Worst RPG System You Ever Palyed?

[Templetroll]

I put Powers and Perils down while doing character creation. Didn't like it.

RM was good but I got to play an Uruk Hai so my view of the game is colored by being able to exhibit overbearing aggressive attitude. Everyone in the party had wildly different characters and the GM was able to give us all chances to shine and opportunities to die. Sometimes in the same situation.

1e was fine; I played that with one DM who made us roll 3d6 in order once and play what we got. However, his world was so dangerous that we were able to convince him to let us all play three characters at first level! Often, one would survive.

 

[mcrow]

Ummm ... my point was not that HARP does not have flexible character creation. It does, and I like HARP.

My point was that AD&D 1e has certain virtues as a system that have *nothing* to do with 'flexibility'.

A failure to appreciate those virtues is a pity, IMO.

But my more general point in that post was that *any* designer of *any* RPG probably should not post in this thread for purely pragmatic reasons.

Any RPG that someone criticizes is bound to be liked by some other poster (and, well, AD&D is still liked by huge numbers of people even today). It cannot help any designer to antagonize potential customers.

Pragmatics aside, though, I think that there are different virtues in a wide variety of different systems. I have attachments to both 'Space Opera' and 'Fighting Fantasy'.

oops... I misunderstood you. Yes, I agree with the above people are bound to like things you dont but the diversity in the systems makes it so that every RPer can find a game they like.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Haven't played it, but I'd have to say Continuum. Not that its badly written, just badly presented, in my opinion.

 

[Gunton The Terrible]

I don't remember exactly why, since its been so long, I would have to say Cyborg Commandos. I just remember playing one session and not being impressed.

Marvel Super Heros also gets a vote. Why was it just as easy to hit Spiderman then was to hit The Hulk?

Warhammer the RPG never impressed me. I guess I didn't understand why I had to start the game as a peddler or some other strange profession.

 

[JamesDJarvis]

Seconded. How many hit locations on the human body does one need exactly?

about 30 it'd seem.

 

[JamesDJarvis]

too am confused by the hate for Rolemaster. Its just simple addition and subtraction and comparing to a table. 3.x D&D uses the same mechanics for task resolution, just with the numbers on a smaller scale.

Nope not the same mechanics , you say so yourself. There is no chart to check in 3.x D&D, clearly different mechanics. In 3.x D&D you generally succeed or fail at a task in RM there could be dozens of different outcomes based on the roll, modifiers and index beign checked on a chart.

Weapon damage is how many dice in RM? Oh yeah, it is a modifier used on chart-X, again, different mechanics from 3.x D&D.

I myself am still confused about the hate for Rolemaster it was an okay game.

 

[F.C.Desoya]

Bureau 13....or was I the only one who ever played it? Great idea....bad system.

 

[DonTadow]

The worst game I've ever played didn't have a name. I was at one of the local conventions and there were no rpg games being played except 1. We didn't recoginize the system but hoped for the best. We stat down and this guy is sitting here with a binder with about 800 pages of lined paper in it. He then proceeded to tell us how this is a game he developed and that it was the best game in the world. His pitch was a person can do anything they want. he proceeded to talk about the game which had 50 races in it and 45 classes. He also offered that we can make up classes if he didn't have them. He proceeded to show us the races which consisted of hand drawn and poorly colored pictures that looked as a kindergardener. We were tryingto be nice so we sat through his 45 minute boring explanation, which was less explanation of his system and more rant about how bad every incarnation of dungeons of dragons and all other systems are. He then nshowed us the world, which consisted of 20 different areas each representing a different time period, race, and ethnic background. We so did not want to be rude, because we were the only 2 people at the game, but the silliness of the concept was too much. we made up some excuse about leaving our lights on and swiftly left the room.

My second runner up is the Palladium system. It just looks way too complex for me to have fun. Me and my gf were attending yet another convention and i was parking the car. I told her to go and find our table and waht game we were signed up at (a d20 game). Unfortenly she sat at the wrong table. I got there, sat down and saw character sheets that looked lmore like what you'd find in a military briefing. Fulll of percentages, and numbers. The guy then explained the rules and it was too much. We polityly told him that this gamem was way too complicated for us.

 

[sniffles]

Warhammer the RPG never impressed me. I guess I didn't understand why I had to start the game as a peddler or some other strange profession.

I've never really played a system I hated, but I have to say there were more parts of that system that annoyed me than any other I've played so far. The character progression just did not make sense to me. And I found it irritating that we never got any sort of sanity bonus/penalty for constantly being exposed to chaos monsters - I always felt that after so much exposure we would either get used to it or just go completely off the deep end, but the game treated it as if you were seeing chaos creatures for the first time every time. Or maybe my GM wasn't interpreting the rules as intended. That's always the question when you've only played a system with one GM.

[edit] Oh, I forgot! A cobbled-together mishmash of Hero and FASA Star Trek rules for a Star Trek campaign. My character sheet was 3 1/2 pages long and I had more skills than I could keep track of. The campaign was actually a lot of fun for a while, but I never liked the system the GM was using. I don't know why we didn't just stick with one or the other.

 

[Wombat]

Hmmm, of the games I've actually played I'd have to say the original Morrow Project -- bad set of combat rules with nothing else, plugged into an over-prepared, hyper-survivalist mentality, along with some truly bizarre notions about politics and human communities. The roleplaying aspects were sort of tacked on after the fact and made no sense. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

Aftermath I never even attempted because of Morrow Project.

Chivalry & Sorcery I had a brief run in, but not enough to really determine. Then again the character generation system was both so complex and so random that it didn't bode well. Space Opera and Powers & Perils I only used to create characters; never actually played, but both, again, drove me crazy over the weird randomness of the character creation process -- in P&P a normal human being could not pick up a sword, and it was possible for your character to be anything from a flailing pile of jelly (well, almost) to a demi-god at the beginning of the game (and this meshed with a background that seemed to combine Gilgamesh with Conan and the Daoine Sidhe, making the Wombat's brain go pop).

Of course I also have played in a couple of awful homebrew games, but let's just leave those in the graves they dug for themselves