Are any RPG's worth playing?

Heaven's Thunder Hammer · Thu Mar 28, 2019 7:00 am

Honest question. I wonder some days. It seems that it's impossible for a game not to be created without somehow forgetting basic math, not doing the play testing, or serious fluff<-->mechanic mismatches.

Thoughts?

Whiysper · Post by **Whiysper** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 9:25 am

Shadowrun 4, D&D 3.x, Homebrew you're happy with.

If you know where the failure points of a given system are, you can patch them to your satisfaction, or just avoid them. No system is perfect, but many are worth playing with a good group.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 10:12 am

EABAnywhere.

phlapjackage · Post by **phlapjackage** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 10:51 am

Earthdawn

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 12:51 pm

No. They’re all trash. It is impossible to have fun with imperfect games.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 1:11 pm

It's not just the game: people are also imperfect. It's impossible to play with a GM and players who aren't flawed in a way or another.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 4:31 pm

Munchausen and Fate Core are all you need for imagination

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 4:52 pm

Oh man, that's a great idea: A game where the developers actually forgot basic math, and you have to read the whole book and think carefully about what they said to even determine what they mean by "add".

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 4:59 pm

Encounter Critical

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 5:15 pm

Foxwarrior wrote:Oh man, that's a great idea: A game where the developers actually forgot basic math, and you have to read the whole book and think carefully about what they said to even determine what they mean by "add".

Better idea, he should play Gempunks.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 7:19 pm

RPGs are hundreds of pages long, with most of that filled with new mechanics and concepts. Even if they are only slight iterations on what came before, each and every paragraph, table, and diagram in an RPG represents several different places to make a mistake. An absolutely flawless RPG is practically impossible except as a minimalist one-page kind of deal. That's a valid way to make an RPG and all and if that's a designer's goal and they accomplish it, then they have succeeded, but it's not a popular way to make or play an RPG.

So, I guess if your standards for play are "literally flawless," then you're pretty much limited to minimalist projects that can't sustain more than a one-shot.

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 8:48 pm

The three games worth playing are ( http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=457603#457603 ) : Spulturatorah, Rifts and Call of Cthulhu.

More seriously, in addition to Shadowrun 4 and D&D 3:

GURPS usually does work, so does Champions; both have serious problems but not generally basic math failure.

Feng Shui 1 is pretty good (the sequel is worse in almost every way, which was a bitter disappointment).

Various rules lites work well for their niche: Toon and I Kill Puppies for Satan are fine, Tales from the Floating Vagabond has a great attitude but manages to mess up the basic math despite being essentially the same game as Toon by having you roll lots of polyhedral dice. There are dozens more, depending on what you want to do, which tend to be worse the more gimmicks they try to inflict on the mechanics.

"It matters more who you play with and that you have fun ideas and chemistry" is a piss-poor excuse for bad game design, but it's still true. So bad games are worth playing with good friends, but again, this isn't an excuse for the game itself to be bad.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Thu Mar 28, 2019 10:06 pm

Chamomile wrote:
So, I guess if your standards for play are "literally flawless," then you're pretty much limited to minimalist projects that can't sustain more than a one-shot.

EABAnywhere is only 8 pages.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 12:50 am

RPGs: because you can't masturbate ALL the time.

jt · Post by jt » Fri Mar 29, 2019 1:39 am

If someone made an RPG that was actually good, how would you find out about it?

Consider how many games are being published on DriveThruRPG, that some awful games have rabid fandoms, and that every popular RPG has someone saying it sucks for reasons that are factually wrong.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 7:40 am

You just commit thirty hours to skim thirty RPGs for an hour each, then you can pick out the handful that maybe showed some promise. Once you've found one that looks good, all you have to do is persuade your friends to commit to reading it too, so you can find out if it works in practice.

Kaelik wrote:Better idea, he should play Gempunks

Or that, but what sort of madman would play a denner RPG.

WiserOdin032402 · Post by **WiserOdin032402** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 12:16 pm

For published games, if you want a low fantasy RPG and don't mind the setting of Conan the Barbarian, then Conan d20 2e is pretty good fun. Got a lot of interesting published material, some of it is very experimental and super jank.

If you don't mind insanity I recommend TOME D&D 3.5, which is like D&D 3.5 but it's free and attempts to make high level playable.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 4:27 pm

The Internet has lowered the bar a lot, but for me the biggest factor in whether a game interests me is whether I can find other players.

I'm interested in trying out the Torchbearer and Mouseguard RPGs, but there's no point. I'd have to do a lot of work just to get a group together and even if I did, there's no guarantee that they or I would like to do it long-term. And I live in a major city.

I've still put literal hundreds of hours into playing 5E D&D and Pathfinder and that's only because I can actually play those games.

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 5:03 pm

WiserOdin032402 wrote: I recommend TOME D&D 3.5

Are you saying you are recommending Tome to those of us in this thread, or are you saying you recommend Tome in general when people ask about good RPGs?

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 5:09 pm

The OP has had an account for 5 years. Obviously they’re aware of Tome and other good rpgs. This is a troll thread and should be treated as such.

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 6:39 pm

I've heard good things about an RPG from the early 2000s called "Deus Ex." Really solid mechanics, good integration of gameplay and setting. I never noticed any math being egregiously wrong either. You should check it out. Later editions weren't received as well, and a new company bought the IP in the last few years, so a lot of people still hold up the first edition as the gold standard.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 7:30 pm

Well, floating point operations are not technically correct, so really Deus Ex is worse at basic math than the games with terrible balancing are.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 7:34 pm

Foxwarrior wrote:Well, floating point operations are not technically correct, so really Deus Ex is worse at basic math than the games with terrible balancing are.

If I'm parsing this correctly, you're saying a game with 2.5 divided by 2 is 'not technically correct'.

I can see why using binary integers (2, 1, etc.) is better, but not seeing how the other is wrong.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 7:36 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating- ... y_problems

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Fri Mar 29, 2019 8:15 pm

I'm really curious to see the math in Deus Ex now.

Floating Point Numbers can't represent irrational or non-terminating rational numbers doesn't necessarily mean that any of the operations within the game are wrong... It does mean that if you're multiplying something by PI you're going to be approximating; but you'd do that if you weren't using Floating Point Numbers and it isn't wrong just because it isn't precise.