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

[Squared]

To respond to the original question about the worst game and why. I'm going to make a list because it is too hard for me to choose.

Of games that I have played (I don't own it, I refused to pay money for it):
1. D&D3.5 - Yeah so the first RPG game I played face to face. (The second one after a Final Fantasy game my, at the time, future wife had made that was PbP.) I loved the RPG thing but hated the mechanics. It probably did not help that I was introduced to this game after all of the ridiculous supplements had come out making it a convoluted mess.

Of games that I own:
1. Burning Wheel - I bought this game years ago when I was still playing Fate. I sat down to read it cover to cover but as I closed the book I realized that I could not remember a single thing I had just read. I'm going to blame that on the game and not me.
2. Conan 2d20 - I was really excited for this game it sounded great, exactly what I was looking for, so I spent way too much on the Kickstarter. By the time I actually got it I realized just how convoluted the game actually was.
3. Fate - I debated not including this as this is the game I started GMing with and played for several years. It wasn't until I was a player in another persons game that I realized just how bland and stale the game was. The Fate point system was also nearly unused by our group, if someone missed on a skill test they would just accept it, if it was really important then they might spend that point only to have to be reminded that they needed an aspect to use it they would then take a second to think of something and then re-roll the dice. Half the time the die roll would fail again and they would just accept the loss.

Honorable mentions (honorable because I think they are fine)
1. D&D5e - I know, I know, I dislike this game but I really think it is well designed, except where it isn't (not sure how else to describe it). Where it excels at is in evoking the imagination and making people excited to come back for more for the next level. Where it falls down are the fiddly details that I could go on about, but I just don't care enough about this system to try and fix it.
2. Shadowrun 5e - I know this one gets a lot of hate. Sure it is pretty easy to break, but there are a lot of games that will break if people try hard enough. Sure the mechanics are a little clunky but they are also evocative and generally lead to fun game play, something the massive HP pools of D&D5e regularly struggles with. But yeah, you will probably have to house rule a thing or two from time to time (especially with vehicles). At the end of the day I think that the setting is worth the trouble, for me. I would not recommend the game for many people though, including about half of my group.
3. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e - I hate this game only because they took one of my favorite games and made it unnecessarily complicated. Not sure it belongs in a worst category though.

^2

 

[Thomas Shey]

I really like the playbook approach, where you start with a solid basic concept, but then on advancement, you can take a new move or whatever from any playbook and customize out freely. Subject to the usual social niceties of course. My Whisper in Blades in the Dark wound up with quite a few advances from other playbooks, including the Hound's Ghost Hunter after he incidentally reuinited a ghost with its body (a husk) during a solo score.

Of course that's not meaningfully different from having someone start with an archetype in a point based system.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Again, very interesting! I've played in a pair of FATE Core campaigns (including one we're now running in Cortex Prime and using approaches) but never in Accelerated so never saw how they wouldn't mesh well within the FATE framework. While trying to not derail this thread too much, how was it in FATE that which approach to use was more flummoxing to the players?

I assume this is directed at Loverdrive, since I didn't say anything about Fate?

Heh, same here. Several decades ago when I got the game I was very much into a "the crunchier and more complex and more granular and more specific, the better!" mode of thinking -- so much so that I bought a whack tonne of the Phoenix Command books all at once. And then it managed to not pique my interest to play with it at all.

Part of it was there wasn't much there outside of combat. Contrast that with, say, Aftermath, which had a tone of non-combat mechanical material.

 

[niklinna]

Of course that's not meaningfully different from having someone start with an archetype in a point based system.

At least you don't have to fiddle with different things costing different amounts of points!

 

[Thomas Shey]

At least you don't have to fiddle with different things costing different amounts of points!

Wheras I tend to think that's a virtue, since I've seen a lot of problems that come down to claiming everything is of the same value.

 

[MarkB]

Wheras I tend to think that's a virtue, since I've seen a lot of problems that come down to claiming everything is of the same value.

Little moreso than claiming that they can have any specific numerical value, when their actual value will vary depending upon how well they synergise with options that you or other players have already taken.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Little moreso than claiming that they can have any specific numerical value, when their actual value will vary depending upon how well they synergise with options that you or other players have already taken.

Maybe to a point, but there are things that are close to universally more valuable than other things that are sometimes assigned the same value. As an example, the number of games where other attributes are genuinely as useful as Dexterity (or whatever term is used for it) in the game are vanishingly small because of the number of skills and tasks it factors into. Similarly there are certain skills (whatever fills in for perception, for example) that are simply going to be more generically useful than others if they're set to a unitary value.

When unitary costs fail out even at a baseline as often as they do, I find misrpriced variable costs far and away the lesser evil.

 

[mamba]

Maybe to a point, but there are things that are close to universally more valuable than other things

one thing I hate is when the cost is supposed to reflect rarity rather than usefulness / power. That to me is bad design

 

[Aldarc]

I don't know what the worst RPG ever made is, but I suspect that this is one of the worst threads that I have ever had the displeasure of reading. This thread is seemingly dedicated to people crapping on other people's yums in the most insulting manner possible. It is not a good feeling.

Just because a game does not work for you doesn't mean that it's a bad game.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I don't know what the worst RPG ever made is, but I suspect that this is one of the worst threads that I have ever had the displeasure of reading. This thread is seemingly dedicated to people crapping on other people's yums in the most insulting manner possible. It is not a good feeling.

Just because a game does not work for you doesn't mean that it's a bad game.

Oh, I don't know. @GMMichael and I seem to be crapping on our own games more than anything else Can't speak for them, but I'm using this thread to highlight lessons learned and to give advice to other creators so they don't make the same mistakes I've made.

As far as a lot of people

crapping on other people's yums in the most insulting manner possible

I haven't seen much of that, which I guess means the people doing that have me on ignore...