Worst RPG System You Ever Palyed?

[painandgreed]

In general, I'd have to say RIFTS. Unbalanced and klunky mechanics that are contradictary and scattered randomly through different books.

However, honorable mention must go to a homebrew game called "Fusion Fleets" IIRC that was made by a guy in our gaming circle. Fairly hard science fiction game set a few centuries in the future that was very well thought out but literaly created by an astrophysist/chemical engineer who had a hard time thinking on normal people's levels. Combat, especially space combat was literally impossible without a calculator as it frequently required things like the square root of a function to figure out the modifier for another function. He demoed it at a gaming con once and the game would come to a standstill for five minutes as he figured out the chance for one spaceship to hit another. Of course, by time the other ship shot back, conditions had changed in the 3D continuous impulse combat system and everything had to be figured out again.

 

[sniffles]

On reflection, I think that almost anything I've ever disliked about a game system has been due to the way the GM ran it, and was not necessarily something inherent in the rules. For example, I complained about the career system in WHFRP, but if my GM had allowed us some downtime between adventures it would probably have made more sense. I've never played a system where the system itself completely sucked.

 

[Rasyr]

For those whose venom is directed at RMSS character generation: I agree with you.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with this statement as well.

 

[Chaldfont]

Ok, somebody tell me about this Synnibar of which you speak. I've never heard of it!

It's fun seeing everyone's opinion on the worst game. Is it bad because of the setting? the mechanics? the people you played with? Even a terrible game can be fun with the right people, or the amount of time and determination to make it work.

I've had a blast with Lords of Creation. I co-DM'd a campaign with 9 players on a three week Boy Scout summer trip to Europe. The setting is bizarre and the rules totally cobbled together, but we had fun with it because it was easy and we were young and had no great expectations. I can tell similar stories about Marvel Super Heroes, Robotech RPG, Rolemaster, (though each character sheet was over 10 pages long with photocopied attack and critical charts), WEG Star Wars, and Top Secret (how can you not like a game where you get xp for passing counterfeit money?).

But I have to agree with Battlelords of the 22nd Century (I think it was written by the same guy who wrote http://www.realultimatepower.net) and Powers and Perils. I love getting P&P out every once in a while and trying to make a character. Maybe someday I'll figure out how to run a fight!

 

[buzz]

Dr. Who.

I got to play this gem not too long ago; once a year some non- and ex-gamer buds of mine and I get together to play "classic" RPGs.

My problem with Dr. Who wasn't so much the setup (one powerful PC, and a bunch of players who get to be mooks), but the rules. It was a classic example fo '80s-era "generate one set of numbers in order to generate a second set of numbers that let you buy skills which define the numebrs that you actually use in gameplay." Buying skills was also very stupid. You got a cerain number of points for skills from each of your stats. The points a stat gave you bought skills related to that stat at 1:1, and others at some poorer ratio. The dumb thing was that there was no good reason I could see to purchase "cross-stat" as it were; it was just a rule that made you jump through hoops and do extra accounting. In play, that game wasn't so bad, but chargen was just a lot of wasted time generating info that never got used in play. Classic '80s crap design.

I have played (and own) Synnibar. It's pretty dang bad. The context in which I played it was very tongue-in-cheek, though, so we had a lot of fun.

As for Rolemaster... I don't really understand the hate, either. Granted, I disagree that, at least the version I played (RM2, iirc), was no more complex than 3e. RM2 starts off a bit more complex (the monster tables in Claw Law and C&T were indecipherable to me); add in the Companions, and you're in the stratosphere. I mean, RMC2 added *hundreds* of skills. The group I played with used the chart-ignoring combat rules from RMC1, though, so the table-itis was reduced. We had a lot of fun; one aborted campaign was some of the best gaming of my life. As a system however, I think it's just okay. HARP seems basically to be what RM should have been all along.

Otherwise... while I've read a lot of bad games, I've luckily not played many. I spent many an hour making characters for C&S2e; I loved it then, but realize now that it was needlessly complex. Making a spellcaster invovled lots of calculations that really provided very little to the in-play experience. Three hours of math just to determine, yes, you start the game with a wand. Space Opera was similarly bad, not to mention indecipherable. Still, it had light sabres and Traveller didn't, so I loved it for a while.

I did play one session and make PCs for Fantasy Wargaming. The rules were a mess, but I thought the introductory essays in the front of the book were great. It basically preceeded the White Wolf formula of "tons of setting and genre info first, rules last" by a decade or so.

We gamers have it really good now. The majority of RPGs I encounter these days are wonderful, and it's very easy to gather a lot of info about them before making a decision to purchase. When I was a kid, everything was shirk-wrapped and in a box*. Sales guys at shops were always trying to scam you, and gawd forbid any of them have an actual return policy. I had to go back with my mom in tow to get my LGS to take back Man, Myth, and Magic.


*Note to publishers: RPGs in boxes = not getting any money from buzz. Boxes are teh suck.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

AD&D (2e), D&D 3.5 and Shadowrun 3.0. Gouging the customer for more money under the guise of an "improved" system whilst producing a crappier, more error prone system than the original just doesn't sit well with me.

I do believe this is the very first time in all of human history that someone had opinied that Shadowrun 3.0 was in any way inferior to Shadowrun 1.0.

Dude, did your guys never get into combat? Or did you ban wired reflexes?

 

[Jack of Shadows]

Well,

Sticking to systems I've actaully played I'd have to say Rifts followed by Space Opera. And both of these because of the rule systems not the settings. Rifts... Rifts is just bad. Space Opera was really cool (I still cling to my rule books) but any system that requires 5 rolls to resolve a single attack just doesn't work.

Some people have been throwing Rolemaster out and I strongly have to disagree. Rolemaster is great providing you meet one condition. All the players MUST know the rules. It's not new player friendly. That being said, my girlfriend ran a great Rolemaster game and never read the rules (of course, all the players DID know the rues). Before 3.0 rolemaster was my groups fantasy RPG of choice.

Jack

 

[Rackhir]

I can understand not liking Rolemaster, but it wasn't a bad system to play, just photocopy the sheets each player would need and it cut down on a lot of the hassle. I ran a campaign in it for about a year and liked it quite a bit. I also used it for a set of high level characters I made up to run in the high level modules.

Twilight 2000 was certainly one of the worst system. Someone did not playtest the damage rules for that.

Space Opera was a half finished systems. In the mustering out tables one of the benefits was that you could get any body armor "up to class 14" or something to that effect. However no place in the system did it ever actually assign ratings like that to the body armor.

Villians and Vigilantes I found could suffer from the "Dr. Who Syndrome" that someone described earlier, where you could wind up with one massively powerful character and a bunch of wimps.

Paladium/Robotech RPG - Terrific background material, but they neglected little things like a MOVEMENT SYTEM for the MECHA! Combat was also similarly crude

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

FASA's Star Trek RPG. It took over an hour to resolve one round of starship combat, having to refer to charts and such.

 

[sniffles]

FASA's Star Trek RPG. It took over an hour to resolve one round of starship combat, having to refer to charts and such.

Ditto! We used Hero system for character stuff, but the starship combat was straight out of FASA. Most boring stuff I've ever done.