Do you love a game despite the mechanics being garbage?

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 8:28 pm

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...

And it is a completely confusing and unbalanced clusterfuck of trap options, fail options, God stats and Crap Stats, an absurdly broken combat system and explicitly has like, OVER 9000!!! mechanics that put you straight the fuck off the Random Number Generator.

Yet I really like it and I'm psyched for Scion 2.0, that is if that vanity press Onyx Path ever puts it out. I know the game has been richly supported online with balance fixes, patches, house rules and a jaw-dropping amount of fan content and they will charge me money for it. And I will buy it. Because I like Scion, even if the system is garbage.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 8:41 pm

Rifts and various White Wolf stuff. Werewolf the Apocalypse has a perpetual soft spot in my heart for being one of the longest running games I've ever played, and because it was really the first full game I'd gotten to play. Rifts is just fucking crazy and thus fun. And another lengthy game in my history.

Scion has always appealed to me, but I haven't gotten a chance to play.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 8:49 pm

Well I play 3rd/PF if that counts. If we were talking about games I've run and had fun with despite it being bad as fuck then I can mention some. Star wars SAGA for one. My players loved playing but I hated running it. I also had one somewhat successful game of Seventh Sea.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 8:50 pm

Prak wrote:Rifts and various White Wolf stuff. Werewolf the Apocalypse has a perpetual soft spot in my heart for being one of the longest running games I've ever played, and because it was really the first full game I'd gotten to play. Rifts is just fucking crazy and thus fun. And another lengthy game in my history.

Scion has always appealed to me, but I haven't gotten a chance to play.

Werewolf was a fun power trip. Playing an immensely powerful character that was predestined to be doomed/to die made you let go of the toon and have *fun*. You get attached to PCs otherwise and hoard them instead of play them to the hilt. I don't think I ever had more than one or two Werewolf characters that *didn't* die in a spectacularly gory over the top death. It was kind of great.

I kind of wonder what a supers (or other supernatural) game would be like if chargen was fairly easy and quick and part of it was that you rolled or somehow determined how many sessions your character was going to last before he/she/it died off. Yeah you have a constant roster of shifting characters but as a player you know that you might as well go balls out since you only have, maximum, 3 more sessions left before your character dies anyway.

Sort of like the Dwarven Troll Slayers from Warhammer Fantasy.

Vampire will always hold a soft spot in my heart because it was my portal to goth girls who I had an immense thing for in high school.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 8:52 pm

I'll throw in Dark Heresy 1st ed. That system was a steaming pile of manure that literally gave me a splitting headache every time I had to keep track of the mechanics of it, but it allowed me to play an epic multi-year campaign and take it places successfully I've never taken games before.

Concise Locket · Post by **Concise Locket** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 8:53 pm

There are too many games with passable-to-good mechanics for me to love a game with obviously shitty mechanics.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:04 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...

And it is a completely confusing and unbalanced clusterfuck of trap options, fail options, God stats and Crap Stats, an absurdly broken combat system and explicitly has like, OVER 9000!!! mechanics that put you straight the fuck off the Random Number Generator.

Yet I really like it and I'm psyched for Scion 2.0, that is if that vanity press Onyx Path ever puts it out. I know the game has been richly supported online with balance fixes, patches, house rules and a jaw-dropping amount of fan content and they will charge me money for it. And I will buy it. Because I like Scion, even if the system is garbage.

I've heard this from more than one person, and I absolutely don't get it. Scion does not have an action resolution system. At all. There are no difficulties for actions. If you want to [do a thing] it is possible to calculate how many dice you will roll, and also possible to calculate that that doesn't matter for shit because of how many automatic successes the game throws around, but it is not possible to calculate how many successes you need to roll to achieve anything in particular.

Scion is literally unplayable. I don't mean that it's a broken mess, although of course it is. I mean that it cannot be played because somewhere along the way the seventeen people designing and writing that game forgot to include the core rules or even the core mechanic.

Scion does not bring anything to the table at all. The concept is public domain. The major characters are public domain. The world is basically undescribed. And the game system isn't even finished. What advantage is there in "playing Scion" rather than playing any other game and calling all the player characters Percy Jackson expies?

-Username17

Bodshivita · Post by **Bodshivita** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:08 pm

Honestly... ?

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

They're the kind of settings you can read through and dream up epic stories for afterwards.

And, I'm familiar enough with said games to know where they catastrophically fuck-up -- the material for Ex 3e has shown me that the devs can't even solve the simplest issues with the game.

I'm also a sucker for Eclipse Phase.

TOZ · Post by **TOZ** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:12 pm

I have only ever played d20. So yeah.

Bodshivita · Post by **Bodshivita** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:17 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
What advantage is there in "playing Scion" rather than playing any other game and calling all the player characters Percy Jackson expies?

-Username17

In my experience, this is what most people do. Using either Fate, or M&M.

silva · Post by **silva** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:25 pm

Shadowrun.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:34 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
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...

And it is a completely confusing and unbalanced clusterfuck of trap options, fail options, God stats and Crap Stats, an absurdly broken combat system and explicitly has like, OVER 9000!!! mechanics that put you straight the fuck off the Random Number Generator.

Yet I really like it and I'm psyched for Scion 2.0, that is if that vanity press Onyx Path ever puts it out. I know the game has been richly supported online with balance fixes, patches, house rules and a jaw-dropping amount of fan content and they will charge me money for it. And I will buy it. Because I like Scion, even if the system is garbage.
I've heard this from more than one person, and I absolutely don't get it. Scion does not have an action resolution system. At all. There are no difficulties for actions. If you want to [do a thing] it is possible to calculate how many dice you will roll, and also possible to calculate that that doesn't matter for shit because of how many automatic successes the game throws around, but it is not possible to calculate how many successes you need to roll to achieve anything in particular.

Scion is literally unplayable. I don't mean that it's a broken mess, although of course it is. I mean that it cannot be played because somewhere along the way the seventeen people designing and writing that game forgot to include the core rules or even the core mechanic.

Scion does not bring anything to the table at all. The concept is public domain. The major characters are public domain. The world is basically undescribed. And the game system isn't even finished. What advantage is there in "playing Scion" rather than playing any other game and calling all the player characters Percy Jackson expies?

-Username17

Between almost everything Neil Gaiman has written and books like Last Call by Tim Powers, I can understand the appeal of ancient myth and ancient gods trying to survive in modern day without their worshippers or power structure. In fact, on reflection ancient myth interacting with modern Earth is one of my preferred fiction genres. So the concept certainly has legs.

I just... never felt the click from Scion. A better-done myth-in-modern-Earth setting might appeal to me though.

silva · Post by **silva** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:49 pm

@Flatline: Unknown Armies scratches that Neal Gaiman itch for me. But I think its rules won't do it for you, knowing your tastes.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:49 pm

Big Eyes, Small Mouth.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:58 pm

Leress wrote:Big Eyes, Small Mouth.

I had *one* great game of BESM where the DM, who almost never DM'd anything, basically just said "Fuck it anything goes. I'll say yes or run with whatever the fuck you throw at me."

So I played a demon trapped in a ninja sword that could communicate telepathically and possess individuals for basically one combat scene if someone could hit with me to begin with.

Which spun off into this really bizarre game where angels and demons had fought Armageddon and called a stalemate and retreated to heaven and hell, but remnants stuck at the moment of the truce were forced to inhabit items and haunt them.

Which got really weird when the guy playing the wizard in the group decided that all magic in this setting was powered by these artifacts and that we were actually living in this pseudo Final Fantasy magitech world and that there were warring factions who wanted to keep using the celestials as mystical batteries and others who wanted free them, worship them, or kickstart the war again.

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.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 10:05 pm

I played one game of BESM and never played it again. It was a long time ago and I remember playing a terrakinetic Gaara/Toph wannabe in a team of supercomic ripoffs. Was ok, but too crazy for me to ever decide to actually run or play in again.

angelfromanotherpin · Wed Apr 15, 2015 10:08 pm

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.

Shady314 · Post by **Shady314** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 10:22 pm

For me the "game" is the mechanics but of course there are plenty of settings I enjoy, at least conceptually, but I never use their mechanics.

Like Bodshivita I enjoy Eclipse Phase. I read the books, however I quickly started skipping straight over anything mechanical. Chargen was so awful it literally made me angry reading it.

Bodshivita · Post by **Bodshivita** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 10:27 pm

Shady314 wrote:For me the "game" is the mechanics but of course there are plenty of settings I enjoy, at least conceptually, but I never use their mechanics.

Like Bodshivita I enjoy Eclipse Phase. I read the books, however I quickly started skipping straight over anything mechanical. Chargen was so awful it literally made me angry reading it.

Eclipse Phase has mechanics? =.=

Miiiiiind chaaaaaaaaulk...

Though, I digress. Concepts can be so attractive, that it makes a steaming pile of shit palatable.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 11:01 pm

Mage the Awakening. Had a really fun campaign with that, and I'm pretty sure the GM was filling in gaps with house-rules.

Rifts, sort of. Looking at the gonzo list of stuff you can play always makes me want to play it. But in actual play, its record is mixed - less than half the times have been good.

silva · Post by **silva** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 11:04 pm

angelfromanotherpin wrote:The most telling part of that story is how the part that made it good is nothing to do with the BESM system.

Which is the case most of the times, no ?

I mean, at least for me, the most memorable parts of my gaming experience are more related to the story/scene/fiction/etc than actual rules.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 11:14 pm

nWoD Mage. We didn't play with most of the society stuff, we just had mages that hunted down other mages (or non-mages) and then blew shit up in a big way. Plus improv magic.

I just want a way to add more action stuff and improv magic to After Sundown.

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 11:16 pm

I've played and enjoyed Rifts and Nightspawn despite the mechanics being trash, but wouldn't say I loved those games either.

For me only one game really can claim that double-edged honor. Deadlands.

If I'm going to love a game then the character creation mechanics have to allow me to make interesting (and ideally, competent) characters, so Savage Worlds version of Deadlands is right fucking out. Original Deadlands did meet that bar handily. Some of my most enjoyable gaming has been despite that the action mechanic for Deadlands is one of the worst of any game system I've ever played. I of course prefer to play with house rules to correct the most egregious garbage, but I'm always down for some Deadlands.

Silent Wayfarer · Post by **Silent Wayfarer** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 12:30 am

Exalted for me. I like the juxtaposition of glorious golden demigod and budding adventuret (and how you could be both at once as a starting Exalt).

brized · Post by **brized** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 12:34 am

Call of Cthulhu, because The Haunting is a fun short adventure and Masks of Nyarlathotep is a fun long adventure. Though I had to analyze the ruleset and then house rule the shit out of it to make it work for my group, so...I don't know if that actually counts.

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Do you love a game despite the mechanics being garbage?

Do you love a game despite the mechanics being garbage?

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