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

[Celebrim]

I'm not intimidated btw, you rolled a 1.

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

 

[cranberry]

Gamma World

The idea was cool, but the gameplay was just "meh" for me.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It's amusing to me how this thread shits on other games but I get this reaction when talk about OD&D's in a non-faltering way.

I'm not intimidated btw, you rolled a 1.

Well, I don't think you can call OD&D the "worst" RPG ever made for a very simple reason; as you acknowledge, it's the first. So without it, we wouldn't have all the other TTRPGs (both good and bad) for people to ... um .... release upon.

More importantly, OD&D as originally released wasn't so much a complete game (really, try playing just "the rules" of the LBBs) so much as it was a toolkit. Almost all of the games in the 1970s were based off of OD&D, either because they were DM's notes that were later polished up and released as separate games, or because they were written in reaction to and based off of OD&D. In addition, there was a strong culture of play that emerged from it; it's impossible to understand OD&D without understanding the culture, the zines, and many different ways that people played OD&D. (This is covered in The Elusive Shift).

To summarize- I find the idea that OD&D was the "worst" TTRPG to be a difficult one to accept for a multitude of reasons. Instead, it's best to remember that it was something else that rhymed with worst, but starts with an "f."


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

 

[Celebrim]

This is a bold choice given how popular GURPS used to be in the 80s and 90s.

I'm not sure GURPS has ever been that popular in the sense of "generated a large number of long running games". Every GM I knew back in the day owned multiple GURPS books, but most of them just ended up as reading material, encyclopedia articles and research resources. GURPS was the king of "lonely fun", selling far more books than it actually produced games.

When I think of worst, I tend to think of games there are nearly unplayable or don't work at all.

I feel that way about GURPS. It gives the appearance of being a workable game, because all of its rules seem to be so well thought out and intuitive. But in practice it proves to have all sorts of issues, many of which for me worked against the reason for playing GURPS in the first place.

GURPS certainly isn't my cup of tea these days, but I had a grand old time with it back in the day.

What genre did you play?

What do you mean lack of party cohesion? Of all the flaws directed at Shadowrun this isn't one I've heard before.

I don't know if cohesion is the best word for what I'm thinking about, but in my experience with science fiction rule sets they have a tendency to create rule sets where a character may be skilled at one mini-game (flying a spacefighter, piloting a mech, healing a wounded character, hacking into a network, social interaction, shooting it out with blasters) but not at multiple mini-games and as a result during task resolution, often only one PC is working on the same problem at a time. If we are in combat there is often one or more characters that are useless, and if we are breaking into the corporate network often there is one character doing all the work while everyone else watches. This has lately become an even bigger problem than it was back in the day, as I find I have a tendency to lose players to phones or the attention sinks during periods where a PC isn't directly contributing.

 

[Celebrim]

Gamma World

The idea was cool, but the gameplay was just "meh" for me.

Which edition? Few games have had such wildly different rules sets as Gamma World.

 

[MGibster]

I'm not sure GURPS has ever been that popular in the sense of "generated a large number of long running games". Every GM I knew back in the day owned multiple GURPS books, but most of them just ended up as reading material, encyclopedia articles and research resources. GURPS was the king of "lonely fun", selling far more books than it actually produced games.

You make a valid point. GURPS sourcebooks were deliberately written to be useful to anyone no matter what set of rules were in use. I also have a working theory that many RPG splat books produced during the 1990s were designed more to be read than they were to be used in a game.

I feel that way about GURPS. It gives the appearance of being a workable game, because all of its rules seem to be so well thought out and intuitive. But in practice it proves to have all sorts of issues, many of which for me worked against the reason for playing GURPS in the first place.

While I'm no longer interested in GURPs, I know my group managed to run several successful campaigns using the rules back in the late 80s and into the early 1990s. The rules work just fine for a variety of campaigns though there same, high powered supers for one, that GURPS is ill suited for.

What genre did you play?

The first time I played the original I-6 Ravenloft module we were using GURPS rather than AD&D. We used GURPS for fantasy, science fiction, horror, and super heros. We generally didn't have problems with GURPS until we tried scaling the power levels up really high. But then I need to stress that during this period of my life I was willing to play a lot of complicated games like Car Wars, Starfleet Battles, and a bunch I can't even remember. These are games I have a lot less patience for today.

I don't know if cohesion is the best word for what I'm thinking about, but in my experience with science fiction rule sets they have a tendency to create rule sets where a character may be skilled at one mini-game (flying a spacefighter, piloting a mech, healing a wounded character, hacking into a network, social interaction, shooting it out with blasters) but not at multiple mini-games and as a result during task resolution, often only one PC is working on the same problem at a time.

Oh, yeah. FFG's Star Wars has the same problem. They have so many skills that characters tend to be good at one or two things and aren't great at the rest. It's been so long since I've actually played Shadowrun that I don't remember if it's a particular problem there.

 

[Celebrim]

D&D Original Edition:

• d20 rollover for attacks
• d100 for thief skills
• 2d6 for turning undead
• 1d6 for adventuring skills
• 1d6 for initiative
• Attack Matrix
• Saving Throw Matrix
• Descending Armor Classes are better.
• Humanoid races are classes but humans choose a class.

It's all over the place! They did everything they could to make it hard to understand and learn. But it was the first RPG, so we forgave them.

OD&D wasn't designed in the same sense modern rules are. It is a rules set that grew organically in response to problems that came up in play, which each new problem generating its own solution. Was it perfect? Not in the slightest. Were the rules well organized? HA!

But over 40 years of gaming and I've come to appreciate the value of that far more than I find value in elegance and unified rule sets. Your opinion reflects the one I had say about 30 years ago, but then I actually ran elegant games with unified rule sets and found that shoe-horning every tested contention into the same fortune range or the same mechanical resolution had its own problems.

 

[Autumnal]

1. Your favorite game.
2. @Whizbang Dustyboots ‘s favorite game.
3. @Umbran ‘s favorite game.

 

[Celebrim]

The rules work just fine for a variety of campaigns...The first time I played the original I-6 Ravenloft module we were using GURPS rather than AD&D. We used GURPS for fantasy, science fiction, horror, and super heros. We generally didn't have problems with GURPS until we tried scaling the power levels up really high. But then I need to stress that during this period of my life I was willing to play a lot of complicated games like Car Wars, Starfleet Battles, and a bunch I can't even remember. These are games I have a lot less patience for today.

Agreed with the lot less patience for Car Wars, SFB and the like.

I have never played GURPS Fantasy, and I suspect of all the ways to play it that would be the most functional. You keep the skill set small, and as long as you don't squint and don't play the same characters for too long, as long as the point buy is 100-150, and as long as no one tries to break the game during CharOp it will probably work out. In particular, GURPS active and passive defense scores are most interesting in a Fantasy like setting with shields and melee weapons and reasonably effective armor against the scale of the weaponry you are facing, and notably when you don't let active defenses go too high (or you do but you have an aesthetic of play where running roughshod over foes is acceptable because you really don't care about challenge just fantasy).

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?

The very fact that you played so many different ways suggest to me that you weren't putting 200+ hours into any one story and any one group of characters, and so I suspect that like me at the time you were a bit blind to the actual effect of the rules on your gameplay. It took me until the mid-1990s (in my 20's) to start taking seriously what rules were doing to my game and where the frustrations I was having were coming from, and at that point I tried GURPS as a rules set for a near future science fiction special ops horror sort of game - commandos versus aliens if you will.

And oh wow did that turn out to be a mistake. BRP would have suited me much better. Everything about GURPS fell apart for me when tested. CharGen was bad. Speed of play was bad. Balance was bad. The math didn't work. Created narrative was bad. For like 15 years I'd been hearing complaints about hit points, levels, classes, combat resolution as a separate system to task resolution, abstract combat, armor should reduce damage not cause misses and so on and so forth, and here I had all of that and the rules problems were worse than ever. It was probably the biggest Eureka moment I ever had as a GM or rules designer.

 

[Zubatcarteira]

Interacting with the rules while playing D&D 3.5 always me wanna jump out of the nearest window.