What is your biggest RPG heartbreak?

[Yora]

Planescape is not actually very suitable for play.

It has fantastic worldbuilding, but there's really not much for PCs to do. All but a few of the factions have any motivations to do something that players can get involved with.
It says specifically that it's not a setting for mercenary dungeon crawling, but that's really the only thing that's available to PCs.

 

[Ghost2020]

TORG. Love the idea and the style but wow when I ran it I just didn’t like it.

GURPS 4e. I had a long history with GURPS running and playing, but I should have known with 3e being a bit too much for me already. I made it through the 4e core books and was excited to play and the game hit me like a lead balloon. Haven’t looked at it since. Note that my ideal game changed too, it took playing GURPS 4e to make me realize how much.

GURPS 4e for me too. I was hyped for it, as I really liked 3rd ed.

The core books were a terrible read. Just a chore, dry, and boring. The supplements, in my eyes, weren't much better. Good for reference, but an onerous task to get through. Eventually I just decided it wasn't worth it to go through 4e for how little we actually play GURPS in the first place. I have two sagging shelves of 3e and it's fine for me.

 

[CleverNickName]

Buying Menzoberranzan on PC.
Then playing it.

I'm trying to be funny, but I'm also serious. I had such high hopes for that CRPG, and it was so expensive at the time (it cost me almost a month of allowance), and it just suuuucked. I'm still sad about it.

 

[Imaculata]

Me and my group had miniatures made of our characters and painted, for a sci fi campaign a friend of ours would run. They looked amazing.

But the campaign slowly started showing its cracks, and we started voicing our objections to how things were going. And eventually it all came to an end, as our DM also leaped onto the crazy covid conspiracy bandwagon, and severed all friendships. The minis are nice though.

 

[Ghost2020]

I'm currently in one of my collecting moods, and the number of RPG manuals on my bookshelf is experiencing a sharp upswing, so right at the moment my biggest RPG heartbreak is the number of times in the past that I've pruned my collection (and how much more it costs to purchase those selfsame rulebooks or adventure modules on Ebay today vs. when I first acquired them).

Same.
I hate going back to re-buy something I sold for pennies on the dollar, only to find out it's considerably more expensive now.

 

[Ghost2020]

I absolutely love the setting of Rifts. I have never ever ever come across a game that someone else was running however that sat well with me.

The first time I ever tried a play by post forum game, it was a Rifts Atlantis "Splugorth prison break" game. For those not familiar, they're one of the introductory bad guy "cover of the base book" monsters. A race of interdimensional slavers who live in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, who capture people and perform terrifying turn-them-into-monsters experiments on them.

The GM told us to all make our characters separately, but to make sure that we focused on role-play over roll-play because he wanted interesting characters, not just gonzo over the top powers and combat abilities.

So I used the "make a Splugorth monster" rules and made a super depressed human sculptor who had been captured by the Splugorth and had his arms lopped off and replaced with sentient lobster claws.

Intro session, the rest of the party goes supernova (if I remember correctly it was Mecha-godzilla, a Scarecrow/Burster (immune to any damage but fire/pyrokinetic psychic who is immune to all fire damage, and Kitt, the car from Knightrider). They level the prison, free all the slaves, sink most of the island, and completely murderlate all of the evil slaver monsters before my character has even had a chance to mope around and sigh dramatically.

I didn't bother sticking around for the rest of the campaign.

That's insane.

I must be one of the half dozen moderate RIFTS GMs in the world apparently. I was able to run a year(s) long campaign that had the characters rescue a town from bandits, then successfully defend it, and eventually were asked to run it. They did, and it was great! We had criminal factions, mercs, slavers, vampires, all vying for the area.

The characters were ley line walker, samas pilot, juicer, head hunter, and mind melter, and vagabond. Everyone had a chance to shine. Man, I don't get how people consistently ruin this game.

I'm sorry your session was so bad.

 

[Ghost2020]

Being in a campaign for 3 years and being 5 or 6 sessions from completing the main story line with 16th level characters (the highest I ever played) and then 2 people moved away. We never got to finish.

I have been playing World Without Numbers on and off for the last few months. Our group absolutely loves it. We are doing a rotating DM thing so I’m not sure if it’s the game itself that I love or if it’s the DM who is running it. I love the toned down stat bonuses, the carrying capacity rules or the hit point/stress system.

have fun with it!

Same.
D&D 3.0, 16th level campaign ran for a few years, and we were literally 2-3 sessions, no more than 4, away from wrapping it up. Then work got in the way, a move, and a new born child. We talked it out once over supper as to the epilogue of sorts, but that was pretty lame after all that time.

 

[S'mon]

For 5e the love waxed and waned faster. But mostly this is the edition that made me realize that D&D is really no longer made primarily for people like me, but rather people that are now in their 20s (like I was when 3e came out), and that their preferences and mine don't align in many regards.

When 5e came out I thought they did a great job making it inclusive. Not so much recently. I guess initially it was kinda amorphous, trying to be appealing to a wide variety of demographics, but since around 2018 it's settled strongly on a particular style, what I think of as Ginny D-and-D.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe5KNXqT7970K8vkHb5BQ5Q

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

That's insane.

I must be one of the half dozen moderate RIFTS GMs in the world apparently. I was able to run a year(s) long campaign that had the characters rescue a town from bandits, then successfully defend it, and eventually were asked to run it. They did, and it was great! We had criminal factions, mercs, slavers, vampires, all vying for the area.

The characters were ley line walker, samas pilot, juicer, head hunter, and mind melter, and vagabond. Everyone had a chance to shine. Man, I don't get how people consistently ruin this game.

I'm sorry your session was so bad.

When I first decided to run RIFTS, I looked at ALL of my books for the player options available- including those from other Palladium games made available via the Conversion guide- and made a list of what was allowed. I was thorough, including the name of the sourcebook, a page # to find the OCC or RCC, and a summary of 1-3 sentences. It was a looooong list.

The campaign didn’t last long, but it was fun.

 

[Ixal]

When I first decided to run RIFTS, I looked at ALL of my books for the player options available- including those from other Palladium games made available via the Conversion guide- and made a list of what was allowed. I was thorough, including the name of the sourcebook, a page # to find the OCC or RCC, and a summary of 1-3 sentences. It was a looooong list.

The campaign didn’t last long, but it was fun.

That seems to be one of the common reasons why Rifts campaigns fail. GMs are not used to ban things.
Most modern RPGs, at least the mainstream ones, try to make everything balanced to each other and there has been a push for GMs to allow everything ("say yes").
Rifts on the other hand does not work that way. Its was not made to ensure balance. Balancing is the GMs job, the book just presents option. So the usual approach of "everything in the core book is allowed" does not work. You might get lucky and end up with a group which can tolerate balance differences or them picking characters of roughly the same power and usefulness level, but it can also go horrible wrong and you end up with a extreme power difference.