able to handle animals and the second one negotiate much better than an average adventurer.

 

[Halivar]

It's your game, of course, but to the extent that they're special is to the extent that there's a high demand for something and a limited supply of it, then you've got an exceptionally lucrative market. I admire your players' restraint; that restriction would break the world for me.

Since NPC's don't get magic items at the rate players do (in fact, player's don't get them at nearly the rate the PHB suggests), if at all, the items are literally "priceless". Yes, the players can sell them, but the offering price wil be a complete shot in the dark, since there is no "market value" for such items. The players choose not to sell their magic items because they know they cannot replace them.

 

[wingsandsword]

4. The PHB being needed was required by WOTC. The idea was any book with the D20 logo was a rules add-on to the D&D PHB (and later the D20 modern book). Not having this feature would mean people could make d20 branded books and have no tie back to the core rulebooks but still reference them. That would have been even worse for WOTC.

I am quite well aware of the terms of the now defunct d20 System Trademark License. However, that doesn't mean it's a good idea as far as how it looks for the actual game. Trying to sell a medieval-fantasy themed D&D PHB for $30 as an add-on cost for a completely separate RPG of a different genre isn't exactly very smart from the point of view of the maker of the other RPG. To WotC it's a guaranteed win, because they'll pick up at least a few sales they wouldn't have had otherwise, while to the maker of the licensed RPG it's a loser decision because that chases away players that don't already own a PHB or aren't interested in paying $30 more for one so they can play an unrelated game.

I even vaguely recall an e-mail interview with Ryan Dancey about the d20 STL back from 2000 about this, where he at the time thought using the STL for other genres (I think Wild West was the example) wasn't a good idea. The later standalone OGL games proved that there were the means within the system to workaround this. Guardians of Order making some of their licensed games like Trigun require their separate d20-derivative rulebook while still having the d20 logo and stating on the cover it also required the D&D PHB wasn't bright either.

. When d20 Starwars 1 and 2 released, the put all of the materials they had at the time in the books. Those RPGs were released before all of the movies were out, so they couldn't work with the materials as they didn't exist. Lucas Film specifically has stated that those time periods were off limits to licensed products until the movies were completed and released.

I am also quite well aware of LFL's policies with regards to the timeframes that were not allowed to be referenced, but again from the standpoint of making a good product it's a huge crippling effect to have a huge swath of the source material that is off limits. As I said, I won't hold that against the d6 version because while they couldn't go into detail about the Clone Wars and that era in the idea that one day Lucas would return to work on it, it wasn't the gaping hole that we had in OCR Star Wars with all the information about the Battle of Naboo in 32 BBY, then leaping ahead to the Battle of Yavin and absolute silence about the intervening 3 decades. From the point of view of a novelist or computer game maker, you can work around this, but for an RPG where you have to expect GM's and players to romp through the setting, big conspicuous holes are bad, especially when you know they will be patched one day.

 

[Punnuendo]

Any system with too low chance of success on die rolls. Take WFRP as an example; a starting character is likely to have 30% chance of success on any given task. This makes you feel like a clumpsy moron when you can't even accomplish easy tasks. It gets ridiculous when all party members fail all the time at everything like a bunch of clowns.

In that specific case I'm pretty sure that is the point of the whole game and setting.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

In that specific case I'm pretty sure that is the point of the whole game and setting.

No, it's not. That life is short and combat deadly is the point - but the low success chances apply to either side of that - the enemies fail their attacks, parries or dodge rolls just as much as the PCs.

I think this might really be fundamentally bad design (as much as I like Warhammer), because IIRC, research has shown that there is a "comfortable" area of success and failure rates, which means in a game like Warhammer players will probably feel uncomfortable with their results most of the time. And this doesn't reflect back on their character being uncomfortable or feeling inadequate (that might be okay), it reflects bad on the system and might lead to disinterest.