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.