What is, in your opinion, the single WORST RPG ever made, and why is it so bad?

[Autumnal]

then what is your case for why skill based is better? Popularity cannot be it, yet it is what you brought up

The posts by Thomas I’ve been reading are making the claim that class & level mechanics aren’t innately better than alternatives. They were in the minds of computer RPG makers, and those were in the minds of later ones, and got entrenched. I take Thomas to be saying that there isn’t a best way to do such things, but rather a bunch of ways that can work well.

 

[Thomas Shey]

then what is your case for why skill based is better? Popularity cannot be it, yet it is what you brought up

I did not.

I may feel that way on a personal level (or at least that its more versatile) but I think you're projecting a claim I never made. All I've said is that the dominance of the class-based approach does not actually tell you the opposite; it might if class and non-class based CRPGs had emerged at the same time in force and the class based ones had been the survivors, but just like in the tabletop case, that's not what happened, and once something gets an early lead in a field, the only way it loses that lead is if other options are blatantly superior or some outside event produces it.

This is a particularly muddy case with the thing called "classes", because even more than their tabletop version, what exactly that means has mutated extensively over time; an old school Wizardry class, like their D&D cohort was pretty rigid, did what it did, and two of them were unlikely to differ much barring differences in attributes. Contrast that with something like an XCOM2 class, which is a bucket of advancement lines where any two of them can be quite different barring their weapon sets (and even that can vary somewhat); similarly, there are FTF game "classes" that have considerable overlap barring one or two things (the most extreme case I ever saw being Alternity classes, where you could end up with a combat engineer built from either a Combat Spec or a Tech Op, and it might be impossible for an outside observer who did not have access to their sheet to tell which was which for quite some time.

Essentially, to make it clear, my only argument is that this is a case where you cannot say anything much one way or another about how "good" any D&D derived mechanics are from popularity, because at the point they came to dominate design, they had the field largely to themselves, and now its become the default way someone does things unless they actively decide to take another tact for some reason. Its not, essentially, a level playing field.

 

[niklinna]

I don't know about worst, but the Cypher System (the setting-agnostic version of the system that Numenera runs on) is the only system I've run that the players staged a mutiny over. I know the exact moment they decided to rebel, too:

For the uninitiated, your characters stats in Cypher are a pool of points that you can spend out of to, among other things, reduce the target number of a roll. One of my players was making a really important roll, so she spent like half of her pool to reduce the TN down to a ridiculously low number, then rolled her die and got an 18. Instead of cheering that she made it, she deflated, and went: "Oh. Well I guess I just wasted all those points."

It was such a feelbad moment that I wasn't surprised the next day when they basically all demanded to switch systems to anything else.

I can think of several ways to alter that crap rule, without having the chuck the whole game. But, if that's just one example of many crap rules, I have to agree with your players!

 

[Thomas Shey]

The posts by Thomas I’ve been reading are making the claim that class & level mechanics aren’t innately better than alternatives. They were in the minds of computer RPG makers, and those were in the minds of later ones, and got entrenched. I take Thomas to be saying that there isn’t a best way to do such things, but rather a bunch of ways that can work well.

More or less. The worst you'll get me to say is that, as in tabletop, there's a tendency to use D&D derived mechanics when they may not be the best choice just from habit and the fact people are used to them. But that in no way means they're never the best choice; if I thought that, I wouldn't be playing PF2e now or getting ready to run 13th Age.

 

[Thomas Shey]

We use discord, because you can upload pictures there.

Yeah, I mention later you can do that. Skype too, far as that goes, though its easier with Discord.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I can think of several ways to alter that crap rule, without having the chuck the whole game. But, if that's just one example of many crap rules, I have to agree with your players!

Frankly, the whole pool approach is, to my view, a bad idea, mostly because they also function as hit point sets. You can make that sort of thing work--Eclipse Phase 2e does something similar--but lumping them together with damage taking capability strikes me as badly thought through from the get-go.

 

[mamba]

I may feel that way on a personal level (or at least that its more versatile) but I think you're projecting a claim I never made. All I've said is that the dominance of the class-based approach does not actually tell you the opposite;

then I misread that, to me it sounded like you made the claim that skill based is better. If all you are saying is 'there is no best, they are both viable', I can agree to that, even though in practice I lean towards class based for being simpler / less complex and easier to balance, but you can design decent games with either approach (ore fall flat with either)

 

[niklinna]

Frankly, the whole pool approach is, to my view, a bad idea, mostly because they also function as hit point sets. You can make that sort of thing work--Eclipse Phase 2e does something similar--but lumping them together with damage taking capability strikes me as badly thought through from the get-go.

Oh, yeah, if one resource is serving multiple purposes, that's a red flag.

 

[Thomas Shey]

then I misread that, to me it sounded like you made the claim that skill based is better. If all you are saying is 'there is no best, they are both viable', I can agree to that, even though in practice I lean towards class based for being simpler / less complex and easier to balance, but you can design decent games with either approach (ore fall flat with either)

Well, my feeling is that making class based design simple also tends to make it more rigid and I'm not a fan. By the time you've got a class based system that gives a reasonable amount of variation, I've not seen one that seemed any simpler than just buying individual components and throwing in some caps.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Oh, yeah, if one resource is serving multiple purposes, that's a red flag.

This struck me as particularly bad with Glaives, who's action pool is the same one used for most physical damage. Glaives are the fighter equivalent.