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

[Thomas Shey]

As someone who plays plenty of videogames.... No? Even in the same fantasy genre, D&D-isms are very rare.

Classes? Levelling? Level elevating hit points?

If those are rare, we must be playing very different video games, at least at the fantasy end.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In my experience, using VTT for PbtA games is quite rare because, like, what would you need a VTT for? Any app that allows for a voicecall is more than enough.

You might occasionally want something you could show images as too, but I tend to agree a VTT is overkill for most people with any game that doesn't care much about maps and positiioning.

 

[Guest 6801718]

To me, what makes a game good or bad is how the mechanics of the game reflect the theme of the game, or what the game is really about. What I mean is, is the game about survival, revenge, overcoming personal demons and so on. Not fantasy, post apocalyptic, sci-fi and all that. A setting or genre is not a theme. Does the game create the experience it's setting out to create?

I'll add two things to that. How easy is it to learn and play? Does everyone have something to do and stay engaged? If a game is too complex to learn or really bogs down in play, I think it failed to create a good experience. If a game silos people into doing their own thing and excludes the group to have one player do something, I think it fails. This is a group activity, after all. That's not to say that a player can't have a solo moment or that the party never gets split. That happens from time to time. If the mechanics keep making that solo experience happen, then it's a problem.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If you had a number of handouts or pictures to show as part of the game to help set the tone or scene, then I could see using one - particularly if you already have access to it and wanted to make use of some of its value. But we certainly got by playing Masks with just a Discord server. We had voice, we had video, we had a dice roller bot, and we had the ability to share graphics. We never really needed a map, though in a case or two, particularly the confrontation with the villain The Maestro at the Wonder Kidz boy band concert, one could have been useful just to help visualize where the action was (between animated tubas, the collapsing stage, and the crashing heroes at the sound mixing board).

Discord and Skype can both show pictures if you need to.

Honestly, the truth is, VTTs do two things that if you don't want at least one of the two, they're probably overkill: allow you to upload maps and move tokens around, and roll dice. If you don't want to do at least one of those two virtually, its hard to see when they'll be necessary.

(Virtually anything I'm liable to run or play requires the first for me, as I have terrible spatial imagination and memory, but I'm not everyone).

 

[Thomas Shey]

D&D style ones? Absolutely. Even say World of Tanks uses the hit point much more like D&D than not. What is really interesting about that is I spent the whole 1980s and half the 1990s with literally everyone you talked to claiming how D&D was bad game because it used hit points and hit points weren't realistic. Yet, find how many video games use cRPG alternatives like wound tracks or wound tables.

Once D&D had its early influence on video games, it was going to propagate enough that any benefit was going to get drowned out pretty thoroughly by that early-adopter effect unless the benefit of doing it a different way was overwhelming. This is even more true there than it is in tabletop RPGs.

Minor variations. A few will use class to set your starting bonuses and then have similar rewards on obtaining a level no matter which class you started with, but this is still leveling. What the expectation should be for those that say OD&D sucks is that classes should have completely disappeared as a concept. Again, I spent the whole of the 1980s and 1990s listening to every 20 something theorist tell me how classes sucked because they weren't realistic.

Again, once there's a set expectation in the market, its not going to disappear unless its unusable, and the reason that people who dislike that model do is usually irrelevant in video games.

Turns out "realistic" isn't the standard a game is judged by, or for that matter that alternative systems aren't realistic either.

They're usually a lot closer than an elevating hit point model. Its just that for most people playing video games, the first part of your statement is entirely true.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Every thread that goes on long enough ... eventually becomes a debate about D&D.

Have you missed where you are?

 

[Bedrockgames]

Every thread that goes on long enough ... eventually becomes a debate about D&D.

We should change the default to debating Van Damme movies

Bloodsport versus Lion Heart !

 

[Thomas Shey]

Hit points are amazing, and that's not their primary purpose. Hit points survive because what they do is make encounter design more predictable. Let's look at a game like Slay the Spire which has hit points and classes but not levels. Both hit points and classes here are the core mechanic not only for measuring the skill of play, but also for allowing the designer to manage the balance of the game in such a way that he can control the challenge and play test the game.

Of course you don't have to have elevating hit points to serve this pace-control mechanism, and the other methods (usually involving metacurrency) don't run into some of the problems D&D style hit points have chronically run into. Its just that there's a little more complexity to using them, and in some circles, the fact they're pretty blunt about what's going on annoys some people, even though D&D style hit points only really make sense as-is if they've got some of that baked into it too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Classses are the same thing. They allow the designer to control what's possible. This makes play testing a lot easier than if players could mix and match and create anything they wanted. You'd have to test all sorts of things to find out if there was some combination with unexpected emergent properties. Classes limit choices down to something designers can manage, while at the same time doing other things like forcing players to go broad rather than deep. You can predict better that a player will have no more than X at a given time, while having at least this much Y. And again, this makes encounter design so much easier compared with freeform systems. It also makes resource creation a lot easier if you are like a video game maker who has to create models and images and intellectual property if you have constraints on what the player is playing.

I do have to note that there's some pretty successful games that have moved out of the class sphere though--the Fallout series comes to mind here. You just don't tend to see them in fantasy CRPGs because the influence of D&D is so strong there.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Powers & Perils by Avalon Hill is one of the games I wanted to love but it was a math and abbreviation nightmare.

wiki: "In a retrospective review in the January 1996 edition of Dragon, Swan recalled that Powers & Perils had been the second-worst game he'd ever played, calling it an "incomprehensible role-playing game."

The sad part is there's a pretty good game buried under there; the basics of the combat and even the magic system were reasonably clever and at least the former didn't work badly in play. But there was so much special-casing it pretty much drowned it (including the all-too-typical problems of exception based design in the magic system that were magnified by the fact the resolution/advancement system wasn't that simple in the first place). It also had the biggest random swings in power in character generation next to, perhaps, Stormbringer.