What is your biggest RPG heartbreak?

[Marc_C]

Not having anyone to play HoL with when it came out.

What is HoL?

 

[Fenris-77]

What is HoL?

Human Occupied Landfiil.

 

[overgeeked]

Not playing with more friends.

How 4E played at the table. I loved literally everything about the game. Everything. But it was so grindingly dull to actually play.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Earlier this year, I convinced the group to try out Ironsworn, and it's gone so much better than I could have imagined or hoped. Our group is stoked to play Ironsworn now.

It's just been time to try new stuff. For sure Ironsworn will continue. We're going to play some Tiny D6 / Tiny Frontiers Sci-Fi. We're definitely going to jump back into FFG Star Wars / Genesys at some point. The combat model in Spellbound Kingdoms sounds different and intriguing enough that I'm definitely going to give it a shot, even though I think the setting is kind of whack. My kids love the Dragon Prince cartoon, and I've been intrigued by the Cortex+ system for a long time. And if Swords of the Serpentine ever makes it out of "beta preview", I'll probably buy a copy of that too.

Off topic, but @innerdude you may be interested in this if you like Ironsworn AND Scifi. It might be your peanut butter and chocolate: Ironsworn: Starforged

 

[Eyes of Nine]

No heartbreaks, but I def share some disappointments with many here especially re: Numenera, GURPS 4e, early ending of D&D 4e (ameliorated by the fact that 5e is pretty darn good).

I guess my MegaTraveller game never completing due to me moving away (back in early 90's, no online gaming then).

 

[Richards]

For me, it was when Dave Gross stepped away as the editor of Dragon magazine. One of the very first things the new editor did was to kill the "fiction and footnote" format of the "Ecology" articles in the magazine, making them into what I considered to be dry, encyclopedic entries that were kind of boring to read. It was particularly painful for me because at the time I had six "Ecology" articles sitting on Dave's desk that had already been revised to meet his editorial change requests and which would have been published had he remained at the editor's desk, but which the new editor just flat-out bulk rejected. And, having had more "Ecology" articles printed than any other writer (at least in the print version of the magazine - I haven't kept up with it since it went digital) and having been pretty instrumental in getting the "Ecology" series revived (it had been fallow for 17 issues in a row when my first "Ecology" article was published, and then I was responsible for writing 24 of the next 39 entries in the series), I kind of took the new format rather personally.

So that took away the vast majority of the articles I'd been writing for Dragon. And then a few years later when 4E came along, I saw right away that was nothing I was going to be interested in, and just like that my freelancing career was pretty much over. (Bummer, too, because it was really nice having a hobby I really enjoyed that also came with a paycheck as an added bonus - most hobbies don't work that way!)

But, on the plus side, shortly after the death of my freelancing career I gained my current gaming group, so all of the effort I would have put into getting articles and adventures published in Dragon and Dungeon magazines was now able to be channeled into making a good gaming experience for them. And I have certainly had a blast gaming with my current group.

Johnathan

 

[thom_likes_gaming]

Warhammer frp. I love that game, always wanted to play more or it (we had a small 2 playees, 1 GM thing going during highschool), never got a group for it going. So, I'm buying TeW campaign books for 4th edition again, they'll look splendid next to all my other unused 1st and 2nd edition stuff

 

[Fenris-77]

Nobody want to talk about HoL? I am disappoint. Before I even knew what hacking was I was messing with that basic rules set to run Horror Cthulhu stuff. It's actually a great basic mechanic, way before that was a thing that mattered.

 

[corwyn77]

Every time I get a new RPG that I'm excited about, only to discover it doesn't come with half a dozen good players in the box.
That's always something of a heartbreak for me.

You need more malleable players. I once ran 6 consecutive campaigns without repeating systems once. But then, they enjoy my games and none of them wanted to gm.

 

[delericho]

Shadowrun for me. I've run it exactly once - I had what I thought was a cool concept for a short campaign, but I hadn't banked on (1) my players knowing much more about the quirks of the system than I did and (2) their tendency towards power-gaming.

It took us hours to get through character creation, and about half an hour for me to realise that it just wasn't going to work. Oh well, you live and learn.

So I did my reading, got excited to play, etc. The GM even let me play a werewolf PC at the start, which I thought could be pretty awesome. Got my PC created and we started our first session.

The rest of the players had a Glitter Boy, Juicer, etc. And I had this PC who at best might be able to do 1d4 MDC while everyone else was going crazy.

The one and only time I played Pathfinder felt a lot like that. I had a character that was actually pretty good, all things considered. Unfortunately, the DM was of the school that accepted anything that felt cool, even if it wasn't balanced, so all the other characters were comparative gods. In particular, there was one guy whose character could do everything mine could do, but better. Oh, and he could fly, too.

(The difference, I think, is that RIFTS had that stuff baked right in to the rules, whereas this case was about the DM selectively disregarding the rules.)