Worst RPG Ever?

[Doc_Klueless]

Worst:
D6 System = Not the Star Wars rpg but the "generic" D6 System that WEG put out. Woefully incomplete including a missing chapter.

Palladium 2e Fantasy Role Playing Game = My munchkin character doesn't have enough hitpoints. I know! Let's tack on S.D.C.s!

Mediocre
Fading Suns Victory Point System = Excellent world/universe. Probably the best I've ever seen. Wacked out system. 10% chance of failing no matter how good you are at something.

GURPS = Great game. Let's you do all kinds of stuff and mostly works all the time. Reads like stereo instructions. Blech.

Best:
James Bond 007 RPG by Victory Games = Beyond a doubt my favorite rpg ever. I loved that game and played it almost exclusively for about a year.

 

[The Furious Puffin]

Who brought FATAL???? I mean yeesh, the reviews page on there web-site says it all. This is offically the stupidest idea of all time.

The worst RPG I have ever played almost certainly goes to Alternity! This games resolution system was so horrible that it beggers belief. Combat was a table consulting nightmare of doom. (This would have improved with time I imagine, but seeing as I am one of the two players in our group that can learn rules it doesn't help) Just having to consult the 3 charts every time you did anything to determine the success roll.

Oh and any game that attempts to resolve Burst fire by bullet (AKA Cyberpunk a LMG and full automatic agaist a heavily armoured target. I suspect it would have been fast to caculate the STD Dev when you get hit 20-30 times. Hardwired corrected this to some extent however.)

Best RPG's I have played

D&D 3e (Duh! ;-)

Paranoia 2nd edition (Again a personal taste issue, if you want is odd-ball sense of humor and slapstick-fights its good, otherwise its quite, quite bad.)

Edit: Removed some misplaced words, added the last part

 

[V-2]

Best:
James Bond 007 RPG by Victory Games = Beyond a doubt my favorite rpg ever. I loved that game and played it almost exclusively for about a year.

Gee. That's exactly what happened to me. Nobody ever mentions that game and how good it was. Simple, elegant, and the hero point system actually worked.

 

[MerricB]

I've never understood seeing this sentiment from d&d players.

A first level d&d character will generally be able to drop a clone of himself with two hits, often times one. At high levels you have insta-kill spells, allowing a single saving throw or die. In earlier additions, you even had insta-kill spells with no save at all (eg, death spell).

Anyone ever fought a beholder?

Don't remind me. I detest beholders.

Death at low levels isn't a problem.

Death from spells isn't a problem for me so much: there's no spell that just says "you're dead"; most allow you a saving throw, or require you to be under a certain level of hit points - then too, spellcasting in melee was extremely difficult. And you need a high level spellcaster for the deadliest spells.

My problem with Rolemaster criticals is that they occur in melee combat, extremely often, and make combat extremely undesirable to participate in - sure, fine for some games and genres, but given that Rolemaster was initially intended as a replacement combat system for AD&D it became quite problematical.

But, its all just a matter of personal taste.

Absolutely! Rolemaster isn't a bad system; it's just that there's a gap between what I think it's for, and what it actually does. (I do like the skill system).

Cheers!

 

[Geoff Watson]

How about Shadowrun? One hit from a hold-out pistol can drop a decker or mage if they aren't lucky...

Only if the shooter is really, really lucky (six successes more than the decker/mages dodge roll and body roll).

Mages in ShadowRun ARE allowed to wear armour, y'know, so they only need to roll 2s on the dice, since holdout pistols have sucky power.

Geoff.

 

[arwink]

Tales from the floating vagabond. And it seemed like such a good idea to buy it at the time.

Streetfighter using the Storyteller system.

The version of Top Secret that came out before top secret/SI, where everything was much more seventies and the rules system was completely random.

What depresses me is I've either run or played in campaigns in all of them, usually lasting six months or more. Masochistic tendencies I guess

 

[Victim]

Who brought FATAL???? I mean yeesh, the reviews page on there web-site says it all. This is offically the stupidest idea of all time.

The worst RPG I have ever played almost certainly goes to Alternity! This games resolution system was so horrible that it beggers belief. Combat was a table consulting nightmare of doom. (This would have improved with time I imagine, but seeing as I am one of the two players in our group that can learn rules it doesn't help) Just having to consult the 3 charts every time you did anything to determine the success roll.

Oh and any game that attempts to resolve Burst fire by bullet (AKA Cyberpunk a LMG and full automatic agaist a heavily armoured target. I suspect it would have been fast to caculate the STD Dev when you get hit 20-30 times. Hardwired corrected this to some extent however.)

Best RPG's I have played

D&D 3e (Duh! ;-)

Paranoia 2nd edition (Again a personal taste issue, if you want is odd-ball sense of humor and slapstick-fights its good, otherwise its quite, quite bad.)

Edit: Removed some misplaced words, added the last part

Umm, what tables do you need in Alternity?

 

[eatenmyeyes]

Depends... what ya got, and what ya want for them?

I have almost everything.*
Worldbooks 1-23
Sourcebooks 1-4
Mercenaries
Demensionbooks 1-4
Mutants in Orbit
Dragons & Gods
Coalition Wars 1-4
Conversion Book 1 & 2
14 issues of Rifter
Signed hardcover Basic book

* WB1, WB2, and SB2 are slightly damaged.

I would be ecstatic to get .25 of the cover price for the lot.

 

[Deadguy]

Holy Crap! I can't believe anyone else has ever heard of this thing! I'm not sure where I got the book, but it somehow ended up in my hands. I passed it on to a friend (without his knowledge) and now he can't get rid of it. Its like a curse! The game was called "Fantasy Wargaming" and the cover proclaimed it "The Highest Level of All!" As I recall the game put a heavy emphasis on your character's astological sign. There were a number of disadvantages, but you simply rolled them at random. I know one of the disadvantages was "Homosexual." Yeesh...

The funny thing is, I can't recall anything about the actual system. I think it used % dice.

I still have a copy somewhere. When I first saw it back in, oh 1982-ish I was really impressed. It had a lot of useful ideas about mediaeval society and how to use that in an RP game. And for its time it had some original ideas.

There were three 'classes' you could advance in: Warrior, Cleric and Wizard. But there was nothing stopping people mixing their classes provided they could justify it. Indeed everyone earned different XPs for each class all the time (there were tables for handling the different sources of XP). So it was an early multi-class system - and you even got to improve your attributes as you advanced.

Additionally, long before AM (or so it seemed) it had a system for magic that didn't rely on fixed spells but was a complex interplay of astrological associations. It allowed all sorts of approaches to magic, from the ecstatic shamanic to the intellectual and esoteric. But it was a really horrible kludge to try and work out what the difficulty was to cast the spell.

Likewise there was a specific system for appealing for miracles, from the powers of Heaven, the infernal powers, or even from the Norse gods. It was again overly complex, but wholly original at the time.

And the rest of the mechanics was very much traditonal 70's-early 80's mechanistic, e.g. you had to calculate who was the party leader using a chart - because characters had to obey him or her - so very wargamer-ish in that regard. There was other stuff too. I don't think it was really usable as a role-playing system, but it was a mine of ideas for mediaeval gaming.

 

[Tsyr]

Dang deadguy, I actualy wanna get a copy of that now