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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9242743" data-attributes="member: 4937">Mousegaurd is perhaps the worst designed RPG I've actually played.  The rules read beautifully for the most part and only a few of the problems jumped out it me when reading it (like the pointlessness of the roshambo system and its complexity despite adding zero gameplay), but oh wow was it a mess in actual use.  Despite the pretense of being a rules light game I counted 11 different factors that can modify an individual die roll, and those modification to the roll can happen in 3 different ways, none of which really added interesting choices or tactics to the play.  I did have some respect for the Char Burner chargen system when I first encountered it, but eventually discovered that it was largely a bad rip off of Traveller.  The rules do absolutely nothing for the game master or the player.  They enhance no aesthetics of play.  They don't make for more gripping scenes or more gripping stories.  They don't handle task resolution particularly well.  The game is an unplayable mess which I'm uncertain has ever been played as intended or written.  My guess is it takes the heavy hand of fiat to run, and even then only runs for such a narrowly defined circumstances that it never forms long running games unless everyone enjoys fiat or house ruling it into something unrecognizable. GURPS is pretty darn bad as well.  Despite being skills based it does everything you could possibly do wrong when designing a skill-based system.  Chargen is a nightmare of fiddly choices.  Combat is an uninteresting death spiral triggered by choices no more interesting than playing the child's card game 'War'.  As a game system GURPS taught me more than anything else that what seems intuitive and feels right in theory is often a disaster in actual play.The single worst mechanic I've ever experienced though is the Megadamage in RIFTS where they thought they could integrate scale by just having two scales interact, where at the mega scale 1 point was 100 points at the ordinary scale.  Most systems address scale very badly (D6 might be one of the few that doesn't completely fail at it) but this was an explicit recognition of scale that at the same time was absolutely worse than if they'd failed to address scale at all.And then there are the games where the mechanics are OK, but the intended form of play is impossible in a group.  The first two that come to mind for me for that are Wraith the Oblivion and Monsters and Other Childish Things, both of which I hugely admire for their evocative writing and even love some of the mechanics, but which I am not convinced are playable as a social multiplayer RPG as written.  I suspect to play them requires vastly changing the terms of the setting, and focusing on something else (later Wraith supplements seemed focused on politics, something the other colon settings focused on).</blockquote>

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