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

[GMMichael]

Potential worst game: Star Frontiers by TSR, 2021. I don't think this one made it out of the legal department.

Ahh, yes, but you rolled a 1 on "sense motive".

Speaking of bad mechanisms... why is a check needed just to have a "hunch?" And why is it so hard (20)? And why is the skill's capstone effect, "Discern Secret Message," potentially covered by Bluff, Decipher Script, Gather Information, Listen, Knowledge, Perform, Search, and/or Speak Language? Why did it need a table?

3&D ranks, for the record, in my top 10 favorite RPGs.

ETA- that said, to quote The Dude, that's like, your opinion, man. And you're welcome to have it!

Sure, but who's calmer?

 

[Sacrosanct]

I beat you to it. But...

my bad, I missed that last sentence. I suppose as punishment I'll have to play your game...

 

[MGibster]

You mention the Supers game not working out, but I really wonder about the science fiction game as well. Horror sure, as you can definitely make characters go splat in GURPS, but science fiction starts really hitting GURPS problems. How much time did you spend on each of these campaigns?

My heyday for GURPS ended about thirty years ago. Since that time, I've run one campaign of GURPS Delta Green (horror) around 2005 and I participated in a one shot fantasy game at my local game store around 2017-18. I don't remember a lot of specifics for any games I played during the Bush and Clinton administrations, at this point I only have vague impressions. I don't remember running into a lot of problems with GURPS until we tried scaling the power level up too far. i.e. I don't remember big problems with any science fiction campaigns we played, but I remember problems with supers and fantasy where we gave everyone tons of points to spend on their characters.

 

[hgjertsen]

SLA industries. Holds great potential, but fails miserably.

A very close second is D&D 2e & 5e. Soul-killing bland, over-powered, and lately, swamped with third-party garbage.

Hm, I wouldn't necessarily agree that 5E is soul-killingly bland but the third party content does suck for the most part. Funnily enough, some of the better-balanced stuff I've seen is the result of a single person's efforts rather than a company.

 

[Undrave]

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.

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.

This reminds me of when, pre-pandemic, there was talk of doing a Pokémon TTRPG campaign with some friends and I looked into what had been done in the fandom… They were all awful bloated messes that made 3.X look sensible. There was this obsession with reproducing the video game WAY too closely (the math in Pokémon games is insanely dense and it works fine when a computer handles the actual boring part), obsession with stating up EVERY Pokémon from the start, giant move list, absurd stat line up, and stacking traits on both human and Pokémon to the point a trainer and their team would basically be like running 7 entire RPG character. They also have to include the 6 Pokémon stats (HP, ATK, DEF, SP.ATK, SP.DEF, SPD) and I even saw a game use the D&D stats and then GENERATE THE OTHER SIX out of the D&D stats! Absolute madness! And some of them have a weird obsession with making rules for humans fighting Pokémon directly.

I can’t imagine any of those being fun to play considering how unwieldy they looked.

 

[hgjertsen]

This reminds me of when, pre-pandemic, there was talk of doing a Pokémon TTRPG campaign with some friends and I looked into what had been done in the fandom… They were all awful bloated messes that made 3.X look sensible. There was this obsession with reproducing the video game WAY too closely (the math in Pokémon games is insanely dense and it works fine when a computer handles the actual boring part), obsession with stating up EVERY Pokémon from the start, giant move list, absurd stat line up, and stacking traits on both human and Pokémon to the point a trainer and their team would basically be like running 7 entire RPG character. They also have to include the 6 Pokémon stats (HP, ATK, DEF, SP.ATK, SP.DEF, SPD) and I even saw a game use the D&D stats and then GENERATE THE OTHER SIX out of the D&D stats! Absolute madness! And some of them have a weird obsession with making rules for humans fighting Pokémon directly.

I can’t imagine any of those being fun to play considering how unwieldy they looked.

There's definitely a trend in fan projects based on video game properties to try too hard to replicate the mechanics of the game rather than the setting or feel of the game, and it almost always doesn't work out when the designer's goal is the former. By nature of having lots of their interactions calculated by a computer, video games are allowed to be a lot more complicated arithmetically and by nature of being video games, there are a lot of features which are easier for a computer to manage than a DM.

I don't know the details of the Dark Souls RPG, but I imagine that if it incorporated waking up next to a bonfire after you die and running through the dungeon again it would soon become boring or would have to rely on a complete lack of dice rolls in combat in order to prevent it feeling like a completely pointless and uncontrollable endeavor to make it through the level. Which in turn would become very boring.

3PP content produced for 5E DnD specifically often suffers from very poor balance stemming from a particular designer's play experience. I find that a lot of 3PP monsters are too powerful for their CR and a lot of 3PP class options deviate so far from 5E design that they feel like a different game.

 

[Undrave]

There's definitely a trend in fan projects based on video game properties to try too hard to replicate the mechanics of the game rather than the setting or feel of the game, and it almost always doesn't work out when the designer's goal is the former. By nature of having lots of their interactions calculated by a computer, video games are allowed to be a lot more complicated arithmetically and by nature of being video games, there are a lot of features which are easier for a computer to manage than a DM.

It became pretty obvious to me with just like 15 min of reading them and I don't know why it's so hard to grasp that it's a bad idea. Let's not even get into how each move in Pokémon has individual accuracy and its own individual PP to track (Power points, aka number of time the move can be used) which means every Pokémon is like a mini caster with 4 'spells' known and each their own collection of slots.

Gen 1 Pokémon has 151 Pokémon and 165 moves and was functional. Today there's over 1000 Pokémon and over 900 moves...there's no way the former is feasible!

 

[Celebrim]

This brings up for me a sub-question which is, "Is there such a thing as a table top RPG that is so bad that someone somewhere didn't enjoy it?" I can see that question going really badly if explored in the wrong way, but I've long believed that "System doesn't matter" but rather only "Process of play matters".

(I recognize that the original promulgator of the concept "System matters" including process of play in his overarching definition of system, but my critique is intended to focus on the fact that the response to the claim "System matters" is to heavily focus on trying to achieve some effect via hard coding of rules including hard coding of the process of play, usually with the underlying assumption that a game has a single objective and a single unified process for achieving that is the best way to accomplish that.)

What this thread has got me thinking about is just how subjective this question is despite the fact that we can objectively analyze a rule set to make a claim like "the math doesn't work" or "the procedures are overly complex" or "there is a lot of unnecessary fortune ritual involved here where we randomize the random numbers" or even maybe "the rules aren't clearly laid out" or "the balance is terrible", because individual tables can all intentionally or accidental have processes of play and aesthetics of play where none of that matters in the slightest and were rules problems and lack of clarity disappear owing to the fact that the table doesn't even realize what the rules are but plows ahead with its own flawed understanding and it just works for them.

I guess I'm saying that it would not surprise me at all for every game we tried to list that there was someone who said, "I played that game and I had an amazing time!" In some cases, that might be a little bit uncomfortable (if the problem we had with the game wasn't mechanical but content), but since we are principally judging mechanics I know that there are people who had a blast playing Rifts, GURPS, and Storyteller games and who knows maybe even Mouse Guard with a good GM that plowed right over the problems.

I guess what I'm saying is Synnibarr has a fanbase.

 

[Divine2021]

I’ve made a couple of bad (and expensive) purchases on 5e supplements with cool premises that I’m pretty cautious now. Drivethru RPG will sometimes lead me astray, and I’ll end up buying something I regret, but I typically try to find reviews now before I click to buy. That being said, the most worthless, poorly edited, and generally awful 5e supplement I bought was Corpus Angelus: The Codex of Good. I thought I was going to get cool Angel fluff and stats and all that stuff, instead I got disappointed.

 

[MGibster]

This brings up for me a sub-question which is, "Is there such a thing as a table top RPG that is so bad that someone somewhere didn't enjoy it?" I can see that question going really badly if explored in the wrong way, but I've long believed that "System doesn't matter" but rather only "Process of play matters".

I'm sure someone out there unironically enjoyed Troll 2, so I'm going to say that it's unlikely there's any professionally made RPG that nobody enjoyed. Even if it was just the creator and a few of their friends.

I guess I'm saying that it would not surprise me at all for every game we tried to list that there was someone who said, "I played that game and I had an amazing time!"

The vast majority of threads here on EnWorld are about opinions rather than any objective truth and this topic is the same. People have all sorts of wild and wacky opinions, like some people think GURPS is one of the worst games ever! Can you even imagine? We don't all like the same things. Sometimes when we do like the same things we don't always like it for the same reason.