The Role Playing Public Radio Forums
General Category => RPGs => : 2sound2furious March 12, 2011, 07:07:17 AM
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this is a thread where you can diss rpgs you don't like so people can avoid them
(old) World of Darkness
this is like new world of darkness except everything sucks. vampires are angsty goths, werewolves are furry hippies, changelings are pussies, wraiths were pretty cool actually but geists are cooler etc.
there were also other stupid books like Mummy: The Resurrection and Who: The Fuck Cares
RuneQuest
there's ducks in it
Big Eyes, Small Mouth
anime
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This is now a thread where you can "diss" flowers you don't like so people can avoid them.
Sunflowers
(http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/5584/sunflowers300x400.jpg)
Need I say more?
Orchids
(http://img862.imageshack.us/img862/3475/orchidpic.jpg)
Look at those lazy fuckers
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Orchids man... MOTHERFUCKING orchids...
The only thing worse than them is the Amorphophallus titanum.
(http://i1014.photobucket.com/albums/af268/Wooberman/corpseflower.jpg)
Its all like "Ooh look at me, I only flower once every 50 years so you gotta wait around and take in the smell of Bigfoot's dick that so happens to be sticking out here".
Fucking attention whore.
The name means Giant Misshapen Penis btw.
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I HATE TREES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnEa1-vU8jI
also I dislike Legends of the Five Rings - not sure but probably because of the snotty attitude I've encountered from the few people that played it. Also seems like shameless japanophilia as it reduces characters to two dimensional caricatures of real people but what do i know? It's probably a great game and I am stupid for disliking it.
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Good good. Give into your anger. Let the hate flow through you.
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I also dislike games that go overboard on the house rules. If you have 20 pages of handwritten 'rules' that extensively modify the base system and only have 1 copy for all of us to use then fuck your game asshole
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I'm sensing a trend in that Ross dislikes people more than games.
Asshole.
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I'm sensing a trend in that Ross dislikes people more than games.
Asshole.
(http://i.imgur.com/v9gDz.gif)
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I'm not particularly a fan of Savage Worlds. I guess I just feel that it really forces you to play combat characters (at least that is how most of the scenarios that my friends have run) and the combat is pretty boring and repetitive for as long as it takes (as opposed to like CoC which is repetitive but short, or DnD which is long, but at least has powers and stuff to mix things up). Dealing new initiative each turn really slows things down and the way that combat is typically a lot of mooks just slows things way down. Also, something about character creation just doesn't jive with me, but I'm not quite sure what...
I don't know, I've just always been bored while playing...
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Rifts
The greatest pool of batshit crazy ideas strangled by their "system." Rifts is much like chocolate to diabetics.
Star Wars
If any character from the movies show upthe PCs attack like rabid dogs. If you play with any normal group there's always the guy who nags over every detail.
Marvel RPG
The old system with the random powers and percentile system. It wasn't so bad until we used the ultimate powers guide. I remember one guy who ended up with nothing more than the power to control steam and the next guy could open rifts in time and space as well as open gateways to other universes.
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Whats wrong with the power to control steam (assuming you can also produce it)?
Steam is hot as shit, can be used as a smoke screen, blast a bunch into someones lungs and have it condense into water and drown them, build your own steampunk power armor suit, turn any collection of random crap into steam pipe bombs you throw and expand the steam violently to blast shrapnel everywhere, and best of all make spaghetti in seconds.
I kinda hate Pantheon, havent ever played it, but its the only non-con AP I couldn't really get through listening to.
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You know what RPG's I really don't like/enjoy?
Dark Heresy and Call of Cthulhu (blasphemy on that last one I know).
I really don't like d100 systems (with Eclipse Phase being a notable exception) because of how very random a d100 is compared to a d20 (which I grew up on, as it were).
Combine the fickle d100 with the two system's heavy emphasis on your characters being largely incompetent at everything (at the start with DH, at least) and it just ends up being this horrendously frustrating experience for me, because I rapidly get frustrated when my characters repeatedly fail tasks that should be relatively routine because the game only lets me start out with a skill of 35 and I always manage to roll in the high 90's.
Also I can't stand grimdarkhurfdurfFORTHEEMPRAH/ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Also, RuneQuest. For the same reasons as above.
But I love games with stupidly random, nonserious CharGen such as Synnibar and TMNT:AoS and the Maid RPG.
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yeah i don't care much about d100 systems either. don't have any problems with Unknown Armies though, i guess the setting is so sweet it balances out the awkward system. also has a lot better sanity system than CoC.
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The guy that had steam powers had no way of creating steam, just controlling it. He also had no super tech skills so the best he could do was walk around with a humidifier or a portable nebulizer asthma machine. Steam punk goes out the window pretty fast when you look at how unbalanced that shit was. Who cares if I carpet bombed him with steam punk grenades, he just opened a tunnel back in time and smothered me as a baby.
Addendum
Marvel Universe
The only reason I dislike this is that I played in two games. The first was set in the DC universe. We met Batman for some reason and he ended up getting knocked out. When this happened my shapeshifter character ended up in the batplane with him. The plane was on autopilot so I took off his mask, copied him, disfigured his face, took all his fancy toys off him, and threw him into the middle of the atlantic ocean. For some reason the game ended after that session (score 1 for dicks everywhere).
The second game was in the Marvel U. I played a character that was min maxed to absurdity. The character could go insubstantial and according to the rules I could just leave objects inside people. Also I could turn 60 feet tall. Oh yeah and I had superstrength and retarded modifiers to every stat due to a broken point buy system. Needless to say the character was never hurt and made the game damn near unplayable. this was also during the great 3.0 optimization wars so I guess I'll scapegoat some of this onto that. That character ended the game because the GM didn't come up with a way to deal with it. After robbing most of the banks in the world it became very boring. It taught me a valuable lesson about both game balance and not being a dick though.
I ran the game and had a similar problem in that the players (after my initial dickery) got together and optimized their PCs to wreck my game. I deserved it though. It was then when the realization that you could make a PC with no superpowers that could destroy galactus with kung fu sank in. Also the magic rules were so broken that the doctor strange of the group could have kicked in the hulk's ass while turning superman to dust. Another guy came in with a gambit ripoff who could charge things up like himself and then build an infinte amount of energy using his bishop like ability to absorb energy and shoot it back. He just stood there and waited for it. He also informed me that he could have done this cheaper with a cyclops like ability and multiple man clones zapping him to power him up. I managed to make it to the end of the first session. Oddly enough they burned through the story with their Power Cosmic level monstrocities in about an hour. After that I threw what I could at them and just watched as the game fell apart beneath the weight of brokeness.
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The guy that had steam powers had no way of creating steam, just controlling it. He also had no super tech skills so the best he could do was walk around with a humidifier or a portable nebulizer asthma machine. Steam punk goes out the window pretty fast when you look at how unbalanced that shit was. Who cares if I carpet bombed him with steam punk grenades, he just opened a tunnel back in time and smothered me as a baby.
Addendum
Marvel Universe
The only reason I dislike this is that I played in two games. The first was set in the DC universe. We met Batman for some reason and he ended up getting knocked out. When this happened my shapeshifter character ended up in the batplane with him. The plane was on autopilot so I took off his mask, copied him, disfigured his face, took all his fancy toys off him, and threw him into the middle of the atlantic ocean. For some reason the game ended after that session (score 1 for dicks everywhere).
The second game was in the Marvel U. I played a character that was min maxed to absurdity. The character could go insubstantial and according to the rules I could just leave objects inside people. Also I could turn 60 feet tall. Oh yeah and I had superstrength and retarded modifiers to every stat due to a broken point buy system. Needless to say the character was never hurt and made the game damn near unplayable. this was also during the great 3.0 optimization wars so I guess I'll scapegoat some of this onto that. That character ended the game because the GM didn't come up with a way to deal with it. After robbing most of the banks in the world it became very boring. It taught me a valuable lesson about both game balance and not being a dick though.
I ran the game and had a similar problem in that the players (after my initial dickery) got together and optimized their PCs to wreck my game. I deserved it though. It was then when the realization that you could make a PC with no superpowers that could destroy galactus with kung fu sank in. Also the magic rules were so broken that the doctor strange of the group could have kicked in the hulk's ass why turning superman to dust. Another guy came in with a gambit ripoff who could charge things up like himself and then build an infinte amount of energy using his bishop like ability to absorb energy and shoot it back. He just stood there and waited for it. He also informed me that he could have done this cheaper with a cyclops like ability and multiple man clones zapping him to power him up.
I've had a discussion of superhero games with my group, and I think the problem is that Superhero games are grossly unbalanced to begin with. I mean, you have to consider that the concept of a superhero is grossly unbalanced, so translating that to a game is going to be something similar.
Even in games without randomly generated powers, it's hard to keep things balanced if you're not watching your players like a hawk. In a M&M game I was running, my players dealt with the serial antagonist (and they said that they wanted a serial antagonist) by teleporting him into outer space. And these characters were still Power Level 10 (the baseline) I think.
If I ever run a superhero game again, it's definitely going to be more "street level."
tl;dr - Superhero games: Fun to play in, not so fun to run.
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Even in games without randomly generated powers, it's hard to keep things balanced if you're not watching your players like a hawk. In a M&M game I was running, my players dealt with the serial antagonist (and they said that they wanted a serial antagonist) by teleporting him into outer space. And these characters were still Power Level 10 (the baseline) I think.
If I ever run a superhero game again, it's definitely going to be more "street level."
tl;dr - Superhero games: Fun to play in, not so fun to run.
After running this a few times I moved on to other better systems and have learned that the key to a great supers game is the magical effect of comic book logic. I would have had you villain come back with a devastating alien based technology that he got after being teleported onto an alien ship and killing the crew. Nothing worse for PC supers than to know that the destruction of lives and property is their fault. Also you could go with the good old troup of the guy in the mysterious suit that for some reason or another keeps popping up. They finally catch him and it turns out to be their arch nemesis from back in the day sporting new threads. And never forget robots and clones. Good ol' Doc Doom never gets killed but his clones and doom bots do. Hell, even when he does get killed he can get out of hell using magic.
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Superhero games are difficult to run not because of the powers themselves - its the variety of them. Exalted characters and epic level D&D characters are just as powerful as superheroes yet its possible to run a campaign with them pretty easily. The difference is that Exalted and D&D GMs know what to expect from their players and the games build all material to support those assumptions. Superhero games as a rule don't. It's one thing to have a game where you can teleport enemies into space - it's another when the system doesn't provide you many ways to deal with it.
I think one of the reasons I like Wild Talents so much is that by boiling all super powers into three categories and focusing the rules on how powers interact with each other, it gives a GM a lot of discretion on how to handle individual interactions. Useful powers that indirectly attack someone always get a resistance check and if they murder the enemy a trauma check. Furthermore, you have to spend a lot of points to teleport someone into space as the range is crazy.
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I wrote (read: stole most mechanics of) a simple Superheroes game whereby the players chose their superpower, and powered it through use of XP. They basically had to fill in a little thing on the sheet, "For 0xp, I can..., For 1xp I can..." etc up to 5xp. So for example, one character had the ability to create doorknobs for free, and then could attach them to to something and pull them open like a door, for XP depending on the size of the door and the thickness of the thing the doorknob was attached to. Since we used candy for xp (my favourite was fruit tingles) people would seek to spend their XP pretty quickly (you got XP by playing your character or making the story push forward).
It seemed a lot to do with setting for my guys. People who came up with powers that tried to game the system found that they weren't having as much fun as those whose powers were more light-hearted and fluffy (eg Disco Inferno, whose powers were something like, For 0xp I can make any musical device play funk; for 1xp I can make my gun shoot louder than anyone else's gun... up to for 5xp I can force all people in the area to take part in a choreographed dance scene like a musical). Also, since each character had to pick a secret shame/flaw for their character, which was basically designed for me to use against the players if they were being dicks, those with cheesy powers just found that their secret shame came up constantly, whereas those who chose quite nasty flaws to begin with had a good chance of being able to mitigate them by their own actions.
Was a great, fun system to play for a few laughs, sort of like an icebreaker game to get people into the idea of roleplaying, before thrusting a more complex system at them.
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Old W.O.D. Too many dice.
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Old W.O.D. Too many dice.
Shadowrun 4e. Gun Adept.
23 dice for Heavy Pistols. 3 passes per round. Two shots per pass.
138d6 isn't too many dice. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TOO MANY DICE.
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Old W.O.D. Too many dice.
Shadowrun 4e. Gun Adept.
23 dice for Heavy Pistols. 3 passes per round. Two shots per pass.
138d6 isn't too many dice. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TOO MANY DICE.
Bah!
When you spend more time counting up "successes" than you spend declaring an action, that is too many dice.*
*Side note:
W.O.D. also had that fixed damage system. (Body score in damage, ect.) If you roll 30bajillion dice for sneak attack damage, spell damage, swordtotheface damage, I do make an exception.
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One thing I really do hate about OWoD's system is that my awesome pumonca biker can hit a dude with a chainsaw with 9 successes but fail to do a single point of damage because hits matter approximately fuckall in melee. "Argh! Fuckin' dicepools!" was often heard at my gaming table.
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I hate any RPG that requires me to acquire another twenty dice.
I hate RPG's with lists of powers that go on for twelve or so pages.
I hate RPG's that come with statistics for anal circumference.
I hate RPG's that are pretentious.
I also hate lawyers, cops, and doctors.
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I hate any RPG that requires me to acquire another twenty dice.
I hate RPG's with lists of powers that go on for twelve or so pages.
I hate RPG's that come with statistics for anal circumference.
I hate RPG's that are pretentious.
I also hate lawyers, cops, and doctors.
Okay Francis!
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He doesn't hate vests though.
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Or lasagna Mondays.
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I also hate lawyers, cops, and doctors.
What about THE Doctor, do you hate him?
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I also hate lawyers, cops, and doctors.
What about THE Doctor, do you hate him?
Better fucking not!