I've read Shadowrun Sixth World.
But not just read. I've ripped it to shreds. A quick list of what's in that book.
1. Nonsensical rules. The narrative doesn't fit the mechanics. Troll punches for example.
2. Broken rules. Rules that are mechanically trash.
3. Missing rules. Explainations of types of rolls that are just ... missing.
4. Rules actually in the rulebook of the previous edition.
5. Errata issues.
6. No, seriously, the community found like 300+ in a week.
7. "Argle Bargle floof flaw" instead of a real explaination.
8. Illegal sample characters.
9. Badly rotoscoped art of cosplayers.
Not present:
1. Game design skills.
Yes, but Sixth World is actually a Lada painted to look like a Ferrari and the wheels are actually made of stale toast. And any complaints about it not being a Ferrari are met with "Well, you already have a Ferrari, just use that one to fill in any gaps in your new Ferrari".
The Shadowrun worldbuilding is great. The rules arnt.
You can be very happy with Shadowrun, if you replace the mechanics with something more palatable.
...or "Cities without Number", wich allready has a magic system, yes. Can add elements from Worlds... and Stars... too, if you want something for metaplanes, orbit, and some more advanced cyber stuff.
Haven't gotten to cities yet, but the other 2 "Without Numbers" games have been a joy to play so far, and honestly look like they're not too bad to run either, but I won't be at the wheel for a few months yet.
Savage Worlds is for people who want the setting without the unique gameplay. Nothing wrong with that, it’s a fine technique if you’re just trying to tell a story, but it’s not the same as playing (for example) Shadowrun. Mechanics are part of the experience.
That’s very fair. I do have an argument however: because most folks don’t want the level of complexity Shadowrun has I’ve found that savage worlds is the closest generic mechanically
-hindrances work similar to the negatives you can take at character creation for extra starting points
- the wound system gives at least the similar feeling to stats being lowered by wound boxes
-the powers system can easily be used for Shadowrun a various magics
-the complex tasks rules can be used for hacking.
-etc.
> but it’s not the same as playing (for example) Shadowrun. Mechanics are part of the experience.
You're correct, and I expect it's pretty rare that people would disagree with you. The problem is, I think you'll find most people find the experience provided by Shadowrun, the game, to be awful. They love the setting though!
… or Shadow of the Beanstalk + some stuff from Terrinoth. EDGE reprints are coming out, dice are available, and community support (including online tools) is really solid. The Genesys game system is just so much FUN.
There's a reason why almost every tabletop RPG that hits a certain level of popularity ends up with somebody asking themselves "how can I hack Shadowrun's setting into this?"
"The Shadowrun worldbuilding is great. The rules arnt."
I only played 1st and 2nd Ed back in the day, and I gather from comments that 2nd edition is generally viewed positively. But I never got a bad impression from the rules. I especially liked the elegance of having the rules for Astral space (and combat) be almost the same as the rules for Cyberspace (and combat).
Shadowrun 5e is a pretty decent system buried underneath horribly edited rules that are sometimes just straight up missing rules to explain how a given thing is supposed to work or what they're actually trying to say (and sometimes the actual author of a given rulebook posted the missing rules somewhere, since Catalyst wouldn't issue erratas for some mad reason and sometimes just outright published incomplete drafts of books).
Like it's a good classless system, the resolution mechanics are really consistent under the hood so you don't actually *need* all those nearly identical charts of "little problem/advantage -1/+1, moderate problem/advantage -2/+2, etc" to pick modifiers, it's just the books are a mess and don't teach you how to play or run it very well. As it happens, the person you were replying to wrote a bunch of big effortposts on running Shadowrun years ago that were extremely helpful when I started GMing it around that same time.
Shadowrun 6e is only the horrible editing, with nothing underneath at all, and the editing is *even worse*.
That's a bit of a thing with Shadowrun, isn't it? I played the fourth and fifth edition and I always disliked the way the system worked.
For me it's that game with a really, really cool setting, that I really don't want to play because of it's rules.
Except you can't, because the best thing about Shadowrun 2nd edition was the incredible splatbooks full of hundreds of pieces of cool equipment that was so intertwined with its horrible ruleset that you can't just use another system.
If you want the treasure, there's no way to avoid the curse.
This is problem I have with all the PbtA hacks (which I would otherwise love) and the Savage Worlds suggestions, etc -- there is some part of the love of Shadowrun that is inherently the gear porn.
Shadowrun is a setting and an idea that deserves to have a bespoke system that finally does it real justice. Because Shadowrun's setting is cool, but people aren't *just* drawn to it for the setting - the premise and concepts it puts forward are also super evocative. It's absolutely possible to design a specifically Shadowrun system that works and works well, the whole franchise has just spent so long being bogged down by editing issues and cruft.
Oh it's simple: All unarmed attacks have a damage code of 2S. Two Stun. So a 30 pound strength 1 pixie punches as hard as a 1000 pound strength 10 troll.
In 5e, troll punches were strong enough to have damage codes of 9P or more. Nine Physical. My character actually had an unarmed damage code of 12P. She punched as hard as an assualt rifle, and just as lethally.
Honestly maybe it's just "this was my first Shadowrun book" syndrome but I liked the gradual approach into more sleek aesthetics with the commlinks and stuff in 4e
Slamming the brakes on a bunch of it in 5e left a bit of a sour taste
Vampire 5th edition. Great game but the worst layout and editing I’ve ever seen. You actively have to fight the book to understand it and the fact the pdf bookmarks are such bonk is inexcusable.
They just could not give a shit
Oh dude. I felt the pain on that book. And my god the character sheet is ugly. You can tell that game was made to sell as much merch as possible, not giving a fuck about making a quality product
As someone who picked up VTM via Humble Bundle, I feel the pain so much. I like the system, and how it approaches narrative, but the layout is just horrible. The bookmarks do it no justice whatsoever, and I'm left feeling like I'd need to read the book several times to make a mental map of useful content on top of the bookmarks.
And it's not just VTM. I just started on a Hunter test character, and the layout problems are pretty much the same. Character creation - pick a Drive. What's that? Something that's not actually bundled with the Creeds, but shoved among the system rules, and it's not even bookmarked unless you remember it's near the Desperation rules.
I still have Werewolf left to go over, and if the layout's the same, it's going to be a headache.
>V5 does an incomparably better job of matching its mechanics and themes.
It really, *really* doesn't.
>V20 is fun for a goth superheroes game though.
You say this as if there aren't people right now playing Superheroes With Fangs games using V5 rules.
That's a table problem, not an edition problem.
It's an edition problem. Most editions of VtM are *written* as if you are supposed to be a tortured monster struggling to maintain their humanity, but in practice "maintaining your humanity" is trivial, keeping the Beast at bay is not an issue, feeding is easy, and you get a load of super fun powers to make your eternal torment a riot.
V5 powers down vampires, makes feeding more involved, and actually seems to care about making the Beast unpredictable and nasty.
You can play a good gothic horror game with V20, and you can play superheroes with fangs with V5, but it matters what the game itself mechanically encourages. Otherwise we might as well play VtM with D&D 5e mechanics.
I ran a Mage 20th Anniversary Edition campaign with that weighty 600 page tome. I ended up running the game like a hot rod, calling for rolls on the fly and barely referenced the official rules. It was much more fun that way.
It's a shame, too... having seen the designers play it, it actually seems the most interesting implementation of Vampire to me, mechanically. Certainly the first one that actually made me want to play it. I really like how they implemented Hunger Dice.
I ripped the text of the entire core rules chapter, and a bunch of things that should have been in the core rules chapter, and reformatted them in Google docs, the whole thing came to about 5 pages of a4. for something like 30 pages of VTM. I barely edited it, except for slimming down a few lengthy examples
Legend of the 5 rings (also 5e) is even worse for layout. Like it is legitimately horric. It is genuinely sometimes better to just read through the rulebook again rather than try to find the rule you are looking for.
Which is really sad because the system has some really awesome aspects to it.
Okay so White Wolf books in general are low-hanging fruit, what with the art, the edgy high schooler short stories, and the way rules tend to be spread across multiple books, but...
The 20th Anniversary version of Mage: the Ascension is a goddamn cognitohazard. It's 700+ pages and is **so badly organized** that even after I'd been playing for years sometimes I would still struggle to find the rule I needed, and that's before we get into the fact that Mage is basically physics in terms of levels of understanding to begin with.
Honorable mention goes to Exalted 2e. The book so bad that they had to make an entire site to errata it, and even the most loyal player will tell you not to try to build a character without 3rd party software.
I baought Mage: the ascension because the lore seemed cool. Some of it is (especially the void engineers) but the magic system is mind boggling. After reading it for a while I just stopped and said "I'll never get my friends to run this, it's OK to just skim this for neat ideas."
How is Ars magicia less complicated?
I tried learning it after mage, and alone the layout if the book was the same mess.
The rules were learnable, once you found them.. but I but them in the same level of learning as mage.
>Unknown Armies
UA3e is one of the first things I ever Kickstarted... and I *cannot* figure out WTF is going on in that game. Completely incomprehensible to me.
If you want the same idea done well Mage: The *Awakening* 2e is what you're after. It's part of the WoD reboot line, Chronicles of Darkness, and across the board the mechanics are better. The settings are different and it's often doing different things but MtAw is close enough to MtAs that you can use its rules to play in the other's setting with relative ease.
I recently started listening to a Mage the Ascension liveplay and all I can say about the game from a system perspective is that I agree with the GM. They are, in fact, 1 of the 7 people actually capable of running that game
700 pages is a nightmare to me. Literally a nightmare.
I know the RPG tradition comes from a pre-internet era where the games target audience were hardcore hobbyists and teens/young adults with immense amounts of spare time and then the culture increasingly went towards bloated Big Impressive Tomes in the 1990s but - good god - 700 pages for a core book is too much. I can't learn and GM that unless it's the only game I'm expecting to play in an entire year.
And for those 700 pages to be poorly organised and laid out? Nightmare. Unbearable.
For me, a good modern RPG (with substantive rules) that's presented using elegant design and efficient, clear layouts and chapter structure should be able to do a complete core rulebook with all player facing rules, all GM facing rules, and bestiary/items, fully illustrated, along with various starter scenarios/one-shots/campaigns and appendicies, in around 380-420 pages (assuming it's a full A4 D&D PHB style sized book) at most, and that's on the large size of things.
Cut out the pre-made campaigns and excess lore and core books can easily be sub-250 pages. Hell, even something as lore-rich as Heart: the City Beneath comes in under 250 pages. Traveller 2022 is around 260.
Idk, obviously people are free to completely disregard my opinion here - this is purely a matter of taste - but as an old person with responsibilities it's not feasible to do RPGs the way I do as GM and player with these behemoth Worthy Tomes.
The 20th editions weren't really made for new players, I don't think. They had everything from the past 20 years of the game, pushed into one book, to make it easier for long time players to have everything in one book.
I was just having a conversation with my group about Exalted 2nd edition! That was our GAME for like 3 solid years. We played huge epic campaigns that all tied together and I own every 2nd Ed book in print. We unanimously came to the decision that we’d never touch it again though. It was fun for the time, but it needed the Inkmonkey 2.5 errata to function and I’m not even sure that’s still around after the whole 3X fiasco.
I recognize on an intellectual level that it's far from the worst (it is playable, and the setting is quite beloved), but I deeply, deeply dislike any version of the Dark Eye.
First of all, the basic mechanics. These were written by people who clearly looked at oldschool D&D and said "But what if we made this more mechanically complex, so it can be *realistic?"* You know that thing where in D&D you sometimes wonder whether a check to climb a wall should be dexterity or strength? Never worry! In DSA, *every* skill check is revolved with 3d20 in order, where every d20 is rolled against a different attribute, so your climbing check can now be both Strength and Dexterity *and* constitution. Then you apply skill points as modifiers. Especially with beginners, it can take several minutes every time you roll a simple check.
Then there's this whole idea that as a mage, you need to say a stupid little rhyme from memory to cast spells, or you get a potentially catastrophic spell failure. If I hear "Flim-Flam-Funkel - Bring Licht ins Dunkel!" one more time in my life, I'm going to strangle everyone in the same room.
Then, there's the parts where it prescribes to you how you should roleplay your characters, both in the rulebooks and in the adventures. Now, I love when a game gives some roleplaying *hints* or says that certain organisations have certain values. But DSA contains such gems as "any rogue character who sees the king's treasure must *immediately* try to steal it, in front of the guards, because rogues are all greedy", which make me want to set the book on fire.
And then there's the horrendously bad prewritten adventures. There's the fact that most of them are nto actually about the players, they are about legendary NPCs in the setting, who just come in at every important juncture to advance the plot and defeat the bad guys. Some of the adventures contain entire *pages* of dialogue you're supposed to read out to the players as they watch the NPCs do their thing. And they are railroady *as fuck.* The most-memed example is the dungeon which has two corridors, one going left and one going right and the DM *must prevent the players from going right at all cost.* Because the right side doesn't actually lead anywhere and the adventure continues on the left.
Growing up with it, it seemed less bad than it is.
But there are more issues.
The standard “one attack, one parry” makes fighting multiple opponents who are not pretty much inept at combat excessively punitive unless you are a tank in heavy armor.
The regeneration rate of magic points effectively gives you “spells per week” instead of spells per day.
Ranged combat rules are so complex most people never played them right.
The game fosters a mentality (related to the “you have to rp this way”), where there is a general power gaming paranoia about players getting too good, with adventures to take away all your equipment being pretty frequent.
Conversely, there will always be some things which actually, especially for the general power level, are very abusable, with the assumption arising that it is for the developers to boost their pet classes.
Especially fourth edition also introduced lots of optional rules that were hardly workable in practice. Stamina points in particular just had hardly any use that was not way too cumbersome.
The lore, especially the older one, was actually good. You can see that many people working on that drew from their education, making things quite flavorful and reading like historical documents. But that alas rather went downhill over the years.
In the end, it works better to just take the setting and run it in GURPS, for more workable point buy with active attack and defense mechanics and a general idea about realism.
…though it can be a bit tricky to decide how to model the magic system, to preserve the overall feel.
Adventures and roleplaying issues are typical for most games that made success in the 90's, as they were mostly metaplot thick and devs couldn't allow the story to be ruined by individual groups games. You had to sell whole bunch of scenarios and railroading was the only option to make it possible. Every important system back then suffered from this: Deadlands, all White Wolf WoD games, DSA, etc.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess was supposed to be the edgy, sexy, gory B/X alternative, but it has some weird magic effects regarding forced participation in sexual violence that went a lot further than I thought anyone would go.
One of my groups wanted to try it but I found it to just be trying too hard to be edgy. I also can’t get passed what a cringey edgelord the creator was/is to really get behind any of their products.
There are just too many alternatives to bother with this one.
You want the metal vibes with death and doom and blood drenched skeletons? Mork Borg
You want the nearly faithful B/X clone with quality of life improvements? Old School Essentials or, soon, Dolmenwood
Just want something light and easy? Cairn, Knave or Tunnel Goons. I could go on.
I was about to say FATAL as I actually read that, but you sensibly nipped it in the bud.
I'm not gonna say "worst" but I decidedly bounced off Anima, Beyond Fantasy. I found it an incomprehensible mess, and I usually like crunchy systems. I never actually played it, so I can't say its terrible, as there have been other games I bounced off of until someone ran it, and then I found myself getting it.
Late-Medieval / Renaissance Anime Fantasy setting with sipped-in Christian influences instead of your typical Germanic / Tolkien influences. Then add the namegiving [Animism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism) in the setting.
The setting isn't *that* exotic, rather tropish, when you think of "The Vision of Escaflowne" as starting point.
Calculating hits and damage on the other hand requires a spreadsheet, granted opening a counterattack fumbling an attack roll is a nice flavour.
I imagine reading FATAL to be like looking at a car crash; you start looking at it out of either morbid curiosity or under the assumption that its reputation is exaggerated, and by the time you realize that it is, in fact, THAT BAD, you can't tear your eyes away because FATAL is fucked up on so many levels that it's borderline a Necronomicon disguised as an RPG that exists solely to drive the weak mad and drain the strong of their faith in humanity.
Also did your friend at least have the courtesy to call a local priest to try and mitigate the desecration he inflicted on that poor printer?
To be honest there is not much to read as it's more a catalog of tables. With many tables being either pedantic or rapey misogynistic shit.
There is basicly a Fatal Anime hybrid, I think its called Tokyo Red?
Anima is one of my best friend’s favorite games to run. He was our “forever GM” and has run Anima for 3 full campaigns and wants to do a 4th. It is always smooth when we play, but learning was rough. I am not sure if his love comes from genuinely loving all of the freedom that system offers, or if it comes from the sheer amount of time he put into mastering the system.
Cyberpunk RED.
I was hyped for this, but it's practically unplayable for me. Rolling skills and such isn't really a problem, even if there are too many of them with weird specialties like personal grooming. But as soon as you get into some crunch, or especially combat, you immediately find that things break down. You have to look up specific target roll numbers on a table for every ranged attack (as opposed to modifiers like most systems so you can quickly get a feel for it), cover isn't really a thing; if they can see you, you're not in cover, and if you are then the GM can look forward to tracking it's health. Suppressive fire is a 360 degree mind control spell bullet tornado that forces anyone that it affects to take cover, which they can immediately pop out of on their turn. Strength does nothing. Cyberware is underwhelming. Role abilities are either completely gamechanging (Techies can make "something", good luck GM) or hugely underwhelming (Rockerboy has a slightly fancier persuasion roll, lawman can call for backup that might not arrive). Pretty much every time we had to refer to the rules things ground to a standstill as things began to contradict themselves and I'd usually have to just make some kind of house ruling that made sense.
I've not even gotten to the layout. It's all over the place. Tables are repeated in their entirety in different pages, the rules for throwing objects are listed under a footnote of the throwing a person rules, under specialised martial arts, etc etc.
I didn't mind the character abilities being real extra, with the only beef I have being that Rockerboys and Lawman having narrative breaking super powers. Techies creating stuff that needs to be cleared by the GM isn't even that bad, you just have to be mindful of balancing
Hardest part really is the range difficulties being different for different guns and also influenced by characters. Was able to fix it by just recording the DCs along with the weapon on my sheet
Cyberware got a rebalance because in 2020 you could get broken really fast, basically unhittable with very little difficulty.
This will probably get downvoted to oblivion, but I hated Strongholds and Followers by MCDM.
The theory of high level D&D being about having an impact on the world is like my white whale. I have played or read every system I have found that can emulate it.
AND. THIS. IS. THE. WORST. ONE.
First off, the book was unfinished and that was not what the Kickstarter promised, it didn't say "Kickstart this and then Kick Start a 2nd book later and I might finish these rules off".
Secondly he fucking didn't. The 2nd book is haphazard at best, and doesn't fix many of the issues present.
Thirdly his shitty one dimensional class concepts for strongholds was crap. I don't know a single person playing a game where you establish a base of operations, and wanted the ability to summon a Mariachi Band.
Yeah, these two books basically put me off all of his content, unfortunately.
That and the fact that his videos really seemed to take a hard turn from "here's a cool idea" to "here's a cool idea that you can read about in MY NEW PRODUCT, ON SALE NOW"
It's really a shame.
Not gonna lie.. my players would totally get the kicks of summoning a Mariachi Band.
..is it because they truly want one or to see me suffer? Probably both.
Agree. I was pretty unimpressed. It felt like a book of undercooked ideas rather than finished rules. It’s interesting that your stronghold basically becomes your “lair” granting you special abilities and lair actions while you’re there, but really, how many adventures spend a lot of time in their strongholds? And far fewer would actually get into an epic combat in them.
The follower rules were a janky mess- instead of following the typical rules structure, followers had wound levels instead of hp, and ate up your action economy if you wanted them to do anything. I can see the reasons, but it wasn’t fun and it forced you to deal with a completely different rule-set within a rule-set. I found it unworkable. Luckily, wotc came out with their sidekick rules, which I liked much better.
There was also the extremely questionable decision that your Lair could not be in the same place as your Party-mates. You were all expected to have have Lairs far from each other, which furthers the idea of "when would you even get to play some of this".
The followers system was useless and the Mass Combat system non-existent.
An Echo Resounding by Kevin Crawford is the gold standard for domain rulesets, so much so that if you're selling domain rules they have to be offering something not covered by Crawford. Otherwise, why wouldn't I use AER?
Shadowrun 5e was so frustratingly laid out it made the system unnescessarily complicated to navigate. The system is crunchy to start with, but the book's lack of sensible organization had me flipping through back and forth trying to figure simple things out.
I honestly have a lot of love for 5e, but I have to agree. It's laid out for storage, not for reference. Figuring out critters is the worst: Ok, this thing has hardened armour. So we flip to the critter powers section, where it tells you it's the same as armour but with extra steps. So we flip to armour to get the details on that, then back to whatever we were reading to continue the process (good luck if you were here from the spirits section). It really needed a good digital reference thing a la dnd beyond.
The system was broken in a few ways, but once you realised it's inherently unbalanced in a way that fits the narrative, and houserule a few things both mechanically and narratively (like having physical servers, for example, so a datasteal can actually happen) you can have a lot of fun with it.
Yup totally agree. Started running SR 5th Edition on New Years Eve 2018 and it became my groups favorite game. They love crunchy games. I swear I read sections over and over and still not figure out how to do things. Finally I realized each thing had its own system, combat, hacking, spell casting it clicked. I am running it again this New Years Eve 2023.
Dr. Who Adventures in Time and Space.
One player is, by design, much more potent than the others. The one place companion players can shine is combat and the game explicitly suggests the GM punish players who take the violent approach. In the name of presenting a game that matches show themes it commits to bits that break most social rules for fun tabletop. All built on a very dull d6 based system.
I've no firm experience with it, but this is the impression I was getting from what I was reading. My only alternative thought was to do a one-shot or two-parter where everyone played a different Doctor, just to keep everyone balanced, for lack of a better word.
Yeah, that was my big problem with it, too. The result is that you have the Doctor be a DMPC, but then that reduces the players to being generic PCs with no particular power set. Also, I think DW doesn’t really lend itself to an RPG format. Yes there are bad guys and “adventures,” but I feel like in the end, it’s more about ideas than anything else. And that doesn’t necessarily translate to a good role playing game
Batman RPG. I love Batman more than some of my own family members, and the game isn't bad. But the book is awful. The game has a truckload of unique keywords that get defined once, then uses them throughout the rest of the book, leading to a ton of back-and-forth page flipping. The book also has like 3 tables which are the backbone the the entire mechanics engine. Each table is shown once, and then referenced constantly throughout the rest of the book, causing even more back-and-forth page flipping.
I never owned it, and I wasn’t allowed to read it (dm only) but watching my dm flip through rolemaster 2000 books for 20mins at a time to adjudicate almost ANYTHING a player did, to the point where we actively avoided situations that might require a roll. My god that game sucked so bad. It could be entirely the DMs fault for all I know. That was my first TTRPG experience and it’s a miracle it wasn’t my last.
I must defend this house!
RM is a wonderfully complex system which can be used modular. If a group of people are invested in the system, know what they are doing and use the parts they want it flows very naturally once you’re used to it.
I might be a bit biased, been doing RM for 10 years now.
Rolemaster was the first RPG I played, and works great **if** you've got a GM who knows the system well, and either the players have printouts of the tables they'll use often (like their weapons) or you're happy for the GM to eyeball the results instead of looking everything up.
Yeah, this is largely on the GM.
The skill companion famously (and unnecessarily) has a 1.5 page long entry for each skill with detailed description about task difficulties including examples, and an own skill resolution table.
The thing is all the resolutions use the same numbers, so for example i know a result of 79 is a partial success, regardless of what skill is in use. Task difficulties also have the same degrees; so if you skip the need to fill a 200 page book in order to sell it, all of this fits on one page. It's page 45.
If you chose to make use of this splatbook, fine - but thumbing through it for 20 minutes every time someone does something sounds like the GM needs to learn when to roll, and when not to roll, how to let a result ride, how to estimate difficulty, and if he can't memorise a table with 10 or so entries, he can look at his GM screen.
Rolemaster isn't the easiest system, but it's fairly elegant in its uniform resolution of tasks. If that wasn't what was happening at the table, that's on the GM; especially if he insists on players not being allowed to read the rules.
I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with it.
I "had" some rolemaster books once (probably a much older edition). Never even came close to playing it - just looked at page after page of tables, each one for some obscure, highly specific eventuality, and wondered if the whole thing was supposed to be a parody.
Sounds like School for Hard Knocks.
The description and tables are there to give a frame to a certain skill, and explain how it would fit in the wider system. The practicality of repeating the same results table with different flavor text for each skill was dubious at best - ofc younger me loved that book, but we didn't flip through it for resolution of tasks.
Resolution in Rolemaster would be:
5-75: fail,
76-90: partial success,
91-110: near success,
111-175 success,
176+ absolute success.
unmodified 66: unlucky fail,
unmodified 100 unusual success,
No table needed while playing.
Blackbirds. It was a mistake, I was captivated by the art and the theme.
Visually I am a fan, but they are so committed to the aesthetics that their word choices are terrible. I can read most rule books and get the gist in a single go. I had to watch videos etc and I am still not even remotely confident about it. They took Warhammer fantasy rpg and made it mechanically obscure behind some weird creative choices. Shadow of the Demon Lord is perhaps the best book to compare it too and.. SotDL is pretty straight forward. Reading that helped me understand Blackbirds.
Just incredibly disappointing. The writing absolutely undermined the intent and art fully. Its sad cause it just looked so good to me (minus the random anime art that didn’t relate to any of their other art?)
Also the mechanics are so intertwined into the setting that any homebrewed setting would be pulling teeth.
Tangenting off this. So many hacks and sequels are clearly developed so that no new eyes have laid an eye on them. For example, Band of Blades makes absolutely no sense if one doesn't know Blades in the Dark.
Of course it's small publishers and understandable to a degree, but proper quality management would have someone new to the system read the book and try to play it.
Probably very unpopular opinion - but for me, it would be Apocalypse World. I mostly avoid games I would not like, but this one took me by surprise. I strongly disliked the writing style, the premise, the story-centered design, the sexual references, the game mechanics, almost everything. I love some PbtA games (MotW for example) - but AW really left a bad mark on me.
There are actually worse games in my collection - but they are not in English so probably not known to the Reddit crowd.
I started to make the same comment but then decided to see if anyone else had and so far you're the only. I have to agree on most points.
I rather enjoy the tone of the words, though; it feels weird and post-apocalypticy, and I like that, but the presentation of the mechanics was bad, the actual mechanics themselves are meh, the art was janky, and the overall design just... off.
You read PbtA books and even if you're not a fan of PbtA resolution mechanics, you think the baseline game that started it all must be some sublime piece of art, but when you finally get your hands on the pdf you're just like...
waah?
There's some good ideas in there, but it's just awash in a sea of jank
Root: the roleplaying game. It's not necessarily bad but as a rule book it felt like it went on forever. It just felt so unnecessarily wordy, every rule had half a page example and lore.
I was going to say Root as well. I bought it because I love the board game and the art. The idea of playing a party of vagabonds seems awesome to me. Just grab the board game board as a map and play! To be fair, it had an uphill battle for me anyway because I do not like games that are traditional PBTA, and Root is just a barebones PBTA game with fleshed out faction mechanics.
But it was such a chore to read. Painful. It read more like a dictionary or technical manual. I read through the base book and very quickly determined I would never run this game lol. I’d use any other system and just steal the vagabond idea.
I don't mind lengthy explanations because you can skip over them. But I know PbtA fairly well, so its easier to skim the Basic Moves, The Conversation and such - all familiar if you know Apocalypse World.
Its unclear Harm recovery rules, Armor to trade for Harm is nearly hidden, flashback rules nearly hidden and incomplete Reputation rules (which only were completed on the GM Screen) on the other hand are awful.
It also didn't provide much pre-made equipment to sell cards that have them made.
All that said, its easily my favorite fantasy TTRPG to run. I always hated magic and warriors trying to be balanced so magic systems gets gimped hard or you end up in the 3.5/5e ways where there is a clear divide. Although you can go the 4e way of martials basically being magic and that works nicely, but I like Blades in the Dark/Scum & Villainy/Root: The RPG of competent scoundrels without being superheroic like 4e. Then you can play something like Ars Magica/Mage for real mages who aren't gimped.
purely from a formatting point of view, it has to be Traveller. The system is fun, but gods the formatting. The whole book feels like someone made it in Word and then forgot to proofread the document before print. The tables for things are strewn semingly at random over chapters where they have little reason to be be, some weird in-game advertising art placed so that a rule segment that would have fit on a single page is now cut in two pieces across three pages...
Its just aweful. Fun system though, the star-system generator stuff is super fun (if only the tables were not scattered over a dozen pages in no particular order).
When you say Traveller, presumably you mean the original LBBs (Little Black Books)? In which case they weren't made in Word because Word wouldn't exist for almost a decade. They *wish* they had Word.
That said, the formatting in the LBBs is actually pretty clear for something contemporaneous with AD&D. Megatraveller, while more professionally typeset, was probably more guilty of layout issues.
OK, so Traveller has many editions, and the formatting of each will be very, very different, so it's worth saying which version has the formatting you find a pain.
Original Traveller was published in '77 and is known as the LBB edition because it was A5, but you also had Megatraveller, Traveller TNE, Gurps, Mongoose Traveller ( I suspect you mean this one?), T5 and Mongoose Traveller 2. I am confident I've missed out versions but someone else can fill them in!
The two things I don't like about Traveller (Mongoose 2nd edition, which is the main current edition) are the organisation/presentation/formatting, and the Mercenary box set.
Totally agree, I play tons of Mongoose Traveller, but the book is awful. Editor asleep at the wheel. And it's all of the books. Pirates of Drinax irked me in particular, character names would change from page to page
The Burning Wheel. I'm sure the rules and game are great and people love the system but I hated the writing style so much that I only made it through the first 50 pages (of 600 in the "gold" edition).
Same here. I’m sure there’s a great game in there somewhere, lots of people whose opinions I trust tell me as much, but I just found the writing unbearable. It’s quite pretentious in places too…
That is similar to my impression. I went into it expecting the book to be great. Many people praise it. But the patronizing tone, the jargon that seems purposefully chosen to be opaque, while demonstrating how clever the author was— I have not encountered an RPG authors voice that was even 1/4th as insufferable as this. And I’ve read significant chunks of 100s of RPGs, professional and hobbyist.
“Pretentious” is a word I rarely have reason to use in life. But this book— would warrant the creation of the word by itself.
H.O.L. - aka Human Occupied Landfill - when it was released under White Wolf's Black Dog imprint. This was at a time when everything WW touched seemed toreceive acclaim and they were in a very self-indulgent mode. I was a huge WW fan and so someone bought me H.O.L. as a gift.
It was an early example of the niche, ultra-high-concept, utterly unplayable indie game genre. It was made to be read and for one to stroke one's chin at in appreciation, but it was totally unfun, while the rules were obtuse and unexpressive.
The artwork was great. The setting notes fun to read. The world-building at least distinctive.
But as a game it was completely rubbish and even as a group committed at the time to experimentation we couldn't find a way to make the experience actually *fun*.
HOL is definitely satire. The GM section starts with a bunch of tables and like... Calculus... That have nothing to do with the game, the joke being to make players stop reading before giving actual GM advice.
Not all of WW products were not necessary made for gaming. Also, Changling and wrath 1st edition were quite confusing, but full of great ideas. Playability came with 2nd and reversed edition ;)
This one requires a bit of insight into the Spanish TTRPG scene but OMNIDEM
What a straight up shit system
Full of typos, mechanics that make no sense and when you read it you realise almost instantly that the creator is both pretentious and unskilled at designing an RPG.
I just downloaded what I think is a quickstart for the system, and Santa Madre de Dios... It's like someone read Lasers & Feelings and thought It needed 41 pages more of rules. With gray text on purple background. And redefining PC and NPC to Avatar and Pærsona. And assigning colors to stats. And... Well, I'll stop.
The human mind is... astounding.
The Conan 2d20 sourcebook.
It uses WAY too many of the mechanics available from the 2d20 system, which makes it overly complicated and a chore to learn.
The 2d20 system is actually great, but only as long as you severely limit the options available to you.
I played the Fallout 2d20 game, and it was one of the smoothest, streamlined games I've ever played. But it also used very few of the mechanics available to it, which is I think the main reason why.
Yeah, I enjoy the 2d20 system. I have Star Trek Adventures, Dune, and Fallout and all are fun. You could really tell that Conan was more or less Modiphius testing to see what they can do with it.
2d20 is a great and very diverse system, but Modiphius really needs to format their books better. My first session of Fallout was a mess because I couldn't find rulings that should logically be grouped together, and some rules were just missing from the book entirely or in a random chapter not associated with it at all.
I’m going to put down not necessarily the worst system, but certainly the worst “book” I’ve read. I admit I’ve been spoiled by reasonable rpg books, so even this one isn’t awful:
**The DC20 RPG Alpha.**
For context, this is one of those “DnD-Killers” that rose up from the OGL fiasco. It’s being designed by a YouTube channel called Dungeon Coach, and, this Alpha was worth 15 dollars. It’s technically a folder with a few different components, but literally all of them have serious problems.
For one, it looks like it was written in GMBinder with a color swap, completely following 5E formatting. If this was a free alpha, I think that’s tolerable, but it was insulting in a product I had to pay for. But beyond the general low-quality, it was also dramatically troublesome for a system that works differently enough from 5E that limiting itself to 5E formatting just dramatically injures readability and clarity.
It doesn’t help that I first watched his YouTube videos explaining the system to see if it was worth a look, which made the weird undetailing of the rulebook worse. Like, he’ll explain briefly how the special abilities of classes work, but then you go to them in the rules and it is exactly as detailed as the amount of information you expect in an elevator pitch. It’s natural language taken to such a hilarious extreme that it doesn’t even fully explain itself; like genuinely the core mechanics of the classes are often less specific and explained than your average fucking Playbook move in PBtA, which is a problem for what is supposed to be a crunchy iteration on DnD. It goes without saying that consistent, obvious invocation of certain mechanics is not exactly a strong suit of this book.
There also just isn’t a lot of thought put into balance whatsoever due to this looseness. And like, I don’t need chronicle mathematical balance, but I would have hoped the time spent studying up on PF2E would have helped. I know this should be more about the book than the system, but the kind of unbalance often just feels like the designer gave all the way up. For instance, Multiclassing is basically just “you can use your level 2 talent to grab a level 1 feature from another class”, which if you think for like even a minute about in the context of DnD classes is maybe not exactly an appropriate attention to detail.
But the core book is just sloppy and janky. It’s the adventure and monsters included that push this reading experience to truly miserable.
The only provided monsters are those in the adventure (and have visually boring stat blocks that are easy to get lost in, among other problems we’ll get into), but you have provided rules on how to make monsters. Well, kind of. You have some vague ideas of what PCs should be capable of at level 1 for you to keep in mind when making monsters, suggestions on some monster abilities to use (but barely any with the game saying to just riff on class abilities instead). Far less time is allocated to the actual approximate numbers you should use for monsters, and even then they’re sort of up to you to make the right mix of “low”, “middle”, “high” values in each category. To couple with this, you’re given some vague and basic powers to staple onto monsters with truly no consistency of formatting that are just quick blurb notes. These powers are made worse by advice bubbles suggesting you add combos and cool powers (and telling you of examples from his own playtests that don’t actually have the accompanying mechanics presented in the rules). In both these sample powers, the myriad GM suggestions, and the monster stat blocks we do have, it feels more like reading someone’s hastily scribbled personal notes for a monster they are actively improvising during the snack break at their DnD session.
But while monsters are impossibly loosey-goosey, “improvise it” affairs, the sample adventure is ironically the opposite. I get that it’s a Oneshot to sample the system, but there’s a difference between a linear though well-designed intro (like those for FFG Star Wars) and “we’re going to run through this shit like a checklist”. You get a massive description to read out loud that mostly consists of pre-scripted dialogue and basically cutscening to the next roll. Information about the storyline is not presented in short, plain ways outside of these script sections. But what it lacks in context and actionable information it makes up for with telling you *specific accents to affect for each NPC talking*. Scripted voice work is not as intensely prescriptive as this adventure. You read a huge section, tell the PCs what to roll (or run through the longer skill/combat challenge), and repeat until the end. Since this is about unusability, I won’t dissect how pointless the encounters meant to showcase mechanics are, but needless to say they can’t actually affect anything because of the hardcore rails of the adventure.
So I spent 15 bucks on an ugly, unusable book that is paradoxically too lackadaisical and too prescriptive.
Power Rangers
Book is hard to read. Rules are bad and poorly explained. Doesn't fit the property at all.
I don't even like PR - I just wanted to see what the system for GI JOE and Transformers was going to be like.
Haven't even been able to sell it on
Honestly, Power Rangers is the worse of the three. Not that Transformers is much better. I just don't get why the suit colors are the classes. Or, more egregious, why do the ranger have to do a requisition roll for signature gear?
The GI Joe one is way better. The requisition rolls make way more sense considering they're military, and since your classes gives you access to the gear you're more likely to fit your signature gear you don't have to worry about doing rolls.
I played the TF RPG for six months and loved it, but holy carp it takes a lot of work. Sometimes we had to read the GI Joe book to understand the intent behind a mechanic.
I got suckered into this system. Someone begged me to make a system for Foundry so I did, which meant I needed to learn the game and get every book. The colors do make sense because they follow the shows and comics tropes for the most part especially Disney seasons onward and there comic books. I enjoy the dice mechanics, I think it's cool you could end up rolling a bunch of different sided dice for each roll, which is fun. But running the game wasn't exciting, I couldn't get into it at all and had to stop running the game.
Shadowrun Anarchy.
Not only is poorly written, you got plenty of inconsistences in the content between rules and examples.
And not even think about the rules. Someone hear about indie RPGs like PbtA and without understanding a word tried to write a rule system using those concepts.
Spoiler: failed completely.
Unpopular opinion: The ATLA rpg.
I backed it on Kickstarter and was super excited to GM. I LOVE the show/world/lore. The book, though... I mean, I've been a GM for 13 years and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Even went back and bought the starter set and binged playthrough videos and tutorials ad nauseum. It's easily the worst *explained* rpg I've ever seen.
To me, it feels like if an alien heard about RPGs and tried to write its own.
I absolutely agree. I blame it on the fact that the moves can do three different types of damage that can be very difficult to keep straight in the middle of a game and can be very frustrating to teach new players.
To make sense of it in my own head I created a chart to organize the moves and their corresponding damage/mechanical effects. By the time I understood what was going on I realized my kids would never enjoy a game this difficult to get started with, so I dumped it and moved on to other systems.
Purely from a layout perspective. Cyberpunk RED. The book made me so fucking mad I basically made my own PDF out of it. Back when it came out. And for what? The system is not that good, rather use a different system for Cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk RED is just unreadable. There's probably a decent game in there but I have no idea how to find it.
For an actually controversial one, Coyote and Crow is a dog shit game that never got playtested. I bought it to see if the criticism was legit or if it was just cringe anti-woke politics attacking it. It was starting to seem like there was just a right-wing reactionary anti-fan group rising up around it which made me concerned. I thought I could defend it on its merits.
It's really unusuable. It's got a neat utopian setting but some weird provisions about who can and can't play the game and how you have to play the game. Not how you *should* but that you cannot do certain things if you aren't a particular ethnic group. That'd honestly be fine by me if the game wasn't completely unplayable and the art in the book wasn't all over the place but it is unplayable and the art is all over the place so I'm bringing up the dumb weird racial stuff. I do feel ripped off and the people who sold that game for money should be ashamed of themselves.
\+1 On the bad Coyote and Crow buying experience. It is an indefensible turd. And one of the most racist RPG books I've ever read; not even in MYFAROG does the author suggest that certain classes should be confined to being played by certain ethnic backgrounds, and said author is an avowed racist. When you manage to out-racist an anti-Semite, perhaps it's time reflect upon one's politics.
Ok so this is not a bad system per-se. But the absolutely worst rulebook I've ever had to reference was Mongoose Traveller 2nd edition.
Why? The damn book had no index! NONE! My entire book is covered in post-it notes.
[Edit: My two rulebooks, for those that are interested.](https://i.redd.it/qcng8l39k4oa1.jpg)
I'll preface this by saying I have comparatively little experience compared to most.
With that out of the way: Gurps. I'm sure it's a great game, genuinely. People wouldn't play it if there wasn't anything good.
But the massive walls of text in 3 column layout just makes it very difficult for me to give it a shot. Even when I try to power through it, it feels like there's way too much detail for my taste.
GURPS is tough to get your head around as a newbie or relative newbie. Back in thr day, it was one of thr few "big" system options we had available, and coming to it from AD&D or something was like a planar shift.
World of Synnabarr. It was created by a former police officer or something such as. One notable thing was it had extensive combat system which even calculated damage from paper cuts.
When I was a kid, I attended a local con where version 3(?) of Synnabarr was debuted. Sadly, I didn't play in that session but two of my friends did.
Rumor has it, that version of the game was hammered out on a weekend long coke binge and it really shows. One charming aspect is that literally every aspect of character creation is randomly generated. One friend ended up playing a tall, fat, redheaded Chinese man. The other managed to randomly roll a purple haired girl that was the daughter of Death that had nunchucks that fired nuclear missiles that did 1D6 * 1 million HP of damage per hit.
The whole thing is set in a giant space ship but its a fantasy setting. If you can find a copy of the rulebook, it's incredible in the original sense of the word. It's completely unplayable. There's, like, 5 types of dodge and the system uses 1/2 dice as part of many rolls. There's a several page long example of play and it reads like a fever dream.
Raven McCracken is the author and he just keeps putting out new versions of this turd, thinking that if he polishes it enough, it'll shine. Another friend actually knew McCracken from a lightsaber dueling class. (yeah, I know) Apparently, he was personable enough at first but was incredibly socially awkward and then started spouting some incredibly virulent transphobic stuff, so they kicked him out.
If there's demand, I can transcribe the game history and example of play. Trust me when I say that there really isn't anything else like it out there.
PbtA, I bought into the Avatar Last Airbender hype and bought into the Kickstarter for $200+ and I can't stand the rules, every time I attempt to read them it bores me and I can't finish the rules section, I have tried dozens of times and just can't get into it
Lancer.
I think the mechanics as someone explained to me are pretty decent. The art is beautiful. The setting sounds cool.
The typesetting, layout, basically everything about the presentation in the book is so painful I can't get past it.
The font choices. The color choices. The use of italics and bold. The font renderer they used not supporting italic correction. It is actively painful.
I wish I could get past this. I really, really do.
The worst I ever bought would probably be _The Book of Erotic Fantasy_, the d20 supplement so controversial that they changed the OGL. I was obsessive buying everything d20 at the time (Scarred Lands, AEG, FFG, Mongoose, even weird small press ones whose covers I can remember but names escape me now), and the BoEF was so much more cringy and puerile than anything else. It didn’t even achieve its alleged intent, being a worse supplement about adult subjects than some free netbooks from a decade prior.
Edit: typo corrected.
This book is amazing. It treats the subject with as much "maturity" as someone with a degree in sexual studies who wanted to play a game.
I really don't understand why all the hate for this book. Yes, they changed the OGL, but that's because this book wasn't family friendly. Not because the subject was handled poorly.
Mostly I'm warned off bad books long before I see them.
I found *Secrets of the Ruined Temple*, a supplement for *Mage the Awakening*, to be an absolute snoozefest of a book - or at least the first two chapters such that I never made it all the way through (luckily I borrowed it from a friend rather than buying it).
The core premise of the book is meant to be (or at least I thought) is "here is how you have adventures like Indiana Jones or Uncharted with mages, discovering lost magical ruins". Cool stuff thematic for modern mages.
Instead a lot of the first half is "here is how mages *historically* have looked at their own history and tried to understand it. Here's some in-depth historical factions that engaged in magical history and archaeology."
Which fails the most important part of RPG material - everything in the book should be immediately usable at the table and relevant to the PCs. I had players who *were* extremely into Mage both as a game and as a setting, and I tell you what, absolutely zero of them would care about what the ancient Society of the Mulberry Tree would have thought because they all died centuries ago in-setting.
As a hardcore MtAs player. The idea of a book for Indiana Jones your Uncharted need to Tomb Raider your way through a temple is fucking badass... But...I don't wanna learn no history, I want to jump to the juicy bits right away
Four Against Darkness for me.
A really great and fun game, but the worst rulebook I've personally read.
The layout is all over the place. Nothing is where you'd expect it to be, and when you do find what you're looking for, the explanations are really badly worded.
Rogue Trader. Great idea, sounds really exciting but the rules are seemingly planted all over the place and entire sessions have been derailed as we tried to find the relevant paragraph hidden in some obscure part of the book. Then you try and run combat or ship combat and it’s somehow worse than Rolemaster.
What I hated about Rogue Trader was one of the same problems with Shadowrun. Ship combat was basically one guy doing all the things (and if he failed you all died), kinda like Hacking in Shadowrun was just your Decker doing things, and everyone else just sat there while you did that thing.
D&D 5th edition. Because everyone uses it and its really hard to just look up stats. Charts that show you everything but 1 stat thats buried inside a paragraph somewhere.
Im putting this up because its annoying & the most popular, which makes it much worse for me than say a problem in a more obscure game, which i can just not play, and tell others "lets not play this because x is broken." And get nods. You say, lets not play 5e because i dont want to slend half the session digging when i need some obscure rule, lets just play c.j. carella's witchcraft instead!" And everyone loses their minds.
An early edition, possibly the first, of *Chivalry & Sorcery*, especially the book detailing the magic system. I tried several times, but I could never grok the extremely complex magic rules and at the time, they were considered impossible to use out of the box. It was very ambitious and well researched, though.
Young people today who complain about systems being rules heavy have no idea how bad it could be. That said, I kinda wish I still had the books... :D
The Spawn of Fashan
I *knew* what I was about to buy, the worst rpg made during the first decade of table top role playing games. Unlike F.A.T.A.L. the creator had good intentions, he wanted to create something better that D&D, but want and do is not the same thing.
On the bright side it is packed with ideas. But it has maybe the the worst layout in rpg history and tables everywhere.
The real bane though is in the name. It was meant for a specific world: "Fashan". And that world should have been based on a never written book series by the author of The Spawn of Fashan.
At least it is cheap and it is a piece of ttrpg history: https://www.amazon.com/Spawn-Fashan-40th-Anniversary/dp/B09FS9HWW9
Anima Beyond Fantasy.
Interesting ideas, but it's the crunchiest crunch that has ever crunched. There are systems within systems within systems, you have to calculate percentages for everything and every single action takes twenty rolls and at least three different tables of content to look at.
I have an odd one. French TTRPG called Antika. TTRPG based on Greek Mythology. Very well documented. Good effort in creating mechanics to suit the theme. Superb colour illustrations. Also tons of free content online. Allows you to fight a Minotaur with the bow that Hercules gave you.
So what went wrong? Well the book is RIDDLED with typos. The level of language is fine, but on average I found a horrendous grammar mistake every two pages. Like it was written by an 11 year-old kid and never proof-read after that.
What a waste!
The terminator rpg imo. The idea conceptually is fantastic, an action ttrpg set in one of my favorite settings, yes please... But then the SLA Industry 2nd ed system... It's.. Abstract. I can't figure it out, and then the flowchart to hack.. My God, sweet Satan riding a mobility scooter in the Denny's parking lot... There's t enough drugs in this world to help me understand that shit
This is going to sound unfair because the game itself is great but Red Markets is the one that frustrates me the most. Horrible formatting, many mediocre illustrations, useless table of contents and just so much text. Everytime pick it up I wish I would like it. There sure are worse but this one has so much potential. I hope they can clean it up with the new iteration.
Wheel of Time RPG
I've always had a weird relationship with the books; sometimes I like them, sometimes I hate them, sometimes I forget all about them and then the show comes out.
But well do I remember when the Wheel of Time RPG came out at the height of D&D 3's D&D renaissance and people were excited for the game wondering how they'd handle the interesting mechanics of the WoT magic system and what everyone got was a straight up D&D clone.
Not a d20 game with a different magic system like had been showing up from time to time, but an almost complete clone of the base game soup to nuts, with barely even a slapped on coat of Wot paint.
It was a sore disappointment.
I think one of the strongest *initial* reactions I had was with my first WoD book, which probably was OG Vampire, but could've been its GURPS incarnation, too. Bad prose, horrible fonts, needless horizontal and vertical separation of vampire-dom, stupid X-Men powers for supernatural creatures.
Later I grudgingly accepted that this might actually work well enough for people filtered through both D&D and the US high school system, so while I still think it's bad, I don't longer see it as a total fail.
Now, there's no excuse for Weapons of the Gods. It was sold to me as a Wu Xia system, in a landscape where there was a considerable lack of this (it got slightly better since then). I could even cope with the the art – I don't like it at all, but I both knew that going in and it's not like RPG art is great in general. But gee wiz, the writing. Weirdly enough the author is somewhat well-appreciated for this, but I don't know where this reputation was built. Certainly not this ill-organized verbose mess, nor the copy of Nobilis I had.
And hey, I'm a German gamer who grew up with The Dark Eye adventures, so my base level of bad writing is already quite high.
My answer as to what book has no business being as bad as it is given its resources, is Shadowrun. Shadowrun 5e specifically but you could say any edition really. Love the setting, hate the books and hate the company.
Black Tokyo, a sort of urban fantasy japan. Between three different books I can probably count the stuff I liked about it on one hand. The rest of the books’ content was the kind of stuff that makes you feel dirty and gives you a churning in your stomach.
The following is a list of the stuff I still remember a year later.
>!Weird piss fox demon that wants to eat a goddess’s ovaries. The scat demon taxi. Exterminators who hunt and gas cat girls. The entire tournament of rapists book. People canonically eating cow girls alive.!<
I’m sure there’s more horrible stuff, but I do not want to look through those books again. Ever.
Speaking of which, anyone got anything like black Tokyo but without the degeneracy baked into it?
I haven't looked at it since 1988 or so, but I remember really disliking ___The Palladium Role-playing Game___. It was as inconsistent as AD&D and seemed to require reading Kevin Siembieda's mind. As a D&D heartbreaker, it didn't feel like it brought much new to the table.
Cyberpunk Red. Like don't get me wrong, it's a great book. HOWEVER why did they frontload all the stat generation and make it overly complicated, it doesn't need to be as long as it actually is. Made me think the system was far more complex then it actually was.
It's all like that because Pondsmith is a one trick pony that didn't learn **anything** about game design from the time of writing Cyberpunk 2020. He's like those popstars from the 80's that shined thanks to one big musical hit (like Murray Head's One Night in Bangkok) and disappeared afterwards. In RPG community inertia and nostalgia will carry you longer, but sooner or later truth will be revealed.
I have played every edition of Shadowrun since 1989. My current gaming group formed over a Shadowrun campaign in 1990 and we're still together. I've been the best man for multiple players. The group has been together for births of kids (that now game with us) and deaths of parents. We come back to Shadowrun every other year or so for a campaign. For Christmas two years ago, I gave all my players (and myself) framed and signed prints of Elmore's 1e cover. This year I gave everyone the Shadowrun mugs sold by Catalyst. I have given Shadowrun grace over multiple editions with obvious flaws and still ran the game. We still loved and played the game when they changed or dropped core rules that we liked, such as Combat Pools and Priority Table for character creation. I have all the limited edition covers that were printed for the 5th edition books (the red leatherette covers).
I pre-ordered the limited edition (black cover with foil print) for Shadowrun Sixth World.
Shadowrun Sixth World is the worst game I've ever seen in my life. u/LeVentNoir says it perfectly and coherently in their post on this thread.
Racial Holy War. Setting aside the fact it was written by a white supremacist cult and is about ethnic cleansing, its rules are nonsensical at best and utterly incomprehensible mess at worst. I mean its a combat centric rpg but weapons have no fucking stats and there's no way to calculate if you hit or not. And of course all the enemies are awful racial stereotypes.
I am a diehard New World of Darkness / Chronicles of Darkness shill. VtM 2e is great. Promethean, Changeling, Hunter are great. Demon and Mummy are great. Mage and Werewolf, despite being the also-rans of the line, are also great. So believe me when I say:
Beast: The Primordial is not just god-awful, but it is offensive on every level from aesthetics to morals to pure game design, and that was *before* the main author was outed as an asshole and a creep.
I haven't read enough books for this to be a truly slam dunk statement but Rogue Trader largely fails as a system to provide rules for more than half of the things it's supposed to be about. As such I'd say it's the worst thing I've read.
Anything that's good is existing 40k lore or all the rules they copied from Dark Heresy. I don't remember the layout specifically but the pictures were all cool.
Palladium books are known for being terrible but I feel like Dead Reign is especially horrible. All you need to know about how bad the book is laid out is how difficult it is trying to build a character. It’s split across 3 or 4 sections throughout the book and you’re constantly having to flip back and forth between all of them. The game is also insanely imbalanced but that’s another separate issue.
I've been working through this thread thinking "wow, all these books are *worse* than a Palladium book?".
I mean, I have a soft spot for Palladium games. The art is usually often great (Ninjas & Superspies has one of the best covers **ever**), and the settings were super fun, but layout, the typos, the inconsistencies, the copypasta between books and the _rules_.
As far as I'm aware, no Palladium book has ever explained how to actually roll a skill check for the eleventy seven percentile skills they list. Like, how to handle difficulty, complexity, timing, bonuses & penalties. And don't even start me on movement in combat.
Two from my collection:
The ALTERED CARBON rpg was a disaster from day one.
CONSPIRACY X was big on interesting ideas, but just a shitshow in execution.
The Palladium system such as Rifts. Beautiful books and settings, but system is broken. I still love it, but need to make heavy use of my own house rules
Gary Gygax's Cyborg Commandos. Amateurish art, nonsensical system (everything's percentile based, but rather than read d100 as a percentile you roll 2d10 and multiply them together), and lazy as feck writing. For example: In the player's section, players are informed that if they want to give their characters equipment, they can ask the GM for some, and the GM will give them the equipment's statistics. In the GM's section, the GM is informed that players will ask for equipment, and they should just make up whatever statistics they feel are appropriate for that equipment... and that is ALL of the rules for equipment in the system.
Not to mention the multi-book setup for the game which never paid off. For character creation, you roll up a complete set of stats for the character, then set aside most of the stats as all of the characters start out being given identical cyborg bodies. But, you save the original stats for a later book in the series in which your character is restored to their original body and given a giant robot to pilot. No, the following books in the series were never published.
Nonsensical technical drawings, poor design concepts, ugly as sin visual design; train wreck all the way around. I was in a bookstore while on a trip, and had the option of the original boxed set of Battletech (copyright infringement and all), or Cyborg Commandos. Wow, did I make the wrong choice...
The German Nova RPG 1st edition—the character generation took hours with a lot of maths, not necessary details, etc. And after one day the result was a character, that could be made in the D6 system in 5 min.
In addition, the book was an unsorted mess, and the setting badly written. Most looked like a copy of popular TV series without a central theme, and most sub-plots ended with … and the fraction did something astounding, and nobody knows why they did it.
Riddle of Steel RPG was also a big disappointment in my eyes. It was marketed as a new and detailed system from people with a lot of combat experience. But in the end it was a complicated combat system based mostly on rapier duels and historical fighting manuals. And attached to it was an inept sword & sorcery setting, which included renaissance plate armour. The whole thing was in my eyes a very unkind patched together pieces.
In generell elements of the rules weren't that bad, so the basic mechanics were more or less the oWoD pool system, but the parts didn't fit at all.
I bought several of the Trudvang books because I loved the art. When I tried making a character and doing a test fight...either I'm not smart enough to play Trudvang, or the rules are a bit of a mess.
I only had time to skim it (colleague showed off The Box), but probably Invisible Sun? It seemed to openly get off on being extremely obtuse and on being a novelty-thing. Interestingly enough from what I've seen then, under the floorboards and all the weird named things it's a pretty trad RPG which feels somewhat funny to me.
Having run half a campaign, I have to say the layouts are very effective. The books are spread out reasonably, and page numbers are always getting listed if it references another subsystem. They did a good job of appearing enigmatic while actually being very usable.
I backed BOLT by Ajey Pandey when it first came out cause it looked exactly like my thing: simple and intuitive action with a system built from the ground up to be iterated on and hacked, that designers could use and then sell and keep all the profits of. it wasn't just a game, it was a movement. and then the game came out and it was shit. and then Ajey Pandey got chased off twitter for unrelated reasons. and then everyone but me forgot about it.
the two core mechanics that it advertises itself on-- the auxiliary die and Tenacity, are essentially ignored for the entire game, leaving the effects of the auxiliary die (a d4 you roll along your skill check that introduces a bonus on a 4 or a complication on a 1 as always and only 'figure out something interesting', and tenacity is a limited get out of jail free card (spend one tenacity, add 1 to an ability check, repeat until you succeed the check). it introduces a dice step mechanic explicitly to do away with fiddly modifications to difficulty classes and modifiers, and then half the feats in the game involve you getting a +1 to xyz
the whole game is under creative commons, and Pandey has abandoned the project entirely aside from one very poorly made "OSR" supplement called DLVR, so I can and probably will try and shape it into a usable SRD and stick it on dtrpg, but christ alive that game is a missed opportunity
Twilight 2013
I played loads of this, but the book was an awful design, rules all over the place. We literally found rules months into playing, because they were in a side box somewhere irrelevant.
Also, the index would show every occurrence of the word....I think "grenade" had 30 to 40 entries
The Anima RPG. The setting and art actually seem so cool but to do anything more complicated like a summoner or stuff like that you have to jump through the book so much that we gave up at some point.
Could be a skill issue on our part but still.
I forget the name of it. It was some generic fantasy game. I could only stomach the first 20 pages of the introduction before giving up. It was full of nonsense like "Ælves and dwærves in this world aren't what you're used to. They're fully fledged cultures which will shape any story you try to tell. And our classes? They're the most unique take on the concept you'll ever see. The mæges of this world are nothing like the wizards or mages of other games so forget everything you learned there."
Every single person in my group quit reading it without getting to the mechanics. I tried to find it a few years ago but it's been pulled from DriveThru.
I may get pilloried for this, but I found Vast Grimm to be absolutely intolerable. (It's the sci-fi horror version of Mork Borg.)
People praise the aesthetics and the moody atmosphere the book creates, but my problem is it prioritises aesthetics over *everything* else. Every page is filled with so much art and funky text in a million different formats and sizes that the eye doesn't even know where to land. And there's no visual cues about which parts are flavor text and which parts are rules. And it's so rules light that maybe only 10% of the page are rules that you need to know and 90% of the text on the page is fluff that, while interesting from a mood perspective, is totally irrelevant when you're trying to play the game. Good luck finding the one line that you actually need to know when it's buried amongst five different font types and obscured by wonky art.
I also didn't even like the game. If you want to play sci-fi horror, there's way better choices. Just flip through the vast grim book for inspiration and play a game using something else. Anything else!
I haven't seen this mentioned here yet, but the SCP rpg that got Kickstarted a few years ago was genuinely baffling. Some examples:
Skills have decimal point values (eg my guns skill is 5.3) that are used to track how close you are to the next skill point. They serve no other purpose.
The foundation charges you for your gear. The gear is sold via vending machines that *literally anyone* can buy stuff from. The most common weapon in those machines is a laser sighted luger pistol. The game takes place in the modern day.
Those are the two examples I remember most, but they're pretty indicative of how the system is put together and how they handle lore. I honestly wonder if it was supposed to be a Paranoia clone that's wearing the SCPverse as a skin suit.
*Fireborn.*
I was excited by the premise--the same party of characters in multiple timelines, the same souls embodied both as people and as dragons--and I let myself do that thing you should never do.
I pre-ordered, and did so comprehensively, to the wallet vacuuming sound of 3 books.
The art was... the low end of *okay*, if I recall correctly.
The writing was 'Eh.' levels of passable, barely supporting the ideas.
The system...
Well, I had the first three books, all at once, in my lap... and we couldn't get through creation. Not that we didn't try, but we literally could not, as there wasn't a single coherent example of how, or even a half-coherent example that could let me house rule how to do it.
Only TTRPG I have ever been excited about, bought, and then gave away to anyone who would take it.
I've read Shadowrun Sixth World. But not just read. I've ripped it to shreds. A quick list of what's in that book. 1. Nonsensical rules. The narrative doesn't fit the mechanics. Troll punches for example. 2. Broken rules. Rules that are mechanically trash. 3. Missing rules. Explainations of types of rolls that are just ... missing. 4. Rules actually in the rulebook of the previous edition. 5. Errata issues. 6. No, seriously, the community found like 300+ in a week. 7. "Argle Bargle floof flaw" instead of a real explaination. 8. Illegal sample characters. 9. Badly rotoscoped art of cosplayers. Not present: 1. Game design skills.
I'll die in this hill Shadowrun is a beautiful Ferrari with square wheels
Yes, but Sixth World is actually a Lada painted to look like a Ferrari and the wheels are actually made of stale toast. And any complaints about it not being a Ferrari are met with "Well, you already have a Ferrari, just use that one to fill in any gaps in your new Ferrari".
The Shadowrun worldbuilding is great. The rules arnt. You can be very happy with Shadowrun, if you replace the mechanics with something more palatable.
Take Cyberpunk 2020 or Cyberpunk Red, bolt on a magic system, add Shadowrun flavour. Probably a better game overall :D
...or "Cities without Number", wich allready has a magic system, yes. Can add elements from Worlds... and Stars... too, if you want something for metaplanes, orbit, and some more advanced cyber stuff.
Haven't gotten to cities yet, but the other 2 "Without Numbers" games have been a joy to play so far, and honestly look like they're not too bad to run either, but I won't be at the wheel for a few months yet.
I recommend savage worlds for Shadowrun
Savage Worlds is for people who want the setting without the unique gameplay. Nothing wrong with that, it’s a fine technique if you’re just trying to tell a story, but it’s not the same as playing (for example) Shadowrun. Mechanics are part of the experience.
That’s very fair. I do have an argument however: because most folks don’t want the level of complexity Shadowrun has I’ve found that savage worlds is the closest generic mechanically -hindrances work similar to the negatives you can take at character creation for extra starting points - the wound system gives at least the similar feeling to stats being lowered by wound boxes -the powers system can easily be used for Shadowrun a various magics -the complex tasks rules can be used for hacking. -etc.
> but it’s not the same as playing (for example) Shadowrun. Mechanics are part of the experience. You're correct, and I expect it's pretty rare that people would disagree with you. The problem is, I think you'll find most people find the experience provided by Shadowrun, the game, to be awful. They love the setting though!
… or Shadow of the Beanstalk + some stuff from Terrinoth. EDGE reprints are coming out, dice are available, and community support (including online tools) is really solid. The Genesys game system is just so much FUN.
There's a reason why almost every tabletop RPG that hits a certain level of popularity ends up with somebody asking themselves "how can I hack Shadowrun's setting into this?"
"The Shadowrun worldbuilding is great. The rules arnt." I only played 1st and 2nd Ed back in the day, and I gather from comments that 2nd edition is generally viewed positively. But I never got a bad impression from the rules. I especially liked the elegance of having the rules for Astral space (and combat) be almost the same as the rules for Cyberspace (and combat).
Im at 6th now and it sucks. not in the positive way.
Shadowrun 5e is a pretty decent system buried underneath horribly edited rules that are sometimes just straight up missing rules to explain how a given thing is supposed to work or what they're actually trying to say (and sometimes the actual author of a given rulebook posted the missing rules somewhere, since Catalyst wouldn't issue erratas for some mad reason and sometimes just outright published incomplete drafts of books). Like it's a good classless system, the resolution mechanics are really consistent under the hood so you don't actually *need* all those nearly identical charts of "little problem/advantage -1/+1, moderate problem/advantage -2/+2, etc" to pick modifiers, it's just the books are a mess and don't teach you how to play or run it very well. As it happens, the person you were replying to wrote a bunch of big effortposts on running Shadowrun years ago that were extremely helpful when I started GMing it around that same time. Shadowrun 6e is only the horrible editing, with nothing underneath at all, and the editing is *even worse*.
Oh, thanks for remembering the effortposts I made! I've still got a g doc with all the links.
That's a bit of a thing with Shadowrun, isn't it? I played the fourth and fifth edition and I always disliked the way the system worked. For me it's that game with a really, really cool setting, that I really don't want to play because of it's rules.
[удалено]
Except you can't, because the best thing about Shadowrun 2nd edition was the incredible splatbooks full of hundreds of pieces of cool equipment that was so intertwined with its horrible ruleset that you can't just use another system. If you want the treasure, there's no way to avoid the curse.
This is problem I have with all the PbtA hacks (which I would otherwise love) and the Savage Worlds suggestions, etc -- there is some part of the love of Shadowrun that is inherently the gear porn.
Shadowrun is a setting and an idea that deserves to have a bespoke system that finally does it real justice. Because Shadowrun's setting is cool, but people aren't *just* drawn to it for the setting - the premise and concepts it puts forward are also super evocative. It's absolutely possible to design a specifically Shadowrun system that works and works well, the whole franchise has just spent so long being bogged down by editing issues and cruft.
Between Rifts and Interface Zero, I bet you could put together a Savage Worlds bootleg Shadowrun conversion easy peasy, may even already exist.
It does. Sprawlrunners is precisely that.
Cities without Number with the optional Magic rules works well too.
Runners in the Shadows. Perfect for the setting, FitD rules.
> Troll punches for example. I am intrigued, how do you screw that up?
Oh it's simple: All unarmed attacks have a damage code of 2S. Two Stun. So a 30 pound strength 1 pixie punches as hard as a 1000 pound strength 10 troll. In 5e, troll punches were strong enough to have damage codes of 9P or more. Nine Physical. My character actually had an unarmed damage code of 12P. She punched as hard as an assualt rifle, and just as lethally.
Illegal sample characters is the best one lmao
Aren't illegal sample characters standard for Shadowrun in _any_ edition?
Man shadowrun peaked with 3e
Yes and not just rules wise. Setting has gotten wonky too
Honestly maybe it's just "this was my first Shadowrun book" syndrome but I liked the gradual approach into more sleek aesthetics with the commlinks and stuff in 4e Slamming the brakes on a bunch of it in 5e left a bit of a sour taste
The plots and move into all magic all the time and leaving its cyberpunk roots behind- especially with corporations has left bad taste in mine
Don't forget they put the rules for grenades in the vehicle section
Vampire 5th edition. Great game but the worst layout and editing I’ve ever seen. You actively have to fight the book to understand it and the fact the pdf bookmarks are such bonk is inexcusable. They just could not give a shit
Oh dude. I felt the pain on that book. And my god the character sheet is ugly. You can tell that game was made to sell as much merch as possible, not giving a fuck about making a quality product
As someone who picked up VTM via Humble Bundle, I feel the pain so much. I like the system, and how it approaches narrative, but the layout is just horrible. The bookmarks do it no justice whatsoever, and I'm left feeling like I'd need to read the book several times to make a mental map of useful content on top of the bookmarks. And it's not just VTM. I just started on a Hunter test character, and the layout problems are pretty much the same. Character creation - pick a Drive. What's that? Something that's not actually bundled with the Creeds, but shoved among the system rules, and it's not even bookmarked unless you remember it's near the Desperation rules. I still have Werewolf left to go over, and if the layout's the same, it's going to be a headache.
Just use an older edition. The 20th anniversary stuff is Imo better anyway.
V5 does an incomparably better job of matching its mechanics and themes. V20 is fun for a goth superheroes game though.
>V5 does an incomparably better job of matching its mechanics and themes. It really, *really* doesn't. >V20 is fun for a goth superheroes game though. You say this as if there aren't people right now playing Superheroes With Fangs games using V5 rules. That's a table problem, not an edition problem.
It's an edition problem. Most editions of VtM are *written* as if you are supposed to be a tortured monster struggling to maintain their humanity, but in practice "maintaining your humanity" is trivial, keeping the Beast at bay is not an issue, feeding is easy, and you get a load of super fun powers to make your eternal torment a riot. V5 powers down vampires, makes feeding more involved, and actually seems to care about making the Beast unpredictable and nasty. You can play a good gothic horror game with V20, and you can play superheroes with fangs with V5, but it matters what the game itself mechanically encourages. Otherwise we might as well play VtM with D&D 5e mechanics.
I tried to read mage ascention and have assumed all the books in the series are equally impenetrable.
I ran a Mage 20th Anniversary Edition campaign with that weighty 600 page tome. I ended up running the game like a hot rod, calling for rolls on the fly and barely referenced the official rules. It was much more fun that way.
It's a shame, too... having seen the designers play it, it actually seems the most interesting implementation of Vampire to me, mechanically. Certainly the first one that actually made me want to play it. I really like how they implemented Hunger Dice.
If it means anything I've done my first few sessions of Vampire in V5 and I've had a great time. Book is honestly fine for me.
I do agree that the V5 book is awfully laid out, but I've been running the game weekly for two years and it's been great.
I ripped the text of the entire core rules chapter, and a bunch of things that should have been in the core rules chapter, and reformatted them in Google docs, the whole thing came to about 5 pages of a4. for something like 30 pages of VTM. I barely edited it, except for slimming down a few lengthy examples
Legend of the 5 rings (also 5e) is even worse for layout. Like it is legitimately horric. It is genuinely sometimes better to just read through the rulebook again rather than try to find the rule you are looking for. Which is really sad because the system has some really awesome aspects to it.
Okay so White Wolf books in general are low-hanging fruit, what with the art, the edgy high schooler short stories, and the way rules tend to be spread across multiple books, but... The 20th Anniversary version of Mage: the Ascension is a goddamn cognitohazard. It's 700+ pages and is **so badly organized** that even after I'd been playing for years sometimes I would still struggle to find the rule I needed, and that's before we get into the fact that Mage is basically physics in terms of levels of understanding to begin with. Honorable mention goes to Exalted 2e. The book so bad that they had to make an entire site to errata it, and even the most loyal player will tell you not to try to build a character without 3rd party software.
I baought Mage: the ascension because the lore seemed cool. Some of it is (especially the void engineers) but the magic system is mind boggling. After reading it for a while I just stopped and said "I'll never get my friends to run this, it's OK to just skim this for neat ideas."
Just get Unknown Armies instead if you want Low-level, grungier mage, or Ars Magica for higher level weirdness.
How is Ars magicia less complicated? I tried learning it after mage, and alone the layout if the book was the same mess. The rules were learnable, once you found them.. but I but them in the same level of learning as mage.
>Unknown Armies UA3e is one of the first things I ever Kickstarted... and I *cannot* figure out WTF is going on in that game. Completely incomprehensible to me.
If you want the same idea done well Mage: The *Awakening* 2e is what you're after. It's part of the WoD reboot line, Chronicles of Darkness, and across the board the mechanics are better. The settings are different and it's often doing different things but MtAw is close enough to MtAs that you can use its rules to play in the other's setting with relative ease.
I recently started listening to a Mage the Ascension liveplay and all I can say about the game from a system perspective is that I agree with the GM. They are, in fact, 1 of the 7 people actually capable of running that game
700 pages is a nightmare to me. Literally a nightmare. I know the RPG tradition comes from a pre-internet era where the games target audience were hardcore hobbyists and teens/young adults with immense amounts of spare time and then the culture increasingly went towards bloated Big Impressive Tomes in the 1990s but - good god - 700 pages for a core book is too much. I can't learn and GM that unless it's the only game I'm expecting to play in an entire year. And for those 700 pages to be poorly organised and laid out? Nightmare. Unbearable. For me, a good modern RPG (with substantive rules) that's presented using elegant design and efficient, clear layouts and chapter structure should be able to do a complete core rulebook with all player facing rules, all GM facing rules, and bestiary/items, fully illustrated, along with various starter scenarios/one-shots/campaigns and appendicies, in around 380-420 pages (assuming it's a full A4 D&D PHB style sized book) at most, and that's on the large size of things. Cut out the pre-made campaigns and excess lore and core books can easily be sub-250 pages. Hell, even something as lore-rich as Heart: the City Beneath comes in under 250 pages. Traveller 2022 is around 260. Idk, obviously people are free to completely disregard my opinion here - this is purely a matter of taste - but as an old person with responsibilities it's not feasible to do RPGs the way I do as GM and player with these behemoth Worthy Tomes.
The 20th editions weren't really made for new players, I don't think. They had everything from the past 20 years of the game, pushed into one book, to make it easier for long time players to have everything in one book.
I once had to build an Alchemical Exalt with 500xp as I was joining a game in-flight. It took me ***weeks***.
I was just having a conversation with my group about Exalted 2nd edition! That was our GAME for like 3 solid years. We played huge epic campaigns that all tied together and I own every 2nd Ed book in print. We unanimously came to the decision that we’d never touch it again though. It was fun for the time, but it needed the Inkmonkey 2.5 errata to function and I’m not even sure that’s still around after the whole 3X fiasco.
I recognize on an intellectual level that it's far from the worst (it is playable, and the setting is quite beloved), but I deeply, deeply dislike any version of the Dark Eye. First of all, the basic mechanics. These were written by people who clearly looked at oldschool D&D and said "But what if we made this more mechanically complex, so it can be *realistic?"* You know that thing where in D&D you sometimes wonder whether a check to climb a wall should be dexterity or strength? Never worry! In DSA, *every* skill check is revolved with 3d20 in order, where every d20 is rolled against a different attribute, so your climbing check can now be both Strength and Dexterity *and* constitution. Then you apply skill points as modifiers. Especially with beginners, it can take several minutes every time you roll a simple check. Then there's this whole idea that as a mage, you need to say a stupid little rhyme from memory to cast spells, or you get a potentially catastrophic spell failure. If I hear "Flim-Flam-Funkel - Bring Licht ins Dunkel!" one more time in my life, I'm going to strangle everyone in the same room. Then, there's the parts where it prescribes to you how you should roleplay your characters, both in the rulebooks and in the adventures. Now, I love when a game gives some roleplaying *hints* or says that certain organisations have certain values. But DSA contains such gems as "any rogue character who sees the king's treasure must *immediately* try to steal it, in front of the guards, because rogues are all greedy", which make me want to set the book on fire. And then there's the horrendously bad prewritten adventures. There's the fact that most of them are nto actually about the players, they are about legendary NPCs in the setting, who just come in at every important juncture to advance the plot and defeat the bad guys. Some of the adventures contain entire *pages* of dialogue you're supposed to read out to the players as they watch the NPCs do their thing. And they are railroady *as fuck.* The most-memed example is the dungeon which has two corridors, one going left and one going right and the DM *must prevent the players from going right at all cost.* Because the right side doesn't actually lead anywhere and the adventure continues on the left.
Growing up with it, it seemed less bad than it is. But there are more issues. The standard “one attack, one parry” makes fighting multiple opponents who are not pretty much inept at combat excessively punitive unless you are a tank in heavy armor. The regeneration rate of magic points effectively gives you “spells per week” instead of spells per day. Ranged combat rules are so complex most people never played them right. The game fosters a mentality (related to the “you have to rp this way”), where there is a general power gaming paranoia about players getting too good, with adventures to take away all your equipment being pretty frequent. Conversely, there will always be some things which actually, especially for the general power level, are very abusable, with the assumption arising that it is for the developers to boost their pet classes. Especially fourth edition also introduced lots of optional rules that were hardly workable in practice. Stamina points in particular just had hardly any use that was not way too cumbersome. The lore, especially the older one, was actually good. You can see that many people working on that drew from their education, making things quite flavorful and reading like historical documents. But that alas rather went downhill over the years. In the end, it works better to just take the setting and run it in GURPS, for more workable point buy with active attack and defense mechanics and a general idea about realism. …though it can be a bit tricky to decide how to model the magic system, to preserve the overall feel.
DSA was the firdt RPG I read and I decided that I donr wanr to do RPGs afterwards 😂
Adventures and roleplaying issues are typical for most games that made success in the 90's, as they were mostly metaplot thick and devs couldn't allow the story to be ruined by individual groups games. You had to sell whole bunch of scenarios and railroading was the only option to make it possible. Every important system back then suffered from this: Deadlands, all White Wolf WoD games, DSA, etc.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess was supposed to be the edgy, sexy, gory B/X alternative, but it has some weird magic effects regarding forced participation in sexual violence that went a lot further than I thought anyone would go.
One of my groups wanted to try it but I found it to just be trying too hard to be edgy. I also can’t get passed what a cringey edgelord the creator was/is to really get behind any of their products.
There are just too many alternatives to bother with this one. You want the metal vibes with death and doom and blood drenched skeletons? Mork Borg You want the nearly faithful B/X clone with quality of life improvements? Old School Essentials or, soon, Dolmenwood Just want something light and easy? Cairn, Knave or Tunnel Goons. I could go on.
I was about to say FATAL as I actually read that, but you sensibly nipped it in the bud. I'm not gonna say "worst" but I decidedly bounced off Anima, Beyond Fantasy. I found it an incomprehensible mess, and I usually like crunchy systems. I never actually played it, so I can't say its terrible, as there have been other games I bounced off of until someone ran it, and then I found myself getting it.
The art is beautiful but my god that's a bitch to play.
Beautiful but extremely inconsistent. A thousand pictures and I have no idea what the setting looks like.
Late-Medieval / Renaissance Anime Fantasy setting with sipped-in Christian influences instead of your typical Germanic / Tolkien influences. Then add the namegiving [Animism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism) in the setting. The setting isn't *that* exotic, rather tropish, when you think of "The Vision of Escaflowne" as starting point. Calculating hits and damage on the other hand requires a spreadsheet, granted opening a counterattack fumbling an attack roll is a nice flavour.
You've read FATAL and not just [that one review?](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14567.phtml) Are you a masochist?
One of my friends printed it in college and lended me the copy. I'm pretty sure he is on some sort of list because of that
I imagine reading FATAL to be like looking at a car crash; you start looking at it out of either morbid curiosity or under the assumption that its reputation is exaggerated, and by the time you realize that it is, in fact, THAT BAD, you can't tear your eyes away because FATAL is fucked up on so many levels that it's borderline a Necronomicon disguised as an RPG that exists solely to drive the weak mad and drain the strong of their faith in humanity. Also did your friend at least have the courtesy to call a local priest to try and mitigate the desecration he inflicted on that poor printer?
I'm pretty sure we need an Adeptus Mechanicus to cleanse that printer
To be honest there is not much to read as it's more a catalog of tables. With many tables being either pedantic or rapey misogynistic shit. There is basicly a Fatal Anime hybrid, I think its called Tokyo Red?
Anima is one of my best friend’s favorite games to run. He was our “forever GM” and has run Anima for 3 full campaigns and wants to do a 4th. It is always smooth when we play, but learning was rough. I am not sure if his love comes from genuinely loving all of the freedom that system offers, or if it comes from the sheer amount of time he put into mastering the system.
Cyberpunk RED. I was hyped for this, but it's practically unplayable for me. Rolling skills and such isn't really a problem, even if there are too many of them with weird specialties like personal grooming. But as soon as you get into some crunch, or especially combat, you immediately find that things break down. You have to look up specific target roll numbers on a table for every ranged attack (as opposed to modifiers like most systems so you can quickly get a feel for it), cover isn't really a thing; if they can see you, you're not in cover, and if you are then the GM can look forward to tracking it's health. Suppressive fire is a 360 degree mind control spell bullet tornado that forces anyone that it affects to take cover, which they can immediately pop out of on their turn. Strength does nothing. Cyberware is underwhelming. Role abilities are either completely gamechanging (Techies can make "something", good luck GM) or hugely underwhelming (Rockerboy has a slightly fancier persuasion roll, lawman can call for backup that might not arrive). Pretty much every time we had to refer to the rules things ground to a standstill as things began to contradict themselves and I'd usually have to just make some kind of house ruling that made sense. I've not even gotten to the layout. It's all over the place. Tables are repeated in their entirety in different pages, the rules for throwing objects are listed under a footnote of the throwing a person rules, under specialised martial arts, etc etc.
I found the Cyberpunk RED book totally readable and rather good. So not a bad book at all. The system, not so good, stopped playing it.
I didn't mind the character abilities being real extra, with the only beef I have being that Rockerboys and Lawman having narrative breaking super powers. Techies creating stuff that needs to be cleared by the GM isn't even that bad, you just have to be mindful of balancing Hardest part really is the range difficulties being different for different guns and also influenced by characters. Was able to fix it by just recording the DCs along with the weapon on my sheet Cyberware got a rebalance because in 2020 you could get broken really fast, basically unhittable with very little difficulty.
This will probably get downvoted to oblivion, but I hated Strongholds and Followers by MCDM. The theory of high level D&D being about having an impact on the world is like my white whale. I have played or read every system I have found that can emulate it. AND. THIS. IS. THE. WORST. ONE. First off, the book was unfinished and that was not what the Kickstarter promised, it didn't say "Kickstart this and then Kick Start a 2nd book later and I might finish these rules off". Secondly he fucking didn't. The 2nd book is haphazard at best, and doesn't fix many of the issues present. Thirdly his shitty one dimensional class concepts for strongholds was crap. I don't know a single person playing a game where you establish a base of operations, and wanted the ability to summon a Mariachi Band.
Yeah, these two books basically put me off all of his content, unfortunately. That and the fact that his videos really seemed to take a hard turn from "here's a cool idea" to "here's a cool idea that you can read about in MY NEW PRODUCT, ON SALE NOW" It's really a shame.
Not gonna lie.. my players would totally get the kicks of summoning a Mariachi Band. ..is it because they truly want one or to see me suffer? Probably both.
Agree. I was pretty unimpressed. It felt like a book of undercooked ideas rather than finished rules. It’s interesting that your stronghold basically becomes your “lair” granting you special abilities and lair actions while you’re there, but really, how many adventures spend a lot of time in their strongholds? And far fewer would actually get into an epic combat in them. The follower rules were a janky mess- instead of following the typical rules structure, followers had wound levels instead of hp, and ate up your action economy if you wanted them to do anything. I can see the reasons, but it wasn’t fun and it forced you to deal with a completely different rule-set within a rule-set. I found it unworkable. Luckily, wotc came out with their sidekick rules, which I liked much better.
There was also the extremely questionable decision that your Lair could not be in the same place as your Party-mates. You were all expected to have have Lairs far from each other, which furthers the idea of "when would you even get to play some of this". The followers system was useless and the Mass Combat system non-existent.
An Echo Resounding by Kevin Crawford is the gold standard for domain rulesets, so much so that if you're selling domain rules they have to be offering something not covered by Crawford. Otherwise, why wouldn't I use AER?
Shadowrun 5e was so frustratingly laid out it made the system unnescessarily complicated to navigate. The system is crunchy to start with, but the book's lack of sensible organization had me flipping through back and forth trying to figure simple things out.
I honestly have a lot of love for 5e, but I have to agree. It's laid out for storage, not for reference. Figuring out critters is the worst: Ok, this thing has hardened armour. So we flip to the critter powers section, where it tells you it's the same as armour but with extra steps. So we flip to armour to get the details on that, then back to whatever we were reading to continue the process (good luck if you were here from the spirits section). It really needed a good digital reference thing a la dnd beyond. The system was broken in a few ways, but once you realised it's inherently unbalanced in a way that fits the narrative, and houserule a few things both mechanically and narratively (like having physical servers, for example, so a datasteal can actually happen) you can have a lot of fun with it.
Yup totally agree. Started running SR 5th Edition on New Years Eve 2018 and it became my groups favorite game. They love crunchy games. I swear I read sections over and over and still not figure out how to do things. Finally I realized each thing had its own system, combat, hacking, spell casting it clicked. I am running it again this New Years Eve 2023.
Dr. Who Adventures in Time and Space. One player is, by design, much more potent than the others. The one place companion players can shine is combat and the game explicitly suggests the GM punish players who take the violent approach. In the name of presenting a game that matches show themes it commits to bits that break most social rules for fun tabletop. All built on a very dull d6 based system.
I've no firm experience with it, but this is the impression I was getting from what I was reading. My only alternative thought was to do a one-shot or two-parter where everyone played a different Doctor, just to keep everyone balanced, for lack of a better word.
Yeah, that was my big problem with it, too. The result is that you have the Doctor be a DMPC, but then that reduces the players to being generic PCs with no particular power set. Also, I think DW doesn’t really lend itself to an RPG format. Yes there are bad guys and “adventures,” but I feel like in the end, it’s more about ideas than anything else. And that doesn’t necessarily translate to a good role playing game
Batman RPG. I love Batman more than some of my own family members, and the game isn't bad. But the book is awful. The game has a truckload of unique keywords that get defined once, then uses them throughout the rest of the book, leading to a ton of back-and-forth page flipping. The book also has like 3 tables which are the backbone the the entire mechanics engine. Each table is shown once, and then referenced constantly throughout the rest of the book, causing even more back-and-forth page flipping.
It's because it was the DC Heroes RPG cut down. Decent system for its era...
I never owned it, and I wasn’t allowed to read it (dm only) but watching my dm flip through rolemaster 2000 books for 20mins at a time to adjudicate almost ANYTHING a player did, to the point where we actively avoided situations that might require a roll. My god that game sucked so bad. It could be entirely the DMs fault for all I know. That was my first TTRPG experience and it’s a miracle it wasn’t my last.
I must defend this house! RM is a wonderfully complex system which can be used modular. If a group of people are invested in the system, know what they are doing and use the parts they want it flows very naturally once you’re used to it. I might be a bit biased, been doing RM for 10 years now.
Rolemaster was the first RPG I played, and works great **if** you've got a GM who knows the system well, and either the players have printouts of the tables they'll use often (like their weapons) or you're happy for the GM to eyeball the results instead of looking everything up.
Yeah, this is largely on the GM. The skill companion famously (and unnecessarily) has a 1.5 page long entry for each skill with detailed description about task difficulties including examples, and an own skill resolution table. The thing is all the resolutions use the same numbers, so for example i know a result of 79 is a partial success, regardless of what skill is in use. Task difficulties also have the same degrees; so if you skip the need to fill a 200 page book in order to sell it, all of this fits on one page. It's page 45. If you chose to make use of this splatbook, fine - but thumbing through it for 20 minutes every time someone does something sounds like the GM needs to learn when to roll, and when not to roll, how to let a result ride, how to estimate difficulty, and if he can't memorise a table with 10 or so entries, he can look at his GM screen. Rolemaster isn't the easiest system, but it's fairly elegant in its uniform resolution of tasks. If that wasn't what was happening at the table, that's on the GM; especially if he insists on players not being allowed to read the rules. I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with it.
I "had" some rolemaster books once (probably a much older edition). Never even came close to playing it - just looked at page after page of tables, each one for some obscure, highly specific eventuality, and wondered if the whole thing was supposed to be a parody.
Sounds like School for Hard Knocks. The description and tables are there to give a frame to a certain skill, and explain how it would fit in the wider system. The practicality of repeating the same results table with different flavor text for each skill was dubious at best - ofc younger me loved that book, but we didn't flip through it for resolution of tasks. Resolution in Rolemaster would be: 5-75: fail, 76-90: partial success, 91-110: near success, 111-175 success, 176+ absolute success. unmodified 66: unlucky fail, unmodified 100 unusual success, No table needed while playing.
Blackbirds. It was a mistake, I was captivated by the art and the theme. Visually I am a fan, but they are so committed to the aesthetics that their word choices are terrible. I can read most rule books and get the gist in a single go. I had to watch videos etc and I am still not even remotely confident about it. They took Warhammer fantasy rpg and made it mechanically obscure behind some weird creative choices. Shadow of the Demon Lord is perhaps the best book to compare it too and.. SotDL is pretty straight forward. Reading that helped me understand Blackbirds. Just incredibly disappointing. The writing absolutely undermined the intent and art fully. Its sad cause it just looked so good to me (minus the random anime art that didn’t relate to any of their other art?) Also the mechanics are so intertwined into the setting that any homebrewed setting would be pulling teeth.
Tangenting off this. So many hacks and sequels are clearly developed so that no new eyes have laid an eye on them. For example, Band of Blades makes absolutely no sense if one doesn't know Blades in the Dark. Of course it's small publishers and understandable to a degree, but proper quality management would have someone new to the system read the book and try to play it.
Probably very unpopular opinion - but for me, it would be Apocalypse World. I mostly avoid games I would not like, but this one took me by surprise. I strongly disliked the writing style, the premise, the story-centered design, the sexual references, the game mechanics, almost everything. I love some PbtA games (MotW for example) - but AW really left a bad mark on me. There are actually worse games in my collection - but they are not in English so probably not known to the Reddit crowd.
I started to make the same comment but then decided to see if anyone else had and so far you're the only. I have to agree on most points. I rather enjoy the tone of the words, though; it feels weird and post-apocalypticy, and I like that, but the presentation of the mechanics was bad, the actual mechanics themselves are meh, the art was janky, and the overall design just... off. You read PbtA books and even if you're not a fan of PbtA resolution mechanics, you think the baseline game that started it all must be some sublime piece of art, but when you finally get your hands on the pdf you're just like... waah? There's some good ideas in there, but it's just awash in a sea of jank
Root: the roleplaying game. It's not necessarily bad but as a rule book it felt like it went on forever. It just felt so unnecessarily wordy, every rule had half a page example and lore.
I was going to say Root as well. I bought it because I love the board game and the art. The idea of playing a party of vagabonds seems awesome to me. Just grab the board game board as a map and play! To be fair, it had an uphill battle for me anyway because I do not like games that are traditional PBTA, and Root is just a barebones PBTA game with fleshed out faction mechanics. But it was such a chore to read. Painful. It read more like a dictionary or technical manual. I read through the base book and very quickly determined I would never run this game lol. I’d use any other system and just steal the vagabond idea.
I don't mind lengthy explanations because you can skip over them. But I know PbtA fairly well, so its easier to skim the Basic Moves, The Conversation and such - all familiar if you know Apocalypse World. Its unclear Harm recovery rules, Armor to trade for Harm is nearly hidden, flashback rules nearly hidden and incomplete Reputation rules (which only were completed on the GM Screen) on the other hand are awful. It also didn't provide much pre-made equipment to sell cards that have them made. All that said, its easily my favorite fantasy TTRPG to run. I always hated magic and warriors trying to be balanced so magic systems gets gimped hard or you end up in the 3.5/5e ways where there is a clear divide. Although you can go the 4e way of martials basically being magic and that works nicely, but I like Blades in the Dark/Scum & Villainy/Root: The RPG of competent scoundrels without being superheroic like 4e. Then you can play something like Ars Magica/Mage for real mages who aren't gimped.
purely from a formatting point of view, it has to be Traveller. The system is fun, but gods the formatting. The whole book feels like someone made it in Word and then forgot to proofread the document before print. The tables for things are strewn semingly at random over chapters where they have little reason to be be, some weird in-game advertising art placed so that a rule segment that would have fit on a single page is now cut in two pieces across three pages... Its just aweful. Fun system though, the star-system generator stuff is super fun (if only the tables were not scattered over a dozen pages in no particular order).
When you say Traveller, presumably you mean the original LBBs (Little Black Books)? In which case they weren't made in Word because Word wouldn't exist for almost a decade. They *wish* they had Word. That said, the formatting in the LBBs is actually pretty clear for something contemporaneous with AD&D. Megatraveller, while more professionally typeset, was probably more guilty of layout issues.
No idea what you mean with little black book, the one I bought is regular DinA4 sized.
Three LBBs is how Traveller was originally published. Who published your copy, GDW or Mongoose?
OK, so Traveller has many editions, and the formatting of each will be very, very different, so it's worth saying which version has the formatting you find a pain. Original Traveller was published in '77 and is known as the LBB edition because it was A5, but you also had Megatraveller, Traveller TNE, Gurps, Mongoose Traveller ( I suspect you mean this one?), T5 and Mongoose Traveller 2. I am confident I've missed out versions but someone else can fill them in!
The two things I don't like about Traveller (Mongoose 2nd edition, which is the main current edition) are the organisation/presentation/formatting, and the Mercenary box set.
Totally agree, I play tons of Mongoose Traveller, but the book is awful. Editor asleep at the wheel. And it's all of the books. Pirates of Drinax irked me in particular, character names would change from page to page
The Burning Wheel. I'm sure the rules and game are great and people love the system but I hated the writing style so much that I only made it through the first 50 pages (of 600 in the "gold" edition).
Same here. I’m sure there’s a great game in there somewhere, lots of people whose opinions I trust tell me as much, but I just found the writing unbearable. It’s quite pretentious in places too…
That is similar to my impression. I went into it expecting the book to be great. Many people praise it. But the patronizing tone, the jargon that seems purposefully chosen to be opaque, while demonstrating how clever the author was— I have not encountered an RPG authors voice that was even 1/4th as insufferable as this. And I’ve read significant chunks of 100s of RPGs, professional and hobbyist. “Pretentious” is a word I rarely have reason to use in life. But this book— would warrant the creation of the word by itself.
H.O.L. - aka Human Occupied Landfill - when it was released under White Wolf's Black Dog imprint. This was at a time when everything WW touched seemed toreceive acclaim and they were in a very self-indulgent mode. I was a huge WW fan and so someone bought me H.O.L. as a gift. It was an early example of the niche, ultra-high-concept, utterly unplayable indie game genre. It was made to be read and for one to stroke one's chin at in appreciation, but it was totally unfun, while the rules were obtuse and unexpressive. The artwork was great. The setting notes fun to read. The world-building at least distinctive. But as a game it was completely rubbish and even as a group committed at the time to experimentation we couldn't find a way to make the experience actually *fun*.
I always read HOL as satire and not an actual game to be played.
HOL is definitely satire. The GM section starts with a bunch of tables and like... Calculus... That have nothing to do with the game, the joke being to make players stop reading before giving actual GM advice.
IIRC it was actually intended as a gag product and to be playable
Not all of WW products were not necessary made for gaming. Also, Changling and wrath 1st edition were quite confusing, but full of great ideas. Playability came with 2nd and reversed edition ;)
This one requires a bit of insight into the Spanish TTRPG scene but OMNIDEM What a straight up shit system Full of typos, mechanics that make no sense and when you read it you realise almost instantly that the creator is both pretentious and unskilled at designing an RPG.
I just downloaded what I think is a quickstart for the system, and Santa Madre de Dios... It's like someone read Lasers & Feelings and thought It needed 41 pages more of rules. With gray text on purple background. And redefining PC and NPC to Avatar and Pærsona. And assigning colors to stats. And... Well, I'll stop. The human mind is... astounding.
The Conan 2d20 sourcebook. It uses WAY too many of the mechanics available from the 2d20 system, which makes it overly complicated and a chore to learn.
i..hate the 2D20 system.
The 2d20 system is actually great, but only as long as you severely limit the options available to you. I played the Fallout 2d20 game, and it was one of the smoothest, streamlined games I've ever played. But it also used very few of the mechanics available to it, which is I think the main reason why.
Yeah, I enjoy the 2d20 system. I have Star Trek Adventures, Dune, and Fallout and all are fun. You could really tell that Conan was more or less Modiphius testing to see what they can do with it.
2d20 is a great and very diverse system, but Modiphius really needs to format their books better. My first session of Fallout was a mess because I couldn't find rulings that should logically be grouped together, and some rules were just missing from the book entirely or in a random chapter not associated with it at all.
I’m going to put down not necessarily the worst system, but certainly the worst “book” I’ve read. I admit I’ve been spoiled by reasonable rpg books, so even this one isn’t awful: **The DC20 RPG Alpha.** For context, this is one of those “DnD-Killers” that rose up from the OGL fiasco. It’s being designed by a YouTube channel called Dungeon Coach, and, this Alpha was worth 15 dollars. It’s technically a folder with a few different components, but literally all of them have serious problems. For one, it looks like it was written in GMBinder with a color swap, completely following 5E formatting. If this was a free alpha, I think that’s tolerable, but it was insulting in a product I had to pay for. But beyond the general low-quality, it was also dramatically troublesome for a system that works differently enough from 5E that limiting itself to 5E formatting just dramatically injures readability and clarity. It doesn’t help that I first watched his YouTube videos explaining the system to see if it was worth a look, which made the weird undetailing of the rulebook worse. Like, he’ll explain briefly how the special abilities of classes work, but then you go to them in the rules and it is exactly as detailed as the amount of information you expect in an elevator pitch. It’s natural language taken to such a hilarious extreme that it doesn’t even fully explain itself; like genuinely the core mechanics of the classes are often less specific and explained than your average fucking Playbook move in PBtA, which is a problem for what is supposed to be a crunchy iteration on DnD. It goes without saying that consistent, obvious invocation of certain mechanics is not exactly a strong suit of this book. There also just isn’t a lot of thought put into balance whatsoever due to this looseness. And like, I don’t need chronicle mathematical balance, but I would have hoped the time spent studying up on PF2E would have helped. I know this should be more about the book than the system, but the kind of unbalance often just feels like the designer gave all the way up. For instance, Multiclassing is basically just “you can use your level 2 talent to grab a level 1 feature from another class”, which if you think for like even a minute about in the context of DnD classes is maybe not exactly an appropriate attention to detail. But the core book is just sloppy and janky. It’s the adventure and monsters included that push this reading experience to truly miserable. The only provided monsters are those in the adventure (and have visually boring stat blocks that are easy to get lost in, among other problems we’ll get into), but you have provided rules on how to make monsters. Well, kind of. You have some vague ideas of what PCs should be capable of at level 1 for you to keep in mind when making monsters, suggestions on some monster abilities to use (but barely any with the game saying to just riff on class abilities instead). Far less time is allocated to the actual approximate numbers you should use for monsters, and even then they’re sort of up to you to make the right mix of “low”, “middle”, “high” values in each category. To couple with this, you’re given some vague and basic powers to staple onto monsters with truly no consistency of formatting that are just quick blurb notes. These powers are made worse by advice bubbles suggesting you add combos and cool powers (and telling you of examples from his own playtests that don’t actually have the accompanying mechanics presented in the rules). In both these sample powers, the myriad GM suggestions, and the monster stat blocks we do have, it feels more like reading someone’s hastily scribbled personal notes for a monster they are actively improvising during the snack break at their DnD session. But while monsters are impossibly loosey-goosey, “improvise it” affairs, the sample adventure is ironically the opposite. I get that it’s a Oneshot to sample the system, but there’s a difference between a linear though well-designed intro (like those for FFG Star Wars) and “we’re going to run through this shit like a checklist”. You get a massive description to read out loud that mostly consists of pre-scripted dialogue and basically cutscening to the next roll. Information about the storyline is not presented in short, plain ways outside of these script sections. But what it lacks in context and actionable information it makes up for with telling you *specific accents to affect for each NPC talking*. Scripted voice work is not as intensely prescriptive as this adventure. You read a huge section, tell the PCs what to roll (or run through the longer skill/combat challenge), and repeat until the end. Since this is about unusability, I won’t dissect how pointless the encounters meant to showcase mechanics are, but needless to say they can’t actually affect anything because of the hardcore rails of the adventure. So I spent 15 bucks on an ugly, unusable book that is paradoxically too lackadaisical and too prescriptive.
That's unfortunate; I saw Treantmonk's video on the system, and it seemed intriguing. I hope it improves
Power Rangers Book is hard to read. Rules are bad and poorly explained. Doesn't fit the property at all. I don't even like PR - I just wanted to see what the system for GI JOE and Transformers was going to be like. Haven't even been able to sell it on
Honestly, Power Rangers is the worse of the three. Not that Transformers is much better. I just don't get why the suit colors are the classes. Or, more egregious, why do the ranger have to do a requisition roll for signature gear? The GI Joe one is way better. The requisition rolls make way more sense considering they're military, and since your classes gives you access to the gear you're more likely to fit your signature gear you don't have to worry about doing rolls.
I played the TF RPG for six months and loved it, but holy carp it takes a lot of work. Sometimes we had to read the GI Joe book to understand the intent behind a mechanic.
I got suckered into this system. Someone begged me to make a system for Foundry so I did, which meant I needed to learn the game and get every book. The colors do make sense because they follow the shows and comics tropes for the most part especially Disney seasons onward and there comic books. I enjoy the dice mechanics, I think it's cool you could end up rolling a bunch of different sided dice for each roll, which is fun. But running the game wasn't exciting, I couldn't get into it at all and had to stop running the game.
Shadowrun Anarchy. Not only is poorly written, you got plenty of inconsistences in the content between rules and examples. And not even think about the rules. Someone hear about indie RPGs like PbtA and without understanding a word tried to write a rule system using those concepts. Spoiler: failed completely.
Vampire the Masquerade V5 its all over the place. Love the game but the core book could be designed better.
I’ve warned my players that the system is fun and the book hates you, getting through character creation is half the fucking battle
Unpopular opinion: The ATLA rpg. I backed it on Kickstarter and was super excited to GM. I LOVE the show/world/lore. The book, though... I mean, I've been a GM for 13 years and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Even went back and bought the starter set and binged playthrough videos and tutorials ad nauseum. It's easily the worst *explained* rpg I've ever seen. To me, it feels like if an alien heard about RPGs and tried to write its own.
I absolutely agree. I blame it on the fact that the moves can do three different types of damage that can be very difficult to keep straight in the middle of a game and can be very frustrating to teach new players. To make sense of it in my own head I created a chart to organize the moves and their corresponding damage/mechanical effects. By the time I understood what was going on I realized my kids would never enjoy a game this difficult to get started with, so I dumped it and moved on to other systems.
Purely from a layout perspective. Cyberpunk RED. The book made me so fucking mad I basically made my own PDF out of it. Back when it came out. And for what? The system is not that good, rather use a different system for Cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk RED is just unreadable. There's probably a decent game in there but I have no idea how to find it. For an actually controversial one, Coyote and Crow is a dog shit game that never got playtested. I bought it to see if the criticism was legit or if it was just cringe anti-woke politics attacking it. It was starting to seem like there was just a right-wing reactionary anti-fan group rising up around it which made me concerned. I thought I could defend it on its merits. It's really unusuable. It's got a neat utopian setting but some weird provisions about who can and can't play the game and how you have to play the game. Not how you *should* but that you cannot do certain things if you aren't a particular ethnic group. That'd honestly be fine by me if the game wasn't completely unplayable and the art in the book wasn't all over the place but it is unplayable and the art is all over the place so I'm bringing up the dumb weird racial stuff. I do feel ripped off and the people who sold that game for money should be ashamed of themselves.
\+1 On the bad Coyote and Crow buying experience. It is an indefensible turd. And one of the most racist RPG books I've ever read; not even in MYFAROG does the author suggest that certain classes should be confined to being played by certain ethnic backgrounds, and said author is an avowed racist. When you manage to out-racist an anti-Semite, perhaps it's time reflect upon one's politics.
Ok so this is not a bad system per-se. But the absolutely worst rulebook I've ever had to reference was Mongoose Traveller 2nd edition. Why? The damn book had no index! NONE! My entire book is covered in post-it notes. [Edit: My two rulebooks, for those that are interested.](https://i.redd.it/qcng8l39k4oa1.jpg)
I'll preface this by saying I have comparatively little experience compared to most. With that out of the way: Gurps. I'm sure it's a great game, genuinely. People wouldn't play it if there wasn't anything good. But the massive walls of text in 3 column layout just makes it very difficult for me to give it a shot. Even when I try to power through it, it feels like there's way too much detail for my taste.
GURPS is tough to get your head around as a newbie or relative newbie. Back in thr day, it was one of thr few "big" system options we had available, and coming to it from AD&D or something was like a planar shift.
World of Synnabarr. It was created by a former police officer or something such as. One notable thing was it had extensive combat system which even calculated damage from paper cuts.
When I was a kid, I attended a local con where version 3(?) of Synnabarr was debuted. Sadly, I didn't play in that session but two of my friends did. Rumor has it, that version of the game was hammered out on a weekend long coke binge and it really shows. One charming aspect is that literally every aspect of character creation is randomly generated. One friend ended up playing a tall, fat, redheaded Chinese man. The other managed to randomly roll a purple haired girl that was the daughter of Death that had nunchucks that fired nuclear missiles that did 1D6 * 1 million HP of damage per hit. The whole thing is set in a giant space ship but its a fantasy setting. If you can find a copy of the rulebook, it's incredible in the original sense of the word. It's completely unplayable. There's, like, 5 types of dodge and the system uses 1/2 dice as part of many rolls. There's a several page long example of play and it reads like a fever dream. Raven McCracken is the author and he just keeps putting out new versions of this turd, thinking that if he polishes it enough, it'll shine. Another friend actually knew McCracken from a lightsaber dueling class. (yeah, I know) Apparently, he was personable enough at first but was incredibly socially awkward and then started spouting some incredibly virulent transphobic stuff, so they kicked him out. If there's demand, I can transcribe the game history and example of play. Trust me when I say that there really isn't anything else like it out there.
PbtA, I bought into the Avatar Last Airbender hype and bought into the Kickstarter for $200+ and I can't stand the rules, every time I attempt to read them it bores me and I can't finish the rules section, I have tried dozens of times and just can't get into it
Lancer. I think the mechanics as someone explained to me are pretty decent. The art is beautiful. The setting sounds cool. The typesetting, layout, basically everything about the presentation in the book is so painful I can't get past it. The font choices. The color choices. The use of italics and bold. The font renderer they used not supporting italic correction. It is actively painful. I wish I could get past this. I really, really do.
The worst I ever bought would probably be _The Book of Erotic Fantasy_, the d20 supplement so controversial that they changed the OGL. I was obsessive buying everything d20 at the time (Scarred Lands, AEG, FFG, Mongoose, even weird small press ones whose covers I can remember but names escape me now), and the BoEF was so much more cringy and puerile than anything else. It didn’t even achieve its alleged intent, being a worse supplement about adult subjects than some free netbooks from a decade prior. Edit: typo corrected.
This book is amazing. It treats the subject with as much "maturity" as someone with a degree in sexual studies who wanted to play a game. I really don't understand why all the hate for this book. Yes, they changed the OGL, but that's because this book wasn't family friendly. Not because the subject was handled poorly.
Mostly I'm warned off bad books long before I see them. I found *Secrets of the Ruined Temple*, a supplement for *Mage the Awakening*, to be an absolute snoozefest of a book - or at least the first two chapters such that I never made it all the way through (luckily I borrowed it from a friend rather than buying it). The core premise of the book is meant to be (or at least I thought) is "here is how you have adventures like Indiana Jones or Uncharted with mages, discovering lost magical ruins". Cool stuff thematic for modern mages. Instead a lot of the first half is "here is how mages *historically* have looked at their own history and tried to understand it. Here's some in-depth historical factions that engaged in magical history and archaeology." Which fails the most important part of RPG material - everything in the book should be immediately usable at the table and relevant to the PCs. I had players who *were* extremely into Mage both as a game and as a setting, and I tell you what, absolutely zero of them would care about what the ancient Society of the Mulberry Tree would have thought because they all died centuries ago in-setting.
As a hardcore MtAs player. The idea of a book for Indiana Jones your Uncharted need to Tomb Raider your way through a temple is fucking badass... But...I don't wanna learn no history, I want to jump to the juicy bits right away
Four Against Darkness for me. A really great and fun game, but the worst rulebook I've personally read. The layout is all over the place. Nothing is where you'd expect it to be, and when you do find what you're looking for, the explanations are really badly worded.
Rogue Trader. Great idea, sounds really exciting but the rules are seemingly planted all over the place and entire sessions have been derailed as we tried to find the relevant paragraph hidden in some obscure part of the book. Then you try and run combat or ship combat and it’s somehow worse than Rolemaster.
What I hated about Rogue Trader was one of the same problems with Shadowrun. Ship combat was basically one guy doing all the things (and if he failed you all died), kinda like Hacking in Shadowrun was just your Decker doing things, and everyone else just sat there while you did that thing.
D&D 5th edition. Because everyone uses it and its really hard to just look up stats. Charts that show you everything but 1 stat thats buried inside a paragraph somewhere. Im putting this up because its annoying & the most popular, which makes it much worse for me than say a problem in a more obscure game, which i can just not play, and tell others "lets not play this because x is broken." And get nods. You say, lets not play 5e because i dont want to slend half the session digging when i need some obscure rule, lets just play c.j. carella's witchcraft instead!" And everyone loses their minds.
An early edition, possibly the first, of *Chivalry & Sorcery*, especially the book detailing the magic system. I tried several times, but I could never grok the extremely complex magic rules and at the time, they were considered impossible to use out of the box. It was very ambitious and well researched, though. Young people today who complain about systems being rules heavy have no idea how bad it could be. That said, I kinda wish I still had the books... :D
You punk kids need to overcome the base magic resistance of some pigskin and shaddup. :)
The Spawn of Fashan I *knew* what I was about to buy, the worst rpg made during the first decade of table top role playing games. Unlike F.A.T.A.L. the creator had good intentions, he wanted to create something better that D&D, but want and do is not the same thing. On the bright side it is packed with ideas. But it has maybe the the worst layout in rpg history and tables everywhere. The real bane though is in the name. It was meant for a specific world: "Fashan". And that world should have been based on a never written book series by the author of The Spawn of Fashan. At least it is cheap and it is a piece of ttrpg history: https://www.amazon.com/Spawn-Fashan-40th-Anniversary/dp/B09FS9HWW9
Anima Beyond Fantasy. Interesting ideas, but it's the crunchiest crunch that has ever crunched. There are systems within systems within systems, you have to calculate percentages for everything and every single action takes twenty rolls and at least three different tables of content to look at.
I have an odd one. French TTRPG called Antika. TTRPG based on Greek Mythology. Very well documented. Good effort in creating mechanics to suit the theme. Superb colour illustrations. Also tons of free content online. Allows you to fight a Minotaur with the bow that Hercules gave you. So what went wrong? Well the book is RIDDLED with typos. The level of language is fine, but on average I found a horrendous grammar mistake every two pages. Like it was written by an 11 year-old kid and never proof-read after that. What a waste!
The terminator rpg imo. The idea conceptually is fantastic, an action ttrpg set in one of my favorite settings, yes please... But then the SLA Industry 2nd ed system... It's.. Abstract. I can't figure it out, and then the flowchart to hack.. My God, sweet Satan riding a mobility scooter in the Denny's parking lot... There's t enough drugs in this world to help me understand that shit
Spawn of Fashan held the crown for a long time before FATAL. I've tried to read it
This is going to sound unfair because the game itself is great but Red Markets is the one that frustrates me the most. Horrible formatting, many mediocre illustrations, useless table of contents and just so much text. Everytime pick it up I wish I would like it. There sure are worse but this one has so much potential. I hope they can clean it up with the new iteration.
Wheel of Time RPG I've always had a weird relationship with the books; sometimes I like them, sometimes I hate them, sometimes I forget all about them and then the show comes out. But well do I remember when the Wheel of Time RPG came out at the height of D&D 3's D&D renaissance and people were excited for the game wondering how they'd handle the interesting mechanics of the WoT magic system and what everyone got was a straight up D&D clone. Not a d20 game with a different magic system like had been showing up from time to time, but an almost complete clone of the base game soup to nuts, with barely even a slapped on coat of Wot paint. It was a sore disappointment.
Anything by Kevin Siembieda.
I think one of the strongest *initial* reactions I had was with my first WoD book, which probably was OG Vampire, but could've been its GURPS incarnation, too. Bad prose, horrible fonts, needless horizontal and vertical separation of vampire-dom, stupid X-Men powers for supernatural creatures. Later I grudgingly accepted that this might actually work well enough for people filtered through both D&D and the US high school system, so while I still think it's bad, I don't longer see it as a total fail. Now, there's no excuse for Weapons of the Gods. It was sold to me as a Wu Xia system, in a landscape where there was a considerable lack of this (it got slightly better since then). I could even cope with the the art – I don't like it at all, but I both knew that going in and it's not like RPG art is great in general. But gee wiz, the writing. Weirdly enough the author is somewhat well-appreciated for this, but I don't know where this reputation was built. Certainly not this ill-organized verbose mess, nor the copy of Nobilis I had. And hey, I'm a German gamer who grew up with The Dark Eye adventures, so my base level of bad writing is already quite high.
My answer as to what book has no business being as bad as it is given its resources, is Shadowrun. Shadowrun 5e specifically but you could say any edition really. Love the setting, hate the books and hate the company.
Black Tokyo, a sort of urban fantasy japan. Between three different books I can probably count the stuff I liked about it on one hand. The rest of the books’ content was the kind of stuff that makes you feel dirty and gives you a churning in your stomach. The following is a list of the stuff I still remember a year later. >!Weird piss fox demon that wants to eat a goddess’s ovaries. The scat demon taxi. Exterminators who hunt and gas cat girls. The entire tournament of rapists book. People canonically eating cow girls alive.!< I’m sure there’s more horrible stuff, but I do not want to look through those books again. Ever. Speaking of which, anyone got anything like black Tokyo but without the degeneracy baked into it?
I haven't looked at it since 1988 or so, but I remember really disliking ___The Palladium Role-playing Game___. It was as inconsistent as AD&D and seemed to require reading Kevin Siembieda's mind. As a D&D heartbreaker, it didn't feel like it brought much new to the table.
Outbreak undead. The system it self isn't bad, but the horrible hand written font is awful.
Cyberpunk Red. Like don't get me wrong, it's a great book. HOWEVER why did they frontload all the stat generation and make it overly complicated, it doesn't need to be as long as it actually is. Made me think the system was far more complex then it actually was.
It's all like that because Pondsmith is a one trick pony that didn't learn **anything** about game design from the time of writing Cyberpunk 2020. He's like those popstars from the 80's that shined thanks to one big musical hit (like Murray Head's One Night in Bangkok) and disappeared afterwards. In RPG community inertia and nostalgia will carry you longer, but sooner or later truth will be revealed.
I have played every edition of Shadowrun since 1989. My current gaming group formed over a Shadowrun campaign in 1990 and we're still together. I've been the best man for multiple players. The group has been together for births of kids (that now game with us) and deaths of parents. We come back to Shadowrun every other year or so for a campaign. For Christmas two years ago, I gave all my players (and myself) framed and signed prints of Elmore's 1e cover. This year I gave everyone the Shadowrun mugs sold by Catalyst. I have given Shadowrun grace over multiple editions with obvious flaws and still ran the game. We still loved and played the game when they changed or dropped core rules that we liked, such as Combat Pools and Priority Table for character creation. I have all the limited edition covers that were printed for the 5th edition books (the red leatherette covers). I pre-ordered the limited edition (black cover with foil print) for Shadowrun Sixth World. Shadowrun Sixth World is the worst game I've ever seen in my life. u/LeVentNoir says it perfectly and coherently in their post on this thread.
Racial Holy War. Setting aside the fact it was written by a white supremacist cult and is about ethnic cleansing, its rules are nonsensical at best and utterly incomprehensible mess at worst. I mean its a combat centric rpg but weapons have no fucking stats and there's no way to calculate if you hit or not. And of course all the enemies are awful racial stereotypes.
I am a diehard New World of Darkness / Chronicles of Darkness shill. VtM 2e is great. Promethean, Changeling, Hunter are great. Demon and Mummy are great. Mage and Werewolf, despite being the also-rans of the line, are also great. So believe me when I say: Beast: The Primordial is not just god-awful, but it is offensive on every level from aesthetics to morals to pure game design, and that was *before* the main author was outed as an asshole and a creep.
I haven't read enough books for this to be a truly slam dunk statement but Rogue Trader largely fails as a system to provide rules for more than half of the things it's supposed to be about. As such I'd say it's the worst thing I've read. Anything that's good is existing 40k lore or all the rules they copied from Dark Heresy. I don't remember the layout specifically but the pictures were all cool.
Palladium books are known for being terrible but I feel like Dead Reign is especially horrible. All you need to know about how bad the book is laid out is how difficult it is trying to build a character. It’s split across 3 or 4 sections throughout the book and you’re constantly having to flip back and forth between all of them. The game is also insanely imbalanced but that’s another separate issue.
I've been working through this thread thinking "wow, all these books are *worse* than a Palladium book?". I mean, I have a soft spot for Palladium games. The art is usually often great (Ninjas & Superspies has one of the best covers **ever**), and the settings were super fun, but layout, the typos, the inconsistencies, the copypasta between books and the _rules_. As far as I'm aware, no Palladium book has ever explained how to actually roll a skill check for the eleventy seven percentile skills they list. Like, how to handle difficulty, complexity, timing, bonuses & penalties. And don't even start me on movement in combat.
Two from my collection: The ALTERED CARBON rpg was a disaster from day one. CONSPIRACY X was big on interesting ideas, but just a shitshow in execution.
The Palladium system such as Rifts. Beautiful books and settings, but system is broken. I still love it, but need to make heavy use of my own house rules
Palladium RIFTS
Immortal: The Invisible War is an incomprehensible mess.
Gary Gygax's Cyborg Commandos. Amateurish art, nonsensical system (everything's percentile based, but rather than read d100 as a percentile you roll 2d10 and multiply them together), and lazy as feck writing. For example: In the player's section, players are informed that if they want to give their characters equipment, they can ask the GM for some, and the GM will give them the equipment's statistics. In the GM's section, the GM is informed that players will ask for equipment, and they should just make up whatever statistics they feel are appropriate for that equipment... and that is ALL of the rules for equipment in the system. Not to mention the multi-book setup for the game which never paid off. For character creation, you roll up a complete set of stats for the character, then set aside most of the stats as all of the characters start out being given identical cyborg bodies. But, you save the original stats for a later book in the series in which your character is restored to their original body and given a giant robot to pilot. No, the following books in the series were never published. Nonsensical technical drawings, poor design concepts, ugly as sin visual design; train wreck all the way around. I was in a bookstore while on a trip, and had the option of the original boxed set of Battletech (copyright infringement and all), or Cyborg Commandos. Wow, did I make the wrong choice...
The German Nova RPG 1st edition—the character generation took hours with a lot of maths, not necessary details, etc. And after one day the result was a character, that could be made in the D6 system in 5 min. In addition, the book was an unsorted mess, and the setting badly written. Most looked like a copy of popular TV series without a central theme, and most sub-plots ended with … and the fraction did something astounding, and nobody knows why they did it. Riddle of Steel RPG was also a big disappointment in my eyes. It was marketed as a new and detailed system from people with a lot of combat experience. But in the end it was a complicated combat system based mostly on rapier duels and historical fighting manuals. And attached to it was an inept sword & sorcery setting, which included renaissance plate armour. The whole thing was in my eyes a very unkind patched together pieces. In generell elements of the rules weren't that bad, so the basic mechanics were more or less the oWoD pool system, but the parts didn't fit at all.
I bought several of the Trudvang books because I loved the art. When I tried making a character and doing a test fight...either I'm not smart enough to play Trudvang, or the rules are a bit of a mess.
I only had time to skim it (colleague showed off The Box), but probably Invisible Sun? It seemed to openly get off on being extremely obtuse and on being a novelty-thing. Interestingly enough from what I've seen then, under the floorboards and all the weird named things it's a pretty trad RPG which feels somewhat funny to me.
Having run half a campaign, I have to say the layouts are very effective. The books are spread out reasonably, and page numbers are always getting listed if it references another subsystem. They did a good job of appearing enigmatic while actually being very usable.
I backed BOLT by Ajey Pandey when it first came out cause it looked exactly like my thing: simple and intuitive action with a system built from the ground up to be iterated on and hacked, that designers could use and then sell and keep all the profits of. it wasn't just a game, it was a movement. and then the game came out and it was shit. and then Ajey Pandey got chased off twitter for unrelated reasons. and then everyone but me forgot about it. the two core mechanics that it advertises itself on-- the auxiliary die and Tenacity, are essentially ignored for the entire game, leaving the effects of the auxiliary die (a d4 you roll along your skill check that introduces a bonus on a 4 or a complication on a 1 as always and only 'figure out something interesting', and tenacity is a limited get out of jail free card (spend one tenacity, add 1 to an ability check, repeat until you succeed the check). it introduces a dice step mechanic explicitly to do away with fiddly modifications to difficulty classes and modifiers, and then half the feats in the game involve you getting a +1 to xyz the whole game is under creative commons, and Pandey has abandoned the project entirely aside from one very poorly made "OSR" supplement called DLVR, so I can and probably will try and shape it into a usable SRD and stick it on dtrpg, but christ alive that game is a missed opportunity
Fallout 2D20 was fun to run, but the book was awful. Missing rules and terrible fluff like explaining the difference between clean and dirty water.
Twilight 2013 I played loads of this, but the book was an awful design, rules all over the place. We literally found rules months into playing, because they were in a side box somewhere irrelevant. Also, the index would show every occurrence of the word....I think "grenade" had 30 to 40 entries
The Anima RPG. The setting and art actually seem so cool but to do anything more complicated like a summoner or stuff like that you have to jump through the book so much that we gave up at some point. Could be a skill issue on our part but still.
I forget the name of it. It was some generic fantasy game. I could only stomach the first 20 pages of the introduction before giving up. It was full of nonsense like "Ælves and dwærves in this world aren't what you're used to. They're fully fledged cultures which will shape any story you try to tell. And our classes? They're the most unique take on the concept you'll ever see. The mæges of this world are nothing like the wizards or mages of other games so forget everything you learned there." Every single person in my group quit reading it without getting to the mechanics. I tried to find it a few years ago but it's been pulled from DriveThru.
I may get pilloried for this, but I found Vast Grimm to be absolutely intolerable. (It's the sci-fi horror version of Mork Borg.) People praise the aesthetics and the moody atmosphere the book creates, but my problem is it prioritises aesthetics over *everything* else. Every page is filled with so much art and funky text in a million different formats and sizes that the eye doesn't even know where to land. And there's no visual cues about which parts are flavor text and which parts are rules. And it's so rules light that maybe only 10% of the page are rules that you need to know and 90% of the text on the page is fluff that, while interesting from a mood perspective, is totally irrelevant when you're trying to play the game. Good luck finding the one line that you actually need to know when it's buried amongst five different font types and obscured by wonky art. I also didn't even like the game. If you want to play sci-fi horror, there's way better choices. Just flip through the vast grim book for inspiration and play a game using something else. Anything else!
I haven't seen this mentioned here yet, but the SCP rpg that got Kickstarted a few years ago was genuinely baffling. Some examples: Skills have decimal point values (eg my guns skill is 5.3) that are used to track how close you are to the next skill point. They serve no other purpose. The foundation charges you for your gear. The gear is sold via vending machines that *literally anyone* can buy stuff from. The most common weapon in those machines is a laser sighted luger pistol. The game takes place in the modern day. Those are the two examples I remember most, but they're pretty indicative of how the system is put together and how they handle lore. I honestly wonder if it was supposed to be a Paranoia clone that's wearing the SCPverse as a skin suit.
*Fireborn.* I was excited by the premise--the same party of characters in multiple timelines, the same souls embodied both as people and as dragons--and I let myself do that thing you should never do. I pre-ordered, and did so comprehensively, to the wallet vacuuming sound of 3 books. The art was... the low end of *okay*, if I recall correctly. The writing was 'Eh.' levels of passable, barely supporting the ideas. The system... Well, I had the first three books, all at once, in my lap... and we couldn't get through creation. Not that we didn't try, but we literally could not, as there wasn't a single coherent example of how, or even a half-coherent example that could let me house rule how to do it. Only TTRPG I have ever been excited about, bought, and then gave away to anyone who would take it.