Do you love a game despite the mechanics being garbage?

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 2:06 am

The first game that springs to mind is Toon. The mechanics are terrible, but everyone who likes cartoons instinctively knows how cartoons are supposed to work so you don't really need any mechanics at all.

I like d20, but I don't think it's garbage (unless you count every tabletop RPG ever written as "garbage" which seems kind of nihilistic to me).

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 2:29 am

Infernum. The system is pretty broken and diplomancers can be a serious problem, in addition to there being no real WBL system, despite there being prices for high end fortresses. However, the setting is rich and detailed enough to make me want to play regardless.

souran · Post by **souran** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:29 am

Exalted has always failed as a game and as a setting.

However, I like some of the games core ideas, the rules are seem like maybe they could work, and the setting seems like you could just ignore whichever broken/disturbing/rapey part you find to distasteful to even consider and focus on some of the better developed and less "disgusting for the sake of being edgy" elements.

I ran an extended (18 months of weekly 4-6 hour sessions) with a party that varied from 3-12. We used every kind of exalt, consumed the players guide conent and basically saw every wart that that system had.

By the end I realized that exalted as printed was basically a shouting contest where the player who shouted the loudest seemed to get their way. You cannot challenge a remotely intelligently built exalt AT ALL with anything described in any existing exalted reference. You have to build every aspect of the opposition, rebuild the very idea of a challenge for there to even be a game.

...but I still have lots of fond memories of those games.

I also liked the non-d20 L5R better than the d20 one even though every version I got to play seemed like the rules were incomplete or simply failed.

I also liked both mechwarrior and every silhouette engine game even though putting a player crafted pilot into the wargames basically broke bot h the wargame and the rpg.

souran · Post by **souran** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:34 am

One more:

Alternity. That game had mechanics that were so screwed up, its default settings were not that special. However, it was easier to explain than gurps and the box said that it was a universal rules set....to bad it sucked. However, we used that system to build starwars, aliens, 40k rpgs, a 3 player xfiles type game, a buff game. Most of them only lasted 2-4 sessions. The rules were fail but the games were fun.

pragma · Post by **pragma** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:35 am

I ran my longest D&D campaign in 4e. The system ran out of steam at about level 7 but the game dragged until level 14. The latter half was a slog for me, but the campaign was an accomplishment, so I remember 4e fondly. I especially like very low level 4e because resources are so sparse that people think carefully about spending them.

I came up under SR3, I remember it fondly in spite of insane probability curves.

CP2020 had an evocative but scatterbrained combat chapter, one memorable adventure about cyberpsychosis, and cool gear. Though there was little else of note, I still think of diagrams in Friday Night Firefight.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:53 am

pragma wrote:I ran my longest D&D campaign in 4e. The system ran out of steam at about level 7 but the game dragged until level 14. The latter half was a slog for me, but the campaign was an accomplishment, so I remember 4e fondly. I especially like very low level 4e because resources are so sparse that people think carefully about spending them.

You guys use essentials? Skill challenges?
I had fun with level 6-ish D&D4e with the Bladesinger of all things. Outlaw theme and feats that granted encounter powers (white lotus something, multiclass sneak attack) were fun to use but they really should've had Bladesinger just use wizard encounter powers as encounter powers.

Now I'm thinking RIFTS has my favorite format for releasing new content, setting books that give you new areas to explore, new options for existing classes or new classes that can replace old ones. If RIFTS cared about balance that would be a good way to release errata that doesn't feel disruptive to the setting.

Also a special thanks to RIFTS being the first tRPG that made me think "I should write my own rules to overhaul this!"

violence in the media · Thu Apr 16, 2015 12:29 pm

I loved CP2020 back in the day. So many shootouts in malls, for some reason, though.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 2:30 pm

Insomniac wrote:I'll cop to loving Scion. I LOVE religion and mythology and think the game is an absolute blast. I've played and ran great games of Scion...
[...]

Bodshivita wrote:Honestly... ?

I adore games such as Scion & Exalted, simply because they allowed you to portray larger than life characters, with fucked-tons of power.
[...]

ITT: Trivial proof that as long as you print a book with good production values and evocative prose, people will fix broken mechanics and create the non-existing ones and fail to realize they didn't actually bought a game.

RPGs as a product are baffling, because they can run on wishful thinking alone. A game of Scion is literally some people pretending to play a game about some people playing a game of pretend about being a bunch of demigods.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:30 pm

angelfromanotherpin wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:It was fucking insane because the setting was seriously that mutable. It's just, once the DM said "okay" then it couldn't really be undone. But it was insane in a good way. Far above and beyond most of the BESM games I've played.
The most telling part of that story is how the part that made it good is nothing to do with the BESM system.

Oh yes the terror that is the TriStat system. God.

So we were talked into playing the Sailor Moon RPG once. Key word once. It was... terrible. We had "average" starting characters except for the knight or whatever the fuck he was who got like triple the starting points because "they need the points since they suck if they're not a sailor scout". Whatever. That character turned out to be the only one who could do anything. The rest of us had like one attack per day that could do massive damage, but due to the shittiness of the tri-stat system and the starting point build amounts, you either could hit that one time per day and do absolutely nothing else, or be absolutely ineffective in combat but stand a chance of tying your shoes.

In defense of BESM, we never once arrived at a point where all that wackiness *wasn't* covered basically by the rules. I didn't *like* tristat, but it seriously didn't take much if any house ruling to play an intelligent demon-haunted sword, and that's pretty impressive for an RPG to have that kind of flexibility.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:47 pm

pragma wrote: CP2020 had an evocative but scatterbrained combat chapter, one memorable adventure about cyberpsychosis, and cool gear. Though there was little else of note, I still think of diagrams in Friday Night Firefight.

Friday Night Firefight was cool. My friend recently dug out the original Cyberpunk (pre-2020) where FNF was a supplemental little booklet. It managed to be even *more* lethal than CP2020's FNF.

I always found it amusing that underground "rebel" rock star was a core character class.

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:55 pm

TheFlatline, I'd love to see/play a superhero game mashed up with the Warhammer Trollslayer stuff.

spongeknight · Post by **spongeknight** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:12 pm

Weapons of the Gods will always have a fond place in my heart, despite the wacky and sometimes terrible mechanics. The rules just try so hard to be fun and flavorful that it's hard to fault them for being faulty.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:13 am

We had a lot of fun playing Villains & Vigilantes as a kid, even though its rules were even sillier than the average superhero RPG.

Sakuya Izayoi · Post by **Sakuya Izayoi** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 3:38 am

Nobilis. You have these godlike powers, but you don't really have any motivation to use them, any more than you do to sit in your pocket dimension and drink tea. Also, the artwork in Nobilis 3e looks like fanart of Kingdoms heart heartless, and has been called out on being tracings of stuff from Pixiv in a few places.

There's also a flavor of Bear World my group likes, which again, probably boils down to it being a serviceable tea drinking simulator, since it punishes having goals, or delusions of competence.

AndreiChekov · Post by **AndreiChekov** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 3:39 am

tea drinking is a noble goal.
I regularly drink tea.
I drink my tea with rum, and all sorts of games become possible.
I don't actually play games anymore as a player, I am always the MC, but I have found that I have more fun, and players have more fun when I add rum to my tea.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 4:34 am

spongeknight wrote:Weapons of the Gods will always have a fond place in my heart, despite the wacky and sometimes terrible mechanics. The rules just try so hard to be fun and flavorful that it's hard to fault them for being faulty.

hogarth wrote:We had a lot of fun playing Villains & Vigilantes as a kid, even though its rules were even sillier than the average superhero RPG.

There any quickstart rules or reviews of these online?

AndreiChekov wrote:tea drinking is a noble goal.
I regularly drink tea.
I drink my tea with rum, and all sorts of games become possible.
I don't actually play games anymore as a player, I am always the MC, but I have found that I have more fun, and players have more fun when I add rum to my tea.

Would it be 'miiind blooowing' if an RPG made some statement in their rulebook/DMG like "The MC is... ALSO a player in the game!" in the sense of getting everyone to feel more cooperative and less gygaxian with one another.

spongeknight · Post by **spongeknight** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 5:13 am

There are no rules online for Weapons of the Gods, no. I'm not even sure the book was popular enough to pirate.

angelfromanotherpin · Fri Apr 17, 2015 11:44 am

The successor game, Legends of the Wulin, was popular enough to pirate, if only because they didn't release the physical book for fucking ever and charged as much for the pdf as the physical book.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 11:50 am

Shadowrun.
I WANT to like the Mechwarrior RPG . . but i simply can't bring myself to do so because of how shitty it is . .

silva · Post by **silva** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:28 pm

Heh. Same here. Tried to like MechWarrior with all my strenght. But I failed.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 6:47 pm

souran wrote:I ran an extended (18 months of weekly 4-6 hour sessions) with a party that varied from 3-12. We used every kind of exalt, consumed the players guide conent and basically saw every wart that that system had.

I've come to realize that every single game I've ever run/played in that lasted for a really long time with like one exception had shit mechanics. What is it about shitty systems breeding games that refuse to die?

The one exception that I can think of is the 3.0 game we played right after D&D 3rd came out that lasted for about 2 years.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 9:40 pm

Mind caulk, player enjoyment and a solid setting can get people to keep playing longer than solid rules.

silva · Post by **silva** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 9:56 pm

Mask_De_H wrote:Mind caulk, player enjoyment and a solid setting can get people to keep playing longer than solid rules.

This.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Apr 18, 2015 10:43 am

OgreBattle wrote:
hogarth wrote:We had a lot of fun playing Villains & Vigilantes as a kid, even though its rules were even sillier than the average superhero RPG.
There any quickstart rules or reviews of these online?

Here's a review of V&V (second edition, although it sounds like it's basically the same as the 1st edition):

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15066.phtml

As noted, the rules are pretty short by modern-day standards.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Sat Apr 18, 2015 10:50 am

Mask_De_H wrote:Mind caulk, player enjoyment and a solid messed up and self-contradictory created by stealing from as many popular sources as you can setting which allows you to selectively ignore the bits you don't like can get people to keep playing longer than solid rules.

Fixed that for you.

Biggest examples would be Exalted and 40K, that have lots of fans for it despite the "heroes" being giant assholes that make the world in which they live a worst place for everybody else.

Heck, if anything, I can't even remember any popular tabletop RPG setting that's also solid.