I have a shelf and a computer filled with old RPG's. I'm not an obsessive collector, and it's rare for me to have more than one or two books from any given system, but I really enjoy owning older games and just flipping through them sometimes for fun and/or nostalgia.

The other night I was hit with just such a fit of nostalgia and I leafed through my old copy of the Aliens Adventure Game (1991). Back in the olden days, we gamers were all about official licenses and rules. We loved rules. And back in those misty old days of yore, we didn't really have any conception of mechanical consistency or sense. And we certainly weren't willing to sacrifice mathematical vigour for playability. We didn't care if a single round of combat took all night, so long as I could aim a shot at that quadruped's left rear large toe in full confidence there was a table somewhere that would allow me to do so.

And Aliens is the absolute pinnacle of that whole line of thought. Absolutely BESET by tables and numbers and rolls and rules and limitations and arbitrary bonuses, it's just about the single most cumbersome and unplayable game in my library.

Does anyone else have an example of a game that you like, maybe even love, but just can't imagine actually playing? Whether because the system is complex, or silly, or just plain broken?

GURPS... :p  *runs*

I have a number of games that I am not willing to GM due to their complexity, but would play if given the chance.  For example, DCC RPG.

About the only game I have that I can think of that I would not be willing to play due to its complexity is Pathfinder.  I backed the Runequest kickstarter and only flipped through the book when it arrived, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the patience to deal with its rules set either.

Back in the day I bought the Weapons of the Gods RPG, a pretty cool 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden dragon' kinda game.

It's still to this day, after countless rules system I have read, the only RPG rules I was unable to understand. The setting is pretty cool, the book is beautiful, but the rules are unplayable.

Don't know if a 2e was made to correct the problem, but 1e was crazy.

I heard Phoenix Command is the pinnacle of overly detailed rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Command

Legends Of The Wulin is a sequel in all but naming rights - I haven't had any major problems, but I know others have sworn off it for the same issues you had with WOTG.

I don't play GURPS but that is because I do not agree with giving someone credit for stealing another persons ideas.

I have not come across a game I love that has rules too complex for me, although I do love Deadlands but I find that no one else wants to play or run it.

That would be "What is Geist: The Sin Eaters?" Alex. Not because it's silly or complex or broken, but because no one ever runs it.

Complaining aside, Houses of the Blooded is up there for me. HotB is one of those games that's beautiful, elegant, even downright simple at times, but it requires a certain type of player and GM that's altogether too rare to get a meaningfully sized group together for. Both are required to cede a lot of control over their characters to the rest of the folks at the table (which isn't always a bad thing in HotB, even though it's not always a bad thing ever). Both must not only be okay with losing but actually want to lose at things (because HotB is all about losing beautifully, in the end). And both must, through the cosmic forces that align the universe, be willing and able to sit down and actually play the game for longer than an introduction sequence. I know that HotB gets played, or at least it did, but I always worry that I'll never see it done it my lifetime.

Mekton Zeta ranks up there pretty high on the "complex" factor. I think I once heard tell there was a new version being made, but the old version has a wonderfully/terribly complicated mecha crafting system that's sort of underwhelmingly overshadowed in actual play by the simplistic rolling system. So it's a pain.

And then I always forget, no matter how many times I go to approach it, how baffling Exalted is to me. I really want to play Exalted, I swear I do, but I just cannot seem to wrap my head around it. I can run Scion without blinking. I can play nWoD and oWoD with a little help now and then. But there's something about Exalted that I just cannot figure out (or, at the very least, 2e, which is all I've ever experienced). Maybe I just need a better teacher, or maybe I just need to look at it on my own again (he said for the 8th time), but it's just crazy to me that I can't understand the system when I understand so many similar(ish) ones.

There are other systems I won't play, or have no interest in, but I'd say those are the three that fit the nature of this thread. ;)

How could I forget Gamma World 3E?  That game was a hot mess.  Even with the errata material, I still can't make it work.

Can I add Fate? I have never managed to be in a game that made it past 100 posts using fate lol.

I have a tendency to really like games by tiny development teams, which means that there are a lot of things that I want to play that are unplayable by anyone other than the one or two dudes that made the game. Dog Town is the biggest offender I can think of on that list, though it has enough supplements out there that there has to be someone out there playing it.

How about:  Manhunter (not the Rifts crossover supplement, the original) and Deepsleep?  A friend of mine tried to figure out Manhunter to run.  Deepsleep, an avatar game where you play yourself, I picked up at a flea market because it was published in my hometown; talk about confusing.....

Spacemaster was a crazy complex game to parse with few examples of how exactly to interpret everything. I absolutely loved the material, it was my first exposure to ideas of transhumanism and such ultratech which I found fascinating.

Let's go even further back to the early 80's and almost anything by Fantasy Games Unlimited - Space Opera, Aftermath, Bushido all quickly come to mind.  As much as I loved some of their settings, there was a reason they were nicknamed, "-censored- Games Unplayable."
This message was last edited by the user at 23:53, Tue 11 Oct 2016.

Rolemaster was "playable" - assuming you survived character creation, at least.  :D

In reply to dybbuk67 (msg # 13):

You need to censor your f-bomb, or the moderators will do it for you.

Why do you think GURPS is unplayable? I have yet to play it (in spite of having all of the books...), but the rules seem fine to me.

I guess it depends on a person... Personally, I just can't wrap my head around Numenera rules, despite the fact that this system was supposed to be soooo easy and simple...

GURPS definitely fits the bill.  It is playable and I've used it many times.  It's just hard to run on RPoL because of the steps and specificity.  It takes longer.

But there was always something satisfying playing GURPS in college circa 1989 and aiming at the slit between a knight's helmet and knowing there was a chance your arrow could hit the mark.  Or with using some complicated martial arts maneuver and feeling like Bruce Lee--if the dice agreed.

TSR's Top Secret.  loved the game and it was easy to follow, but with the Cold war over and times changed, it seemed out of touch.  It didn't help that they stopped main production to work on a 'mission impossible' style and it didn't mesh with anything.

to me worst game I have that is kind of hard to follow is Aftermath.  where you start the game building yourself as a charrie.  Then figuring out the body armor and over lapping, etc.  Let the wandjina bump you off.  My group only kept me around as I was the only one who knew how to grow tobacco...or what the plant even looked like and 3 out of 6 smoked.

I know they were playable, because I had friends who played them...but I just could never get excited enough by either Battletech or Starfleet Battles to be willing to do the endless number-crunching and data-tracking involved in a game.

I absolutely adore Paranoia, but it's something I'll probably never get to play because it requires a basically perfect group to get the proper feel.  I've just never found a group that I thought had even a remote shot of pulling it off.

In reply to LBalor (msg # 20):

I've ran lots of Paranoia games. Mainly Classic, but Straight a couple of times too. There are definitely some players I would never accept into a Paranoia game, but it's not really THAT demanding. Worst case scenario, you can always play Zap with pretty much anyone.

I also found Amber Diceless to be unplayable.  Just too much competition between egos.  I'm sure that is not universal.

Ars Magica.
Beautiful game.  Beautiful concept.
But it actually has entire section of "Formulae Review" in the Appendix, just like an engineering textbook.

No, I don't mean "formulae for the player character wizards to create potions".  I mean the actual things needed to run the game.  There are tons of variables and terms used only for this game, and you need to know things like how many zings can a zoomble transfloop to if your wibble bonus is eight.  And how do you calculate that wibble bonus?

You don't so much learn this game as take courses in it.

The trick with Amber is, if you don't want a lot of PvP stuff, just give them a bigger threat to focus on.  Like, for example, an invasion by unstoppable enemies from another universe, bent on "terraforming" this one to suit their own very alien needs.

That's worked for me for the game I've been running for the last 14 years.  Occasional outbursts of party infighting, but they've mostly been focussing on the alien things and how to defeat them.

In reply to Dgorjones (msg # 3):

Can you give an example of why you think Pathfinder was crazy complicated? Personally, I saw Pathfinder as an improvement from the normal D&D stuff.

And it both was and wasn't.

Pathfinder added a lot of different paths for different classes to follow, and it got rid of "empty levels" so there was more to do and combine with each level up.

So the complexity is not so much in the system, as it is in the various builds that players can come up with.  Lots more stacking of feats and special abilities.

I've played Paranoia games too.  It is hard to get a solid group who get into the feel, especially  here on RPoL compared to tabletop.  The other hard thing was the introduction of the Perversity Points in Paranoia XP, which I could simply not use on RPoL.  However, the traitor accusation method introduced in XP can be translated well to RPoL and make it interesting, but you still need the right players.

In reply to Eur512 (msg # 23):

Ars Magica takes a slightly different approach, but once you get used to it, it is quite playable.   You have to want to put in all that time in the lab to be a good Magus, and enjoy that sort of thing.  A magus should be spending 3 out of 4 seasons in his lab.

Which is why there are the various mythic companions you can use to fill your magus slot if you don't want to deal with all those variables.

I have heard it referred to as "an extended experiment in character creation."  While not completely accurate, there is a ring of truth to it.

Hands down.  Wraeththu

And I've looked at dozens of systems over the years.   I didn't expect to be able to play this game... the setting was enough to guarantee that I'd never even test it.  But it made for amusing reading...
This message was last edited by the user at 06:07, Thu 13 Oct 2016.

I'm a collector of superhero rigs and I have to admit the worse one I've bought and probably the worse RPG in general I've ever seen is Chimaera Universe Roleplaying Game

this game has terrible layout and absolutely no readable rules anywhere....I have never found game until this one that I couldn't at least role up a character with.... but I had difficulty finding the rules for making a character and when I did I might as well been reading a foreign language.....it is truly dreadful .....I can find nothing positive to say about it.

http://www.chimaerastudios.com/core_rule.htm

In reply to dybbuk67 (msg # 28):

Ars Magica certainly does take a "different approach."

Let's summarize this for the viewers at home.

You spend a lot of time and effort making up a very complicated main character, as well as a lesser character.

The main character is the one the game is really about, but that character has things far more important than the stuff of mere "role playing", despite it being a "role playing game".  You don't want that powerful, important, central character wasting his time, right?  So, for most of that, you use the secondary lesser character.

Now, given the pace of most Rpol games... Ars Magica would be truly unplayable here.

Your Magus is going to spend a season in his lab!  Excellent!  So, let's do something with that Companion that occurs over that time, and...

whoa... did we just spend two weeks of real time covering a one day meeting?  Yes, we'll get back to that Magus...  some day.

It's just a matter of perspective.  I can't understand how anyone can look at Pathfinder and fail to reach the same conclusion I did.  It's sort of like cilantro.  For some people, it tastes amazing.  For others, it tastes like dish soap.  It all depends on how you are wired.  I am a rules lite guy.  Pathfinder is anything but rules lite.  That doesn't mean it's a bad game or deserves to be bashed.  It's just not the game for me.

I have to concur on this one. This is going to sound strange but I learned DnD in 1st and 2nd ed. Those made sense, 3rd and on (including pathfinder) simply did not make any sense to me at all. Reading the rules made me think of modern MMO's rather than the game systems I grew up with.

Thanks to this, and everyone simply insisting on 3 and 3.5, I simply switched rule sets to something that made more sense to me. To me Wizards of the Coast killed the game and even though I tried several times, I could simply not grasp the game.

I'm finding myself more and more along the "rules lite" path as mentioned above. It is meant to be Role playing, not Roll playing (to me) and most rules lite systems encourage the former.

Mutants and Masterminds is unplayable to me.  There are so many broken elements that it's in desperate need of a from the ground up overhaul.

Character creation isn't the problem, but putting the mechanics into play is a non-starter for me.

In reply to badpenny (msg # 34):

Mutant and Masterminds....1st ed was fantastic ..I understood it and loved playing it...2nd ed just confused me and 3rd ed is just to Hero system (no disrespect to people who play hero system games) I will always play 1st ed M&M and nothing else if I have a choice

In reply to Heath (msg # 27):

My first encounter with Paranoia was when it came out, and I got to play with one of the original playtesters. I'd already played a handful of systems -- Basic D&D, AD&D, BattleTech, Rolemaster, stuff like that. With the original Paranoia, though, one of its tenets was that the players weren't allowed to learn how the rules worked. The GM was encouraged to penalize players if they looked like they were metagaming, and to make arbitrary changes to keep them guessing.

I only played a few sessions of it, but each one was chaotic, unpredictable, and memorable. The useless administration, the brainless micromanaging, the dangerous experimental tech, the back-stabbing and plotting. It was obvious each time that the real problem was something simple, but the needs of the setting made it impossible to take the common-sense approach. And even if we managed to succeed, most of the group's clones would end up imprisoned (or terminated) for some sort of treason anyway.

Every victory was Pyrrhic, every failure was spectacular. I never actually learned how the rules worked. It's been nearly thirty years since I last played, and I still vividly remember amusing anecdotes from it.

Now that I think about it, the system I hate the most is "Anima". Amazing concept, great lore, beautiful details...and it's incomprehensible. It took us SEVERAL DAYS to be 100% clear on the exact steps you need to take to create a character. Then we told the GM we'd quit if he didn't change systems.

badpenny, which edition of M&M are you talking about? Because for 3E I thought the in-game mechanics were really simple.

It's not about simplicity or character building, but playing the game.

Both 2e and 3e suffer from the same problem: trade-offs are broken.  Trading off Attack bonus for effect is not as good; trading off Defense for Toughness is not as good.

• Rolling over someone's Defense (Parry/Dodge) gets you nothing; lowering your effect also reduces your ability to stunt as you can't stunt off your attack bonus.
• Defense can be bypassed by Area attacks and Perception-range attacks; nothing bypasses Toughness.

The skill system is broken, more egregiously in 3e than in 2e, but both have problems.  Effects are clearly better than the effects you can buy from skills, for instance.  A STR 2 martial artist with invests 6 points to get Athletics +12 is totally outclassed by buying Wall-Crawling 1, Speed 2, and Leaping 2.  The effects require no skill rolls, are objectively better, and can even be used with Extra Effort for additional effect.

I can go on and on.  M&M 1e has other problems, but can be fixed with minor houserules, whereas 2e/3e would required a thorough re-write.

IMO, M&M 4e (if there should ever be one) should go all in on effect-based building and do away with skills for effects.  If you want to climb, buy Wall-Crawling and apply modifiers/descriptors to make it "skill-like."

But when you have so many ways to build characters that out class other characters, you have a broken system.  Street-level characters are so totally hosed in M&M they are unplayable.

Here's one that's unplayable, not to mention unbelievably obscure: Immortal: Invisible War.

The entire book is filled with full-color artwork on glossy pages, but the art looks like a DeviantArt newcomer just got his hands on Photoshop and has discovered things like lens flare. The sort of pictures that tend to accompany a breathy "let me tell you about my character".

The premise of the game is odd enough: the PCs start out as ordinary people (maybe even themselves) but quickly discover that they're actually immortal beings. Who can change shape into animal forms (or, in a couple cases, turn into weapons or detach their own shadow). They also find out that they can alter reality around them by 'singing' at it with a specialized vocal chord. This special chord is the key to their invulnerability, which means if it gets broken (by, say, severing the head), bye bye immortality.

Oh, and there's a worldwide shadow conspiracy that's infiltrated governments and wants to control and/or destroy them. So you've got Highlander-style immortals who can turn into animals, cast spells, revert to past lives, and run into X-Files-style weirdness.

If that's not hard enough to wrap your brain around, the game itself is notorious for having renamed every aspect of RPGs. They don't even use the terms 'point' or 'rank' or 'level'. You had to have the 'quick-start guide' on hand for a bit just to get the hang of the terminology.

To make matters worse, the first edition of the game was completely unplayable as-is. Character creation was a mess, and spread around several parts of the book. It had several 'Prides' (essentially, races) but didn't do much to differentiate them. It described interesting stuff about each 'Calling' (i.e., class) but didn't explain them in mechanical terms. The rules on 'spells' and shapechanging were vague at best.

Now, if you got ALL the add-on books, you were better off. One of them covered everything combat-related, and actually made the combat system useable. Another focused on the spell system, making it work. A third expanded on the whole shapeshifting thing and made that worth bothering with. But even then, the character-creation part was still broken. There was once a set of pages on their site that had a lot of mechanical bits about the races and classes (or, at least, most of them) and you could cobble together a workable way to make characters with all that info.

Those pages are gone now, and I'm not sure if the Wayback Machine can retrieve them. I'd have to figure out where to look first.

It's a novel concept. The past-lives/multiple-personality aspect plays out really well here (I've run it here). But it takes a LOT of work to make the rules playable.

I have a fear that you're talking about Anima: Beyond Fantasy and not Anima Prime, since I believe Anima Prime is a fairly simple system (and almost entirely unheard of to boot).

I'll be the first to admit that approaching Anima head-on is a lot like approaching a train head-on. The train is going to win. It's going to hurt you. And there's really not much of a chance that you'll survive the encounter. That being said, if you can find the right angle, Anima is a great way to get from point A to B, and it's a whole lot more fun than taking the plane (not more expedient, but more fun).

Anima has this terrible habit of, as you said, being "amazing... beautiful... [and] incomprehensible." They've dedicated at least 50% of the (currently) 8 books to character generation (and roughly that much in the Core book alone) and yet finding a rule that's consistent from one book to the next is sort of like finding one of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets inside an egg. It definitely wasn't supposed to be there, but it was a nice surprise. I've, quite literally, spent the last two years creating a character sheet in Open Office Calc (the poor man's Excel) which automatically calculates values for players, and it's still nowhere near finished. In fact, I still find rules I had no idea existed.

But, then again, you can do pretty much anything with the system. You can build your favorite characters and really flesh them out in the way you'd expect them to be fleshed out. As many ways as there are to break the system, every single build has a counter (with maybe one exception, but that exception is literally turning yourself into a god). There's this... freakishly precise balance to it that's completely nonsense given how unbalanced the system appears to be under even the tiniest bit of scrutiny. And, honestly, when compared to some systems I've gone up against it's just better for what I want to do, because gameplay is about 1000x easier than character generation. Seriously. It is.

The whole system is a mess, but it's one of my favorite messes of all time. I'm sorry to hear that you hate it so much, even if I can understand why. But if you're ever willing to give it another chance (or if anyone is), drop me a line. ;)

Also, back to the specific topic, I've always wanted to play Savage Worlds, but every time I read the rulebooks I have I get... disappointed, I guess. I feel like there's a lot there, but there's not enough there to make me excited about making a character. Or the information is presented in a way that just makes me a little sad. I honestly don't know. All I know is that every time I look at the books I think "Well, nah. Maybe next time."

These days, I consider anything with more than a couple of dozen pages to be unplayable. I’m getting less patient as I get older.

The days of poring over 400 page tomes to cross reference the level, race and class of a character with the level, class and type of a skill or spell, and then figure out which of the twenty variations apply in the particular circumstances the character is facing... are long gone. And good riddance!

I just can’t be bothered to read it all, let alone use it. My current go-to game has its core rules written on two sides of A4. I just roll 1D6, apply a couple of modifiers that are easily committed to memory, and move on to the next action.

The last attempt I made with a large rule set was BESM 2nd Ed. The character generation rules were fun to begin with - you could build just about anything in amazing detail. I played about with it and found that Batman was recognizably Batman, Aragorn was recognizably Aragorn. It was the rules equivalent of HeroMachine^tm.

But then all that detail becomes an irritating burden when you have to look up the multiple effects that each facet of your build has on actions. Having built these amazing characters, I just couldn’t be bothered playing them.

Should I mention Traveller The New Era? There are supplements in that game that let you construct bullets from individual components, for fruit’s sake! You pick a case length, head weight, and decide how much powder to put in it!
Then you can design a gun to put it in, and then you have to figure out the infinitesimal variations in characteristics that your weapon design brings to play - and IIRC in order to make use of those variations it becomes necessary to calculate the distance to target down to the nearest foot, etc, etc.

Talk about micro-management.

In reply to LonePaladin (msg # 36):

I had just about the same experience with Paranoia back in about 1988 or 1989.  The original rules might actually work better on RPoL because the players don't know the rules.  But the catch 22 with Paranoia is that your characters are already traitors so knowing the basics of the rules is part of their treasonous behavior.  Paranoia XP allowed them to know the basics--and the addition of perversity points and the traitor accusation chart was nice.  It also split games into the traditional type of comedy based mayhem (Zap), the regular paranoia style (Classic), and a serious, more rule focused game (Straight).

FYI, the new edition of Paranoia was funded by Kickstarter and I believe it will be released soon.

In reply to icosahedron152 (msg # 41):

At least Fire, Fusion and Steel's design sequences are optional.  You can always just stick to the default weapons.

Still, trying to design the ultimate weapon, vehicle or starship for the various iterations of Traveller is an oddly compelling solo game.  :)  Have spent a lot of time doing just that over the last 39 years (yes, Traveller turns forty next year).

My friend literally printed out charts and tables for combat. CHARTS AND TABLES. *shudders* That said, if I was the only player, I would have been fine with it. I had actually 90% finished my character, but I knew my fellow players would refuse to understand the system and I would have been expected to make up for them. I said no. And yeah, you're right, it offers quite a few opportunities for breaking things. Through using the Knowledge...sub-school?(I forget the terminology) and a couple of generic spells, I was casting spells from every school for free. (The weak, crappy spells, but still.)



On Paranoia, I joined the Kickstarter and the new rules look pretty nice.

For me, it's the HERO system, any edition. I've run out of patience for game systems that are textbooks because rule intricacy is not why I play pen-and-paper RPGs. I find it gets in the way of playing the game because I'm not always sure of the consequences for actions (I love my first tabletop group, but they were munchkins to the extreme)---and that is doubly true if I'm GM-ing.

HERO is not only complicated, but is also counter-intuitive for me because you wanted to roll under a number instead of over. Every game I had played before had a mechanic where you wanted to roll over a number. My first experience with it sucked blueberries because we tried it right after Shadowrun. Suddenly, rolling 6s was not a good thing.

Star Fleet Battles.   Oh the fun.   Oh the engineering manual the basic rules are....

Well, in all fairness, Anima just actually writes down the charts and tables that many other systems leave in the background for you to figure out yourself. You could easily do the same thing for Scion, D&D, M&M, WoD, and almost anything with a rulebook longer than a few pages. If it makes you feel any better, the rewrite of the Core Book did provide formulas for some of the charts instead (A-B=C; C*D=E sort of thing), and most of the tables are just descriptions of modifiers.


Subpath (close enough, really). I can imagine the path you would've taken there, and it seems like you either had a very solid grasp of the rules, or a very loose one. ;) Of course, given how Anima works, it could be both at the same time...


Wow. That sounds crazy as buckets. I don't even know how that would work (since it sounds like it doesn't).

True, but if you're going to stick to the default weapons, you might as well stick to Classic Traveller. :)

Yes, I spent a good many solo years designing stuff for Traveller myself. I have notebooks and obsolete computer programs full of the stuff. It's very compelling, but alas, not very playable.

I particularly liked Striker - except for its own unplayable section: aircraft. That section was an iterative process of redesign until you found a set of components that would fit properly into the airframe without being underpowered or overweight; utterly impossible without a spreadsheet.

Forty already?? I recall its thirtieth birthday like it was yesterday. Where's my bath chair and blanket?

Star Fleet Battles? I loved that game.....................

It kind of seems like there's a missing distinction between "games that are difficult to play" and "games that are difficult to create characters for".  GURPS and HERO both fall into the second category (and can also thus be difficult to run since making foes is much the same process), but in play they seem to work just fine.

Nobilis. Good God, how I love the idea and the setting of that game, especially the "Great White Book" edition. The same side of that coin relates to its sheer density though, and the depth required from both players and GM to make the game work in its purest form.

Oh, you can narrow it down and play just about any genre of storytelling through it, but at the same time it would feel to me like I'd be missing something, or depriving my players of options. I'm just not a good enough player or GM to run that game, but damn if the book isn't amazing.
This message was last edited by the user at 18:34, Sat 15 Oct 2016.

I dunno about you, but I found HERO also ground to a halt once combat started.

In reply to JxJxA (msg # 52):

Most games grind to a halt once combat starts, because most games are written for Face to Face play in real time.

PbP is different. Every little detail that adds to immersion or improves suspense across a table, generates impatience and boredom in PbP while you wait for someone in a different time zone to ask a question, receive an answer, roll the dice (maybe more than once), get feedback from the GM, and then post the results of their activity - each part of which takes 12-36 hours. Then you move on to the second of six players...

This is why I prefer simple rules these days, along with rules-lite or semi-freeform games.

In reply to icosahedron152 (msg # 53):

Well, in this case I meant face-to-face for HERO. It's definitely not something I'd ever want to play again.

I fall in the same group as you. I play RPGs for the acting and interaction. I like game systems that use a rule system that helps facilitate that while keeping people honest and not go into god-mode.

Yes, the interaction that one might use at a table has to be done away with over pbp. It's possible, though, to not ask that question (or allow players to answer it themselves), not require the feedback, and to allow players to resolve their own actions, so that their turn takes only a single post. It takes trust that isn't needed as strongly at the table (but which table play can also benefit from), but I have yet to see a game in which the rules actually required that degree of back and forth.

Edit: I get that you may be referring to details like hidden defenses an enemy might have, which can be sprung on players to turn the tables, and require the GM to supply the results of PC actions. Yes, those kinds of things can slow things down to an irritating degree, even at the table. I submit that neither immersion nor suspense hinge entirely on such things. I suppose this isn't the thread for that discussion, though.
This message was last edited by the user at 21:10, Sun 16 Oct 2016.

No, I think we're some way off topic. If you want to start another, though, I'll chat a while.

In reply to icosahedron152 (msg # 56):

Eh, probably not, thanks anyway. I've learned that people have very different ideas about what immerses them. I'm glad you know what works and what doesn't for you.

This message was deleted by the user at 04:40, Wed 19 Oct 2016.

I am really not sure what makes peoples' brains explode when they play M&M.  Yes, it's not strictly mechanically balanced, but it never has been (even in 1e.)  You just have to communicate from player to GM, and maybe in some cases fudge a bit.  Yes, as a GM, you have to be diligent about peoples' sheets and lay some ground rules and have mutually respectful players who will use mechanics to carry the flavor and tone of the game rather than playing the hypothetical mechanically ideal Stab Man.  Properly played and run, its mechanics really encourage a comic book feel better than most (if not all) supers systems I've had the privilege of playing.

Anima (Beyond Fantasy) is on the other side of the spectrum.  It system begs you to hyperspecialize, because if you don't Maxxor your Combaxxor Staxxor, you're going to get your ass kicked in by generic town guardsmen.  This leaves you with precious few points to round your character out.  The math gets worse when you consider skill checks.  Imagine a 30th level D&D 3.5 edition character having to make a DC 50 skill check he's not proficient in.  Only there are about... what, 40 different skills?  And if you want to be an athetic anime fighter guy, you know, what they sell on the cover, with the whole aesthetic and theme of the game, you need... Acrobatics, Athleticism, Climb, Jump (yes, this is a separate skill from Acrobatics AND Athleticism), Swim (and again), and Feats of Strength (?!?!).  And if you're spending your proper allotment of advancement points on being a proper anime fighter dude, there's no way you can keep up with all these, much less keeping up with all of these and not being blind, socially inept, and totally uneducated.

As for my personal bugaboo of an unplayable game?  A Time Of War, the hotly anticipated Mechwarrior RPG.  Chargen is a nightmare, and it strongly encourages heroin-addicted psychopaths with its point buy system, and the mechanics are not nearly nuanced, interesting, or satisfying enough to warrant all that effort.  I tried to run a Battletech campaign with A Time Of War characters in the backdrop, and I literally dropped it session 2, and homebrewed some Traveller stuff which was way, way easier and way, way better.

As someone who has spent a good few years with the system, I can tell anyone and everyone that none of this is true (there are 52 skills, not 40 =P ).

While it might not be as easy to do as D&D or other systems, it's certainly possible to make an Acrobatic Warrior that's proficient in nearly everything (there's an advantage for it, actually, which is nearly broken in how useful it is). As to what's a "proper allotment," I've gone through the books enough times to say, with confidence, that even without the advantage you can keep yourself relevant in 6-8 skills. The Level 30, DC 50 is a ridiculous comparison since most skill checks never get nearly that high (comparatively), and when a character is what would be 30th level in D&D, they have plenty of points to throw around.

I won't say Anima doesn't give the impression that most of this isn't possible, and some players even perpetuate these misconceptions, but just like you preached with M&M you need people who know the system and are willing to work with it properly. Almost anything is possible in Anima, even if it's not all possible at Level 1.

My experience with it has been largely at low levels, and my group as a whole had great difficulty building competent characters.  Maybe the math does level out eventually.  The game's writing and emphasis on rapidly scaling numbers certainly doesn't prepare one for the impression of the first level experience.  The benchmarks of what appear to be fairly generic NPCs (Knights, Samurai, and City Guards) seem to set extremely high bars for competence in combat.

Does the math level out as one advances in level?  Do you need to dig through multiple sourcebooks to build a character with basic competence?  I did see a... rule?  Errata?  That added some basic skill points to all characters, when we thought about picking it up again.  Do those help?  Do the mathematic performance requirements of characters at higher levels preclude spending your Creation points on things that are fun and thematic?

In reply to GreyGriffin (msg # 61):

Without derailing things too much, the rule you're talking about for extra skills is from the revised Core book (called Core Exxet) which isn't available in English. The revised Core, along with the GM's Toolkit and both of the setting books, makes character competency much easier, though Anima still has a flair of realism in that it limits just how much one can be good at without sacrifice.

While the combat bar can be set fairly high by the NPCs, it's important to remember most of them have no purpose other than their core job, and 95% of them have little-to-no supernatural capacity or equipment. It's also very much the decision of the GM whether or not they want to modify those stats in order to set combat expectations lower than the creators (who were, and still are, just a tad crazy).

And if you'd like to discuss this more I'm more than happy to do so over PMs, so that we can let this thread get back on track. Not that we're too far off course now, but I'd rather not risk it. ;)

In reply to Tyr Hawk (msg # 62):

I think discussing why systems are (or seem!) unplayable is quite salient discussion.  For instance, our conversation has brought up the interesting concept of benchmarking.

Games like D&D 3-4 are relatively easy to benchmark because of the vast swathes of statistically rich content.  You can easily compare your character to a goblin or a dragon and find out where he or she is on the food chain.  You look at the list of DCs for each of your skills and figure out what you are capable of.

A system with a wider variance of power, or less published content, can make it much more difficult to benchmark a character.  In Anima, for instance, all we have to compare ourselves to is the NPC stat blocks.  It's possible (probable?) that Anima seemed unplayable to my group because we were comparing ourselves to comparably leveled NPCs and finding ourselves wanting.

I have to admit I struggled making characters (and adversaries) in M&M until I learned to compare my character to various NPCs and equipment, up to and including a tank (the metal box with a cannon, not the PC role).  Once I had an eye on that baseline, and really got what those bonuses meant (in a comic bookey context), the game really started to make a lot more sense to me.

A lot of more abstract systems can seem unplayable because character generation feels very floaty, and you lack concrete reference points.  A dearth of content can force the GM to throw out math on the fly, and some  GMs are better at that than others.  Without some level of consistency or common understanding at the table, there's no real way to get a feel for your character's aptitude or capabilities.  You are just throwing dice into the void and hoping you get narrated a success.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:51, Thu 20 Oct 2016.

Rolemaster has something like this: character creation is very complex, and can take experienced players an hour or more. (It's much longer if you have no idea what you're doing.) The creatures and NPCs, on the other hand, are just given some abstract numbers with no real 'how-to' behind them.

A PC, for instance, is going to have ten different stats, with each skill using the combined bonuses from two or three of these, and dozens of skill ranks coming from background, package deals, and direct purchase. In the end, you'll need to know that your fighter has a weapon skill of, say, +75, but you know how it got that high.

By contrast, here are all the stats you get on a goblin, in shorthand: