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

[Thomas Shey]

If you're a "trad," "My Precious Living World" GM, you'll hate it.

That seemed unnecessarily snarky.

 

[billd91]

If you're a "trad," "My Precious Living World" GM, you'll hate it.

I'm not sure how, exactly, that follows from anything with the FFG Star Wars game.

 

[DarkCrisis]

One that sticks in my mind was the Diceless Marvel RPG. Diceless? WTF? Hated every minute of it. May have been fine but it just rubbed me the wrong way due to the way the system worked. No dice!?!?

 

[innerdude]

I'm not sure how, exactly, that follows from anything with the FFG Star Wars game.

The second resolution axis (advantage / setback) seems to be a huge sticking point for GMs who struggle with improvisation and/or reimagining scenes/setting/framing to represent the die results.

Trad GMs who instinctively treat their prep/ notes as gospel and not subject to change / reinterpretation as needed will struggle with understanding FFG's narrative dice approach.

 

[billd91]

The second resolution axis (advantage / setback) seems to be a huge sticking point for GMs who struggle with improvisation and/or reimagining scenes/setting/framing to represent the die results.

Trad GMs who instinctively treat their prep/ notes as gospel and not subject to change / reinterpretation as needed will struggle with understanding FFG's narrative dice approach.

I don't see why being stuck on prep notes without ability to react to changes going on is necessarily being a "Trad GM". Nor do I see how FFG's narrative dice approach fails to work with a Living World campaign.

 

[pemerton]

is that different from BX / 1e, or did you just not play those?

Completely different from them. Moldvay Basic is a game of dungeon crawling, and has resolution for that (stuff to do with doors, and corridors, and wandering monsters).

Cook/Marsh Expert adds hex crawls, and has (weaker) systems for resolving that (miles per day, getting lost, stuff like that).

Gygax's AD&D is (not in terms of publishing history, but in terms of content) a type of compilation of Basic and Expert. It has some stuff that is poorly thought out (eg brief commentary on town adventures) but mostly focuses on dungeon and hex crawls, and contains much the same rules as B/X. It also adds some wargame rules for naval battles, aerial battles and sieges.

AD&D 2nd ed keeps most of the above resolution rules, doesn't really add any significant new ones, and purports to be a RPG about epic fantasy heroics of the DL-ish/post-DL-ish kind.

 

[pemerton]

Honestly, a lot of games in that period pushed themselves by badmouthing either specific classes of games or pretty much everything of a different style at all.

Examples?

 

[innerdude]

I don't see why being stuck on prep notes without ability to react to changes going on is necessarily being a "Trad GM". Nor do I see how FFG's narrative dice approach fails to work with a Living World campaign.

It's a function of how loosely held the GM's ideas about the world are. The narrative dice mechanic naturally pushes against some aspects of holding tightly to pre prepped material.

It's not as heavy a pushback as PbtA, but it's definitely there. I felt exponentially better prepared to run FFG after playing Ironsworn, and in my mind it's because there's a similar ethos behind the way the GM should picture scenes/frames and how mutable they can be.

If you're the type of GM who is uncomfortable addressing the results of player rolls with something happening off screen or a result not directly related to the check---e.g., the classic "Schroedinger's Canyon" effect---FFG is going to be nails on a chalkboard to you.

Once again, go play a solo session of Ironsworn for 3 hours and then come back and describe the process of how you generated fiction for the game world.

If you can honestly say it was no different than the way a typical GM runs a typical game of 5e, then I don't know what to tell you.

 

[mamba]

AD&D 2nd ed keeps most of the above resolution rules, doesn't really add any significant new ones, and purports to be a RPG about epic fantasy heroics of the DL-ish/post-DL-ish kind.

ah so it is that it has essentially the same rules but wants them for heroic fantasy then, not so much the rules themselves, as I did not see much difference there between BX, 1e and 2e (never really played BX, only 1e and 2e) and it sounds like you do not see much difference either

 

[Kannik]

Leading Edge Games. Yeah, there's a pretty good review of it here:
I'd love to see an updated version with the same rules, but improved components.

Wow, that brings back so many memories. Despite never having played myself, the board and components of that game are burned into my memory.

Meanwhile, the Aliens RPG had the following useful guidance on skills "Most are self-explanatory":

That's hilarious. It feels a bit like the designer had not much interest in that section (or that type of character) and wanted to handwave things and move on. Three lines of description for the "self-explanatory" Power Loader Operation, nothing for any of the Officer skills. Guess Gorman really always was an *******.