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

[Snarf Zagyg]

Gygax himself said that he felt he was in a hurry to publish because others were also experimenting with the same idea. Not sure where I read that. Maybe someone here knows?

If you're looking for sourcing from that time period, I will recommend reading Game Wizards and The Elusive Shift, which should provide some better overall insight into the general gaming zeitgeist.

That said, this is why I try to avoid counterfactuals. If things had been different, maybe they would have been different. But we only have this one reality at present that we can examine, and in this reality, OD&D was the first TTRPG, and its impact cannot be overstated.

 

[Mannahnin]

Cyborg Commando. The game itself is, perhaps, not the most terrible game ever. But it is bad. Most of the choices made in the game are, at best, baffling- for example, IIRC, the rulebook spends countless pages detailing population statistics (and also how to generate them), and include maps of all the Cyborg Commando bases, but doesn't actually tell you anything about Cyborg Commando bases. There are so many rules and formulas and conversions ... most of which I can't imagine using in actual gameplay, and the character creation rules (and skills) which have both a basic and advanced component are just ... bad (unless you really need to have obstetrics and gynecology as a skill, which, I mean, points for realism I guess ... but I'm not sure why you'd need to include two different skill levels for ... domestic arts?).

This right here.

Myfarog would be my other contender, but I think it's kind of outside the spirit of the thing, given the degree of worldview overlap it has with RaHoWa. And honestly, while it is a BAD game as well as being racist, it's not mechanically that much more terrible than dozens of other vanity press RPGs from the 80s.

Synnibar. Oh God. I haven't had the... pleasure? no, experience... of actually playing it, but I have read through part of a pdf of the rules. It is... it's... I guess I would say that it is unique.

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

Yeah, I played it for a while. It's... well, it's not GOOD, but it's certainly a playable game for super-powered D&D-style comic book fantasy adventure.

I started following Raven McCracken on social media a year or two ago, and I have to admit that my desire to play Synnibarr for real has been steadily rising.

His social media stuff has definitely strained what remains of our friendship.

 

[MarkB]

I've never played a really good superheroes system, but I recall being particularly frustrated with Mutants & Masterminds. Very detailed rules for powersets, but so many balance issues. Like, I think there was a transformation ability where, for a fairly low investment, you could essentially spend all the rest of your resources twice over, once for each of two forms, with the ability to switch between them very easily.

And in play the different powersets were difficult to synergise and very tough to build balanced encounters around, and in a party with vastly different modes and speeds of movement it became all but impossible to avoid splitting the party.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I've never played a really good superheroes system, but I recall being particularly frustrated with Mutants & Masterminds. Very detailed rules for powersets, but so many balance issues. Like, I think there was a transformation ability where, for a fairly low investment, you could essentially spend all the rest of your resources twice over, once for each of two forms, with the ability to switch between them very easily.

And in play the different powersets were difficult to synergise and very tough to build balanced encounters around, and in a party with vastly different modes and speeds of movement it became all but impossible to avoid splitting the party.

Although it's been a very long time since I've played it, I quite enjoyed the TSR Marvel FASERIP system for what is was back in the '80s. Weirdly, it was panned by a lot of reviewers when it came out, as it definitely bucked the Phoenix Command style of game design that was gaining ascendance at the time, instead opting for simple, fast, and uncomplicated (or as some put it, "for kids.").

With hindsight, it looks much better of course.

All that said, the issue with almost all superhero games is the same- the "Why is Hawkeye in the Avengers" problem. It's hard to have characters with disparate power sets and disparate power levels unless you're going for a more narrative approach (and less combat-y).

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think that is all true but even more so my suspicion is that the most popular PbtA is Dungeon World which is a decidedly Trad gamist game that reminds me a lot of Basic D&D. I find this funny because it feels like the biggest attraction of PbtA is hipsterism. It's what the cool kids are playing (that and Blades). Don't get me wrong, there are a couple of clever things going on in both games that make me want to steal ideas from them, or play them if someone was offering, but sometimes I think the biggest attraction is claiming how much cooler you are than trad gamers no matter how trad your game actually is. It is I think the modern equivalent of saying, "My game doesn't have unrealistic things like classes and levels. And my spells are powered by mana points!"

I'm going to make a game called Crap Takes. I imagine you might find it to be the worst game ever... but you'd be damn good at it!

 

[GrimCo]

For me, that would probably be The Window. There are rules light and there is Window rules light. It's been a while since I played it, but it mostly boiled down to descriptions and hardly any real mechanics. Yes, it uses some dices and once in a blue moon you do roll, but that tends to be exception, not the rule. It removes game part from role playing game and mostly leaves role playing aka improv acting and collaborative narration.

 

[Celebrim]

Of course, "bad mechanics" is very subjective and depends both upon what you're modeling and the intended tone of the system

I would like at some point to be able to distinguish between actually bad mechanics and mechanics that are simply not to someone's taste.

For example, 3e D&D is notoriously fiddly with lots of possible stackable and even worse named non-stackable modifiers to a roll. But I would claim that this isn't actually a "bad mechanic" just that it is a mechanic that may not be to someone's taste, because the mechanics do have a noticeable positive impact on gameplay for certain aesthetics of play and that is the players are motivated to fight for every advantage encouraging planning and creativity. And if you don't think that's an advantage, well I put it to you that some people are going to miss it when it is gone. So the question is are you willing to trade fiddly for granular since there is a tradeoff here of ease/speed of play versus depth.

How you manage that tradeoff is just a matter of taste. The game could take a very long time to figure out at each step and be heavy math but it doesn't necessarily follow that that is bad, just that the further you lean into that the smaller your audience is like to be.

On the other hand, there are mechanics that are just objectively bad. An example would be adding steps to the process resolution that don't actually effect the results in a meaningful manner. For example, imagine rules set where you have a contested roll and each contestant first rolls a D20 to determine their target number, and then rolls a second D20 to determine their success based on how much the second D20 beats the target roll and then you compare your degree of success to your opponent's degree of success to determine who won. It's probably the case that we could generate the same range of results using fewer steps than that. Phoenix Command IMO is an example of this sort of process resolution in spades where the results of the system could probably be approximated by some more abstract system with fewer steps but the same or close to the same probable results at the end and just as much verisimilitude. Dwarf Fortress isn't a tabletop RPG but it has the same mindset and is likewise an example of intuitive concrete steps can end up generating results that probably not only could be produced with fewer steps but might even have more verisimilitude if they were.

So those I would argue are objectively bad mechanics. They might not be part of objectively bad games, but we can learn a lesson here about what not to do even if we are goal and intended tone are the same as those games.

 

[Divine2021]

I'm going to make a game called Crap Takes. I imagine you might find it to be the worst game ever... but you'd be damn good at it!

This is really uncalled for behavior dude. Do better.

 

[Umbran]

I'm going to make a game called Crap Takes. I imagine you might find it to be the worst game ever... but you'd be damn good at it!

Mod Note:
Rhetorical questions:

Are you sure making this personal is the way you want to go?

Like, does this even make you look good? Do you figure it is persuasive? Do you figure your target, or other readers, are thinking, "Darn! There's someone whos opinion I ought to listen to! That person has impressive thoughts about RPGs!"?

Whatever effect you were going for, do you figure it is worth a moderator hair eyeball for the personal potshot?

 

[hawkeyefan]

This is really uncalled for behavior dude. Do better.

Please. No admonishment for the screeds @Celebrim has put forth? His take on Mouse Guard is abysmal. His assessment of the entirety of the fandom of PbtA and Blades in the Dark is about as lousy as it gets. And the idea that GURPS has never led to long standing games? I don’t even like GURPS, but that’s clearly ridiculous.

They’re awful takes. He said what he said and I’m responding to it.