TOP 3 Badly designed games: Shadowrun and... ?

[DragonChild]

4. Palladium's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles first edition. I'd call chargen a war crime, but that would be unduly harsh to many infamous war criminals.

I'd love to hear you talk sometimes about RPGs everyone has heard about but nobody actually has but old-timers, like that, or whatever one about aliens stealing cheerleaders (were there multiple?).

[TheFlatline]

I dont have to read a game to know it has problems. The bazillion online reviews and discussions available allow me to take a very good picture of most games out there and their problems (or qualities)

It would be rather easy if half the people in the discussion actually read or play the damn game, you know. I bet we would not be having this discussion in the first place.

[brized]

Emerald, that's some Phoenix Wright shit right there.

[erik]

That's bullshit, I don't see the NFL anywhere on there. This thread is as good as any to discuss the serious issue of "Has u ever RPG'd with a person of colour?"

Has u?

I'm a person of color who RPG's

I can vouch for that. And we were both turned onto RPing by a black dude.

I am assuming ogre is accepting my invitation to derail yet another silva troll thread and support his post in that spirit.

Yes, I has!

[radthemad4]

There's some lovely filth down here.

[Scrivener]

If you ignore the obvious three (FATAL RaHoWa and sinnabar), my list would be.
Scion what a cool concept. What a failure at every step. Aside from rules that aren't explained, actual parts of the rules encourage combat to be a pointless exercise of wacky stunts while you wail away at beat sticks. (The "stunt" system). The entire idea of cinematic game in scion is "everyone fights like Jackie Chan" not quick easy and let the rule if cool be king.

Asylum this is bad design 101. We have an overly complicated setting with a proposed meta plot, encouragement for random and pointless PvP (seriously, in an example of play one PC shoots at another for no reason other then they were far away), and the worthless cutesy die mechanic (draw marbles out of a bag, lol, you've lost your marbles lol, please kill me). There is nothing redeeming about this game, and everyone involved in it should apologize to society.

BESM d20- poorly worded, with an easily abused point buy system. I had no positives about this game, but most d20 point buy ports suffer from the same pitfalls.

Honorable mention to anything that uses the poker dice mechanic like Cthulu tech.

[Wiseman]

I know what the first two are, but what is Synnabar? Can someone give me a quick rundown, or link me to somewhere that explains it?

[Mask_De_H]

CTech is an unplayable, rapey mess which manages to fuck up everything it rips off, so it's up there. Scion isn't actually a game that you can run. The Returner FFRPG 2nd Edition was a hot mess, I remember. So was Pokemon Tabletop Adventures.

[Krusk]

I can't play a session of savage worlds without being furious. So I have to throw it in conversation, even if it isn't universally agreed as top 3.

Cthulutech was terrible for the reasons Mask says.

Hellas RPG - was god awful, and generally stupid in both concept and execution.

Little Fears - This is like, pederast the RPG. Nightmare Edition is billed as the worst of the bunch, but I'm not sure. NE claims to use the pederast fantasy as fuel for "how messed up everything is", whereas the other editions use it as a joke.

PF should seriously win some points for taking one of the better RPGs out there, shitting on it, then reselling it. They had years of playtest reports and all the problems were well known. The designers managed to ignore them and write what they did.

Rifts is an unplayable mess that with classes that encourage Malks (the crazy) and classes that are vastly different power levels (mech pilot vs homeless dude vs dragon vs dog man). Luckily its setting and concepts are just awesome.

Rogue Trader is nice for the whole "You are the elite of the elite of the universe, but you are still small fries compared to any NPC you meet". Also its system is god awful.

Spycraft 2nd edition. Its just d20 modern. Like straight up. But it was published after and managed not to learn from it at all.

I've got a softspot for Street Fighter the Storytelling Game" but haven't gotten to play it yet. it doesn't really have a system for things outside of Hand to Hand combat between 2 people... because its street fighter. But you are expected to do other stuff, and just sort of make some stuff up. And its billed as a team game, so it should be rare for 1v1 fights. So I'm not really sure how you are supposed to use the rules for anything. (Shit I just noticed it was made by White Wolf Game Studio, is it somehow part of WOD?)

Someone tried to get me to play Mordheim or Necromundia once claiming it was an RPG, but I'm pretty sure it was just a tabletop game. I wasn't allowed to look at the rules for either so I don't know whether its an RPG and bad, or a tabletop game and also bad.

Anytime you try to find a steampunk RPG all you get are super sexist victorian age RPGs which are kind of ironic. Almost all include an essay on "its required for accuracy" but I can't see how the main audience (women) for steampunk stuff can get behind it. (Recommendations?) (not Victoriana, The Imperial Age, Forgotten Futures, Etherscope or Broken Gears please)

uhh.. top 3 (outside of the obvious)
Hellas, Little Fears, Rogue Trader.

[Stinktopus]

I can't play a session of savage worlds without being furious. So I have to throw it in conversation, even if it isn't universally agreed as top 3.

I'd like to hear more about your issues with Savage Worlds. I keep hearing it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it always leaves me a little unsatisfied.

[ACOS]

Unsatisfied how? Like, in the way that the RNG is totally fucked from the start?

[rampaging-poet]

I lost what little respect I had for Savage Worlds the first time I tripped someone. We looked up the rules and found that standing from prone is a free action you can make as part of defending yourself against a melee attack. Since it's harder to hit prone creatures with ranged attacks, being tripped is actually a buff.

As ACOS mentions, the RNG is pretty messed-up. The creators claim higher attributes are always better, but that isn't strictly true. There are some numbers that are easier to hit by rolling up a low-attribute die type than by upgrading dice - or at so close that the return on investment for the higher die is low. From what I recall, those particular target numbers are pretty common in the system.

Other poor design choices include character drawbacks that get worse the longer the campaign goes on, metagame mechanics that encourage IRL five-minute workdays, and exploding dice in a game intended to resolve quickly.

[Stinktopus]

Unsatisfied how? Like, in the way that the RNG is totally fucked from the start?

Well, since you asked so nicely and my lunch break just started...

1. Bennies: Great idea hard-wiring "blow the DM for power" right into the system. When I played, I found myself getting bennies for making the DM laugh, while people who were less boisterous, but still playing their characters, got nothing. Some people have suggested giving out bennies for players hindering themselves, or failing spectacularly, but that just turns into FATE-style, Sackpunch Dicklazer shenanigans.

2. Exploding Dice: This mechanic seems like it was included for people who laugh uproariously at farts well past the age of 30. PC's can shake off a shotgun blast with a soak roll, then destroy a fucking tank by throwing a rock at it. A row of peasant archers that would be irrelevant in D&D becomes of fucking Death Star in SW.

3. Toughness/Soak/Shaken: The actual methods for dealing injury to someone in SW are back-asswards. "Soaking" damage makes some sense for White Wolf supernaturals, but Indiana Jones doesn't shrug off bullet wounds. Bad guys in the "Pulp Hero" genre are suppose to miss, which doesn't happen much in SW ranged combat.

Remember the library scene from James Bond: Goldeneye? Bond goes running down a catwalk while machine gun fire explodes all around him. Well, in Savage Worlds, Bond would be fucking hamburger. Meanwhile, his final fight against Sean Bean would consist of them pinging small caliber handgun fire off of each other's adamantine hides.

[silva]

Never played Savage Worlds myself (the bennies management always felt anti-immersive to me) but I heard a lot of complaints about the game selling itself as "fast and furious action" and then being actually slow in action. Also the weird resolution mentioned by Rampagin-poet.

Anytime you try to find a steampunk RPG all you get are super sexist victorian age RPGs which are kind of ironic. Almost all include an essay on "its required for accuracy" but I can't see how the main audience (women) for steampunk stuff can get behind it. (Recommendations?) (not Victoriana, The Imperial Age, Forgotten Futures, Etherscope or Broken Gears please)

Two I played and liked..

- Ghost Lines. (requires familiarity with Apocalypse World)
- Castle Falkenstein.

This one I never played but heard good things:

- Wolsung.

[talozin]

I can't play a session of savage worlds without being furious. So I have to throw it in conversation, even if it isn't universally agreed as top 3.

I'd like to hear more about your issues with Savage Worlds. I keep hearing it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it always leaves me a little unsatisfied.

Oy, Savage Worlds. I played in a year-long SW campaign, and, while I did not hate it, you also have to take into account that it immediately followed a 4E campaign and therefore automatically looked better by comparison. Also, we played the swashbuckling pirate adventures setting rather than the pulp heroes setting, so no problems with autofire weapons and such.

The bennie mechanic is not inherently a terrible one. Giving players more agency, fine. As long as the GM sticks to giving out a fixed number at the start of the session and gives them to the group when they accomplish in-session goals, rather than awarding individual players because he feels like it, it ends up working okay. Of course, this is in direct contradiction to the way the rules tell you to pass them out like candy whenever someone amuses you or does something you think is fabulous.

Swashbuckling pirate swordsmen tend to start looking a lot alike because the system is fairly granular and not all that option-rich. Also, the soak mechanics are, as noted, absurd and backwards.

The RNG is both quite bland and occasionally ridiculously swingy, which is quite an accomplishment. We eventually started using special combat maneuvers almost as the default, just because hitting was very easy but doing enough damage to make someone care was less so. On the other hand, for a cinematic pirate campaign, that periodic swinginess was arguably in theme.

I didn't find resolution speed to be particularly slow (again, bear in mind we were coming off 4E) but the exploding dice did periodically cause issues where somebody wouldn't notice they needed to add an extra die. Annoying but not fatal.

I wouldn't rate it one of the worst games ever designed, though. There are so many games that are both mechanically terrible and complex and difficult to learn that Savage Worlds is actually somewhat refreshing by comparison.

[fectin]

Try Leagues of Adventure for steampunk.

[ACOS]

@ SW bennies = "blow the DM for power":
I think this is supposed to be on purpose. The intent is to encourage a certain type of behavior at the table.
I'm not saying that this is a good way to do it; but I can appreciate the goal.
I knew a guy who really liked SW, and his attitude was "if you're just going to be a bump on a log, then this is the wrong game for you".

@ exploding dice:
I actually like the idea of exploding dice (in principle) - it makes things a little less deterministic.
I guess it depends on your tolerance for slowing down the overall pace in exchange for a chance to do some nifty stuff that is outside the norm.

@ soak:
I've only played a few sessions, so I didn't really experience any real issues with this.

Another big problem I have with SW is the initiative system. I get what they were going for, but I found it rather distracting and intrusive.

---

Never played Savage Worlds myself (the bennies management always felt anti-immersive to me)

I'd say that this is one of the more incoherent things you've said.
Also, did you really just shill for yet another AW hack?

[CCarter]

I know what the first two are, but what is Synnabar? Can someone give me a quick rundown, or link me to somewhere that explains it?

http://www.somethingawful.com/dungeons- ... cracken/1/

Its a multigenre RPG set on a spaceship made out of a hollowed-out Mars 50,000 years in the future. Uses d100 roll under mostly for mechanics, stats are rolled on d20 (minimum 8) and go up to between 25 and 1100 depending on the stat and how many god levels you have. Classes include android, aquaman, giant, psionic elf, ninja with lightsaber, winged guy, dwarf, superhero (mutant) and shapeshifting dragon that hates gay people, as well as having a point-based GURPS option (the best choice if you want bionics since those cost skill points).

[name_here]

I watched a stream of people going through Synnibarr character creation for charity. One line sums up the horror and confusion: "Mutants do not receive mutations."

I mean, it turns out they actually get them in a later stage of the character creation, but the book did not see fit to mention that when saying they didn't get mutations.

[Koumei]

I've got a softspot for Street Fighter the Storytelling Game" but haven't gotten to play it yet. it doesn't really have a system for things outside of Hand to Hand combat between 2 people... because its street fighter. But you are expected to do other stuff, and just sort of make some stuff up. And its billed as a team game, so it should be rare for 1v1 fights. So I'm not really sure how you are supposed to use the rules for anything. (Shit I just noticed it was made by White Wolf Game Studio, is it somehow part of WOD?)

It's not part of the World of Darkness, but arguably, it's no worse at mixing with Vampire than, say, Werewolf. So if you have chainsaw furries in your emo count game, then you may as well have Ryu in there too.

I mean, the combat systems work completely differently, but WW practically defines itself by "Having ten different rule sets that are almost the same but suddenly they are different in key parts and everything stops working".

[Dean]

Savage Worlds is definitely bad, it's just not talked about that much because it isn't bad in very interesting ways. Savage Worlds combat is largely unplayable because any successful attack does 1/3rd of your health so any combat that is not against a small number of weak opponents will kill at least 1 PC. It also includes a lot of non-choices like "Attack" or "Attack better (Wild Attack)" so everyone ends up saying the standard choices many many times in the course of a night. It also has no challenge guidelines so there's no way to actually know what your party should be fighting and since it is a rule lite game almost all of its power are written so vaguely as to mandate arguments and houserules for even basic mechanics.

I have read many worse systems than Savage Worlds but it is probably one of the worst ones that comes across as initially playable. I think the 3 worst games I've actually played would be 4E Gamma World, Savage Worlds, and Exalted.

As an aside I fucking -love- Star Wars Saga and that game is really commonly talked about as if it's shit. I disagree with that common wisdom because Star Wars Saga, much against it's own intent, can be played in a very high optimization style where you abuse it's Spaceship modification rules, Droid modification rules, and Gear modification rules and get a great game. It is a game that looks NOTHING like Star Wars but is intensely fun to run and play.

[TheFlatline]

After being burned so badly by the previous WOTC attempt at Star Wars RPG (you know, the one where a level 1 jedi has a better chance of reflecting a blaster bolt than yoda. Yes really) when the Saga edition came out I was so pissed at the system that I never looked at it.

I guess they fixed some of those errors, but the derp was so bad that I wanted to beat my head against the wall.

[OgreBattle]

I'm a person of color who RPG's

I can vouch for that. And we were both turned onto RPing by a black dude.

I am assuming ogre is accepting my invitation to derail yet another silva troll thread and support his post in that spirit.

Yes, I has!

One of the first campaigns I was in was run by a Black dude.

[silva]

I know what the first two are, but what is Synnabar? Can someone give me a quick rundown, or link me to somewhere that explains it?

http://www.somethingawful.com/dungeons- ... cracken/1/

Its a multigenre RPG set on a spaceship made out of a hollowed-out Mars 50,000 years in the future. Uses d100 roll under mostly for mechanics, stats are rolled on d20 (minimum 8) and go up to between 25 and 1100 depending on the stat and how many god levels you have. Classes include android, aquaman, giant, psionic elf, ninja with lightsaber, winged guy, dwarf, superhero (mutant) and shapeshifting dragon that hates gay people, as well as having a point-based GURPS option (the best choice if you want bionics since those cost skill points).

Ugh. That looks like shit.

But... does it have an entire sub-system thats central to its premise and do not work at all, like Shadowrun Matrix ?

See, thats one of the main problems with Shadowrun. Its like playing a game of Spellcasters where the spellcasting rules are totally broken. After 5 editions.

[Whipstitch]

You keep saying that like it's an uncommon featur in rpgs.