What RPG did you want to love, but just couldn't get into?

[GrimCo]

7th Sea for me. The setting and art drew me in but the gameplay/mechanics are a mess. My group ended up hating it and I quickly traded in the books.

Out of curiosity, was it 1st or 2nd edition? Cause they made drastic changes to game rules and mechanics in 2e, so much so that it's like whole new game in same setting.

 

[overgeeked]

FFG Star Wars. Everything I read about it soon after its release sounded amazing, I was intrigued by the concept of the two-axis resolution, and those who tried it were sharing positive outcomes. Yet it completely fell flat for us at the table in its execution in a myriad of ways, a death from a thousand paper cuts.

For me that mostly came down to the funky dice. I really, really hate funky dice. Gimme new and interesting dice with weird number of sides with actual numbers on them, I'm good. Replace the numbers with symbols I have to learn to decode? No chance.

PbtA games. I get FATE and I love Mouse Guard's version of Burning Wheel, FitD games, Cortex Prime, Legend in the Mist, and the like, but PbtA games haven't clicked with me yet. So I'm reticent to venture into that space again.

I have Fate and PbtA flipped. I looked at my first PbtA game and just got it. It took me a long time to get Fate. For a similar reason to yours about Savage Worlds. It seems to want to split the difference between crunchy and narrative in a weird way, for me. Something like Fate Accelerated just makes more sense to me.

Savage Worlds. This one I put an * on it, as I haven't actually played it yet and I get how games can play different than they read, but given how many really like it, including a very good friend of mine, I have read through the book 3 times and every time I can't seem to like it. It falls in this uncanny valley of not enough crunch to be a good system in that direction and not enough narrative support to be a good narrative system. So it leaves me totally cold.

Yeah, I can see that. It's a minis wargame with narrative elements tacked on. My issue with it is all the tiny modifiers and the weirdly incongruent subsystems. As much crap as I give 5E, at least they dropped most modifiers in favor of dis/advantage. And the bulk of the Savage Worlds subsystems would be much easier to understand if they were more unified, as in all clocks from BitD or PbtA games, instead of sort of unique... sort of similar bits of design you have to just memorize or reference because they're similar enough to be confusing.

 

[overgeeked]

Well to me the odd thing about so many people going to Modiphius 2d20 and Star Trek Adventures in particular is that that STA is my answer as well, but it's not really because it's 2d20 per se. I think at its core the 2d20 system serves Star Trek pretty well.

Star Trek protags have a huge pile of multifaceted skills whose particulars the audience doesn't really understand, so abstracting it into matching your Discipline scores (basically how good you are in different departments of a ship) and Attributes (ability scores) and then doing a roll under with them is a relatively elegant way to handle things, with the expanded crit range of your focuses adding individual specialty flavor. I found in terms of core resolution the characters felt comparable to Star Trek characters in their capabilities which is what the game had to do. Now maybe people just hate roll under and would have preferred a system that accomplished essentially the same thing by rolling a die based on the relevant Discipline and one based on the relevant skill and adding them together (with varying DCs instead of the multiple d20s), or something like that, but I think on a fundamental level some approach of mix and matching broad ability scores with broad skill sets with some sort of additional narrow expertises is the best ttrpg approach for Star Trek as a property.

I also think, as much as I'm not into shared metacurrency, that Momentum in STA captures something of the feel of a Star Trek crew coming together to solve a problem. I think giving each character values and making them core to level up captures the fundamental Star Trek approach to character growth. I also think encouraging players to play additional characters on away missions and such is a really cool idea that keeps everyone at the table involved even while following the narrative beats of Star Trek.

My problem with Star Trek Adventures, and the reason it sort of is my "game I want to love but can't" is that a reasonably elegant system (in terms of core mechanics serving its narrative goals) with some good ideas is bogged down with a bunch of unnecessary crunch. Lots of special talents that add complexity without being particularly evocative. Needlessly complicated combat for a game that's mostly about solving space mysteries and such (and it uses a terrible scheme of zones: not all zone based combat sucks but 2d20 zone based combat certainly does). And it's all kind of terribly presented, by which I mean you get halfway through the (beautifully illustrated) Second Edition rulebook before it actually explains the core mechanics, and they remain semi-poorly explained. I think maybe they assumed you would do the Starter Set first, or that everyone was coming from first edition, I don't know. I am usually the one sitting down and teaching myself games to GM from scratch, but this one I had to watch YouTube explainers just to make sense of it enough to be a player. I was in a campaign for three months and still struggle with core elements like how conditions work, and how I can use my value and special Determination metacurrency (yeah, I complimented tying values to level up in theory, but in execution or explanation something is defititely left wanting). All and all STA is a game I love right up to the point where I start hating it.

The single best experience I've ever had playing Trek is with Fate Accelerated. Instead of trying to differentiate between characters by skills and stats, it was all about style (approaches) and the actual things that made the characters unique (stunts). Throw Fate points around like they're nothing and frame scenes like something from a TV show and we were off.

 

[TheHand]

Another vote for Fate. I tried it a few times, even once run by a self described Fate enthusiast, but it just never grabbed me. I like the idea in theory though.

Amber Diceless was another for me; I mentioned in a recent Amber thread that it was almost a friendship-destroying experience, but I had a great time reading the lore.

Honorable mentioned to Exalted. I tried to get into it when 2nd edition started up. Huge disconnect for me between the lore and how it played.

 

[Celebrim]

For me, I really want to love FATE, but I just don't like FATE dice. I can't even explain why.

The math is bad. Dice pool games like that tend to hide the chance of success, leading to things unexpectedly not going as planned. It's treated as a feature, but its more of a bug.

 

[Celebrim]

Burning Wheel is a love/hate relationship to me. I love what it is doing (or attempting to do). I hate the unnecessary complexity that's used to get there.

That's it in a nutshell.

 

[Celebrim]

I second (or third, or lots) the votes for Amber diceless, FATE, or Mouseguard.

But of the three, Mouseguard is the one that broke my heart the most. It reads well but it plays horribly, is a pain to adjudicate, and for a rules light system is frustratingly dense and complex, while offering up bad math that just doesn't work in general. I don't remember the exact counts, but it was something like three different types of metacurrency and 17 different ways to modify a roll. This is insane in a narratively focused game, and I'd offer up for comparison something like WFR (or AoS) as a medium crunch abstract game with rules that work and are easier to resolve and just work. I was so excited for the game and play testing it with my daughter, it was just lousy at the level of RIFTS with a system in the way rather than helping.

 

[Maxperson]

Star Frontiers

 

[Tigris]

Pathfinder 2. I had high hopes because of my like for Pathfinder 1 and also because I heard that PF2 was inspired by DnD 4e. I understand that I am not the target audience, but when looking at other games there are at least interesting parts to get inspired by or clever ideas or good gamedesign, but in PF2 there is just nothing of any of those.


There is really tigh balance with allowing only minimal effects + a ton of illusion of choice design over it. So much time spent trying to find something interesting, something to learn from, but appart from the XP table (4e one with a factor 2 but not depending on total level but just level difference which is quite elegant) i just found nothing.

 

[Kannik]

The use of your highest drives requires justifying it with the drives drive statement- so players may be opting for mathematically harder-to-succeed but no justification needed rolls. If STA works for you, Dune should too. If STA1 doesn't, and it's due to the CD, well, the CD went away, so it might.

That sounds like a good addition, bringing in more of the character aspect to the resolution system than the more neutral/detached values used in STA. Though I didn't bounce off the STA rules when we played it, the way drives/values/etc were in a way siloed for special use cases was a missed opportunity when they often played a role in the fiction/series. (Though I suppose to what degree depends on what era and series you were watching.)

I haven't had a chance to play much STA2 yet, but I think streamlining out that extra step of rolling CD is a welcome one.

For me that mostly came down to the funky dice. I really, really hate funky dice. Gimme new and interesting dice with weird number of sides with actual numbers on them, I'm good. Replace the numbers with symbols I have to learn to decode? No chance.

Heh, we didn't even have the dice and used the table in the book. (And fortunately later found an online roller for those of us who wanted to use it.) I'm willing to use specialized dice if what they and the rules generate make it worthwhile. But at least how they played in EotE it was, alas, a big no to us.

I have Fate and PbtA flipped. I looked at my first PbtA game and just got it. It took me a long time to get Fate. For a similar reason to yours about Savage Worlds. It seems to want to split the difference between crunchy and narrative in a weird way, for me. Something like Fate Accelerated just makes more sense to me.

True, while I don't mind FATE it does now also fall into that same uncanny valley for me that SW does. I'd much rather use Cortex Prime or Legends in the Mist as my go-to flexible narrative systems. Though I do love Approaches from FATE Accelerated and use them all the time in my Cortex games (usually paired with Roles).

Yeah, I can see that. It's a minis wargame with narrative elements tacked on.

Ah, that would explain another thing that annoyed me in reading it, that there were these very broad rules for many areas of the game, and then it would drill down into things like detailed rules for grenade scatter. If it was mini wargame rules turned generic with metacurrency rerolls tacked on, that would illuminate why.