I have never played bad RPGs. I can smell them before playing with a couple of quick questions about key points in the rules and setting. I'm not saying that I can judge any game in five minutes, but if it is a real stinker I can tell it quickly.
However, there's this Ancestry RPG I played at a con. It's a fantasy RPG. It's got a lot of races, a decent magic system, good fighting rules, and is skill-based. What's wrong with it? Uhm, the total lack of flavor.
The first thing I ask when I am confronted with a fantasy system that doesn't seem to have anything special is "Why should I play this instead of D&D"?
When I asked the author, he started talking about how his system fixed all the mistakes in AD&D. This immediately made me peery. Most of the problems he pointed had already been fixed by 3e, and others (like the unrealistic AC and HP rules and the alignments) I actually consider some of the things that make D&D fun.
But the thing that made me even more suspicious was that he spouted a string of "fixes to D&D" and didn't bother telling me what his game had of special, or if it had an interesting setting. The back cover stated things like "300 spells! 15 races! Infinite monsters thanks to hybridomancy!" and such.
I played it all the same, 'cause the D&D tables were all already taken, and as I expected it was a nice fantasy system, just like thousands of others, without anything special or interesting about it. The demo adventure was a dungeon crawl.
It did have some good bits, like the "scalable" combat system - it had three levels of hit location precision, each balanced against the others, allowing you to play it like D&D or like GURPS or like something in between. Eg. you could aim to the enemy and just deal HP, or aim to his head and deal HP and stun rounds, or aim to his eye and deal HP, blindness, and bleeding damage for some rounds.
But in the end, it's still a wizard, a fighter, a rogue and a cleric wandering through a cave complex and massacring monsters.
