What's the worst a game can get before becoming unplayable?

[Aryxbez]

It's not stupidity. It's the modern design philosophy that's obsessed with rules for everything and being ultra literalistic with every bit of rules text.

(sighs) Generally people who say these type of things don't seem to understand the actual subject(s) at present. That said, latest RPG's to come out are trying to be more "narrative, Simpler" and "rules lite" (Edge of the Empire, 5th editions). Despite of course, they want to make more products, so in turn they're going to be adding more material and/or rules anyway. That, and it generally lacks rules in bits where it would be most useful and fun-inducing (like Edge's lack of good Vehicle/space combat rules).

[TheFlatline]

Traveller: Because Traveller.

Maybe it's just the revised edition from Mongoose, but Traveler is entirely playable.

What part breaks it beyond playability?

[Hicks]

I like Mongoose Traveler, but one part that breaks it for me is there are no rules for damaging objects that I can find. I get that a marine in battle dress, shooting a Fusion Gun Man Portable, in a space ship, is a bad thing that will wreck shit, as the weapon's purpose is to spray crazily radioactive super heated plasma everywhere you don't want anyone to be, but nowhere can I find where it tells me how badly it fucks your ship up. What happens if you try to take out an armored bunker with it? What about an asteroid? No one knows! It is a divide by zero error in the system whenever you try to cut into anything that is not starship armor with anything else.

[MisterDee]

The edition of Middle Earth Role Playing that someone lended me half a lifetime ago had the interesting quirk of presenting itself as a stand-alone roleplaying game.

It was mostly complete, too. It just didn't state what the resolution mechanic actually was.

(IIRC it was an offshoot of Hero System, and the first edition of MERP was just a Hero supplement, but when they moved it to a full game they somehow failed to explain what you were supposed to roll)

[Username17]

MERP was a Rolemaster hack, and as such used d100 rather than the 3d6 used by HERO.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

What part breaks it beyond playability?

A chance to die in chargen. Do I need to elaborate?

I'm not talking necessarily about broken, just crappy.

[TheFlatline]

As I said, I played the mongoose version, and they made that an optional "iron man" rule I guess. In the revised Traveller, instead of dying, "bad things" can happen to you. Which offers more roleplay possibilities.

I get why they did the death during chargen thing though. Power gains are pretty significant in Traveller, since you're dealing with a 2D6 RNG with a target number of 7. The older you get, the more power you get, significantly, and they wanted to balance that out somehow.

I agree that's crappy but the Mongoose approach of "bad stuff" instead of death is probably a better solution.

Also, I never thought about it, but Hicks is right- there is no "doing damage to terrain" abilities. Something that seems strangely out of place. 9 times out of 10 it won't matter, but if you want to batter a door down or break through a wall the rules are missing. I'd say that's way more of an argument than chargen.

The other charge I could level against Traveller that was equally "bad" was that you really couldn't think of a character type and have much hope of creating that kind of character due to the lifepath. While you'd usually end up with a pretty interesting character, you'd rarely end up with the character you wanted at the beginning.

[MisterDee]

MERP was a Rolemaster hack, and as such used d100 rather than the 3d6 used by HERO.

-Username17

Right. I knew that.