Dud-geons and Drag-ons.

…badum tsss…
What RPG did you play, read or buy that turned out to be a real dud? Maybe it was hyped up beforehand but was dead on arrival? Perhaps it was a more promising, niche offering that didn’t meet your expectations?

For me: Enter…

STAR WARS


Specifically, the dice mechanics of the FFG offering. Amazing universe. There’s something for everyone. And it’s known. None of that "well, in this world there are no XYZ."

But the dice seemed to get in the way of the narrative each and every time. It felt like we were doing something great only for us then to get out the chart, cross reference stuff and then decide. Not to mention going back and forth and agreeing on appropriate outcomes with the GM and yadda yadda yadda…

How about you?

Oh God, White Wolf's Scion.
We were sooo excited when a friend of ours got the three core books as a gift. I offered to GM and made up a short campaign.
Amazing setting, great lore.
ABYSMAL ruleset, even worse than the standard White Wolf fare; nonsensical examples (weapon chart with a Macuahuitl but no explosives of any kind); no balance whatsoever between attributes and powers.
We enjoyed the setting so much we kept playing, but then after 8 sessions re-made the PCs using the Mutants & Masterminds ruleset.

Omg so many sadly.

The card mechanic really detracts from the game and makes magic very un-fun.

Character advancement is lackluster, flashbacks interrupt the narrative flow, and everything you do seems to generate stress which makes me stressed as a player.

Amazing world, really cool concepts, interesting classes, absolute garbage mechanics.

I may give this one another chance as I only ran it once but I didn't enjoy that session. I can't point to any specific issue off the top of my head.

I like a lot about the system, except for the single d20 roll with no modifiers. It just feels so lame to only roll one die and have so much riding on it. The mechanics are just too simple that it feels unsatisfying.

Shadowrun 5e: Reading the rules, modifiers for this and that, that makes sense at cudos for the minnusa and ability to tweak your character
Playing the rules: What a fucking mess

I feel like that's every version of Shadowrun for me.

My big one was Pugmire. It's such a neat setting and I love the Code of Man. Unfortunately, they made it based on D&D 5e (that's not the problem) and only included 10 levels (that's also not the problem) and they did this before 5e was even solidly out and without any solid understanding of 5e's problems and solutions (this is the problem). They oversimplified the systems that 5e had already simplified and it feels like playing a classless version of 5e where everyone lacks exactly the same thing - something that would make their character interesting.

Anything Palladium but Rifts in particular. There is no consistency between rulebooks and with each new book released, there is a new, more powerful character class. I tried to consolidate the various skills into a single list and found that with each book, even the base skills weren't consistent with one another. Rifts provided one formula for a specific skill, Heroes Unlimited provided another, and Ninjas and Superspies provided yet another. They are all the same system and are supposed to be cross-compatible! And the organization of the rulebooks is utter chaos!

I love the idea behind Rifts. The setting is sheer brilliance, but the presentation is sorely lacking.

The End of the World RPGs published by FFG. The basic idea of roleplaying yourself surviving an apocalypse is an interesting idea, if a bit gimmicky. What would you do when faced with a horde of zombies? Where would you hide at night when the aliens patrol for survivors overhead?

However, the entire thing feels like half an effort was put into it. The core resolution mechanic is poorly balanced, challenging design questions such as "what do you do after your game self dies" are ignored instead of addressed, and the GM material is sorely lacking in useful materials. I'm frankly surprised this is an entire line of RPGs, though they're all the same RPG with different apocalypse settings.

The idea probably would work much better for a solo rpg of some sort instead of a group game, where a lot of the clunky bits show their teeth.

It's probably a good system. I've tried it two or three times on GP, and I have that impression that it might work, but you have to basically play only with people who agree that it's a good way to play. Whether that's a shared delusional state, or a harmony of vision, depends entirely on your success.

Oh MAN Scion... The imbalance between the power levels of each of the... epic stats or legendary stats was insane. I had such a bad time playing in the campaign I was in.

For me it's Pathfinder 2e, partly because the base difficulty being upped by 5 [from 15 for an 'easy' task to 20] combined with the skills modifiers being on average lowered makes it so characters feel ineffectual and unskilled, combo this with monsters having been ported forward with relatively no changes and it feels like you're forced into playing either a completely min-maxed build or you're just some random dirt-peasant who wandered into a bad situation to die. The other partly is because someone on the dev-team seems to have a hateboner for my favorite class, and nerfed it deep into the ground.

Pathfinder 1e wasn't much better. I used to be in an IRC channel that often invited RPG publishers to come talk about their latest offerings, and I remember right around the time 13th Age came out, they invited a couple Paizo devs in. One of the questions they got asked was why they didn't balance the changes they made to d&d 3.5, and their answer was, as near as I can recall, 'We tried to balance those issues, but balancing them would have required us to change other things so we just didn't.' And that appears to be their overall reaction to balance as well. It's too hard, so they just... don't.

Uh we have drastically different viewpoints here. I can understand hating BitD, but for other reasons... I would classify the mechanics you pointed out as very well implemented and fun.

Still more balanced than AD&D 2e's kit system. Some kits had mechanical penalties, others had RP penalties that were either ignored or so minor as to be little more than an inconvenience. Dwarves gained extra NWPs just for being dwarves, while rogues had so many NWPs to choose from that it was hard to be consistent. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy 2e and have a soft spot for it, but the kit system was horribly unbalanced.

For me, it would be D&D 5e. I was already boycotting WotC after the lie about 4e, but then 5e came out, I got curious, and I started hearing good things about it. Eventually I found a really good deal on Amazon where you could buy all 3 core rulebooks for 40% off. Considering that my DM's Guide came with printing errors and that they had to send me a replacement copy, and that fact that Amazon obviously would take its cut, I was satisfied that WotC would not be making much profits with me...

Anyways, I started playing it, and at first I really liked it, but the more I played, the more the cracks showed. Ugly, unsightly cracks that I could simply no longer ignore... The monsters only exist to make the players look good, combats devolve simply in an annoying formality of seeing how fast you curb-stomp the opponents. Healing is overabundant. There are clearly balance issues among the various sub-classes and feat selections. And the list just goes on and on and on...

So much so that I started to look for alternatives for 5e. My first idea was going into the O5R movement and play some of those games, with Five Torches Deep quickly becoming my favorite, but I must admit that later I noticed Red Hack and Into The Unknown looked like they could pull off O5R even better than FTD. But last month I did finally received my books for the EN Publishing Kickstarter I backed: Level Up, Advanced 5th edition. And after being almost done reasing the behemoth of the Adventurer's Guide (their version of the PHB, clocking in at 656 pages), I must say that I really love the fixes, and this will be my 5e from now on (tough I'll still dabble in O5R when I feel like having an OSR feel).

Do you mean the one from 2007 that had playbooks and Party Bears and kitsune?

All I can think of whenever I think of the Kit system is the Jongluer kit. I knew a guy who that was all he would play because it was just so insanely busted. Evasion before evasion existed, Deflect Arrows but better before that existed, and a bonus to hit and damage with thrown weapons that stacked with picking up WP in the throwing skill. He had something like +4 to hit and +4 damage on top of whatever he got from stats and base THAC0 at level 1.

The kits were definitely all over the place, but so were the races, that was just kind of 2e's thing. Like a lesser reflection of RIFTS in that aspect, which is to say specifically relying entirely on the individual game's DM to keep people on roughly the same level of power rather than actually building it into the game. Just without the power gap being a gulf the size of an entire galaxy, between 'A homeless guy' (Vagrant OCC) and 'The Silver Surfer' (Cosmo-Knight OCC) and 'My class starts at the level your class ends' (Adult Dragon RCC). Sure could be frustrating on both parts.

Oh, sorry, I should have taken into account that there are more than one "red hack" out there... I was talking about that one.

Oh yeah, I guess there's that game too. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate RIFTS, but man are those books an organizational mess!

Fun is definitely subjective because I've never had fun with a BitD system lol. I'm curious what your "other reasons" are though, cuz I might hate those as well and just forgot to mention them! Haha.

This had a LOT of potential and a really amazing setting but the mechanics were just so, so bad. It seemed like a couple of the designers had a good grasp on how to handle the mechanics and the rest just made a half-hearted stab at throwing something on a page. Balance was a joke but the setting made putting up with the system almost worth it. The production values on the various books was on-point and did a great job of promoting the look and feel of the setting.
I played the White Wolf version of Aberrant/Trinity but haven't tried the Onyx Path version.

I mostly had big problems with the fact that it sold itself as "low prep". Prep during session 0 might be low, but as a GM you have to keep track of one thousand things at once during play, there's a million subsystems rather then few universal principles. It is one of the hardest thing I ever GMed and even as a player your sheet looks like a QC module from the 80s (still not as bad as some others).
Also the "magical" elements of the setting felt a bit tacked on, it could've been played in a historical setting such as Peaky Binders and would've worked almost better.

Meanwhile introducing quick flashbacks was a blast, it totally felt like a heist movie such as Ocean's Eleven where the flashback is enhancing the narrative rather than interrupting it.
And I loved that there's no "safe course" you're in a very stressful situation and there's only so much you can do without having a crackdown.

For your consideration; a wet fart.

I’ve actually sworn off buying any and all PBtA games until I play a game of it that actually excites me. The books are gorgeous, and the system seems to make sense. But it’s just never clicked with me.

I’d have scooped up a copy of Night Witches months ago, had I not been burned one too many times!

Yeah, PbtA is one of those systems where games are either hits or misses with very little in between.

Personally, I really enjoyed Urban shadows and I can't wait to get my books form the 2nd edition Kickstarters I backed a while back. Uncharted Worlds is also pretty good, and Vagabonds of Dyfed is a sort of hybrid of PbtA and OSR which looks really good on paper, but I've yet to try it yet. I've also heard a lot of good things about Dungeon Worlds, so probably look into that.

I did backed the End Time Kickstarter, and when I received my book, felt the system was pretty "meh"... just to prove that they're not all games that I like...

I deny your consideration. Also my vacation starts tonight so I think I'm going to start a Cartel game. I'll show you the wonders of PbtA!

I own so many PbtA games... and remain very conflicted about most of them. I've had good fun with Masks, The Sprawl, Action Movie World (briefly), Offworlders and Breakers, like the -idea- of Freebooters on the Frontier and Stonetop... and I think I could enjoy Monster of the Week and Super Destiny High School Rumble. Had a good time with AW finally, because I played in a PbP game run by a PbtA pro. I think it *really* matters how these games are run.

Still waiting for great core experiences with stuff like Dungeon World, SCUP, Root, and MotW. Not sure if it's in the cards.

*cough*You forgot to mention Cartel.*cough*

I so want to play Breakers

My top of the list for Duds: DnD 4e. TOO BALANCED to the point that every class feels and plays exactly the same with different flavor. The adventure modules have interesting set ups but then are far too rail-roady, it's one set piece battle to the next.

Oh, that reminds me of Cypher. I only ever played one low-level game of it, so I might not be a good judge of the system but while the character creation sounds fun with the three parts, in practice, I only ever ended up rolling a straight D20 for anything. Sure, my abilities added a bit of personality, but overall, it felt very bland and not like my character choices really influenced what I was good at or not.
The fact that if you do spend points, it doesn't give you a bonus but only reduces the difficulty also adds to this feeling of sameyness.

I still enjoyed the game but it was definitely despite the system, not because of it

In fact, I did not. =]

I love Call of Cthulhu and games of that genre. Average Joe’s mixing it up with a mystery.

But boy, does it feel bad to constantly roll over your meager stat values. They’re just so low. I don’t know if it’s something that ‘Pulp Cthulhu’ might correct for (making the heroes more competent and punchy) but I hope it does.

It’s on both sides of the screen. It really takes any horror or fear out of a scene when you’re big ugly gribblies miss inexplicably for the third round in a row.

Yeah that and overly complicated combat are the two big negatives about CoC. I feel too many skills start at too low a value. I feel all skills should start at either 1/2 or at least 1/5 of the most applicable base stat, similar to how the Dodge skill works. Next time I run CoC I might do that.

It's the best terrible game. ;)

There are many alternatives! Cthulhu Dark, Rats in the Walls, Eldritch Tales, Tiny Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, the list goes on.

Here's a wetwipe so you can clean up! Gonna agree though. I played Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Fellowship, and their verison of Avatar. I just can't get into it. Everything you do feels the same, and the playbooks don't do enough to differentiate the characters. I kept trying new ones but not one actually felt any different to play than any other.

I hear that. In some ways, this is the 'appeal' of the system but it does make your character's specializations invisible in a way. I wonder if it would make a difference to add modifiers to rolls rather than decrease the target number? It wouldn't be hard to do.

Another thing that bugs me in cypher in pbp is the GM can't roll for the player because they should be given a chance to declare effort before the roll is made. In particular this can lag combat. In D&D-likes, the GM can roll all the monster's attacks in a single post, but in Cypher you have to wait for your player to roll their defense.

There are other bells and whistles to draw upon that could shake things up. GM intrusions, player intrusions, and having interesting cyphers could go a long way. I'd like to see a Cypher game really push those unique features. Characters are pretty robust and can afford big intrusions to push the drama buttons, and that kick starts the XP economy for players to make intrusions too. I think people should think about intrusions as a "Make This Scene More Awesome" button and press it liberally. But again, it is another transaction - a player can refuse the intrusion and that takes time to confirm that can hold up the game.

Cyphers are also pretty hit-and-miss. Like, is your character cool because of disposable gadgets? Maybe if you're playing Adam West Batman or James Bond, but not most characters in fiction. They make perfect sense in Numenera but not many other genres.

The "I am an adjective noun who verbs" formula for characters is one of the system's best features and I think you could leverage it for other things in the game. Like, a cypher Star Wars game, your ship could have a sentence. The Millenium Falcon could be a Piece-of-Junk Smuggler Ship that's Got It Where it Counts.

I would love to play it in person, because the Harrigan transactions aren't so much of a time-killer there. I think it would really shine that way.