Worst RPG System You Ever Palyed?

[Thunderfoot]

I'm either about to really date myself or tick a bunch of people off...

ICE's Rolemaster, home of the infamous Law series of rules - Spelllaw, Clawlaw, etc.
Yeah, I just LOVED playing with a slide rule and 900 pages of charts and graphs.
(Howcome we don't have that 'rolleyes" smilie yet!!) We actually never played, it took us three days to make up characters. Luckily I bought it cheap at a yardsale - I soon figured out why.

 

[Nikosandros]

Poor Role Master always gets so much hate...

Not a perfect system, but I really enjoyed my RM games.

 

[Rasyr]

I'm either about to really date myself or tick a bunch of people off...

ICE's Rolemaster, home of the infamous Law series of rules - Spelllaw, Clawlaw, etc.
Yeah, I just LOVED playing with a slide rule and 900 pages of charts and graphs.
(Howcome we don't have that 'rolleyes" smilie yet!!) We actually never played, it took us three days to make up characters. Luckily I bought it cheap at a yardsale - I soon figured out why.

slide rule??? ROFLMAO... All it required is simple addition/subtraction..

Note that yes, chargen can take a long, long time, but that was part of the fun, that you got to make the character exactly how you wanted it.

Personally, I tend to think that D&D 3.5/d20 is actually more complicated than RM ever was...

 

[Glyfair]

Played? Absolutely, with 100% certainty I'll say Powers & Perils from Avalon Hill. The experience system was horrible. You had to keep track of exactly how many points of damage to which creatures you inflicted to determine your experience for a combat. Which weapon you attacked with was important, too, IIRC. There were many other clunky things in the game.

I played in a campaign that must not have lasted long. I'm rure it lasted a least a couple of sessions, but we just couldn't stand the system.

Read? Spawn of Fashan. Almost unplayable as written. A fun read, though

 

[Crothian]

Space Opera

Okay, I liked it but my freinds who frankly didn't understad calculus and were not that profiecient with a graphic caculat and took art classees instead of the hard sciences were confused. "Space opera, the game written by math geeks for math geeks" is what I always called it.

Feng Shui is a great system, you must have been playing it wriong. But to speak of games that I used to hate becasue of DM incompitance is Exalted. I hated this game for years becasue unbeknowst to me the guy running it was cluless. Same for Abberant, I like both games now though. Amazing how a crappy DM can ruin a gamesystem for you.

 

[Glyfair]

Space Opera

Space Opera joins Chivalry & Sorcery as the only games where I spent an entire gaming session creating a character, only to never play the game because we were so burnt out on character generation that we didn't want to try the game.

Traveller had one character generation problem (character's dying during character generation), but there were ways around that.

 

[Thunderfoot]

slide rule??? ROFLMAO... All it required is simple addition/subtraction..

Note that yes, chargen can take a long, long time, but that was part of the fun, that you got to make the character exactly how you wanted it.

Personally, I tend to think that D&D 3.5/d20 is actually more complicated than RM ever was...

No offense, no really, but you can't be serious... And those charts were ANYTHING but fun...

 

[Kanegrundar]

Can I ask why you say this?

Considering that RM and D&D3.5/d20 use almost identical mechanics for resolution, I find this to be an odd comment to say the least.

Is it because of the tables? Tables do not make a bad game (even though they may not be for everybody).

mcrow - the next question is for you as well.

Have you actually played RM before?

Yeah, I've played RM many times. It would be silly for me to even bring it up if I haven't. The amount of charts and the time to create characters was my big turn offs to the game. For what it's worth, I can create a character in 3.5E in 10 minutes easy, most times without looking in the book. I never got to that point with RM. Plus in 3.5 I don't have to spend time looking up charts. Most of the time, the only thing I need to look up is a spell. For me, saying RM is less complex than 3.5 is laughable. I don't doubt that RM is better for you, but for me it wasn't overly fun. That's just a difference in tastes. This just goes to show that one person's worst (of which RM wasn't mine, just close) can be another's favorite.

 

[adwyn]

I've played all of the mentioned games except Synnibar and have to say that as klunky as they were they were playable, albeit often with a bit of guessing at what the authors intended.

The worst in my experience was Man, Myth, and Magic. Nice production values but the rules were written by a non gamer after only a few sample games. Nearly a hundred skills masquerading as abilities that were all randomly rolled and whacky class abilities that made no sense. Still it had nice maps and the encounter charts included a GM who had fallen into his game.

 

[Rasyr]

No offense, no really, but you can't be serious... And those charts were ANYTHING but fun...

Actually, I can be serious.
To me, charts and tables are not intimidating, nor confusing. And they were fun - FOR ME. That is the stipulation here - for me. If you didn't like them personally, that is fine.

As for d20 being more complicated than RM - I do, personally, feel that that IS the case right now. But note, I am talking about in play, not about chargen (both are about even in that department for complexity in my opinion).


Oh, just noticed that you are new here. In case you did not realize it, I do have a VERY strong bias for RM, and an even bigger one for a game called HARP (both published by Iron Crown Enterprises.... the company I work for )