Best and worst RPGs

[Lord Relvenous]

I've really enjoyed the Dark Heresy system. It's a pretty easy simple system to figure out, and the rules are very easily used to convey a very cinematic sense of game play. The critical charts are a nice touch too. One of my enduring loves for it is that it is very, very simple to figure out the bonuses/penalties to your rolls, so dice rolling doesn't get in the way of game play, it compliments it. The degrees of failure/success also allow for differing results from rolls other than pass/fail. Example: Two characters were sneaking around a house, trying to avoid guards. The first fails his Move Silently check by 1 degree (0-10 over the stat). He makes a small creak as he steps on a floorboard, unnoticed by the guard downstairs. The second fails by three degrees (30-39 over the stat) and drops the lock box he is carrying down the steps, causing a terrible crash as the box hits every stair on the way down. As a GM, it was easy for me to quickly assign these results to the rolls, and the tense pace of the scene was not broken by consulting of various different charts.

The setting is love it/hate it, like all 40K, but that's more of a personal preference for story-telling than system, if you catch my drift.

[Stark]

This is what I mean when I say people have no idea what they're talking about. Now no offence, but pretty much every non-DnD system with skills has degree of success/failure. It's not in the least noteworthy. That said, I've read the DH rules and they seem pretty good combatwise but fiddly non-combat wise. It's not horrible.

[Norade]

Stark, what's your favorite RPG? I'm asking because if all of the games I've played have been shitty and I've had fun with them, I wonder how much fun I could have with a mechanically better system.

[Stark]

Well that's it; aside from Arthur's game they've always been broken. Like I've said elsewhere, I enjoyed Pendragon and CoC for the versimilitude and lack of inflation. I played Shadowrun and had fun, despite the game being broken from the ground up. I have here the rules to Phoenix Command, so I can always show people how bad 'wargame' RP games combat can get.

[Lord Relvenous]

This is what I mean when I say people have no idea what they're talking about. Now no offence, but pretty much every non-DnD system with skills has degree of success/failure. It's not in the least noteworthy. That said, I've read the DH rules and they seem pretty good combatwise but fiddly non-combat wise. It's not horrible.

No offense taken. The systems I have played are Scion, DnD 3.5, DH, and Star Wars Saga Edition, so I'm not the most experienced. I just thought I'd throw out another system for consideration.

I phrased the success/failure thing wrong, however. I was less talking about the presence of it, and more the ease of implementing it combined with the difficulty system. Pretty much everything is a modifier of +10/-10 or multiples thereof, you don't have to do much math to arrive at your target roll (not that other systems require to do much more, I just find it faster in DH), and the fact that you are rolling against your stats allows dice rolls to be done in a much quicker time frame. That was my point, less success/failure.

[Norade]

I wonder if we could build a better RP on this forum by deciding what makes for a good RP? Honestly, I think we'd end up with people wanting to go in different directions and get nowhere, but if people were to post ideas for what makes a good game trying to make something of it would give me something new to do as a hobby.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Hey! I liked Phoenix Command...

Well, that might be a slight overstatement. Leading Edge's Aliens movie tie-in RPG was based on a simplified variant of the system, and I must have put in a thousand or so hours of play on that, mainly as GM. (We only blew up Earth once. All right, one and a half times...)

Phoenix Command was a relief after that because it was, finally, a look under the hood at how the engine of the system really worked. It made more sense because it filled in the missing pieces.

The intricacy of it was sort of like being a competitive athlete- I'm a fat bastard now but I was a runner once- you have to do everything right, take every possible advantage and avoid every possible mistake, because every split second counts and every move matters.

In Phoenix, they were very well split seconds indeed, and the biomechanics were often crazy - human beings just can't move and react that fast- but as complex and brutally unforgiving as it was, there was a sort of catharsis in dealing with it, especially round exam time. A clear case of mileage varying, I think.


Anyone heard of a free PDF game called Donjon? It was an experiment in allowing the players to define the world as they went along- characters had a given number of 'facts' based on their statistics, and could spend them in play to make things up and steer the adventure. For instance,

GM; 'You enter a cavern-'
player 1; 'Low and wide, with the far end out of sight and blackly rippling water.'
GM; that's two facts, you sure?
Player 1; oh, OK then, what do you want to leave out?
GM; shape of the cavern or the contents, pick.
Player 2; leave the shape. 'water filled, with a frothing, spiralling whirlpool in the centre'.
GM; not filled, unless you really want to spend facts on suddenly having gills.
Player 3; Can I do that?
Player 4; don't be daft. Mostly full of water, with low, mossy stepping stones.
Player 3; you bastard, you know my agility's not that great.
Player 1; you've still got options, find a canoe.
GM; right, the challenge you want is- leaping from rock to rock and avoiding being swept to your doom? A test of heroic poise and agility?
Players; yep.
GM; right, I'll spend a fact point too.
Player 2; what on?
GM; you see a tentacle break the surface of the water...

And so forth. It was not munchkin proof, that was it's great downfall, but with a good crowd it was a lot of, potentialy very silly, fun.


You can find creativity in the oddest places; a tabletop tie-in to a computer game, Rune. Fairly stereotypical hack and slay, but it had a genuinely innovative gamesmastering system- it used a round robin. Each player designed one scene of the adventure and ran it, handing over to the next player for the next scene.

There was a score to be kept, and you gained points by setting up interesting challenges for the other players, or dealing with them when you were a player yourself. It was very burlesque- Norse, and so silly it was actually a lot of fun.

There are lots of different ways to move away from the standard model.

[Gunhead]

One of the worst RPG system I've encountered was the one used in Legend of five rings. That system really stank. I tried to make some improvements to it, but I gave up when it became clear it's easier to just use something completely different.
It ties for the last place with storyteller or whatever it is the system used in WOD.

-Gunhead

[tchizek]

Wow I went away for 12 hours and this is up to 2 pages! How'd that happen?

Anyway, I had completely forgotten about Palladium (even after I mentioned it in the other thread), yea that even beats original AD&D for bad.

In some ways I agree with Stark about classless RPGs being better, but most of them that I have played made character generation so complex that it was frustrating.

Stark - I briefly looked over the D10 system you pointed me too last night it looks like it might be interesting. I have only read the first little bit of the original document but interesting so far.

It is interesting however that it started out as a set of house rules on top of AD&D and evolved to the point where the author dropped the AD&D roots completely!

[Stark]

The concept of classes and levels are linked - after all, back in the old days before every game was designed by marketing commitees, Traveler had neither and DnD had both. It's almost meaningless for classless games to have levels, but many do anyway (like Oblivion) out of sheer conservative inertia.

Skill systems are often done poorly because they're designed by powergaming nerd idiots. Any char sheet with giant lists of skills that all start at some base level and occupy 70% of the real estate and include skills probably useless to 75% of campaigns is stupid and broken. Millienium's End is the prime example of this, but Chaosium system is guilty of the same shit. Over-specific, clunky, crap.

[Vympel]

Well for my part I've recently returned to my childhood by playing some Fighting Fantasy books I picked up cheap.

Want to see if your character can do something? Role 2d6 against your Skill score (which you determined by rolling 1d6 and adding 6 to the result).

Want to see if your character can escape a trap? Role 2d6 against your Luck score (which is determined the same way).

Got hit by the trap? Deduct two points against your Stamina score.

That's it. Skill. Luck. Stamina. No other attributes.

[Stark]

Holy shit Vymp, I found a bunch of my ones too. So broken; it's really sad that as an adult I can see teh structural problems in heaps of the books. That said, I dug the settings, art and most of the speical rules (even if some like Army of ... Death/Blood/Doom/Hell had an 'army' that was almost game-irrelevant). House of Hell + Moonrunner ftw.

Man. I wasted my childhood on that shit. Why can't you buy them in html format or something? The similar Lone Wolf series is available for free in this form (as Joe Dever expressly released them). It's fucking cool to use them in that way.

[Vympel]

Holy shit Vymp, I found a bunch of my ones too. So broken; it's really sad that as an adult I can see teh structural problems in heaps of the books. That said, I dug the settings, art and most of the speical rules (even if some like Army of ... Death/Blood/Doom/Hell had an 'army' that was almost game-irrelevant). House of Hell + Moonrunner ftw.

Moonrunner was awesome. My favorite ever was Black Vein Prophecy, even though it was the most horribly YOU MUST DO EVERYTHING IN A CERTAIN ORDER OR YOU WILL DIE IN THE FINAL BATTLE book they ever made.

Man. I wasted my childhood on that shit. Why can't you buy them in html format or something? The similar Lone Wolf series is available for free in this form (as Joe Dever expressly released them). It's fucking cool to use them in that way.

Yeah, you'd think some clever bastard would put them in html format and maybe embed some online dice (what I use anyway) in them. Some are still for sale (they have a website) but it's definitely not the entire catalog ...

[Stark]

Truthfully, I never finished Black Vein Prophecy without cheating. Even reading all the sections, I never worked out what you were supposed to do when to get to the face-off with your brother and god save you if you didn't get the scales at the start. The other Asian mindfuck one, where you're a peasant growing up, I never solved that either; there's some crazy thing you have to know to meet Maior, and I never worked it out. Creature of Havok is similar, but I eventually solved that one.

I found reviews online for these books, and they're hilarious. They hate Moonrunner because it's 'not Fighting Fantasy enough' with 'not enough references to the universe' and has 'inappropriate' mood and horror themes. They actually hated Conrad the Maniac Guard! He was AWESOME!

[Vympel]

Yeah, you know something's fucked if you need to be deliberately unlucky and avoid picking up a shield in order to beat the book. Conrad was hilarious - no wait, need to put it in all caps - CONRAD, THE MANIAC GUARD - he was the dude that kept coming back over and over no matter how many times you killed him, right? Battleblade Warrior was another good one - the writing was pretty good, as I recall, and the ending was funny as hell (you get the magic sword, kill your asshole bad guys, then head back to your city under seige from the Lizardmen and its implied IIRC that you kick all their asses)

Where can I get the Lone Wolf series? Is it better/ worse than FF?

[Stark]

Even at eight I knew that when the book asked 'do you have cainam written down', that funny shit was going to happen. I really liked that particular approach (of key words tracking what you've done in a relatively non-linear book) rather than the earlier approach of items with numbers associated that you do maths on. It got absurd in some books, get 6 items with numbers and multiple them together and subtract 60! I think Phantoms of Fear was the worst offender in this regard.

I quite like the Lone Wolf books. The first four are good, but Lone Wolf powers up VERY fast and is eventually basically a Jedi in the 'magnakai' books and I didn't enjoy those as much. The combat system is FAR superior, but the writing style is very different and more like nudging an existing story. Use a d10 instaed of their silly 'stab the page' system and you're set (and the html things have a little app that tracks all your shit anyway).

EDIT - Sorry, get it here. The site has some little java apps to track your sheet and resolve combat.

[Covenant]

I wonder if we could build a better RP on this forum by deciding what makes for a good RP? Honestly, I think we'd end up with people wanting to go in different directions and get nowhere, but if people were to post ideas for what makes a good game trying to make something of it would give me something new to do as a hobby.

We could build a better RPG in a half hour with a few beers and a pizza, the issue with an RPG isn't the complexity of the rules, but in the ability to pack up all of the reasoning for the rules--that's what the purpose of in-depth rules are, to keep a consistant play experience throughout and reduce the amount of angst the player has for the GM. It's easy to kill players off, or design dungeons, or present them with skill challenges. You don't need rules for that. You need rules for saying why the player failed and is now bisected on the floor, otherwise it feels arbitrary.

But yeah, it would be a simple task to build a better RPG engine, if you could decide on a theme, and a focus for the game. Big companies don't market themselves as the best RPG system, but as the one you can most easily get into. Familiarity is valuable.

That's why making an RPG is easy enough that people do homebrews all the time, and can make them really well for the specific theme. Without the need to be able to plug-and-play with anyone you meet, a game can rest on a few core tenants that are simple to run with, but usually that requires all the players to agree to it and not cause a lot of problems by bringing baggage to the table. It would be hard to make a game that works as well as D&D as a portable "anyone can play" RPG to the depth it offers. But I do assert that if we wanted to make, like, a better RPG for a theme of our own devising, it could be done pretty simple.

[Covenant]

I just wanted to qualify my statement, as I was a bit tee'd off elsewhere and may have been being a little flippant here for no reason. When I say you can write an RPG in a half hour, what I generally mean is that you can sit down with an idea in mind, bang out two pages of rules, and start roleplaying the rest.

As I had said earlier, the core of a roleplaying game is the roleplaying aspect. As a GM you have a choice to challenge your players with puzzles they throw dice at, or puzzles that you use roleplaying to solve. Think about movies--how many times does the character really roll a skill?

Indiana Jones guesses the weight of the idol, and moves a sandbag onto it, failing, and triggering the boulder. What skill is used here? Appraise Weight (gold/sand) and Run? This could be entirely roleplayed. James Bond guesses the right wire to cut, stopping the bomb right as it reaches 007 seconds to go. What skills are used here? A roll versus luck? Or you could make the player have to choose.

So while a gunfight might be the sort of thing that really pays to have two paragraphs of rules about it, the purpose of skills in an RPG could be a lot more limited than D&D has it. The same goes for attributes, whose only real purpose is to operate as 'super skills' in most of the instances, and offer some debatable, arbitrary bonuses to other things. If people agreed that the purpose of the RPG was mostly to reason out the problems, think through the mystery, and then follow it up with a lot of violence and stabbing, then you wouldn't need a whole lot of rules outside combat and a few skills.

[Gunhead]

Covenant is right. I've been using a system for years that I've built myself. It started as a modfication to an existing system but now it's almost completely different. I'm currently experimenting with a combat system to it that takes a new look to to the normal "roll to hit, roll for damage and deduct hitpoints". My goal is to have the system include rudimentary morale system built into the rolls made to determine the effectivness of the attack. Making a basic rpg system is not that hard. The real challenge is to balance it out so it fair to both PCs and NPCs. And achieving the needed level of detail.

-Gunhead

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Yes, and the problem is that the level of detail required varies from group to group, player to player, hell, even mood to mood.

The trick seems to be pitching it just right to stimulate the moderately creative, give them inspiration to draw from and a framework to build on, without being so closely defined as to rule too many possibilities out and suppress player creativity, or so loosely defined as to leave novice players without a clue where to go.

Covenant, I can see your 'make the player choose' idea being immense amounts of work to run, given that it seems like the GM would have to give complex if not complete descriptions of the situation on far too many occasions for it to run anything like fairly.

That works in live roleplaying, where you have your own senses and your own judgement to go on, but I don't think it works well enough to do in tabletop. Not with four to six people round the table, who will get very bored while the lead actor makes up their mind.

The skills exist so you can use the character's judgement, instead of having to go into forensic detail trying to feed the players'. I know you didn't say that, but I think you know that there are players, and gamesmasters, for whom that is how it would end up- essentially bogged down in a mess of you-said-no-you-didn't.

Besides which, with no skills, how do you define the character? Obviously you can act in a manner consistent with a particular personality or archetype- but that's almost as generic as class and level. Character growth, and measurable character growth at that, is most of the reason for having any kind of feeling of achievement at the end of the day.

Did you ever play first edition Feng Shui? Very strange setting- time travelling ninja furniture arrangers trying to control the world by steering the flow of good fortune to their descendants. Or ancestors in that setting, actually. Each skill had a full write up that included where you were likely to have learned it, how good the levels in it meant that you were, who you met learning it and practising it- it was an excellent use of the skill system idea because it added depth and meaning to the character.

Any system that gets any measurable market share is going to be played by a range of people- maybe not a very broad spectrum depending on how nichey it is, but there are going to be differences of opinion among the players, differences between the players and the GM- a rule system is there to resolve, or hopefully forestall, those differences, or at least impersonalise them enough that you (the generic second person, not you particularly) avoid falling out with your mates.

I like freeform when it works, but I've seen it not work too often, so I have come to accept the need for a framework to resolve creative differences- it can be minimal, if you get it right it can be elegant, but I think it does need to be there.

[Stark]

ITT we learn there are people who like to make decisions to get results, and people who like to have tables make decisions for them. The Cov/XI remnant thing is basically what drives RP design, since the majority of players are fat impotent power-tripping nerds who want to jack off over equipment tables and super-detailed rules for every possible eventuality.

Covenant, I can see your 'make the player choose' idea being immense amounts of work to run, given that it seems like the GM would have to give complex if not complete descriptions of the situation on far too many occasions for it to run anything like fairly.

Wrong. Every decent game I've ever played has had a minimum of dice-rolling, because it's not necessary. Almost the only rolls necessary are oppositional or character vs player ability, everything else is just 'WOW CAN I LIFT A CAR' 'yes you can, this time'.

That works in live roleplaying, where you have your own senses and your own judgement to go on, but I don't think it works well enough to do in tabletop. Not with four to six people round the table, who will get very bored while the lead actor makes up their mind.

I hear RP is a cooperative process between all involved?

The skills exist so you can use the character's judgement, instead of having to go into forensic detail trying to feed the players'. I know you didn't say that, but I think you know that there are players, and gamesmasters, for whom that is how it would end up- essentially bogged down in a mess of you-said-no-you-didn't.

Yeah, they're idiots. This is 80% of the RP playing population. We know that.

Besides which, with no skills, how do you define the character? Obviously you can act in a manner consistent with a particular personality or archetype- but that's almost as generic as class and level. Character growth, and measurable character growth at that, is most of the reason for having any kind of feeling of achievement at the end of the day.

Sad but true, a short paragraph about a character tells other players and the GM more about your character than a sheet covered in tiny (largely useless) numbers with ridiculous simulationist formulae attached. Even the wargame aspects of most games are driven by three or four stats and a handful of skills, the rest is worthless shit like 'does my guy know xyz' or 'can I pick this lock even though I'm a master thief who has done it a million times before'.

I like freeform when it works, but I've seen it not work too often, so I have come to accept the need for a framework to resolve creative differences- it can be minimal, if you get it right it can be elegant, but I think it does need to be there.

It works all the time with adults, people who aren't playing to measure their fantasy penis and get more +5 longswords. However, those players are most of the market, so obviously systems will cater to that play.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

You mentioned tables, I didn't.

You're also choosing to miss the point about description. You're not thinking perversely enough. The more freeform it is, the more contingencies you have to cover- which means either thinking them out in advance, and describing them in enough detail that they can be thought of, or winging it. Which is great when you get it right and terrible when you get it wrong. You seem to have some sort of vision of perfection here with players who are never lost, never confused and never completely at a loss as to what the fuck is actually going on.

I also find it funny that you talk about fat impotent power tripping nerds and go on to use an example that involves solving an adjudication issue by letting the player power trip.

And stating the extremely obvious like it was some blinding flash of insight. Which for you it may well be, I couldn't say. You also didn't speak to the point, where time consuming and elaborate description tends to bog down the game and result in a dull experience. Netrunners in Cyberpunk 2020 come to mind? I'm talking about trying to avoid that.

80% of gamers being idiots- I'd say fools rather than idiots, flaws in judgement rather than intellect, but that means that to deal with eighty percent of them, you need a system or a method that has some degree of fool or idiot proofing built in. (At that, it's still an improvement on old Ted Sturgeon's estimate. Are these signs of optimism creeping in?)

Defining the character is an issue. For a good example of what I mean and what I'd like to see more of, the Issaries Industries version of Runequest- much more open play and freeform than the Chaosium version; you could improvise like mad.

The recommended method of creation was exactly that. Short, hundred word usually, description of your character, from which the key phrases and words were extracted that defined his or her actual abilities and interests.

I want, and in my home brew system I think I have, a system detailed enough that I can look at a character sheet and get an actual sense of the character; a writeup that answers the question 'what is this imaginary person like'?

I think a character sheet should be something like a CV; it follows the person it describes and records their capabilities, rather than defining them. Unfortunately, this is very hard to set up, especially in a system that has any kind of mechanic for character growth. I see where you're coming from about Pendragon, it was good for that.

Adult gamers, that's a bit of a contradiction- I think most of us have an unusually active inner child- but with a small group of good mates, certainly it can be done. However, one of the places I run is at a child- infested community wargames club.

There have been days when I've had eleven players round the table, seven of them under fifteen. A freeform game would disintegrate. (The opinion that the players should be disintegrated has come up more than once.) Trying to teach them how to play a part and carry a plot and generally be better gamers, I couldn't do that without the senior team, (whom I could be having so much more fun with if the kids weren't there) and without some kind of fairly closely defined system that they can use as a crutch- as a learning aid, effectively.

[Vendetta]

Moonrunner was awesome. My favorite ever was Black Vein Prophecy, even though it was the most horribly YOU MUST DO EVERYTHING IN A CERTAIN ORDER OR YOU WILL DIE IN THE FINAL BATTLE book they ever made.

Black Vein Prophecy was a basket of cunts.

I remember Starship Traveller being hard as bastards as well. So many ways to completely die, a few ways to half win, and only one actual win.

[Jade Falcon]

Black Vein Prophecy was a basket of cunts.

I remember Starship Traveller being hard as bastards as well. So many ways to completely die, a few ways to half win, and only one actual win.

Showing your age there, though the original Deathtrap Dungeon was a bugger for it's time.

Remember the Sorcery books?

The Shamutanti Hills
Khare-Cityport of Traps
The Seven Serpents
And one last book that I can't recall the name of.

[Covenant]

Just for the record, the examples I used included James Bond cutting the bomb wire in a "Cut the red one? They're both red!" moment. How the fuck can that be better done with dice? And how does "I'll cut the left one!" take an immense amount of work to run? You're misinterperting what I've said, or full of shit. I'll assume the former.

Covenant, I can see your 'make the player choose' idea being immense amounts of work to run, given that it seems like the GM would have to give complex if not complete descriptions of the situation on far too many occasions for it to run anything like fairly.

It isn't, because these "But Thou Must!" skill checks are essentially of arbitrary value to begin with. What I'm talking about is not pure freeform without any kind of basis in established characters, but a system where important decisions are left up to the player to decide and unimportant decisions are removed as impediments to the plot, and actual "skill" rolls are used in important contests and conflict resolution.

Think about it--In any situation defined primarily by dice, you need to assume that even a well-informed player can fail at a point where you really need/want them to succeed in order to continue advancing the plot. Because of this you need lots of extra avenues in order to make it so no single failure will break the campaign and pointlessly end the game. That's forcing the GM to come up with lots of extra assets in order to account for randomness. Thus, you have to do X amount of work to make sure the players can advance the game, and to accomidate for failure or stupidity you need to have X+Y amount of total work of easiest path plus detours. Removing skillchecks should in most cases reduce the amount of work for X, and make Y unnecessary. I think you've confused "let them decide what to do" with "give them a sandbox." I'm giving players the ability to choose specific actions, but still keeping them linked to the plot.

Also, as a GM, you try to challenge your players and ideally present them all with something for their characters to do during the day's mission. As you have to cater to their level of badassedry no matter what, you are already throwing in a bunch of skill tests that are designed to be succeeded at by the players. If they're just minor roadbumps to be solved by random dice-tossing, what the hell is the point of 'em? Take out the skill tests and just give the players the flavor text you were planning on giving them anyway, once they had succeeded in the test.

I am not saying you replace all skills with so-called 'freeform' roleplay, which I consider to be boring and stupid. But skill checks in games are, generally, pretty pointless. Contested or opposed skills, and combat skills, that's when it's useful. But by and large, I don't often see the reason that other people do to overcomplicate the game with a burdensome set of rules that must be memorized and can be argued about.