Game Mechanics You Hate

[RobbyPants]

I hate mechanics that limit how often you can try something for no reason. Take lock picking in AD&D. If you failed, you had to gain a level because the lock was "too hard" to pick. Now, I see why they didn't want you to bypass the lock by spamming your d100, but that leads to the next point...

I hate games where you are supposed to be an expert at one thing and you're not really good at it. Again, take AD&D and thieves. At 1st level, you had less than a 50% chance of success on any given task. A 1st level thief typically had less than a 25% chance to be able to bypass a trap on a door without springing it and then be able to open the door. Dungeons would typically feature quite a few of these.

[8d8]

That whole mass combat subject would make for a good new topic. Just sayin.

I hate popularity contests / critiques in RPGs. If my XP/advancement/bonuses are at all influenced by the GM or other players voting on how good a job I did at something then I'm just not willing to play. I don't know if it's a "you can't judge me!" mentality or if it's because asking people to both play the game will and pay close enough attention to other people that they can give a fair and honest review hours later is just super ridiculous. Even worse is when you have to collectively cast votes for the most superlative of the group... shoot me now. Voting is a necessary evil at best.

In video games I hate time fillers more than anything. Examples:

• Start a game up and sit through splashy identifying sequences from 4 companies before the game even loads
• Repetitive animations, regardless of how awesome they are, that do not contribute to the gameplay at all (frex: Hand of Fate looks awesome until you've played it for about an hour and realize that every time your character has to load onto the screen or every time the dealer draws a card you have to sit through a 4-30 second animation that you cannot skip - very painful)
• Poorly written dialogue that comes in tiny snippets at a time. There's just no excuse for a character's dialogue box to load up if the text being displayed is "..." (I'm looking at you, every Japanese game with dialogue ever).
• Distance filler. In a game like Fallout where every step you take in the wilderness has a likelihood of danger or discovery, walking long distances is great. But in hand-holding theme parks like WoW where you have to run for literally 20 minutes to get through a place where you've been forced to walk a dozen times before and you cannot possibly be in danger, it's just a waste of time.
• Unresponsive interface. Big resource-intensive games can't get away from this entirely I suppose, but if you've played CK2 you know how annoying it is to have to wait 2 seconds every time a popup occurs before you can dismiss it. I can click through these 16 popups in like 3 seconds, but I guess CK2 wants me to really read every single identical dialogue box, so there goes half a minute. An interface should immediately respond, every time, regardless of how important the game designers think something is.

[Longes]

I hate segregation into player-exclusive minigames. Like hacking in Shadowrun. Or the way White Wolf games produce combat characters and social characters, who go eat pizza during each other's game portions. One of the reasons I like DnD, even if I never play it, is that every character is equiped for the combat portion of the game, and every real character can put points/spells into influencing roleplaying portions of the game.

[silva]

I hate high complexity in rpgs like seen in Hero, Gurps, Eclipse Phase, Shadowrun, D&D3e, etc.

Other than that, I dont hate any specific mechanic per se. I think most of them are fine as long as they fit well in the game premise and the other rules.

[Judging__Eagle]

Any game system that uses Gygaxian "For DM's Eyes only" rulebook mentality or it's LARP equivalent "Find out in game".

Any, and almost all, "black box" game mechanics (THAC0, Magic Effect Creation in certain LARPs, & economies). Mostly because they hide obviously not working, or just broken, rules.

"Die no save" effects.

The premise any character has to bring less to the warparty than anyone else.

[Josh_Kablack]

Dominion's rule that you are not allowed to count your discard has a very special place on my hate list.

The contents of your starting deck are public information. On top of that, all of your buys, trashing, draws and upgrading are public information. So at any given time, the overall state of your deck has been determined by entirely public information events, and moving any part of that back into hidden information merely serves to add a memory component to the game's strategy, and/or to reward using recordings to review previously public information in place of a sensible rule that would leave public information public until new randomization occurred. The rule quite literally says "you can't do the simple thing, so take notes or use a videocamera instead"

The rule that only the top card of the discard is visible is a related piece of stupidity, but at least that one actually has marginal (if negative) consequences for strategic decision making.

[OgreBattle]

Skillpoints instead of skill proficiency in a class based system

My least favorite part of making a d20SRD character is counting up skill points given from whatever and spreading them across various skills. What winds up happening is you always max out any skill you use to stay level appropriate.

I'd much rather have a skill proficiency that says "You get X bonus now and add +level!", so after I have the proficiency there's no fiddly book keeping whenever I level up.

[Neeeek]

1. Games with barriers to entry. This is less of a problem with modern games than older ones, because I guess people who are actually trying to make good games notice this sucks.

What this is: In Sorry, until you draw one of 2 or 3 (the "Sorry!" card counts if someone else is already in play) cards in the deck, you can't actually start playing the game. Like, at all. A lot of the various domino games are the same way. If you don't have one of the right dominoes, you literally can't do anything but draw.

2. RPGs that either don't have a ton of generic NPCs already made or don't have easy character creation. I once tried to arrange a battle in 7th Sea between 20 Swordsmen and the party + allies. After spending 20 hours stating the first 10 guys, I just wanted to end my campaign entirely. That said, 7th Sea is/was an amazing campaign world.

3. Being better at something making it more likely that you will massively screw up while doing it. This is mostly a complaint about the old WW system (I don't know anything about the new one, as I've never played it), where any task of difficulty 8 or higher(I may be remembering the probabilities wrong here, honestly) became more like to botch as you added additional dice. Just freaking annoying.

Regarding mass combat... The D&D campaign setting Birthright had some decent, though very abstract rules that worked pretty well, from what I recall. Also, depending on how you define "mass" the old Mystara based game Fantasy Empires had a pretty workable mass combat engine. It did have this weird scaling problem though. Ranged troops were utterly dominant if the scale was 1:1, and were basically crap, and grossly overpriced, if it was 20:1, and the scale was something the player could control. Back in the day, we played entirely on the 20:1 scale, not to cheat but because our computer couldn't render the high scaling levels. Years later, I got a copy of the game and needed something to slow down my CPU to make the battles playable, even at the 1:1 scaling. Until then, I had no idea why the bow-wielding Elves were 3000 gold each and the human warriors were around 500 gold each.

[Shrapnel]

A mite late, but I don't care.

Invisible walls, especially in Bethesda games (Oblivion, FO3, etc.). I'm not opposed to the idea behind them, but I don't like the implementation. I mean, they really could have come up with a more imaginative way to prevent you from leaving the game world (such as guards around the borders saying you can't leave, as an example off the top of my mind cage) other than an immersion breaking invisible force field with the accompanying text "You cannot go any further, please turn back". What a load of shit.

I'm going to have to call bullshit. Maybe in Fallout 3, I don't remember the walls in that game, but are you fucking kidding me? Oblivion has super high mountains to block your path outside the game. And people still got over those mountains. Same for Skyrim, but without the getting over. Morrowind was literally an island with Ocean in every direction, and I don't care about invisible walls out in the middle of the Ocean.

Ummm... No, Oblivion DID NOT have "super high mountains" blocking your path. There were many places where it would be a flat plain and an invisible wall would just block your path and make any further progress utterly impossible. I strongly suggest you play the game again and try crossing the borders to other provinces, and I guarantee you that you will run into this:


I don't know about Skyrim, and I know that Morrowind didn't have this problem, but Oblivion and Fallout's 3 and New Vegas most certainly did

Elder Scrolls has the best fucking invisible border walls of any fucking open world game because they actually make sense or are in the middle of no where and so it doesn't bother people.

Yeah, because that random, invisible force-field that just prevents me from moving forward at the Black Marsh border makes soo much sense, and doesn't detract from the game immersion AT ALL, and it's not like in a large, open sandbox game like Oblivion or Fallout that I might conceivably want to see if I can go outside of Cyrodiil/the Captial Wasteland. No, invisible force fields are SOOO fucking awesome.

And fucking guards? Are you a complete idiot? If the entire fucking border was covered in arbitrary guards in Fallout that would be way the fuck worse. It's fucking fallout, I should be able to shoot the guards and keep walking. Not to mention the completely absurd idea that all these guards surround and area and never let anyone in or out for no reason at all because they are literally guarding an empty frontier.

Okay, I will give you that the guard thing wasn't a good idea, but then again it was also just something off the top of my head, because honestly anything is better than fucking invisible walls.

[ACOS]

No, invisible force fields are SOOO fucking awesome.

I think this is much ado about nothing.
The medium has certain limitations; and a designer isn't going to waste their time on extending meaningless empty-space. Who cares that you can't just randomly wander the desert forever? It sounds like "fuck this game for not providing a perfectly-reproduced reality". Just get back to playing the part of the game you actually paid for (that is assuming that you wouldn't actually pay money for a game that was nothing but uneventful wandering of empty-space).

---

@ skill points:
I get your point, and I certainly empathize with it; but I, for one, actually do like that level of granularity, despite the fiddly-ness.
Of course, I'm kind of a wierdo sometimes.

[Neeeek]

No, invisible force fields are SOOO fucking awesome.

I think this is much ado about nothing.
The medium has certain limitations; and a designer isn't going to waste their time on extending meaningless empty-space. Who cares that you can't just randomly wander the desert forever? It sounds like "fuck this game for not providing a perfectly-reproduced reality". Just get back to playing the part of the game you actually paid for (that is assuming that you wouldn't actually pay money for a game that was nothing but uneventful wandering of empty-space).

---

@ skill points:
I get your point, and I certainly empathize with it; but I, for one, actually do like that level of granularity, despite the fiddly-ness.
Of course, I'm kind of a wierdo sometimes.

I don't know. They could have some fun putting some "Hunger Games" like borders into the game, where random fireballs start shooting at you if you get too far away from the action...

[DSMatticus]

I have no idea what is supposed to stop someone from wandering off the edge of the world that isn't some bullshit boundary. I suppose Fallout could get away with just surrounding the map in radiation that murders you, but Oblivion and Skyrim have a significant problem in that people successfully leave those games settings for other places all the time and preventing the player from finding a way, any way, to leave will automatically give you an opportunity to call bullshit. As a matter of fact, that there aren't roads leading out of Oblivion that run you into an arbitrarily invisible wall is in some ways worse than the fact that the invisible walls are only in the middle of nowhere. Because there absolutely 100% should be roads out of those places, and you absolutely 100% shouldn't be expected to be able to take them because medium limitations. Though honestly, even in the context of Fallout lore the places you're playing in aren't completely isolated and you should be able to leave those areas too. So radiation death clouds have exactly the same problem.

The game world has to stop somewhere. It just has to. Even Minecraft has a world border, the game known for its 'infinite worldgen.'

[Longes]

No, invisible force fields are SOOO fucking awesome.

I think this is much ado about nothing.
The medium has certain limitations; and a designer isn't going to waste their time on extending meaningless empty-space. Who cares that you can't just randomly wander the desert forever? It sounds like "fuck this game for not providing a perfectly-reproduced reality". Just get back to playing the part of the game you actually paid for (that is assuming that you wouldn't actually pay money for a game that was nothing but uneventful wandering of empty-space).

---

@ skill points:
I get your point, and I certainly empathize with it; but I, for one, actually do like that level of granularity, despite the fiddly-ness.
Of course, I'm kind of a wierdo sometimes.

I don't know. They could have some fun putting some "Hunger Games" like borders into the game, where random fireballs start shooting at you if you get too far away from the action...

But then someone would drink fire resistance potions, or get a ton of HP, or just cheat, and either run into an invisible wall, or cause the game to crash.

[Shrapnel]

@invisi walls: No, I get the need for limiting the borders, what my complaint is is that random invisible force fields is a dumb way to implement it, or at the very least incredibly immersion breaking. If they did put something like inaccessible mountain ranges or whatever around the borders, that'd be even better. Hell, if they just changed the message from "You cannot proceed in that direction. Please turn back" to something more, I dunno, lore-y, then I'd have much less of a problem with them.

Basically, I just think they could've found a better way to do it.

[Kaelik]

I'm going to have to call bullshit. Maybe in Fallout 3, I don't remember the walls in that game, but are you fucking kidding me? Oblivion has super high mountains to block your path outside the game. And people still got over those mountains. Same for Skyrim, but without the getting over. Morrowind was literally an island with Ocean in every direction, and I don't care about invisible walls out in the middle of the Ocean.

Ummm... No, Oblivion DID NOT have "super high mountains" blocking your path. There were many places where it would be a flat plain and an invisible wall would just block your path and make any further progress utterly impossible. I strongly suggest you play the game again and try crossing the borders to other provinces, and I guarantee you that you will run into this:[Picture of Fallout because Shrapnel can't read]

Here is a youtube video of a man totally walking across an open plain and definitely not climbing a mountain, and definitely running into an invisible wall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd5KcFi5hnw

Elder Scrolls has the best fucking invisible border walls of any fucking open world game because they actually make sense or are in the middle of no where and so it doesn't bother people.

Yeah, because that random, invisible force-field that just prevents me from moving forward at the Black Marsh border makes soo much sense, and doesn't detract from the game immersion AT ALL, and it's not like in a large, open sandbox game like Oblivion or Fallout that I might conceivably want to see if I can go outside of Cyrodiil/the Captial Wasteland. No, invisible force fields are SOOO fucking awesome.

There is no such force field. There are mountains there that get in the way and direct you off the border, just like on all the other non water edges of the map.

[OgreBattle]

Basically, I just think they could've found a better way to do it.

My thoughts on how to do invisi barriers

-Player gets a warning to turn back
-Heads ui display dissappears after a while
-Player enters cutscene describing how he's left and was never seen in the lands again
-Return to main menu screen

Depending on the tone of the game it can vary from humorous to wistful to "and then the demons won and everyone died", but it still feels like a 'player choice'.

[name_here]

I once swam out of Oblivion's relevant area and made landfall.

[Dogbert]

1) Sekrit Squirrel Rules: "Rules are eval and your players shouldn't know them!".
2) Rolling your attributes.
3) Pigeonholing: You can do this and only this.
4) Ivory Tower Design: Filling a game with trap options for chargen.

[TiaC]

Splatbooks wasting time on already failed systems.

It goes like this:
1. Bad rules come along, people try using them, fail, subsequently ignore them.
2. A designer decides that he needs to allot another 20 pages to those rules without significantly changing anything.
3. Everyone ignores the new material.

[Username17]

The best way to do Invisible Barriers is the Fallout 2 method. You have an overland map. If you go out of the walky areas, you pop out the to overland map. The overland map only goes so far in each direction. The end.

No funky messages about how you have to turn back. No invisible brick wall. Just a lack of ability to send your character slogging any farther north than the edge of the map because there's nothing to click on.

-Username17

[Grek]

Morrowind did something similar with the Vvardenfell borders: There was an invisible wall, but it was out in the middle of the ocean, several viewscreens away from anything else but empty water and your swim animation continued to play when you walked into them. So it looked like you just swam off into the middle of the ocean forever, up until you decided to turn around and swim back. Tribunal managed to fuck it up though, by having walls keeping you in the city and banning levitation so you couldn't look at the empty void behind the walls.

[ishy]

@invisi walls: No, I get the need for limiting the borders, what my complaint is is that random invisible force fields is a dumb way to implement it, or at the very least incredibly immersion breaking. If they did put something like inaccessible mountain ranges or whatever around the borders, that'd be even better. Hell, if they just changed the message from "You cannot proceed in that direction. Please turn back" to something more, I dunno, lore-y, then I'd have much less of a problem with them.

Basically, I just think they could've found a better way to do it.

In borderlands when you cross the boundary you get told to turn back or gun towers instantly kill you. Which does make me wonder why the bad guys aren't using those.
But what really pisses me off about them, is the area where you have to ignore the warning for a short time, jump off the edge of the world into a hidden cave to unlock a secret chest.

Also I hate that the game rewards exploration and jumping to reach hard to explore areas but also features areas where you're not supposed to go and you just fall through the world.

[Chamomile]

Borderlands is a particularly egregious example because its setting isn't well-developed enough that having mountains, cliffs, or oceans on all sides of the play area would cause any kind of dissonance. Areas outside the gameworld of whatever game you are currently playing are almost never mentioned, so there's no "how come I can't drive to New Haven" problem.

I like the idea of warning the player about imminent game over followed by a non-standard game over if they keep going. Feels most natural and is still effectively an invisible wall that you can dump anywhere you like.

[Dogbert]

Videogame RPGs with multiple choices without multiple save slots or the option to do Save Scumming... because I'm not the "replay" type, whatever I don't get in the first playthrough I'm not getting it at all.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Ultima IX was one of the most railroaded (and generally bad) of the series, so it made me laugh that it allowed this

Ocean Travel Without A Boat

In Ultima IX, bread has an amazing property: it can float while supporting the weight of the Avatar! With this method, you can easily go anywhere in Britannia! When you arrive in Britain, make sure to grab (DO NOT EAT) all the bread you can lay your hands on. In Lord British's Castle, cast ignite on the candle and grab all the bread that appears. Grab all the bread in the kitchen (behind the hidden door in the banquet room). Also, you can make bread in the Baker's house.

Now that you have enough bread, run to the shores. Try to place the bread in the water. It should work if the water is shallow enough. Otherwise, use gust to push it out. If you do it right, the bread should be floating. Now, try to climb on the bread or jump onto it like in this picture.

Now, once you are standing on the floating piece of bread, place a second piece just in front of the Avatar. Do not put it too close, or the bread will just go into the Avatar's backpack. Place it like in this picture:

You can continue to place pieces of bread in front of the other until you run out of bread (or your cursor turns yellow). Pretty soon, you could have a bridge that looks like this.

If you combine this trick with the Magic Bag Trick, you can easily carry enough bread to lay down permanent bread bridges across Britannia.

NOTE: You can purchase unlimited amounts (I think) of bread in Buccaneer's Den and other places.

An explanation for this strange effct, see Weaknesses in the Ultima IX Physics.

http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Cheati ... out_A_Boat (link includes pictures)