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

[Zaukrie]

13th Age. I still steal a few things here and there.....

 

[Kannik]

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.

There are so many steps to a test that I made a flowchart for it. And it seemed super odd to me as well until that epiphany moment where I realized (if I am getting the system correct but it does work really well for us using it) that, unlike many/most other RPGs, in a given scene (except for conflict) there is generally ever only one Test (and it is made at the start of the scene). Given that, it started to make sense why there was so many steps to the resolution and why it could be so convoluted: because it was so pivotal. And, since there was so few of them, the extra time wasn't as big of a deal. (Which does break down in conflict as there are many rolls there.) The rest of the scene is pure narration, collaboratively RPing towards the outcome of the scene from what went into and the results generated by that single Test.

Now, to generate that flowchart was an adventure in of itself and revealed just how poor the layout and organization of the game/book is. I essentially read it from cover to cover, and there were numerous of times I needed to go back to re-work a part of the flowchart because this important part of the chain wasn't denoted earlier...

And then for the best laugh there is the index. Indents, italics, colouration, all seemingly at random throughout.

(But I still wouldn't call it as bad as the Palladium/Rifts system!)

 

[Kannik]

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.

That's interesting, at least with 4dF the results are very weighted to the centre (generating a 0) which leads to much greater predictability of the outcome than a single die whether d20 or d100.

(And I wouldn't classify FATE as die pool system as both the number and type of dice remains completely constant, just as I wouldn't classify HERO as a die pool system as, again, it's always using 3d6 for resolution. It's just a standardized bell-curve die roll rather than a standardized linear die roll.)

 

[TheHand]

13th Age. I still steal a few things here and there.....

Oh, same. I was turned off by the randomness of the original martial classes and the way damage scales up so dramatically with levels. Definitely some neat ideas in there though, and I messed with adding the Escalation die in a few D&D games.

 

[aramis erak]

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.

Do note that the combat rules for STA 1e WERE released as a standalone minis game ruleset for use with the tiles and minis. Momentum included.

 

[aramis erak]

That's a GM problem. Ha! Ha! Just kidding. I once had an encounter with a few alligators I thought would be a speed bump for the player characters but I kept rolling so high it almost turned into a TPK. I've also had anti-climatic end battles when the PC rolled an incredible amount of damage on their dice. The swinginess itself is swingy. Sometimes it's bad and other times it's not bad at all.

I do want to get SavW back to table. It felt right for Deadlands.
But it didn't feel right for the genres which we played either side of it.

 

[dbm]

I once had an encounter with a few alligators I thought would be a speed bump for the player characters but I kept rolling so high it almost turned into a TPK.

That’s why I don’t do speed bump combats using the full combat system - I either remove them completely or run them as a dangerous Quick Encounter. A character could be incapacitated if the DQE goes badly for them, but it is much less likely.

 

[aramis erak]

There are so many steps to a test that I made a flowchart for it.

I found it very well laid out and very easy a read.

Now, to generate that flowchart was an adventure in of itself and revealed just how poor the layout and organization of the game/book is. I essentially read it from cover to cover, and there were numerous of times I needed to go back to re-work a part of the flowchart because this important part of the chain wasn't denoted earlier...

The important concept of only one roll per scene is quite the key to understanding the complexity.

And understanding that the factors list can be safely ignored once you've a feel for difficulties turns it into a much lighter experience.

 

[innerdude]

Fantasy Craft.

I've said many times, it is without question the absolute best distillation / re-invention of 3.x era D&D produced, period.

But by the time I really discovered it, read it, grokked it, and understood just how innovative it was ...... I was already pretty much done with the entire d20 spectrum of games.

Like ..... I just can't bring myself to even put it on the table to my players anymore. "Hey guys, wanna try this super cool retro D&D 3 system but it doesn't really have any active support or supplements or modules? Oh, and even if we do start it up, secretly as a GM I'll be pining to run Ironsworn/Starforged, Edge of the Empire, Swords of the Serpentine, or Daggerheart instead?"

 

[Agamon]

Alternity. The Dark Matter setting in particular is fantastic, and even the default Star Drive setting was not bad, and the game itself seemed interesting, but it was just never been my cup of tea.