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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 9242768" data-attributes="member: 6777737">Limiting myself to just what I've played and can sorta remember, which I think is all I can honestly answer, the in-order list from actually genuinely bad to merely intensely frustrating would be:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Shadowrun. 1e/2e in my case. Cool setting, bad system. The dice system doesn't scale well, and it's hard to grok the probabilities. Having riggers/deckers/netrunners in your party basically means the GM runs two separate dungeons. Shadowrun has always been a game you play because you love the setting, and one that you put up with awful rules for.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">RIFTS. Extremely overwrought, poorly organized, and largely unbalanced. This one is so old that I don't remember specifics anymore, but I remember a 10-year period where this was why I avoided it. Another cool setting that just forces you to endure the awful rules.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Conan 2d20. I loved my time with this game and had a ton of fun with it, but the rules are so badly organized or non-functional (e.g., magic, Doom) that I have zero interest in ever returning to it. I wish it had a revised edition that fixed the poor organization and problems.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">FATE. I think this was Fate 2e, but I don't really know. On the one hand, I think the problem here was because we had too many players (at least 7) and a narrow scenario (zombie apocalypse) where the PCs aspects constantly ran into each other. On the other hand, it felt like the game was mechanically structured to progress the narrative using the first thing any player imagined, so the game felt like a race-to-the-buzzer to see who could imagine a way to invoke or compel first and get a positive outcome. The result was extremely chaotic and disjointed, and not much fun. This game upsets me because I still think we were playing it wrong, but I couldn't tell by reading the book how else we were supposed to be playing it. It's a game that feels like it taught us incorrectly.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Star Wars d20. (Not the later Revised edition, which I don't know anything about. Also not the even later SAGA edition, which I have heard good things about.) This system was like running 3e D&D with the d20 Modern classes... and also 3.5e Clerics. Force powers were way, way too good. If one person was force-sensitive, then everyone else was a sidekick. Lots of Star Wars TTRPGs have this issue in some part, but it was so transparent here that I don't think they playtested it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">FFG Star Wars. I like this game system, but I hate how they released it. It feels like there was always another book you need to buy. They intentionally split up necessary rules into different books to sell more of them. The system is fun enough, but I am so annoyed by the greedy business model that I wouldn't want to play it even if I had all the books already.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">3.Xe D&D... if you include all the splatbooks and optional content, which everyone I play with insists on. It's simply an unmanageable amount of content. By the time you can wrap your head around all the material, you'll have enough system mastery to break the system by looking at it funny. You can absolutely have a fun game, but it will be incredibly stupid fairly quickly without some prior agreement from the players, and there are major subsystems (spell scaling, melee scaling, multiclassing and prestige classes, item creation) that are dysfunctional designs.</li> </ol>I also remember really disliking Storytell[er/ing] but I don't remember why anymore beyond vaguely disliking how dice rolls worked and preferring OWoD over NWoD. And I remember being very frustrated playing Amber Diceless, but I remember that even less. Something about feeling extremely competitive instead of cooperative. I remember disliking MERP, too, but I don't remember anything about it at all anymore beyond that it had too much expanded lore. The lore was good, but I didn't want to read lore.</blockquote>

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