Manbearcat
Legend
I rarely "hate" games, because if I strongly dislike one, I just don't play it, so I don't let the feeling bloom into hatred.
But there are things that make me say a hard "NO" to a game:
- Games that lie to me. This typically takes a form of the game being advertised or presenting itself in the book with "You can do X in this game" while the rules do not help do X or, in some cases, even get in the way of doing X. I "can" do anything, running a freeform. A game needs to offer significantly more to be worth my money and time.
- Games that want me to lie (me as a GM, not my NPCs). If a game advises me to bait and switch or to railroad players while giving them an illusion of choice, I won't even try running it.
- Games that offer a lot of options and expect me to balance them somehow. I don't want to review each character and make sure it's not too strong or too weak. If it is rules legal and fits the themes of the game, I expect it to work in play. Balancing things is the designer's job, not mine. And if someone does not want to put the effort into balancing their game, they should make is simple enough that balance is not a problem.
I'll just copy this brilliant post by @steenan and agree with it in full.
The only thing I could add to it is probably:
* Games that require a not-insignificant amount of "specific beats general" corner case mental overhead to run while the designers simultaneously overwhelmingly punt both the "specifics" to me to infer through multiple rules interactions (that may or may not be intentional) AND don't provide a robust set of GMing principles attached to a focused play premise, the substrate of which I can use to guide my inference.
That is sort of a combination of steenan's 1 and 3 though, so it may not be an altogether discrete category.