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

[Celebrim]

Mousegaurd is perhaps the worst designed RPG I've actually played. The rules read beautifully for the most part and only a few of the problems jumped out it me when reading it (like the pointlessness of the roshambo system and its complexity despite adding zero gameplay), but oh wow was it a mess in actual use. Despite the pretense of being a rules light game I counted 11 different factors that can modify an individual die roll, and those modification to the roll can happen in 3 different ways, none of which really added interesting choices or tactics to the play. I did have some respect for the Char Burner chargen system when I first encountered it, but eventually discovered that it was largely a bad rip off of Traveller. The rules do absolutely nothing for the game master or the player. They enhance no aesthetics of play. They don't make for more gripping scenes or more gripping stories. They don't handle task resolution particularly well. The game is an unplayable mess which I'm uncertain has ever been played as intended or written. My guess is it takes the heavy hand of fiat to run, and even then only runs for such a narrowly defined circumstances that it never forms long running games unless everyone enjoys fiat or house ruling it into something unrecognizable.

GURPS is pretty darn bad as well. Despite being skills based it does everything you could possibly do wrong when designing a skill-based system. Chargen is a nightmare of fiddly choices. Combat is an uninteresting death spiral triggered by choices no more interesting than playing the child's card game 'War'. As a game system GURPS taught me more than anything else that what seems intuitive and feels right in theory is often a disaster in actual play.

The single worst mechanic I've ever experienced though is the Megadamage in RIFTS where they thought they could integrate scale by just having two scales interact, where at the mega scale 1 point was 100 points at the ordinary scale. Most systems address scale very badly (D6 might be one of the few that doesn't completely fail at it) but this was an explicit recognition of scale that at the same time was absolutely worse than if they'd failed to address scale at all.

And then there are the games where the mechanics are OK, but the intended form of play is impossible in a group. The first two that come to mind for me for that are Wraith the Oblivion and Monsters and Other Childish Things, both of which I hugely admire for their evocative writing and even love some of the mechanics, but which I am not convinced are playable as a social multiplayer RPG as written. I suspect to play them requires vastly changing the terms of the setting, and focusing on something else (later Wraith supplements seemed focused on politics, something the other colon settings focused on).

 

[Bacon Bits]

Limiting myself to just what I've played and can sorta remember, which I think is all I can honestly answer, the in-order list from actually genuinely bad to merely intensely frustrating would be:

1. Shadowrun. 1e/2e in my case. Cool setting, bad system. The dice system doesn't scale well, and it's hard to grok the probabilities. Having riggers/deckers/netrunners in your party basically means the GM runs two separate dungeons. Shadowrun has always been a game you play because you love the setting, and one that you put up with awful rules for.
2. RIFTS. Extremely overwrought, poorly organized, and largely unbalanced. This one is so old that I don't remember specifics anymore, but I remember a 10-year period where this was why I avoided it. Another cool setting that just forces you to endure the awful rules.
3. Conan 2d20. I loved my time with this game and had a ton of fun with it, but the rules are so badly organized or non-functional (e.g., magic, Doom) that I have zero interest in ever returning to it. I wish it had a revised edition that fixed the poor organization and problems.
4. FATE. I think this was Fate 2e, but I don't really know. On the one hand, I think the problem here was because we had too many players (at least 7) and a narrow scenario (zombie apocalypse) where the PCs aspects constantly ran into each other. On the other hand, it felt like the game was mechanically structured to progress the narrative using the first thing any player imagined, so the game felt like a race-to-the-buzzer to see who could imagine a way to invoke or compel first and get a positive outcome. The result was extremely chaotic and disjointed, and not much fun. This game upsets me because I still think we were playing it wrong, but I couldn't tell by reading the book how else we were supposed to be playing it. It's a game that feels like it taught us incorrectly.
5. Star Wars d20. (Not the later Revised edition, which I don't know anything about. Also not the even later SAGA edition, which I have heard good things about.) This system was like running 3e D&D with the d20 Modern classes... and also 3.5e Clerics. Force powers were way, way too good. If one person was force-sensitive, then everyone else was a sidekick. Lots of Star Wars TTRPGs have this issue in some part, but it was so transparent here that I don't think they playtested it.
6. FFG Star Wars. I like this game system, but I hate how they released it. It feels like there was always another book you need to buy. They intentionally split up necessary rules into different books to sell more of them. The system is fun enough, but I am so annoyed by the greedy business model that I wouldn't want to play it even if I had all the books already.
7. 3.Xe D&D... if you include all the splatbooks and optional content, which everyone I play with insists on. It's simply an unmanageable amount of content. By the time you can wrap your head around all the material, you'll have enough system mastery to break the system by looking at it funny. You can absolutely have a fun game, but it will be incredibly stupid fairly quickly without some prior agreement from the players, and there are major subsystems (spell scaling, melee scaling, multiclassing and prestige classes, item creation) that are dysfunctional designs.

I also remember really disliking Storytell[er/ing] but I don't remember why anymore beyond vaguely disliking how dice rolls worked and preferring OWoD over NWoD. And I remember being very frustrated playing Amber Diceless, but I remember that even less. Something about feeling extremely competitive instead of cooperative. I remember disliking MERP, too, but I don't remember anything about it at all anymore beyond that it had too much expanded lore. The lore was good, but I didn't want to read lore.

 

[Celebrim]

[*]Shadowrun. 1e/2e in my case.

Never played it, but everyone says that. Lack of party cohesion is a generic problem that I've never seen solved in any SciFi game. It's a shame with Shadowrun because I remember picking up the examples of play and thinking the game could be cool.

[*]RIFTS. Extremely overwrought, poorly organized, and largely unbalanced.

Agreed. I only played it once, thanked the GM, and made excuses as to why I couldn't come back.

[*]Conan 2d20.

Never played it, but have been underwhelmed by all my (admittedly limited) experience with 2d20.

[*]FATE. I think this was Fate 2e, but I don't really know.

Like so many Indy games, it feels like a game that's best with a single GM and a single player and that is exactly all they did to play test it (if that). As far as the game itself goes, I've never read a game that more misunderstands itself than FATE. Probably the definitive example of game designed entirely based on a set of theorems rather than organically through the process of play and trial and error. Also, FATE is a classic example of a rules designer not understanding their own math and doing what feels elegant without mathematically working out the results (or maybe not caring). I don't have any direct experience with FATE, but wow do the rules not seem to understand what game they are making, and the examples of play I've watched on YouTube really bore that out for me. Personally, I consider the design incoherent because what it made isn't suited for what it wants to do IMO. PBtA is a better take on solving the same problems FATE wants to solve.

[*]Star Wars d20.

I think that may be your most controversial take, because I've heard people say good things about the system. But yeah, balancing the force with non-force users is inherently the martial versus spellcasters problem that any system with magic runs into.

[*]3.Xe D&D... if you include all the splatbooks and optional content, which everyone I play with insists on.

3.X is the definitive example of creating a great system and then the publisher running it into the ground in the pursuit of short-term profit. The core of 3.0e is a really good solid system that could have been improved by slow laborious tweaks and revisions over time, and extended slowly with care to cover aspects of play it isn't good at (chases, mass combat, crafting, etc.), and filled out with great adventures and examples of play. Instead, there was a mad rush of untested and dubious content in an effort to fill out a publishing schedule.

And I remember being very frustrated playing Amber Diceless, but I remember that even less.

I played it once sufficient to convince me that the dice are absolutely necessary. It's like trying to play a child's game of make believe without having any arbitration. Everything is black or white. Nothing surprising happens unless everyone agrees to it. Turns out we have dice and fortune mechanics for a reason.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I backed a kid-friendly RPG several years back on Kickstarter and it was a mess. It was like someone tried to chop down D&D to work for kids, but the finished product is a collection of houserules that pretends to be complete, makes no reference to using the SRD or Basic Rules or anything to function, and renames a bunch of stuff pointlessly to, I guess, not be OGL. (This was years before the OGL fiasco.)

I'm not terribly sorry I backed it -- I would like Kickstarter's algorithm to promote kid-friendly RPGs -- but I read through it once, face-palmed, and never looked back.

Not saying the name because it was clearly an extremely enthusiastic dad's pet project, but wow, was it not ready for prime time.

I have a lot of complaints about Tails of Equestria, the kid-friendly RPG we went with instead to introduce my youngest to the hobby, but it's at least a complete and functional game. She's since moved on to 5E and is eagerly waiting fulfillment of the new edition of Kobolds Ate My Baby, which I know will be a much better game, having owned the previous editions of it.

 

[Celebrim]

I backed a kid-friendly RPG several years back on Kickstarter and it was a mess. It was like someone tried to chop down D&D to work for kids, but the finished product is a collection of houserules that pretends to be complete, makes no reference to using the SRD or Basic Rules or anything to function, and renames a bunch of stuff pointlessly to, I guess, not be OGL. (This was years before the OGL fiasco.)

I've come to the conclusion that 99.95% of everything that has been written for RPGs is a waste of paper. I get so sick of having to house rule games to get them to work. I get so sick of buying cool sounding books only to find that they are completely free of useful content.

 

[hgjertsen]

I've come to the conclusion that 99.95% of everything that has been written for RPGs is a waste of paper. I get so sick of having to house rule games to get them to work. I get so sick of buying cool sounding books only to find that they are completely free of useful content.

I definitely sympathize with that view. I am not exactly tooting my own horn here, but sometimes when I read the supplemental pamphlets I've purchased from unnamed companies making content for 5E DnD, I am just utterly stunned by how insanely unbalanced, incredibly niche, or utterly stupid the optional rules, extra monsters, and extra PC options are. It's not even that they're useless necessarily because they need to be tweaked a bit, it's that it's all just fluff or these ponderous rulesets to deal with the niche details of some adventuring side activity that will never get used once at the table.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I've come to the conclusion that 99.95% of everything that has been written for RPGs is a waste of paper. I get so sick of having to house rule games to get them to work. I get so sick of buying cool sounding books only to find that they are completely free of useful content.

Yeah, I now read through all the preview PDFs in extreme detail before backing, and don't back diddly without detailed previews available. That's one of the reasons I knew Shadowdark would be good -- the free quickstart rules contain way more content than TSR sold in BD&D boxed sets back in the day, allowing everyone to make an extremely educated decision about backing. (The full rules just give more monsters, spells, treasures and random tables -- you could play forever with just the quickstart rules.)

 

[hgjertsen]

Yeah, I now read through all the preview PDFs in extreme detail before backing, and don't back diddly without detailed previews available. That's one of the reasons I knew Shadowdark would be good -- the free quickstart rules contain way more content than TSR sold in BD&D boxed sets back in the day, allowing everyone to make an extremely educated decision about backing. (The full rules just give more monsters, spells, treasures and random tables -- you could play forever with just the quickstart rules.)

I feel ya on kickstarter regrets. The worst is when the product only ships like 2 years later after a bunch of delays so by the time you get it you aren't even upset anymore, just disappointed.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Never played it, but everyone says that. Lack of party cohesion is a generic problem that I've never seen solved in any SciFi game. It's a shame with Shadowrun because I remember picking up the examples of play and thinking the game could be cool.

Shadowrun is cool. It's just... you're going to be fighting the system as much as the hypercorps.

Like so many Indy games, it feels like a game that's best with a single GM and a single player and that is exactly all they did to play test it (if that). As far as the game itself goes, I've never read a game that more misunderstands itself than FATE. Probably the definitive example of game designed entirely based on a set of theorems rather than organically through the process of play and trial and error. Also, FATE is a classic example of a rules designer not understanding their own math and doing what feels elegant without mathematically working out the results (or maybe not caring). I don't have any direct experience with FATE, but wow do the rules not seem to understand what game they are making, and the examples of play I've watched on YouTube really bore that out for me. Personally, I consider the design incoherent because what it made isn't suited for what it wants to do IMO. PBtA is a better take on solving the same problems FATE wants to solve.

I don't necessarily think there's anything mathematically wrong with FATE (I don't remember enough to evaluate it) but the issue we had was more that there were kind of less than 7 stereotypes for characters in a 1980s zombie apocalypse. And when there's a lot of aspect overlap, it felt very competitive. I'm ex-special forces. You're police SWAT. Who is better at fighting zombies? She's a pathologist. He's a research biologist. Who is better at understanding or treating zombie bites? Thank kind of thing. And you have to know because you have to know who should roll. And we did create characters together, but it didn't feel like we were stepping on toes until we got to picking aspects and skills. Then it felt like we were fighting over the same things. And that carried over into playing the game. Only one person really needs to use an aspect in a scene to progress the narrative.

It was like having 7 PCs in PbtA but only 4 playbooks. So I think we were doing it wrong, but it felt like the game led us to do it that way? IDK. I like Evil Hat's stuff, but my table has bounced off it all so hard.

From what other people have described, they usually have 4 PCs or less. 4 is a lot less than 7. But they didn't really seem to play that differently than us from the description.

I think that may be your most controversial take, because I've heard people say good things about the system. But yeah, balancing the force with non-force users is inherently the martial versus spellcasters problem that any system with magic runs into.

I have, too, but I think a lot of people saying that were talking about either the Revised edition or SAGA edition. I don't think most people know there were three editions of a WotC Star Wars RPG. Or maybe they really like Jedi power fantasies, or maybe they just naturally all played Jedi. Because as-written the original SWd20 was very one-sided if the players had any system mastery. I find it hard to believe that anybody else didn't have the same balance problems. Maybe they just didn't care? It was fun to play. It was just... kind of dumb.

I played it once sufficient to convince me that the dice are absolutely necessary. It's like trying to play a child's game of make believe without having any arbitration. Everything is black or white. Nothing surprising happens unless everyone agrees to it. Turns out we have dice and fortune mechanics for a reason.

To be entirely fair, that is basically how the novels work. Contests in The Amber Chronicles either involve (a) traveling to a shadow where you have an advantage, (b) bringing a ton of allies to overcome your disadvantage, (c) ensuring the contest was one of your choosing, or (d) running TF away as fast as possible.

 

[hgjertsen]

Speaking of bad systems and disappointing books, I ended up looking back at my Modiphius Conan book and it really does not feel well-explained at all. I sort of don't blame my players for not having any interest in it. The actual crunch is hidden under a mile of fluff and is so poorly organized as to be almost impossible to navigate. I felt like I was doing something wrong trying to generate a character.