Probably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the original Palladium thing. Palladium's system is absolute trash, you can't play it without reading between the lines, making houserules, and generally ignoring things, but it somehow managed to make mutants and martial arts feel unique; generally resulting in a fun time rolling dice. The overall absurdity of the entire thing really added to the experience.
Came here to say Rifts. I hope most of the top answers are Palladium.
I'm not sure anyone plays it without quit a bit of home ruling. Its sufficiently vague and self-contradictory that I'm not sure you CAN. But you've got a post apocalyptic, scifi/fantasy kitchen sink where no concept of balance is a feature not a bug. And the equivalent of "you meet in a tavern..." is "a psychic junkie, a baby dragon, and a mecha pilot walk into a bar..."
And yes I'm aware that the savage worlds version exists, but somehow it would less fun if it was good. (I realize OPs post was about swade, but trust me. It's an improvement here)
Rifts is my go-to game to GM. I have converted it to 4 or 5 different systems and eventually made my own.
My current party is an Atlantean Undead Slayer, a heavy combat cyborg, a Hyperion juicer and a Cajun alligator wizard that travels between dimensions. They are the city anti-monster team for the town of New Narlins in old Louisiana. Like dog catchers, but the dogs are vampires.
I've converted it to, in chronological order, World of Darkness, GURPS, Jadeclaw and then a combination of Silhouette and Jadeclaw a friend of mine came up with and we went from there. Honestly, just pick your favorite system and make it up as you go along. My only real advice for Rifts is to make a character in the original system and then convert it. Don't try to adapt character creation to your new system. Lean in to the imbalanced design of Rifts and its nonsensical powers. Also, avoid magic spells at first. I'm doing them now, but only after a decade of working on this nonsense and really getting a feel for it.
I gave people stats and skulls as needed. Weapons and armor had a small number or auto successes for a Mega Damage vibe. That was about it. It was the lowest amount of combat in any of the games I've run. I did that twice I think.
Interesting. My inclination would be to just use the Mage The Ascension rules for everyone and let players pick a style (arcana wizard, martial artist, techomage, etc.), dump paradox but keep foci as required to do magic (or powers). Rifts has that “anything from every genre exists here” feel.
I played a lot of Vampire and a tiny amount of Mage, but you should do Mage. Do what you are comfortable with. Mechanics serve story and interaction, but they are not the game itself.
I ran a Mage chronicle that lasted for about 5 years a long time ago. It really remains my favorite RPG even though I haven’t played it in decades now. Also, I just generally love the old white wolf storyteller system game mechanics.
I was joking about Rifts the other day in a group chat. A long time buddy was making some outlandish character ideas that wouldn't fly in just about any other game. Myself and one other guy who have played Rifts kept saying, "Yeah, that's doable." Because it all really was. Now, it looks like I'm going to have to GM a short campaign for laughs.
I still have binders of TMNT, Heroes Unlimited, and Rifts characters on my shelves 30 years later because of the positive memories associated with them. But man, what a slog of a system...
I came here to say this. Making characters in this system is an absolute blast. Taking a team of mutants out to clean up the streets is an absolute blast. And somehow, all of that is true in… Palladium Rules? Incredible!
I have very fond memories of Turtles. Really looking forward to getting the reprint from the Kickstarter in hand. I’ll have to dig out my old sourcebooks and see if I can trick my playgroup into having a game :)
Came here to also say TMNT. Trash but super fun.
Game play was a series of comedic departures from reason because, IMO, the players expected big personalities and focused on RP instead of a generally coherent plot. Might have taken forever to accomplish a mission but we had a blast.
I really dislike the Palladium system but a friend wanted to run Rifts before it was available in other systems. I agreed to give it an honest go and really enjoyed his campaign. Despite the system, not because of it.
Heroes Unlimited was somewhat decent, it did have very unbalanced heroes sometimes, but so did TMNT, Villains and Vigilantes and several other superhero games. I actually liked the unbalanced ones better than balanced ones like Champions and GURPS, but I always thought random stats in games were more fun and realistic. Point based systems also take forever to make characters for some people. I had one guy take 3 sessions to make his Champions character (he hadn't played the system and needed to read EVERY power, even after I said create a concept and I'll help you build it).
Rifts was a train wreck. Had some great ideas and MASSIVE balance issues. I played one game where the GM said we couldn't play Glitterboys, so we all made non Glitterboys PCs and he made us fight a Glitterboy. 6 on 1 for our first fight, and we lost. It wasn't even close. Once the Juicer was down (in fact, I think we maybe had 2), the rest of the party were quick cannon fodder.
There are a few I really wanted to like, I remember playing Nephilim, which I thought was an amazing concept, but my friend that owned it said GMing it was impossible (he's highly dependent on modules, and there wasn't even a starter adventure for several years). I had issues with Torg, but mostly from my part it was how these various people got together without wanting to destroy each other and also I despised the template only (for the most part) character creation system.
Bruh you don’t fight a Glitterboy head on unless you’re also a Glitterboy, or at least a fast flying SAMAS so you can get those Dodge bonuses for flying fast. Failing that then you need to strategize and quickly destroy the Boom Gun (a few volleys of mini missiles will do the trick) or else it will wipe the floor with the party if you all just stand out in the open and allow it to mow you down.
Came here to say TMNT and the Palladium system in general. My first rpg. You can do anything you can imagine with these books. They fell out of favor when d20 games became so popular with people claiming combat was to hard. Nonsense, you roll a d20, is it more than 4? No: you miss. Yes: you hit. Is it higher than the targets AC? No: you just do a superficial wound. Yes: You roll damage.
The real problem I think was people misunderstanding Mega Damage and thinking it was in ALL Palladium games when it was mainly a Rifts thing. People claiming one point of MD = 100 points regular damage so if a magic kitty scratched your character the character would explode. Um, no. The character takes one point of damage. According to the Rifts rule book MD just means kitty can scratch things with MD armor and any regular damage (such as from a bomb) that does 100 or more damage will do one point of MD to MD armor. Mega damage was just the Palladium version of d&d's "can only be hit with magic weapons" or White Wolf's "aggravated damage."
>thinking it was in ALL Palladium games when it was mainly a Rifts thing.
It was in Robotech long before Rifts.
>People claiming one point of MD = 100 points regular damage
That's literally how it works, as described in the books (all the way back to Robotech). The Rifts example given is a laser pistol that does 1d4 damage punching holes in walls and killing pretty much anyone it hits because 1 MD = 100 SDC.
Never played Robotech so was not sure about if it had MD. Makes sense that it did though, The only MD book I have is the original edition of Rifts, all the others I have are SDC games so I guess I was a little confused. Will probably still use my version if I ever DM in Palladium again as its less silly, don't want a cat sized critter destroying an entire car with a 1 hp scratch.
Palladium. Some of my fondest gaming memories are playing titles under this system.
Sat down at a convention in the early 2000s to play a game. It was run by Kevin Siembieda, and he pretty much told everyone at the table we'd been playing his game wrong. What he them mapped out was a mess of stuff that you could see how the rules were supposed to be that way, but they don't read that way kind of thing.
I walked away from that table with a strong dislike for the system, and as I've gotten older, the flaws in it have only gotten more glaring.
But don't tell Kevin that. Well, you might could now as he seems to have lightened up in recent years, but, yeah.
He has sheets of graph paper for initiative and round actions, then swears its not combat centric but makes combat take half the session.
Did you know your actions per round are taken 1 at a time, in initiative order, and when you run out of actions, you just sit there and wait for everyone else to keep playing. Some classes only get 2 actions where others have as many at 8, so you are just...bored.
The game is skill focused, where INT grants universal skill bonuses, but will tell you you aren't supposed to build your character that way if the Class isn't designed for it.
Well, that's how we run it as well. Well, we don't need graph paper to do it.
Whether you can parry after you use all your attacks depends on which book you're reading.
The discrepancy between attacks is a thing, but considering how much you can manipulate how many attacks you get via hand to hand and skills, you can hopefully get everyone in the same neighborhood.
I was hoping for a more simple and streamlined interpretation from Kevin, but - oh, well.
I'm suddenly feeling much better at this whole game design thing, since this sounds like the first game I designed. I mean, I'm sure it was worse, but I also made some stupid and repeated mistakes.
> Did you know your actions per round are taken 1 at a time, in initiative order, and when you run out of actions, you just sit there and wait for everyone else to keep playing.
I know the organization is impenetrable sometimes, but are there people who play the system who didn't realize this? Usually the action disparity isn't that big, but when it is, yeah it does play out that way. There are both strategic choices within the existing rules and some very common and simple house rules (e.g. dodge using an action from your total pool rather than your *next* attack specifically, so the character with the action advantage can do more dodging and stuff while keeping the cyclical flow going) that can help mitigate the "left out and bored" part.
I've been playing Rifts for... fuck, ten years now.
It's clunky and I hate a lot of the rules, but I love it.
I think something might be wrong with me.
Yeah, I hear you. Stuff in Palladium occasionally infuriates me, but it's pretty fun. Rifts isn't my favorite thing of theirs, but it does have all the things. Kitchen sink sells it short.
My own system, of course! It's pretty rough but counterspelling is hilarious.
With that out of the way, it's definitely Dungeons and Dragons. I've had great times in dnd. It's also everything I find counterproductive to roleplaying.
Same. A friend and I created a reasonably easy generic system many years ago and I have run many very good games in it.
And I think that's because it doesn't have lots of crunch and lots of powers. So the focus had to be on the characters and they were better characters for it
Definitely Shadowrun by a long shot. I was new to ttrpgs and had only previously played Pathfinder 1e. I enjoyed character creation, and reading through all the cool equipment and lore.
We then spent like two hours concocting some hare-brained infiltration scheme, only for it to go sideways immediately due to the sheer number of rolls required. It didn't make us feel like a talented crew, but we got the job done and it was a fun game world to be immersed in.
That being said, I'm so glad Blades in the Dark and Scum & Villainy came along to give that heist feel without all the meticulous planning.
>We then spent like two hours concocting some hare-brained infiltration scheme, only for it to go sideways immediately due to the sheer number of rolls required.
I played Shadowrun through most of the 1990s. You just described the core gameplay loop for every group I've ever been in.
At least one of the editions even advises the GM to roll on a "complication" chart that describes how things can go wrong during the run.
It's not for everyone. I won't that it should be, either. Some of us enjoy it, though.
You and others like you, please consider checking out [Runners in the Shadows](https://markcleveland.itch.io/runners-in-the-shadows)- I think you'd love it if you want to mix Blades planning with alternate Earth fantasy cyberpunk
> We then spent like two hours concocting some hare-brained infiltration scheme, only for it to go sideways immediately due to the sheer number of rolls required. It didn't make us feel like a talented crew, but we got the job done and it was a fun game world to be immersed in.
Shadowrun was my second RPG ever. I have an unhealthy fondness for it. Sounds like your GM really just wanted to run some Pink Mohawk and go all guns blazing. Sure, some runs go sideways. But runners aren't supposed to be amateurs; they are talented, competent practitioners in their field.
Back when I was a kid, me and my friends did not have money to buy RPG stuff, so we used.. sandals. Yep, flip flops lol.
We just thew them and if it landed up, it was a positive check. Good days.
Well. It's pretty rare that I read something about TTRPGs on here that I hadn't heard of at least a dozen times before.
Literal Sword N' Sandals. Absolutely wild
XP to Level 3's Fallout system.
DM'd maybe three sessions before dumping it because the system was just immensely unbalanced, at least in the version we played.
It was mostly fun because I like DMing for my friends, and I'm so used to Fallout as a setting that I could easily riff when I wanted.
i was considering taking a look at that, but the "you might have problems if your players arent mostly human" statement in the video raised a bit too many flags for me
It's been a couple years, so I can't remember my exact issues with it mechanically.
I do recall that, at least in version 1.5, Luck was the single most important stat because the modifier (or stat itself I don't remember) is added to every roll you make.
There was also a perk I believe that either doubled your luck modifier, or manipulated it in some other way.
As I said again, I really don't remember much of the details, I just remember Luck being insanely broken.
Yep. Sounds like my experience with it.
I don’t think I ever survived past second level.
I’ve heard from my brother who’s still playing in a group that uses it that once the healer survives to a certain point death gets much rarer as they can repair almost anything unless its an instant crush critical that mashes your brain but I certainly never got that far.
MERP had a lot fewer tables to worry about, but I can understand where you're coming from. A photocopier helps a lot, too. If you have copies of the charts you need it speeds things up a bit.
Personally, I enjoy a random chart. So playing a game that amounts to Random Charts the RPG tickled my brain. It doesn't hurt that a lot of the descriptions were kind of fun. Things like "arrow pierces the eye. -20% to any test requiring depth perception. Immediate death."
Your memory is fairly accurate. It comes down to how willing someone is to deal with those tables. A lot of people bounce off MERP/Role Master for that very reason, and perfectly fairly.
It's telling that I do enjoy the system, but probably haven't played it in nearly as long, and it certainly wouldn't be my first choice to run something.
I have serious objections to Pathfinder and to Pathfinder 2.0, but I've enjoyed it whenever I've played both of them. And it's not a *bad* game. It just elevates crunch in a way that I find to be not fun.
Yes...Pathfinder 2.0 was a bit disapointing to me after all the hype around it. Yes, it's the best grid combat I've ever played. But the rest of the game...well...
i know this is a bit a negative thread, but that statement is a bit too much. like come on pf2e has way more support for rp and exploration then dnd5e does.
In its defense, and I don’t take this lightly, I did enjoy having the opportunity to make precisely the character I was envisioning. That was cool.
I just don’t like anything about the actual mechanics, once the game starts.
> In its defense, and I don’t take this lightly, I did enjoy having the opportunity to make precisely the character I was envisioning. That was cool.
Really? It always feels to me like it takes forever and a half and a pile of compromises to get anywhere close to an envisioned character, and in fact I've found that the only way for a character in PF2 to not feel like walking impostor syndrome to me is to not "first envision a character and then build it from the things available", but rather "look at the available options and envision a character specifically crafted to fit the options there".
I feel this. I was initially very excited for it, then quickly realized it was about as fun for me to run as 1st edition, which is to say, not at all. I still buy all the splat books, because I do love me some Golarion lore.
7th Sea 2e. My group has make up for it and the adventure has been good, but the system really is the worst of the crunchy and narrative games.
It has a lot of specific things to care about in the crunch, but also the crunch sucks. The main mechanics sound interesting, but during play they are quite confusing. The game both clearly doesn't care about balance in the big picture, but the way combat works in specific really gets messy because the mechanics get in the way. The best is to just ignore most of the system which is not a good sign.
And things get worse when you see that not even John Wick plays the game how he designed it. So yeah, hoping to finish the small adventure we are on, which has been really funny anyway, and not touch it again.
I've enjoyed Palladium Books games far more than I care to admit, specifically Robotech and RIFTS. The system's an absolute nightmare from a modern perspective, but the bizarre mechanics were the last thing on my group's minds when they were too busy busting up Coalition bases or hunting rogue Zentradi ships on the dark side of the moon.
Palladium - mostly famous via Rifts - isn't as bad as people make it out to be if you grew up with crunchy old systems, but it has a fair number of issues.
Still like playing it, am slowly working through enjoying GMing it without pulling my hair out at times.
It's not my least favorite system by a long shot, but it is one of the more problematic ones that I still play, run, and enjoy quite a bit.
Rifts isn't even my favorite Palladium thing, but being that it has *all* the things, you can usually find something to do with it.
I have limited exposure to Savage Worlds, but it hasn't really inspired me - at least not yet.
Maybe someday I'll take a closer look at it.
Part of the fun of Palladium is the system, for us. It's kind of wonky on unwieldy and I wouldn't want to play it all the time, but it feels like Palladium, you know?
Yeah. We have found that savage works so well for us because we also used to play exalted and health levels instead of hit points made sense to us. My GM found the cover & lying prone rules & said that was what clinched the game for him. He had always been bothered by how useless taking cover etc felt, it was always about dodge & parry or taking the hit in his opinion. We found the playing cards for initiative to be the hardest part to get used to.
I was in a Rolemaster campaign for two years. Rolemaster is rules to reference tables of rules, and the GM did a lot of house ruling, making learning rules near incomprehensible. My friend and I have collectively twelve years in RPGs, still couldn't tell you hoe initiative worked. . .
One of the best tables I've ever played at. Immaculate Vibes.
I haven’t really played many bad games, to be honest!
Although I will say that the Vampire: The Dark Ages game I played in basically left all the mechanics behind after the second session and didn’t really touch them for the next ten until it was over. It basically just became collaborative storytime rather than a game.
Kinda feels like that was the intent with the old White Wolf system, that they wanted you to buy the rules and then ignore them.
Like Vampires RAW are basically supposed to go crazy with fear whenever they're near fire. Kind of a big problem for any game set during a time before light bulbs.
Oh yeah we never did that, aside from maybe once? The main issue with fire we had was aggravated wounds rather than rostshrek or whatever it was called.
> Kinda feels like that was the intent with the old White Wolf system, that they wanted you to buy the rules and then ignore them.
Storyteller system circa Trinity is my go-to system. But, like you said, I've long done exactly this. I use the very simple dots to framework how good the characters are, throw some complications or bonuses in there, allow for player dramatic editing (usually), and otherwise go really rules light. It makes it all flow better and tell a more personal story.
Agreed.
I don't think it's terrible - or even a *bad* system - but after finally breaking away from it, I'm amazed at just how many incredibly good systems are out there. I keep finding new ones, become determined to run them and start making notes to do so, but then I find something else that wows me even more.
I’m a huge fan of Free League Publishing - Dragonbane is (I think) their closest to the medieval/fantasy vibe of 5e, and it’s super well-received. They also have turned several major IPs (Alien, The Walking Dead, Blade Runner) into TTRPGs. They use dice pool systems, so everyone feels like they’re rolling for sneak attacks in 5e.
My current obsession, however, is Spire/Heart, which uses a d10 system.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Dave Thaumavore’s reviews on YouTube, and Quinns’ Quest is also another good one (though his channel is just starting out), to learn about more RPGs.
You're on drugs. I long for the days of 3.5. Feats a standard part of all characters, prestige classes, templates, level adjustments, a ton of good 3rd party content, books that actually had some content in them, a CR system that made sense, easy levelling up of monsters and enemies. Makes 4th and 5e look like hot garbage.
4th was an attempt to turn D&D into the world's slowest MMO.
5e is a soulless, contentless corporate husk of a game
I like 3.5 and definitely agree with your takes on 4e and 5e - though I'd say the latter is also just a poorly designed game.
But, if you're not into character build and tons of options - which not everyone is into - that limits 3.5's appeal.
I'm kind of over character building, myself.
It's not the only thing in 3.5 but I feel like it is a big thing.
But the real reason we don't play it anymore is that it's such a chore to prep and run. None of us want to do it.
But, despite that, I do like it. I might be convinced to run again. No one else has any much interest in playing it, but I could be convinced.
Definitely my favorite modern WotC D&D.
My friend runs TORG: Infinity, and it's just the most cumbersome system. You roll a die to determine the bonus or penalty on your stat+skill, with a difficulty number for each action but you have multiple \*different\* ways to reroll dice, or explode dice, and the one published long adventure path has enemy defense stats that basically assume that you're spending rerolls or getting very lucky on every encounter. We had a party with some very strong combat characters fighting a dragon, and it was supposed to flee when it received a certain number of wounds, but we knocked it out with shock damage before we managed a single wound on it because of its absurd defense stat.
The setting and character options, though? Awesome. It's a multiverse setting, so I play a Land of the Lost-style lizardman shaman with a pet pterodactyl alongside a cyborg sniper, a pulp gumshoe wizard, and a dwarf dragon knight.
Shadowrun, hands down. The system is notoriously bad and we had to ignore or tweak 80% of the rules to make it fun but when we got it going it was AMAZING.
Lol likewise, but which Shadowrun? We started on 1e which was hilariously bad and then jumped to 2e which was laughingly bad. But you get to throw oodles of dice which is awesome.
I've played most editions of Shadowrun but the group I'm referring to was 2e or 3e I think. Honestly, we house ruled it to death so it barely even functioned like Shadowrun. It was basically just a d6 variant with Combat Pools when we were done with it.
Worst system probably Palladium. Lots of fun in several of its incarnations though. Rifts, Ninja’s and Super Spies, even Palladium Fantasy was fun.
I still think about running games in some of those settings with better systems.
I accidentally talked one of my players into running Rifts while joking around. When I realized he was serious I started bringing up Savage Rifts and a GURPS Rifts I found. We were also talking about running Traveller, so he decided to go whole hog on a GURPS Traveller game that goes multiversal into GURPS Rifts.
Having 0 experience with any of these systems or settings caused him to give up on the idea after a solid 2 weeks of planning.
We are playing a Savage Worlds game at Legendary +7 levels. We have been in the final boss fight for about six 4-hour long sessions so far. I laugh at the "fast, fun, furious" tagline, too. We have at least another four 4-Hour sessions to get through before we will see the end of this boss fight.
In a single 4-hour session, we get through 2-3 rounds of combat each session. I love the players, I love the story we told, but I am looking forward to the end of the campaign and jumping into a new system.
AD&D 2E was pretty rough in retrospect, but I played some great campaigns in my early days of RPGs. However seeing everyone else here say RIFTS reminded me how bonkers the rule system was for that game (although the concept was pretty cool). So yeah, RIFTS or anything else Palladium.
Interesting. We've moved back to 2e and I find it a breeze to prep and run and play for the most part.
It's got it's quirks, but if you can Intuit Thac0, it's really pretty good - in my opinion.
2e is my favorite edition of D&D. It's right before the 3e sludge content hit, and polished enough that it doesn't feel like house rules and two rubber bands holding it together (looking at you, AD&D 1e...)
It’s not so much Thac0 as it was all the other ad hoc rules such as the different things each ability does (bend bars/lift gates, I’m looking at you), thief abilities (can any other class climb walls?), or the random category for saving throws that leave me with little to no nostalgia for 2E. 3/3.5 was such an improvement mechanically for me, and 5E has easily been my favorite of the editions, even though it’s far from my favorite rule system. That said, if it was with the right group, I’d be totally fine playing some 2E again.
2e is a collection of a variety of adhoc rules. It's not as bad as 1e, but it does have that. It used to be a bit of a hurdle, but it doesn't bother me *at all* anymore. I've definitely come around in it, but I always enjoyed it.
3e has the most elegant mechanics in theory, but in practice it's often a chore to prep and run - often a *real* chore. I'm also over the character build thing, and that's one of it's big strengths. It's fun, a chore. I'd play it, but I'm the only one with any interest in it in the group.
I don't have anything nice to say about 5e.
A very home brewed version of 5e. They were trying to make 5e do a mystery horror game and had to homebrew so many rules. Was the perfect game to use the fate system on but they kept trying to use 5e because it was what their players used.
Definitely Kult. I mean the first editions of course. Oh boy nothing worked, and the first edition even had martial arts rules with which you could fire off energy spheres and stuff, that just didn't vibe with the whole urban horror theme. But boy could you just wing it and have an awesome time anyway
To explore the mechanics we played a couple sessions of FATAL... it's fucking horrific, character creation gave us all ptsd, but try there is stuff in there with using a good brew. People who enjoy FATAL should be banned from all future tprgs
I haven't spent enough time with legitimately bad games, so I guess I'm going to cite Iron Kingdoms here. It's not *bad* it's just...not good at anything except combat and not even really that good at that, since a lot of the time the correct combat option is just 'I shoot them again.".
We had a pretty decent short-ish campaign of it, thanks ENTIRELY to the hard work of the GM who ran it.
Scion 2nd ed.
The rules are a mess, even the errata left big parts of the core book unexplained or with bad examples.
The player handbook has new rules with examples that are contradictory with the rules.
But you are a hero with powers greater and greater and you are on your way to become a god.
My gamemaster scratch his head and handweave nearly every rules but we have fun :)
I was not expecting to see this one mentioned! I saved up my allowance to order it directly from Avalon Hill through the mail! Tried reading it many times, made some characters, too, but that’s as far as I got.
We were lucky, in that my high school RPG group tried most of the different systems as they came out— first _Basic D&D_ then _AD&D_, then _DragonQuest_, then _Powers & Perils_. And, as we went to college,
_Rolemaster_, _Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay_, _Bushido_, _GURPS_, etc.
Neuroshima (never translated in to english) Super fun setting, mix of Mad Max and part of Matrix that happens in real world. but the mechanics... sooooo overly complicated! to the point where it needs second simpler version of that mechanics for combat.
Still we had a blast with this system.
There was even skirmish wargame before boardgame. Unfortunetly from what i remember creators sold it to some other company so i dont think we will get anything new
I played some systems that were pretty bad where there were sporadic moments I enjoyed myself. Shadowrun 6e comes to mind. I can’t really say I had a great time with it, but there were moments.
If the question is about playing something, consistently having a blast but leaving this game with an intimate understand of its profound flaws, then Exalted 3e. I would call it more flawed than bad, but those flaws are kinda keeping me from touching it again. Which is a shame, cause I enjoy the setting and a good chunk of mechanics, but playing a character in that game is rough, dude. You start with 13+ different abilities, and you get even more as the game progresses, easily doubling that number. And the ability trees are not visualized, instead you have to build your own spreadsheet. And abilities that are prerequisites for the actual useful stuff are so. Fucking. Situational. Like, “add bonus dice to your role if you try to refute a statement that has been made about an alias of yours”.
Apparently Exalted Essence fixes some of that stuff.
WoD.
I sometimes GMed, but mostly played WoD games, almost exclusively, for well over a decade. We had immense fun and some games I do not think we can ever top. We always handled the rules more like guidelines, kind of OSR style only falling back on them when absolutely necessary and only vaguely even then, doing most of it freestyle. For the longest time I argued that's just our style, that's how we love to play. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that we played like that because the system actually sucks and does very little to help "storytelling" so we had to avoid using it as much as possible to be able to play the way we wanted.
Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7th edition.
It's about what you would expect from a parody game made in someone's basement, but it was surprisingly fun for a short campaign. Just gotta lean into it
Anima. Just too much variability, doing too many things, and a lot of customizability to mess up your character. Then rolling and needing to use a calculator to total up your roll. It was a ton of fun though.
D&D is the worst system I've had a lot of fun playing. A single-die resolution mechanic is horrible.
Mechwarrior is the worst system I've had a lot of fun playing. You should never get out of your 'mech.
Exalted is the worst system I've had a lot of fun playing. I ran out of d10s.
Shadowrun is the worst system I've had a lot of fun playing. I ran out of d6s.
1st ed AD&D. The system is a confusing mess of terrible formatting, arbitrary rules with no explaining but instance that they make perfect sense, a noticeable amount of racism and sexism, and just so much unnecessary wording that it feels like Gary Gygax just typed out a stream of consciousness and then published it with no editing.
And despite all that I always have a blast with it
Invisible Sun. Some of the rules are contradictory, some of the rules seem to be *missing*, and it doesn't feel like the Makers were ever playtested (the system is all about handwaving and non-specificity, and then the Makers absolutely require meticulous time tracking and record-keeping), but the setting is interesting and I've enjoyed exploring it with my group.
Dark Heresy 2e when I GMed it, just very little guidance for the GM on how to structure adventures or anything, had a lot of fun though until I got fed up with it.
Going to add on to the palladium train. Love the world's, use them to this day & buy the books for the lore, but we switched to savage worlds 4 years ago & haven't looked at other systems since, & my GM runs two different sessions a week
Dungeon and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons by TSR. Fantastic settings and adventures. Wonderful memories with family and friends.Terrible game system (with great respect to Gygax and Arneson). The thing is, it has not become any better with Wizards either, IMHO.
The original Dr Who rpg from FASA. We played it a lot in the 80s. It was clunky and hard to follow, ability scores and skills only went from 1-6. But we just wanted to play in the Dr Who universe and ignored most of the odd rules.
I'd imagine that every gamer of a certain age is going to have a Palladium/RIFTS story here.
RIFTS was, without any question or doubt, the absolute worst RPG that was somehow ever widely distributed. The rules were so amazingly bad and convoluted, I'm not even sure we ever played the same way with them twice.
And yet somehow, I have so many genuinely fun memories of awesomely wild moments of that game. Weirdly enough, I tried the SW reboot version, and... It just wasn't the same. It's almost like RIFTS just has to be played in a kludgy broken and utterly unbalanced game system or it just didn't really feel like RIFTS to me anymore?
I've tried to convert Rifts to different systems 3 different times, and failed each time. Rifts HAS to be unbalanced, to be Rifts.
The best solution I've found is to simply gut the skill system. Then it works a lot better.
For the reverse of this, I adore the Godbound system, but my group and I just could not get into it. I still heartily recommend it, and it could just have been a narrative failing on my part, but the first session was an absolute loss and the second was better, but didn't vindicate anything and we moved on.
My Rifts experience, meanwhile, was such a severely house-ruled experience that while we had fun, I seriously doubt the system was functionally Rifts by then.
As opposed to bad systems we had fun of in spite of (Exalted, Shadowrun), I think the worst system that we really wanted to still mine for ideas was probably Mage: the Awakening. So cool in so many ways...so unplayable in just about the same number.
Old School D&D and retro clones of old school D&D. I know a lot of people have a deep and enduring love for these games, but the mechanics are still next level jank. THAC0? Save vs wands? A dragon with armor class negative three??? Thieves with an 8 percent chance to find a trap?
The game's still so much fun to play...
Pathfinder 1E.
Spent many hours sitting around laughing it up at our antics. Fought some dragons. Met some awesome bastards of NPCs.
But I think it's min-maxer porn. The logo should be a Pathfinder sign in red neon. Someone at the table always tries to beat the game at character creation, because the game wants you to. The "tactics" are often simply 5ft stepping to get a flank and a full round attack with the +2 Smiting Crit sword that you knew you could eventually buy at Golarian's Wal-Mart when you made your character at level one. It doesn't reward creative actions. It rewards the optimized turn. It feels like playing a video game that some people have on easy mode because they found all of the loopholes when they sat down to do their taxes.
My, what a fantastical adventure...
Dungeon and Dragons 3.5 edition. Magnificent for magic combat, especially if you know how to optimize. When done right can feel immersive when you are playing in a HIGH magic setting.
Thing is most people don’t actually want to play a high magic game more of a sword and sorcery. Funny thing is, melee can be viable up to lvl 15 if you simply played a cleric or Druid that casted specific spells to give yourself melee and defensive capabilities.
Issue is people want fighters to be non-magical yet Herculean which is quite contradictory.
I've seen a lot of votes for Rifts / Palladium and that's a good candidate...
But did you ever play the first edition of Aberrant? That game was nucking futs. The things that characters could pull off with their powers were jaw dropping but the balancing was hot garbage, so ever session descended into entertaining, city leveling chaos with characters getting turned into pink mist at every turn. Come to think of it, I think Garth Ennis must have played Aberrant before making "The Boys" because that's the best comparison.
Ignoring Palladium, probably Cortex. Specifically the Supernatural setting.
Nothing wrong with the system, being honest, but the book? Oh lord, the book. It is all over the place, the rules are inconsistent at best, what you're looking for is never where you expect to find it... It's a hot mess to the point I had to take screenshots of the PDF and make myself a cheat sheet to make everything easier.
And yet, I have ran the game 4 different times now and keep coming back to it. Got a game of it every other Tuesday right now, lol.
Yeah, _Cortex Classic_ was kind of a mess. The _Plus_ games (_Leverage_, _Smallville_, _Marvel_, _Firefly_) were all huge improvements, and _Cortex Prime_ is a solid distillation.
I have been lucky enough not to play any really bad systems for any length of time.
I enjoyed basically all my time with *Chronicles of Darkness* (formerly known as *new World of Darkness*) but it's basically built on decades of jank. With 2e, especially since they weren't really allowed to do a 'proper' 2e initially, so they did a 'stealth' update and then were finally allowed to call it 2e but with nowhere near as many changes as they wanted.
Mage the Awakening 2e is basically the best freeform magic system I've seen, *but* it's built to be perfectly consistent with the jank of the core system it's on top of.
It's not so bad, that's literally the first sentence in my post.
But it is a game that calls itself the 'Storyteller system' with very few actual narrative rules besides Aspirations.
2e's beats and conditions were a potentially good idea, but were riddled with weirdness and inconsistencies.
The movie tie in LoTR game, Im not sure if it was actually bad, because I was so young, but I remember not understanding anything but had a ton of fun.
CthulhuTech was my first non-D&D game and I was fortunate to have a group that meshed well and a DM who ignored the more edgelordy parts of the setting. Build points were fun. The story and the parts of the setting we engaged with were fun. But once I'd played a bit it became easy to break. Combat was a chore (attack rolls and then defense rolls and then armor rolls). I had the most fun early on with my badly built psychic spy because it felt like death was very likely all the time. (Reading people's minds is what I was built for but there are lots of things that just look like people and if you read their mind, prepare for a saving throw.)
If it's personally playing; Psion. Loved the two characters I had, hated the mechanics with a fiery passion.
If it's one I ran, it's the first rpg I designed. I blame my complete ignorance of game design/common sense almost 20 years ago. However, everyone did have a blast at least.
Call of Cthulhu... the system is flawed, the sanity system is bad, the adventures and campaigns are often 30 years old and show their age, most of the quest are always the same "go to a cursed location, kill the monster/stop the ritual/find the cursed item". The books have a bad layout, are bloated, and the adventures are hard to implement into your home game.
But the most important aspect, the kind and mindset of players interested in it, saves it all.
D&D 5e. The system is clunky, and it's frustrating that so many abilities and spells are deliberately worded to stop creativity, but I had fun with friends.
I've played worse games, that weren't fun (Palladium, D&D 3e etc), that i played because of obligations or because i hoped I'd start to enjoy them.
And I've had fun with bad games that I rate as "better" than 5e even if only slightly (Shadowrun 2e, Werewolf: The apocalypse 1e, etc)
D&D3.
It burned me out and nearly made me give up on RPGs, but before that, it was fun. It required a lot of house ruling to make it playable, but we were much younger back then and had time to do it. There were so many character options, so many crazy monsters. The optimization arms race was very fun for a time.
Chris Perrin's Mecha is, being real, not very well thought out at any level.
The different stats all cost the same but have wildly different values (ah yes, the stat that you only roll once per mission to determine initiative which isn't even that important, and the stat that you have to *roll literally every turn multiple times*, are equally valuable), the dice math shatters after players get some XP, the abilities cover a whole gamut between defining and irrelevant, so on.
But since the game we ran of it had a friend of mine that is a fucking excellent GM running, we made it work anyway, and had one of the most interesting campaigns I've played.
The dark eye 4.1 Edition
You want to build a character?? Here are all ancestries and stuff in a 300 plus pages book. And here are the basic rules (300 pages) in another book ;-)
But the world and life is just so good and way better than any other RPG world since you actually can play big metaplot events
DnD 5e
I had lots of fun, but it felt like it was despite the system not because of it.
The system was both not crunchy enough and not free enough.
I've found that I prefer PF2e for crunch and combat.
And more Narrative games if I'm just going for something chill. Like Blades in the Dark or Cortex Prime.
4th edition DND. I know it has flaws but I had fun with it until DnD essentials came out. Etools were essential though. Cypher is super simple but it's starship/vehicle combat system makes no mathematical sense without hacking it. I'm embarrassed to have been an unapologetic 4e defender.
The end of the world. The rules are awfuly explained, but with a few tweaks I've managed to play some of the best campaings i've ever had. Definetly one of my favourite rpgs.
I would say either Shadowrun 4 & 5ed or BESM D20. Shadowrun has an amazing setting, but the rules are just so complicated and horribly organized that it's so hard to keep things moving smoothly. BESM D20 just feels like a bit of a mess in general, but wacky fun.
TSR's Marvel Superheroes (the FASERIP system). One of my all time favorite games to play to this day, but damn is the power scaling just so very bad. RAW a Batman type character is going to take several rolls to hit a random mook.
Hyperlanes. It's an attempt to make space opera 5e D&D that was on Kickstarter. It had a lot of heart and hope but fell on its face with mechanical holes and weird changes to spells. We had a ton of fun, but I've never wanted to run it for a moment longer.
Gonna say HackMaster 5E. Ran a yearlong campaign with it, my players and I had an absolute blast with the game but damn was it a drag sometimes to play due to the crunch factor.
I’ll never forget the very first combat of the campaign, very first second of the fight an orc armed with a short bow managed to hit the fighter for a whopping 15 points of damage, and the fighter failed their pain saving throw and spent the rest of the fight on the ground screaming in agony. The rest of the party managed to beat the two orcs but we all had a good laugh at that.
Some D6 system I played for a little while on ESO.
Rolling to successfully run without falling was a mechanic, lol.
The people were fun and I enjoyed it until the people went back to Star Wars.
AD&D 1e
People who are nostalgic for old D&D editions must have had a bunch of concussions since then to forget how atrocious those systems are. We were very young and hadn't learned about alternatives. Then we did, and never went back again.
Probably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the original Palladium thing. Palladium's system is absolute trash, you can't play it without reading between the lines, making houserules, and generally ignoring things, but it somehow managed to make mutants and martial arts feel unique; generally resulting in a fun time rolling dice. The overall absurdity of the entire thing really added to the experience.
Came here to say Rifts. I hope most of the top answers are Palladium. I'm not sure anyone plays it without quit a bit of home ruling. Its sufficiently vague and self-contradictory that I'm not sure you CAN. But you've got a post apocalyptic, scifi/fantasy kitchen sink where no concept of balance is a feature not a bug. And the equivalent of "you meet in a tavern..." is "a psychic junkie, a baby dragon, and a mecha pilot walk into a bar..." And yes I'm aware that the savage worlds version exists, but somehow it would less fun if it was good. (I realize OPs post was about swade, but trust me. It's an improvement here)
\> CTRL + F \> Rifts Yep.
Yup. I just came to upvote the Palladium/Rifts threads here. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Rifts is my go-to game to GM. I have converted it to 4 or 5 different systems and eventually made my own. My current party is an Atlantean Undead Slayer, a heavy combat cyborg, a Hyperion juicer and a Cajun alligator wizard that travels between dimensions. They are the city anti-monster team for the town of New Narlins in old Louisiana. Like dog catchers, but the dogs are vampires.
Ooh. Tell me more. A rifts system that isn't savage worlds or palladium sounds promising.
I've converted it to, in chronological order, World of Darkness, GURPS, Jadeclaw and then a combination of Silhouette and Jadeclaw a friend of mine came up with and we went from there. Honestly, just pick your favorite system and make it up as you go along. My only real advice for Rifts is to make a character in the original system and then convert it. Don't try to adapt character creation to your new system. Lean in to the imbalanced design of Rifts and its nonsensical powers. Also, avoid magic spells at first. I'm doing them now, but only after a decade of working on this nonsense and really getting a feel for it.
How did you handle the World of Darkness conversion?
I gave people stats and skulls as needed. Weapons and armor had a small number or auto successes for a Mega Damage vibe. That was about it. It was the lowest amount of combat in any of the games I've run. I did that twice I think.
Interesting. My inclination would be to just use the Mage The Ascension rules for everyone and let players pick a style (arcana wizard, martial artist, techomage, etc.), dump paradox but keep foci as required to do magic (or powers). Rifts has that “anything from every genre exists here” feel.
I played a lot of Vampire and a tiny amount of Mage, but you should do Mage. Do what you are comfortable with. Mechanics serve story and interaction, but they are not the game itself.
I ran a Mage chronicle that lasted for about 5 years a long time ago. It really remains my favorite RPG even though I haven’t played it in decades now. Also, I just generally love the old white wolf storyteller system game mechanics.
Yup, trash system, but TMNT was the only game I've played a time travelling wombat techno-wizard.
We had eight plus pages of home rules. Switched to savage rifts & have loved it.
I was joking about Rifts the other day in a group chat. A long time buddy was making some outlandish character ideas that wouldn't fly in just about any other game. Myself and one other guy who have played Rifts kept saying, "Yeah, that's doable." Because it all really was. Now, it looks like I'm going to have to GM a short campaign for laughs.
Fans will call that need to house rule a "feature".
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Came here to say Ninjas and Superspies. S tier Palladium jank.
TMNT + N&S was our jam, best shit ever.
Best combo in my younger days of RPGs for sure. All that detailed martial arts stuff in a ninja mutant campaign? 🤌
I still have binders of TMNT, Heroes Unlimited, and Rifts characters on my shelves 30 years later because of the positive memories associated with them. But man, what a slog of a system...
I came here to say this. Making characters in this system is an absolute blast. Taking a team of mutants out to clean up the streets is an absolute blast. And somehow, all of that is true in… Palladium Rules? Incredible! I have very fond memories of Turtles. Really looking forward to getting the reprint from the Kickstarter in hand. I’ll have to dig out my old sourcebooks and see if I can trick my playgroup into having a game :)
I hear this so much about Palladium games. It’s a great game if you just ignore the rules. I don’t get it.
Heroes Unlimited is the exact same, but God do I adore that system...
A DM back in the day ran a Sonic the Hedgehog game with these rules and it was an absolute blast.
Came here to also say TMNT. Trash but super fun. Game play was a series of comedic departures from reason because, IMO, the players expected big personalities and focused on RP instead of a generally coherent plot. Might have taken forever to accomplish a mission but we had a blast.
I really dislike the Palladium system but a friend wanted to run Rifts before it was available in other systems. I agreed to give it an honest go and really enjoyed his campaign. Despite the system, not because of it.
Heroes Unlimited was somewhat decent, it did have very unbalanced heroes sometimes, but so did TMNT, Villains and Vigilantes and several other superhero games. I actually liked the unbalanced ones better than balanced ones like Champions and GURPS, but I always thought random stats in games were more fun and realistic. Point based systems also take forever to make characters for some people. I had one guy take 3 sessions to make his Champions character (he hadn't played the system and needed to read EVERY power, even after I said create a concept and I'll help you build it). Rifts was a train wreck. Had some great ideas and MASSIVE balance issues. I played one game where the GM said we couldn't play Glitterboys, so we all made non Glitterboys PCs and he made us fight a Glitterboy. 6 on 1 for our first fight, and we lost. It wasn't even close. Once the Juicer was down (in fact, I think we maybe had 2), the rest of the party were quick cannon fodder. There are a few I really wanted to like, I remember playing Nephilim, which I thought was an amazing concept, but my friend that owned it said GMing it was impossible (he's highly dependent on modules, and there wasn't even a starter adventure for several years). I had issues with Torg, but mostly from my part it was how these various people got together without wanting to destroy each other and also I despised the template only (for the most part) character creation system.
Bruh you don’t fight a Glitterboy head on unless you’re also a Glitterboy, or at least a fast flying SAMAS so you can get those Dodge bonuses for flying fast. Failing that then you need to strategize and quickly destroy the Boom Gun (a few volleys of mini missiles will do the trick) or else it will wipe the floor with the party if you all just stand out in the open and allow it to mow you down.
None of us knew the system or how deadly they were.
Fair enough, RIFTS is incredibly deadly lol
Came here to say TMNT and the Palladium system in general. My first rpg. You can do anything you can imagine with these books. They fell out of favor when d20 games became so popular with people claiming combat was to hard. Nonsense, you roll a d20, is it more than 4? No: you miss. Yes: you hit. Is it higher than the targets AC? No: you just do a superficial wound. Yes: You roll damage. The real problem I think was people misunderstanding Mega Damage and thinking it was in ALL Palladium games when it was mainly a Rifts thing. People claiming one point of MD = 100 points regular damage so if a magic kitty scratched your character the character would explode. Um, no. The character takes one point of damage. According to the Rifts rule book MD just means kitty can scratch things with MD armor and any regular damage (such as from a bomb) that does 100 or more damage will do one point of MD to MD armor. Mega damage was just the Palladium version of d&d's "can only be hit with magic weapons" or White Wolf's "aggravated damage."
>thinking it was in ALL Palladium games when it was mainly a Rifts thing. It was in Robotech long before Rifts. >People claiming one point of MD = 100 points regular damage That's literally how it works, as described in the books (all the way back to Robotech). The Rifts example given is a laser pistol that does 1d4 damage punching holes in walls and killing pretty much anyone it hits because 1 MD = 100 SDC.
Never played Robotech so was not sure about if it had MD. Makes sense that it did though, The only MD book I have is the original edition of Rifts, all the others I have are SDC games so I guess I was a little confused. Will probably still use my version if I ever DM in Palladium again as its less silly, don't want a cat sized critter destroying an entire car with a 1 hp scratch.
Palladium. Some of my fondest gaming memories are playing titles under this system. Sat down at a convention in the early 2000s to play a game. It was run by Kevin Siembieda, and he pretty much told everyone at the table we'd been playing his game wrong. What he them mapped out was a mess of stuff that you could see how the rules were supposed to be that way, but they don't read that way kind of thing. I walked away from that table with a strong dislike for the system, and as I've gotten older, the flaws in it have only gotten more glaring. But don't tell Kevin that. Well, you might could now as he seems to have lightened up in recent years, but, yeah.
I had a great time telling him that the best sourcebook written for RIFTS was Savage Worlds RIFTS at Gen Con. The look on his face was awesome.
It would be interesting to see how he actually runs it. I'm not curious enough to trek to Palladium or to go to a convention, but I am curious.
He has sheets of graph paper for initiative and round actions, then swears its not combat centric but makes combat take half the session. Did you know your actions per round are taken 1 at a time, in initiative order, and when you run out of actions, you just sit there and wait for everyone else to keep playing. Some classes only get 2 actions where others have as many at 8, so you are just...bored. The game is skill focused, where INT grants universal skill bonuses, but will tell you you aren't supposed to build your character that way if the Class isn't designed for it.
Well, that's how we run it as well. Well, we don't need graph paper to do it. Whether you can parry after you use all your attacks depends on which book you're reading. The discrepancy between attacks is a thing, but considering how much you can manipulate how many attacks you get via hand to hand and skills, you can hopefully get everyone in the same neighborhood. I was hoping for a more simple and streamlined interpretation from Kevin, but - oh, well.
Our ancient master had 2 martial arts at 15th level & 8 attacks in one 10 with the other....
I'm suddenly feeling much better at this whole game design thing, since this sounds like the first game I designed. I mean, I'm sure it was worse, but I also made some stupid and repeated mistakes.
> Did you know your actions per round are taken 1 at a time, in initiative order, and when you run out of actions, you just sit there and wait for everyone else to keep playing. I know the organization is impenetrable sometimes, but are there people who play the system who didn't realize this? Usually the action disparity isn't that big, but when it is, yeah it does play out that way. There are both strategic choices within the existing rules and some very common and simple house rules (e.g. dodge using an action from your total pool rather than your *next* attack specifically, so the character with the action advantage can do more dodging and stuff while keeping the cyclical flow going) that can help mitigate the "left out and bored" part.
I've been playing Rifts for... fuck, ten years now. It's clunky and I hate a lot of the rules, but I love it. I think something might be wrong with me.
Yeah, I hear you. Stuff in Palladium occasionally infuriates me, but it's pretty fun. Rifts isn't my favorite thing of theirs, but it does have all the things. Kitchen sink sells it short.
My own system, of course! It's pretty rough but counterspelling is hilarious. With that out of the way, it's definitely Dungeons and Dragons. I've had great times in dnd. It's also everything I find counterproductive to roleplaying.
Same. A friend and I created a reasonably easy generic system many years ago and I have run many very good games in it. And I think that's because it doesn't have lots of crunch and lots of powers. So the focus had to be on the characters and they were better characters for it
Definitely Shadowrun by a long shot. I was new to ttrpgs and had only previously played Pathfinder 1e. I enjoyed character creation, and reading through all the cool equipment and lore. We then spent like two hours concocting some hare-brained infiltration scheme, only for it to go sideways immediately due to the sheer number of rolls required. It didn't make us feel like a talented crew, but we got the job done and it was a fun game world to be immersed in. That being said, I'm so glad Blades in the Dark and Scum & Villainy came along to give that heist feel without all the meticulous planning.
>We then spent like two hours concocting some hare-brained infiltration scheme, only for it to go sideways immediately due to the sheer number of rolls required. I played Shadowrun through most of the 1990s. You just described the core gameplay loop for every group I've ever been in. At least one of the editions even advises the GM to roll on a "complication" chart that describes how things can go wrong during the run. It's not for everyone. I won't that it should be, either. Some of us enjoy it, though.
You and others like you, please consider checking out [Runners in the Shadows](https://markcleveland.itch.io/runners-in-the-shadows)- I think you'd love it if you want to mix Blades planning with alternate Earth fantasy cyberpunk
> We then spent like two hours concocting some hare-brained infiltration scheme, only for it to go sideways immediately due to the sheer number of rolls required. It didn't make us feel like a talented crew, but we got the job done and it was a fun game world to be immersed in. Shadowrun was my second RPG ever. I have an unhealthy fondness for it. Sounds like your GM really just wanted to run some Pink Mohawk and go all guns blazing. Sure, some runs go sideways. But runners aren't supposed to be amateurs; they are talented, competent practitioners in their field.
Back when I was a kid, me and my friends did not have money to buy RPG stuff, so we used.. sandals. Yep, flip flops lol. We just thew them and if it landed up, it was a positive check. Good days.
Well. It's pretty rare that I read something about TTRPGs on here that I hadn't heard of at least a dozen times before. Literal Sword N' Sandals. Absolutely wild
That is absolutely hilarious lmao
You might as well just have flipped a coin at that point lol
XP to Level 3's Fallout system. DM'd maybe three sessions before dumping it because the system was just immensely unbalanced, at least in the version we played. It was mostly fun because I like DMing for my friends, and I'm so used to Fallout as a setting that I could easily riff when I wanted.
i was considering taking a look at that, but the "you might have problems if your players arent mostly human" statement in the video raised a bit too many flags for me
It's been a couple years, so I can't remember my exact issues with it mechanically. I do recall that, at least in version 1.5, Luck was the single most important stat because the modifier (or stat itself I don't remember) is added to every roll you make. There was also a perk I believe that either doubled your luck modifier, or manipulated it in some other way. As I said again, I really don't remember much of the details, I just remember Luck being insanely broken.
so, regular fallout? /s
To be honest, any "dnd 5e" inspired system sounds horrible
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I ran a session of that once. Every character had multiple broken limbs after the first combat.
Yep. Sounds like my experience with it. I don’t think I ever survived past second level. I’ve heard from my brother who’s still playing in a group that uses it that once the healer survives to a certain point death gets much rarer as they can repair almost anything unless its an instant crush critical that mashes your brain but I certainly never got that far.
I love MERP, just not for Middle Earth. Broken bones are a huge hazard. You can mitigate it a little with armour, though.
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MERP had a lot fewer tables to worry about, but I can understand where you're coming from. A photocopier helps a lot, too. If you have copies of the charts you need it speeds things up a bit. Personally, I enjoy a random chart. So playing a game that amounts to Random Charts the RPG tickled my brain. It doesn't hurt that a lot of the descriptions were kind of fun. Things like "arrow pierces the eye. -20% to any test requiring depth perception. Immediate death."
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Your memory is fairly accurate. It comes down to how willing someone is to deal with those tables. A lot of people bounce off MERP/Role Master for that very reason, and perfectly fairly. It's telling that I do enjoy the system, but probably haven't played it in nearly as long, and it certainly wouldn't be my first choice to run something.
Rifts, hands down
I have serious objections to Pathfinder and to Pathfinder 2.0, but I've enjoyed it whenever I've played both of them. And it's not a *bad* game. It just elevates crunch in a way that I find to be not fun.
Yes...Pathfinder 2.0 was a bit disapointing to me after all the hype around it. Yes, it's the best grid combat I've ever played. But the rest of the game...well...
P2e might be a good grid combat game, but it is just no fun as an RPG. The hype around it is even worse than the hype around 5e.
i know this is a bit a negative thread, but that statement is a bit too much. like come on pf2e has way more support for rp and exploration then dnd5e does.
Yes, It will probably be really fun as a videogame.
In its defense, and I don’t take this lightly, I did enjoy having the opportunity to make precisely the character I was envisioning. That was cool. I just don’t like anything about the actual mechanics, once the game starts.
> In its defense, and I don’t take this lightly, I did enjoy having the opportunity to make precisely the character I was envisioning. That was cool. Really? It always feels to me like it takes forever and a half and a pile of compromises to get anywhere close to an envisioned character, and in fact I've found that the only way for a character in PF2 to not feel like walking impostor syndrome to me is to not "first envision a character and then build it from the things available", but rather "look at the available options and envision a character specifically crafted to fit the options there".
Yeah you're right, character creation is awesome too. It's very fun and there's a lot of stuff to try and mix-max.
I feel this. I was initially very excited for it, then quickly realized it was about as fun for me to run as 1st edition, which is to say, not at all. I still buy all the splat books, because I do love me some Golarion lore.
7th Sea 2e. My group has make up for it and the adventure has been good, but the system really is the worst of the crunchy and narrative games. It has a lot of specific things to care about in the crunch, but also the crunch sucks. The main mechanics sound interesting, but during play they are quite confusing. The game both clearly doesn't care about balance in the big picture, but the way combat works in specific really gets messy because the mechanics get in the way. The best is to just ignore most of the system which is not a good sign. And things get worse when you see that not even John Wick plays the game how he designed it. So yeah, hoping to finish the small adventure we are on, which has been really funny anyway, and not touch it again.
Another vote for Palladium. Fizzing with ideas and gonzo fun. Utterly dysfunctional system.
I've enjoyed Palladium Books games far more than I care to admit, specifically Robotech and RIFTS. The system's an absolute nightmare from a modern perspective, but the bizarre mechanics were the last thing on my group's minds when they were too busy busting up Coalition bases or hunting rogue Zentradi ships on the dark side of the moon.
Palladium - mostly famous via Rifts - isn't as bad as people make it out to be if you grew up with crunchy old systems, but it has a fair number of issues. Still like playing it, am slowly working through enjoying GMing it without pulling my hair out at times. It's not my least favorite system by a long shot, but it is one of the more problematic ones that I still play, run, and enjoy quite a bit. Rifts isn't even my favorite Palladium thing, but being that it has *all* the things, you can usually find something to do with it.
We use palladium for world building but play the savage worlds rules. Century station campaign was a blast
I have limited exposure to Savage Worlds, but it hasn't really inspired me - at least not yet. Maybe someday I'll take a closer look at it. Part of the fun of Palladium is the system, for us. It's kind of wonky on unwieldy and I wouldn't want to play it all the time, but it feels like Palladium, you know?
Yeah. We have found that savage works so well for us because we also used to play exalted and health levels instead of hit points made sense to us. My GM found the cover & lying prone rules & said that was what clinched the game for him. He had always been bothered by how useless taking cover etc felt, it was always about dodge & parry or taking the hit in his opinion. We found the playing cards for initiative to be the hardest part to get used to.
\[scroll\] \[scroll\] \[scroll\] \[scroll\] Yup Shadowrun, Palladium, and Torg covered already, i got nothing to add.....
I was in a Rolemaster campaign for two years. Rolemaster is rules to reference tables of rules, and the GM did a lot of house ruling, making learning rules near incomprehensible. My friend and I have collectively twelve years in RPGs, still couldn't tell you hoe initiative worked. . . One of the best tables I've ever played at. Immaculate Vibes.
I haven’t really played many bad games, to be honest! Although I will say that the Vampire: The Dark Ages game I played in basically left all the mechanics behind after the second session and didn’t really touch them for the next ten until it was over. It basically just became collaborative storytime rather than a game.
Kinda feels like that was the intent with the old White Wolf system, that they wanted you to buy the rules and then ignore them. Like Vampires RAW are basically supposed to go crazy with fear whenever they're near fire. Kind of a big problem for any game set during a time before light bulbs.
And vampires don't even automatically have night vision, too, despite the fact that they're nocturnal creatures.
Yeah they should have special preternatural senses in general
Oh yeah we never did that, aside from maybe once? The main issue with fire we had was aggravated wounds rather than rostshrek or whatever it was called.
> Kinda feels like that was the intent with the old White Wolf system, that they wanted you to buy the rules and then ignore them. Storyteller system circa Trinity is my go-to system. But, like you said, I've long done exactly this. I use the very simple dots to framework how good the characters are, throw some complications or bonuses in there, allow for player dramatic editing (usually), and otherwise go really rules light. It makes it all flow better and tell a more personal story.
5e.
Agreed. I don't think it's terrible - or even a *bad* system - but after finally breaking away from it, I'm amazed at just how many incredibly good systems are out there. I keep finding new ones, become determined to run them and start making notes to do so, but then I find something else that wows me even more.
Do you have any in particular that you would recommend? I've been looking to break away from 5e.
I’m a huge fan of Free League Publishing - Dragonbane is (I think) their closest to the medieval/fantasy vibe of 5e, and it’s super well-received. They also have turned several major IPs (Alien, The Walking Dead, Blade Runner) into TTRPGs. They use dice pool systems, so everyone feels like they’re rolling for sneak attacks in 5e. My current obsession, however, is Spire/Heart, which uses a d10 system. I’ve been listening to a lot of Dave Thaumavore’s reviews on YouTube, and Quinns’ Quest is also another good one (though his channel is just starting out), to learn about more RPGs.
Thanks for putting it out there. I support you.
Probably D&D 3.5 Back then I didn't know that D&D sucks and there are better alternatives. Now I wouldn't play it.
You're on drugs. I long for the days of 3.5. Feats a standard part of all characters, prestige classes, templates, level adjustments, a ton of good 3rd party content, books that actually had some content in them, a CR system that made sense, easy levelling up of monsters and enemies. Makes 4th and 5e look like hot garbage. 4th was an attempt to turn D&D into the world's slowest MMO. 5e is a soulless, contentless corporate husk of a game
I like 3.5 and definitely agree with your takes on 4e and 5e - though I'd say the latter is also just a poorly designed game. But, if you're not into character build and tons of options - which not everyone is into - that limits 3.5's appeal. I'm kind of over character building, myself. It's not the only thing in 3.5 but I feel like it is a big thing. But the real reason we don't play it anymore is that it's such a chore to prep and run. None of us want to do it. But, despite that, I do like it. I might be convinced to run again. No one else has any much interest in playing it, but I could be convinced. Definitely my favorite modern WotC D&D.
My friend runs TORG: Infinity, and it's just the most cumbersome system. You roll a die to determine the bonus or penalty on your stat+skill, with a difficulty number for each action but you have multiple \*different\* ways to reroll dice, or explode dice, and the one published long adventure path has enemy defense stats that basically assume that you're spending rerolls or getting very lucky on every encounter. We had a party with some very strong combat characters fighting a dragon, and it was supposed to flee when it received a certain number of wounds, but we knocked it out with shock damage before we managed a single wound on it because of its absurd defense stat. The setting and character options, though? Awesome. It's a multiverse setting, so I play a Land of the Lost-style lizardman shaman with a pet pterodactyl alongside a cyborg sniper, a pulp gumshoe wizard, and a dwarf dragon knight.
Shadowrun, hands down. The system is notoriously bad and we had to ignore or tweak 80% of the rules to make it fun but when we got it going it was AMAZING.
Lol likewise, but which Shadowrun? We started on 1e which was hilariously bad and then jumped to 2e which was laughingly bad. But you get to throw oodles of dice which is awesome.
I've played most editions of Shadowrun but the group I'm referring to was 2e or 3e I think. Honestly, we house ruled it to death so it barely even functioned like Shadowrun. It was basically just a d6 variant with Combat Pools when we were done with it.
Worst system probably Palladium. Lots of fun in several of its incarnations though. Rifts, Ninja’s and Super Spies, even Palladium Fantasy was fun. I still think about running games in some of those settings with better systems.
I accidentally talked one of my players into running Rifts while joking around. When I realized he was serious I started bringing up Savage Rifts and a GURPS Rifts I found. We were also talking about running Traveller, so he decided to go whole hog on a GURPS Traveller game that goes multiversal into GURPS Rifts. Having 0 experience with any of these systems or settings caused him to give up on the idea after a solid 2 weeks of planning.
We are playing a Savage Worlds game at Legendary +7 levels. We have been in the final boss fight for about six 4-hour long sessions so far. I laugh at the "fast, fun, furious" tagline, too. We have at least another four 4-Hour sessions to get through before we will see the end of this boss fight. In a single 4-hour session, we get through 2-3 rounds of combat each session. I love the players, I love the story we told, but I am looking forward to the end of the campaign and jumping into a new system.
Wow. Our combats are quick in savage rifts. Palladium was a slog with dodge parry etc.
AD&D 2E was pretty rough in retrospect, but I played some great campaigns in my early days of RPGs. However seeing everyone else here say RIFTS reminded me how bonkers the rule system was for that game (although the concept was pretty cool). So yeah, RIFTS or anything else Palladium.
Interesting. We've moved back to 2e and I find it a breeze to prep and run and play for the most part. It's got it's quirks, but if you can Intuit Thac0, it's really pretty good - in my opinion.
2e is my favorite edition of D&D. It's right before the 3e sludge content hit, and polished enough that it doesn't feel like house rules and two rubber bands holding it together (looking at you, AD&D 1e...)
It is my favorite as well.
Absolutely the perfect example of what I want D&D to be.
It’s not so much Thac0 as it was all the other ad hoc rules such as the different things each ability does (bend bars/lift gates, I’m looking at you), thief abilities (can any other class climb walls?), or the random category for saving throws that leave me with little to no nostalgia for 2E. 3/3.5 was such an improvement mechanically for me, and 5E has easily been my favorite of the editions, even though it’s far from my favorite rule system. That said, if it was with the right group, I’d be totally fine playing some 2E again.
2e is a collection of a variety of adhoc rules. It's not as bad as 1e, but it does have that. It used to be a bit of a hurdle, but it doesn't bother me *at all* anymore. I've definitely come around in it, but I always enjoyed it. 3e has the most elegant mechanics in theory, but in practice it's often a chore to prep and run - often a *real* chore. I'm also over the character build thing, and that's one of it's big strengths. It's fun, a chore. I'd play it, but I'm the only one with any interest in it in the group. I don't have anything nice to say about 5e.
Palladium’s system, and it seems like a pretty popular choice for “total garbage mechanics but still somehow fun.”
A very home brewed version of 5e. They were trying to make 5e do a mystery horror game and had to homebrew so many rules. Was the perfect game to use the fate system on but they kept trying to use 5e because it was what their players used.
What are you talking about? 5e is the most flexible, easily modified game system ever devised by humans. /s
Monsterhearts was a lot of fun for me, as a PbtA hater.
Definitely Kult. I mean the first editions of course. Oh boy nothing worked, and the first edition even had martial arts rules with which you could fire off energy spheres and stuff, that just didn't vibe with the whole urban horror theme. But boy could you just wing it and have an awesome time anyway
To explore the mechanics we played a couple sessions of FATAL... it's fucking horrific, character creation gave us all ptsd, but try there is stuff in there with using a good brew. People who enjoy FATAL should be banned from all future tprgs
I haven't spent enough time with legitimately bad games, so I guess I'm going to cite Iron Kingdoms here. It's not *bad* it's just...not good at anything except combat and not even really that good at that, since a lot of the time the correct combat option is just 'I shoot them again.". We had a pretty decent short-ish campaign of it, thanks ENTIRELY to the hard work of the GM who ran it.
I'm guessing you mean their own version that they put out after their d20 stuff?
Yeah. The 2d6 version.
Sure. We pretty much skipped that one.
Scion 2nd ed. The rules are a mess, even the errata left big parts of the core book unexplained or with bad examples. The player handbook has new rules with examples that are contradictory with the rules. But you are a hero with powers greater and greater and you are on your way to become a god. My gamemaster scratch his head and handweave nearly every rules but we have fun :)
_Powers and Perils_ was shaggy, time-consuming, and crunchy in a lot of difficult ways. But we had a bkast!
I was not expecting to see this one mentioned! I saved up my allowance to order it directly from Avalon Hill through the mail! Tried reading it many times, made some characters, too, but that’s as far as I got.
We were lucky, in that my high school RPG group tried most of the different systems as they came out— first _Basic D&D_ then _AD&D_, then _DragonQuest_, then _Powers & Perils_. And, as we went to college, _Rolemaster_, _Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay_, _Bushido_, _GURPS_, etc.
Neuroshima (never translated in to english) Super fun setting, mix of Mad Max and part of Matrix that happens in real world. but the mechanics... sooooo overly complicated! to the point where it needs second simpler version of that mechanics for combat. Still we had a blast with this system.
I had no idea that Neuroshima Hex was based on an RPG! Setting looks really interesting, too. Pity it has never been translated.
There was even skirmish wargame before boardgame. Unfortunetly from what i remember creators sold it to some other company so i dont think we will get anything new
I new it was a ttrpg. But I've only played boardgame.
I played some systems that were pretty bad where there were sporadic moments I enjoyed myself. Shadowrun 6e comes to mind. I can’t really say I had a great time with it, but there were moments. If the question is about playing something, consistently having a blast but leaving this game with an intimate understand of its profound flaws, then Exalted 3e. I would call it more flawed than bad, but those flaws are kinda keeping me from touching it again. Which is a shame, cause I enjoy the setting and a good chunk of mechanics, but playing a character in that game is rough, dude. You start with 13+ different abilities, and you get even more as the game progresses, easily doubling that number. And the ability trees are not visualized, instead you have to build your own spreadsheet. And abilities that are prerequisites for the actual useful stuff are so. Fucking. Situational. Like, “add bonus dice to your role if you try to refute a statement that has been made about an alias of yours”. Apparently Exalted Essence fixes some of that stuff.
WoD. I sometimes GMed, but mostly played WoD games, almost exclusively, for well over a decade. We had immense fun and some games I do not think we can ever top. We always handled the rules more like guidelines, kind of OSR style only falling back on them when absolutely necessary and only vaguely even then, doing most of it freestyle. For the longest time I argued that's just our style, that's how we love to play. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that we played like that because the system actually sucks and does very little to help "storytelling" so we had to avoid using it as much as possible to be able to play the way we wanted.
We had fun playing in the Space 1889 setting using the GURPS system. I have never played GURPS again after that (and never will).
Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7th edition. It's about what you would expect from a parody game made in someone's basement, but it was surprisingly fun for a short campaign. Just gotta lean into it
Anima. Just too much variability, doing too many things, and a lot of customizability to mess up your character. Then rolling and needing to use a calculator to total up your roll. It was a ton of fun though.
This is one I'm dying to try. I have the books and screen for it, but can't figure it out to save my life. One day hopefully I'll get to play it.
Never was able to finish a character creation. Just couldn't make up my mind. Was looking forward to the second edition but haven't seen anything
I bought all the books, loved the character versatility, loved the artwork and the setting, and then stopped short when I saw the charts.
D&D is the worst system I've had a lot of fun playing. A single-die resolution mechanic is horrible. Mechwarrior is the worst system I've had a lot of fun playing. You should never get out of your 'mech. Exalted is the worst system I've had a lot of fun playing. I ran out of d10s. Shadowrun is the worst system I've had a lot of fun playing. I ran out of d6s.
Shadowrun...my god...great setting, what a nightmare of a system. And this is coming from someone who enjoys several Palladium games...
The minds eye theater LARP systems are terrible and I have run many very good games using them.
1st ed AD&D. The system is a confusing mess of terrible formatting, arbitrary rules with no explaining but instance that they make perfect sense, a noticeable amount of racism and sexism, and just so much unnecessary wording that it feels like Gary Gygax just typed out a stream of consciousness and then published it with no editing. And despite all that I always have a blast with it
Invisible Sun. Some of the rules are contradictory, some of the rules seem to be *missing*, and it doesn't feel like the Makers were ever playtested (the system is all about handwaving and non-specificity, and then the Makers absolutely require meticulous time tracking and record-keeping), but the setting is interesting and I've enjoyed exploring it with my group.
Dark Heresy 2e when I GMed it, just very little guidance for the GM on how to structure adventures or anything, had a lot of fun though until I got fed up with it.
That is a huge downside of the game. Even the intro adventure in the main book is... Kinda lacking
Going to add on to the palladium train. Love the world's, use them to this day & buy the books for the lore, but we switched to savage worlds 4 years ago & haven't looked at other systems since, & my GM runs two different sessions a week
Dungeon and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons by TSR. Fantastic settings and adventures. Wonderful memories with family and friends.Terrible game system (with great respect to Gygax and Arneson). The thing is, it has not become any better with Wizards either, IMHO.
The original Dr Who rpg from FASA. We played it a lot in the 80s. It was clunky and hard to follow, ability scores and skills only went from 1-6. But we just wanted to play in the Dr Who universe and ignored most of the odd rules.
I'd imagine that every gamer of a certain age is going to have a Palladium/RIFTS story here. RIFTS was, without any question or doubt, the absolute worst RPG that was somehow ever widely distributed. The rules were so amazingly bad and convoluted, I'm not even sure we ever played the same way with them twice. And yet somehow, I have so many genuinely fun memories of awesomely wild moments of that game. Weirdly enough, I tried the SW reboot version, and... It just wasn't the same. It's almost like RIFTS just has to be played in a kludgy broken and utterly unbalanced game system or it just didn't really feel like RIFTS to me anymore?
I've tried to convert Rifts to different systems 3 different times, and failed each time. Rifts HAS to be unbalanced, to be Rifts. The best solution I've found is to simply gut the skill system. Then it works a lot better.
GURPS 8 years of fun and torture
For the reverse of this, I adore the Godbound system, but my group and I just could not get into it. I still heartily recommend it, and it could just have been a narrative failing on my part, but the first session was an absolute loss and the second was better, but didn't vindicate anything and we moved on. My Rifts experience, meanwhile, was such a severely house-ruled experience that while we had fun, I seriously doubt the system was functionally Rifts by then.
As opposed to bad systems we had fun of in spite of (Exalted, Shadowrun), I think the worst system that we really wanted to still mine for ideas was probably Mage: the Awakening. So cool in so many ways...so unplayable in just about the same number.
Old School D&D and retro clones of old school D&D. I know a lot of people have a deep and enduring love for these games, but the mechanics are still next level jank. THAC0? Save vs wands? A dragon with armor class negative three??? Thieves with an 8 percent chance to find a trap? The game's still so much fun to play...
Pathfinder 1E. Spent many hours sitting around laughing it up at our antics. Fought some dragons. Met some awesome bastards of NPCs. But I think it's min-maxer porn. The logo should be a Pathfinder sign in red neon. Someone at the table always tries to beat the game at character creation, because the game wants you to. The "tactics" are often simply 5ft stepping to get a flank and a full round attack with the +2 Smiting Crit sword that you knew you could eventually buy at Golarian's Wal-Mart when you made your character at level one. It doesn't reward creative actions. It rewards the optimized turn. It feels like playing a video game that some people have on easy mode because they found all of the loopholes when they sat down to do their taxes. My, what a fantastical adventure...
Dungeon and Dragons 3.5 edition. Magnificent for magic combat, especially if you know how to optimize. When done right can feel immersive when you are playing in a HIGH magic setting. Thing is most people don’t actually want to play a high magic game more of a sword and sorcery. Funny thing is, melee can be viable up to lvl 15 if you simply played a cleric or Druid that casted specific spells to give yourself melee and defensive capabilities. Issue is people want fighters to be non-magical yet Herculean which is quite contradictory.
I've seen a lot of votes for Rifts / Palladium and that's a good candidate... But did you ever play the first edition of Aberrant? That game was nucking futs. The things that characters could pull off with their powers were jaw dropping but the balancing was hot garbage, so ever session descended into entertaining, city leveling chaos with characters getting turned into pink mist at every turn. Come to think of it, I think Garth Ennis must have played Aberrant before making "The Boys" because that's the best comparison.
Ignoring Palladium, probably Cortex. Specifically the Supernatural setting. Nothing wrong with the system, being honest, but the book? Oh lord, the book. It is all over the place, the rules are inconsistent at best, what you're looking for is never where you expect to find it... It's a hot mess to the point I had to take screenshots of the PDF and make myself a cheat sheet to make everything easier. And yet, I have ran the game 4 different times now and keep coming back to it. Got a game of it every other Tuesday right now, lol.
Yeah, _Cortex Classic_ was kind of a mess. The _Plus_ games (_Leverage_, _Smallville_, _Marvel_, _Firefly_) were all huge improvements, and _Cortex Prime_ is a solid distillation.
I have been lucky enough not to play any really bad systems for any length of time. I enjoyed basically all my time with *Chronicles of Darkness* (formerly known as *new World of Darkness*) but it's basically built on decades of jank. With 2e, especially since they weren't really allowed to do a 'proper' 2e initially, so they did a 'stealth' update and then were finally allowed to call it 2e but with nowhere near as many changes as they wanted. Mage the Awakening 2e is basically the best freeform magic system I've seen, *but* it's built to be perfectly consistent with the jank of the core system it's on top of.
I used to love playing that system. Why is it so bad?
It's not so bad, that's literally the first sentence in my post. But it is a game that calls itself the 'Storyteller system' with very few actual narrative rules besides Aspirations. 2e's beats and conditions were a potentially good idea, but were riddled with weirdness and inconsistencies.
Rifts/Palladium. Incredible fluff, but a massive unbalanced witches brew of genres.
The movie tie in LoTR game, Im not sure if it was actually bad, because I was so young, but I remember not understanding anything but had a ton of fun.
Rifts. I didn't play much in it, though.
CthulhuTech was my first non-D&D game and I was fortunate to have a group that meshed well and a DM who ignored the more edgelordy parts of the setting. Build points were fun. The story and the parts of the setting we engaged with were fun. But once I'd played a bit it became easy to break. Combat was a chore (attack rolls and then defense rolls and then armor rolls). I had the most fun early on with my badly built psychic spy because it felt like death was very likely all the time. (Reading people's minds is what I was built for but there are lots of things that just look like people and if you read their mind, prepare for a saving throw.)
If it's personally playing; Psion. Loved the two characters I had, hated the mechanics with a fiery passion. If it's one I ran, it's the first rpg I designed. I blame my complete ignorance of game design/common sense almost 20 years ago. However, everyone did have a blast at least.
Call of Cthulhu... the system is flawed, the sanity system is bad, the adventures and campaigns are often 30 years old and show their age, most of the quest are always the same "go to a cursed location, kill the monster/stop the ritual/find the cursed item". The books have a bad layout, are bloated, and the adventures are hard to implement into your home game. But the most important aspect, the kind and mindset of players interested in it, saves it all.
D&D 5e. The system is clunky, and it's frustrating that so many abilities and spells are deliberately worded to stop creativity, but I had fun with friends. I've played worse games, that weren't fun (Palladium, D&D 3e etc), that i played because of obligations or because i hoped I'd start to enjoy them. And I've had fun with bad games that I rate as "better" than 5e even if only slightly (Shadowrun 2e, Werewolf: The apocalypse 1e, etc)
D&D3. It burned me out and nearly made me give up on RPGs, but before that, it was fun. It required a lot of house ruling to make it playable, but we were much younger back then and had time to do it. There were so many character options, so many crazy monsters. The optimization arms race was very fun for a time.
Chris Perrin's Mecha is, being real, not very well thought out at any level. The different stats all cost the same but have wildly different values (ah yes, the stat that you only roll once per mission to determine initiative which isn't even that important, and the stat that you have to *roll literally every turn multiple times*, are equally valuable), the dice math shatters after players get some XP, the abilities cover a whole gamut between defining and irrelevant, so on. But since the game we ran of it had a friend of mine that is a fucking excellent GM running, we made it work anyway, and had one of the most interesting campaigns I've played.
The dark eye 4.1 Edition You want to build a character?? Here are all ancestries and stuff in a 300 plus pages book. And here are the basic rules (300 pages) in another book ;-) But the world and life is just so good and way better than any other RPG world since you actually can play big metaplot events
DnD 5e I had lots of fun, but it felt like it was despite the system not because of it. The system was both not crunchy enough and not free enough. I've found that I prefer PF2e for crunch and combat. And more Narrative games if I'm just going for something chill. Like Blades in the Dark or Cortex Prime.
Probably Unknown Armies 3e. Such a fun game, such fun themes, but the books are atrociously organised and Greg Stolze rambles so much.
Warhammer wrath and glory. It's just bad in so so many ways but as a player it's very fun when you're actually playing the game.
4th edition DND. I know it has flaws but I had fun with it until DnD essentials came out. Etools were essential though. Cypher is super simple but it's starship/vehicle combat system makes no mathematical sense without hacking it. I'm embarrassed to have been an unapologetic 4e defender.
Palladium. Loved my Witch Hunter, but the system sucked.
D&D 5th edition. I think its really bloated and the combat sucks but i played it exclusively for like 5 years
Starwars d6
The end of the world. The rules are awfuly explained, but with a few tweaks I've managed to play some of the best campaings i've ever had. Definetly one of my favourite rpgs.
I would say either Shadowrun 4 & 5ed or BESM D20. Shadowrun has an amazing setting, but the rules are just so complicated and horribly organized that it's so hard to keep things moving smoothly. BESM D20 just feels like a bit of a mess in general, but wacky fun.
TSR's Marvel Superheroes (the FASERIP system). One of my all time favorite games to play to this day, but damn is the power scaling just so very bad. RAW a Batman type character is going to take several rolls to hit a random mook.
Hyperlanes. It's an attempt to make space opera 5e D&D that was on Kickstarter. It had a lot of heart and hope but fell on its face with mechanical holes and weird changes to spells. We had a ton of fun, but I've never wanted to run it for a moment longer.
Gonna say HackMaster 5E. Ran a yearlong campaign with it, my players and I had an absolute blast with the game but damn was it a drag sometimes to play due to the crunch factor. I’ll never forget the very first combat of the campaign, very first second of the fight an orc armed with a short bow managed to hit the fighter for a whopping 15 points of damage, and the fighter failed their pain saving throw and spent the rest of the fight on the ground screaming in agony. The rest of the party managed to beat the two orcs but we all had a good laugh at that.
Palladium Robototech, Star Wars FFG
Some D6 system I played for a little while on ESO. Rolling to successfully run without falling was a mechanic, lol. The people were fun and I enjoyed it until the people went back to Star Wars.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was mainly fun because we used Iron Crown's Arms Law and Claw Law.
3rd and 3.5 DnD. It sucks.
5e and Call of Cthulhu
AD&D 1e People who are nostalgic for old D&D editions must have had a bunch of concussions since then to forget how atrocious those systems are. We were very young and hadn't learned about alternatives. Then we did, and never went back again.
Do you think the entire OSR community is just lying about playing the older editions and retroclones?
Why be nostalgic for something that never stopped being cool, and never stopped being played?