Things that instantly turn you off a new system

>We only use d6! No need for "hard to find" dice!
I like fiddling with my dice, and I find the d6 to be the most boring of all dice. As a side note, there aren't enough games that use my favorite of all dice, the d12.

>Actual mechanical rules are less than 1 page long
So many 1-page indie games that basically involve "roll a d6 and decide things based on how you _feel_".

>Rules have a glass ceiling
Meaning that there isn't anything that just -is-, just ridiculously large challenge numbers, much like 3.5e. I like certain things just being deadly and not requiring a roll.

>Rules allow for rerolls
Nothing takes tension out of the scene moreso than someone just rolling out of the badthing over and over again. You getting an initial roll to begin with is your chance to get out of the bad thing. The roll should not be a guaranteed thing.

>Long paragraphs of Holier-than-thou introductions from the author
I really wish this wasn't an actual thing. I've returned at least 3 rules to the authors at conventions they were selling them in.

>Rules get so granular that they dictate your entire life
3.5. Nuff said.

>Playing a game by referencing a chart every roll

user, there's a reason we've moved away from 1e and THAC0.

Pic related is pretty much the only thing. I try to keep an open enough mind to at least give everything else a chance, but there is absolutely zero defending this garbage.

>Published under the OGL.

Won't touch it.

Yeah, because, the one thing easier than learning a bunch of abstract symbols, is learning which random numbers represent those symbols. Especially when the same number will mean a totally different symbol depending on which die it appears on.

Fucking please, dude.

>Roll under

>d20

>Custom dice

>Fantasy Flight Games

Motherfucking

Dice

Pools

>too many skills, not enough accessibility

also, the chip on my shoulder
>make an (unjustifiably) unbalanced game, put the onus on the GM to figure any issues out

I am currently writing up the outlines for a tabletop system based in the xcom apocalypse setting, any suggestions?

OH also
>your character effectively the same as everyone else

The Mountain Witch did this, and while the game concept itself was cool, the fact that who my character was and his motivations having no actual effect on the outcome of anything felt dumb.

What's abstract wealth?

like instead of say your character having "your character has $3,427 in his account", the game just has your character be "wealthy" or "poor" or "average" or any other grade of personal wealth. this also typically includes any connections/networking your character might have in regards to acquiring things.

instead of just straight up spending money you might have, purchasing things is largely a case of "lol of course you can afford a new car!" or "of course you can buy a fast food meal!" sometimes rolling dice is involved.

>rolling high is always best except one thing where you want to roll low

Wow for once i actually agree with something one of these stupid threads says.

I mean, I get why they try to do it, so you can't have a guy with cheater dice roll nothing but 6's all day, but honestly if he got weighted dice for the 6 he's probably got some for 1's as well.

Its really not hard for a guy who's played for a while to get, but it always confuses newbies when everything else needs to roll high, but morale for example needs low numbers to be successful

>re-rolls available to the point of frivolity
FATE, I'm looking at you

>re-rolls available, but the second roll *must* be taken
This is shit. If you're giving up some sort of in-game currency, be they character build points / class features or fate points/bennies, then the re-roll shouldn't potentially give you a *worse* result.
GURPS nails it with the Luck advantage: roll the dice two additional times, and take the best result of the three.

3 is past the line of frivolity for me

D&D 5e "Advantage" is nice, or FC's Action Dice

>Fantasy Flight Games
Ill give you that their rule books are pretty universally shitty but their games are fun from the ones Ive played. Does FFG do TTRPGs? Ive only seen board games from them.

>hit points are plot armor, not actual injury
So you want meat points? Absolutely disgusting.

FFG are responsible for the Warhammer/WH40K RPG lines.

It's basically like advantage in 5E, but you roll three times, not two, so you're more likely to get a good result. Considering it costs character points to take the Luck advantage, *and* you have to wait an hour between uses, it's reasonable.

Being able to pay fate point after fate point (in FATE) to constantly re-roll your result is frivolity.

High Five for knowing FC. That game doesn't get enough love.

I'm not a big fan of meat points either, but it depends on the game. GURPS, where the average human has 10 and they don't bloat up, is fine. D&D, where they bloat up considerably, is stupid.

>alignment and "objective" morality
>character classes
>levels
>Vancian magic
>"fail forward" mechanics
>guaranteed successes with high skills/attributes
>eldritch anything
I hate D&D, its derivatives and clones, d20 systems in general, and PBtA-style games.

So you hate role playing games in general? Would have been a lot faster just to type that.

You're some poor wretch to think that garbage is all there is to RPGs.

I enjoy GURPS, WoD, DoubleCross, FFG Star Wars, and many others.

I am indifferent to half of those things but I'm pretty sure I hate you and your stupid face

>rules on chargen aren't organized so you can go through the book doing each step with the book in order and come out with a fleshed out character once they're done
>really anything where I need to backtrack and skip ahead and overall read the book in a jumbled order to learn the system; pouring over these things is for when it's time to see if there's any neat options or combinations thereof I missed, a rule everyone's forgotten and we wanna see if there's an official one before the GM makes a ruling, etc
>book dedicates 50% of its contents to short stories, but doesn't separate fluff and crunch into separate halves of the book
>game gets so caught up on simulationism that it becomes a chore to read the crunch

>hates eldritch anything
>likes WoD and Double Cross
>both games built around unnatural, sinister forces with a supernatural overtone

Buddy...

Specifically Lovecraftian, cosmic horror. WoD is generally not horror at all and Gothic on the rare occasion it is. DoubleCross is not even close to horror, especially of the worst kind.

>"objective" morality
Altruism is objectively good. It's programmed into humans at birth and inherent to all cultures. Not having a sense of empathy (which creates the ability to be genuinely altruistic) is literal genetic degeneracy. Being able to rationalize altruism by understanding that helping others helps us or to be able to resist unwise altruism where our loss is disproportionally significant compared to the other's gain is a measured and matured form of good.

Believing otherwise is edgy teenage bullshit and nothing more.

Natural things are not inherently good you juvenile.

Then call it cosmic horror, not eldritch. That's not what eldritch means.

Found the degenerate.

Eldritch horror is synonymous with cosmic and Lovecraftian horror.

Horror as a genre is pretty much the lowest, most plebeian variety, except maybe for conedy.

Altruism has nothing whatsoever to do with morality. One can be altruistic and immoral (commies) or egotistic and scrupulously moral (some of the better capitalists).

>Altruism is objectively good. It's programmed into humans at birth and inherent to all cultures.
Being universal to all human culture is not the same as being objective. Good and evil are value judgements, always.

>d12
Play more modempunk, fuck face

>I get why they try to do it, so you can't have a guy with cheater dice roll nothing but 6's all day

man, that's not why. it's just bad design, plain and simple. like they can't fucking be arsed to play around with how numbers work to make all rolls try and be high or low.

thac0 isn't a roll completely different from everything else in AD&D, but it's a good example of what I mean. it made armor work better with lower numbers. this was completely different from everything else in the system where larger numbers meant something was better. why? because the people who created D&D and their friends were a bunch of wargaming nerds who couldn't let go of the idea that 1st class armor is better than 2nd class armor and— hell you get I mean.

this got fixed in 3rd edition 'cause designers finally said having 10 as an "average" number and armor adding to 10 is not a hard concept to wrap your head around.

can't tell if being sarcastic, but aside from the 40k and newer Warhammer RPGs, they've also made a successful series of Star Wars RPGs as well

I'll take the bait. What's wrong with failing forward? If nothing of significance happens on a failure, then why bother rolling at all?

The thing that's wrong is that you should fail BACKWARD. The assumption that every action the PCs take will always progress them takes the significance out of failure, no matter what bullshit insignificant "consequences" you make up.

I don't know, really, since I usually take the time to read and understand the purpose of the rules before disregarding them as shit.

I'm pretty sure seeing a book that has 200+ pages in it is a turn-off, because most of the time, it's uncalled for.

By forward, they mean that the story moves forward, not that the PC gets what they want.
If your failure to pick a lock means you take too long and get caught by guards, that's failing forward.

that would be great if it worked with a consistent version, where you could say things like "higher rolls are generally better" making it easier to eyeball.
"I need a 6, a 9, or a 4 on this die, and not a 2 or 3 on this die" is stupid as fuck.

The significance is that you fail, and something bad also usually happens on top of your failure.

The problem with failing forward is that it trivializes every challenge and heavily railroads the game in often irrational ways.

If you fail to sneak into the enemy castle, you should be forced to flee, captured, or killed. If you fail to seduce the CEO's daughter, she should rdject your advances and maybe even find you creepy. If you fail to hit the nail with you hammer you could hit your thumb too.

Failure should not be rewarded.

What you're referring to is a system without binary pass/fail which is different than "failing forward". Systems that use one of those concepts usually use both, but they aren't actually the same thing.

I agree with a lot of things said in this thread. I dislike inconsistent rolling mechanisms, abstract wealth, hit points as plot armour (these actually makes LESS sense than absurdly high meat points), the people who play the system, d6 systems, one-page rulesets, rerolls, Holier-than-thou introductions from the author, dice pools, too many skills, unjustifiably unbalanced rules, and vancian magic. You are all wonderful people and we can hate things together.

However, none of these things are instant "into the trash it goes" things for me, because if they were I would be playing no games. Sometimes you have to give a little, or modify a system into your preferences.

When "something bad also happens" that's "failing forward"

No, failing forward is "you fail, but..." What I'm describing is "You fail. Your failure produced obvious negative consequences."

The problem is that the "story", as failing forward systems have it, assumes the PCs succeed at the end. The correct approach to "story" is to assume that the story does not exist, that there is no particular end you are approaching.

Every system has something bad happen when you fail, that's why its called failure. "Failing forward" systems have you fail, and fail, and still succeed at the end because that's what the "story" says.

The only story that a game should have is the story told after, naturally constructed from the events that took place. This could mean that the story ends with all the PCs getting shanked by goblins. If you have a "story" to progress to before the game is over, you are railroading, plain and simple.

You're the only one who didn't know what the fuck you're talking about

"You fail, but..." is non-binary pass/fail. "Your failure produced obvious negative consequences." is failing forward. They don't actually have to be used in the same game, but most games that use one, use both so I can understand the confusion.

Failing forward is not some revolutionary concept. It just isn't written into most older games, they assume the GM won't let the party sit at the same door rolling checks to pick or bash it all day.

>"Your failure produced obvious negative consequences." is failing forward

No, because that isn't how the term is actually used, and also because that would mean that every system ever is "failing forward".

Words only have meaning when they distinguish one thing from another.

>every system ever is "failing forward"

Let's look at D&D combat versus combat in a game with failing forward.
In D&D, you attack and you roll low. Literally nothing happens.
In a failing forward game, you attack and roll low. The enemy hurts you.

That's the most basic explanation of failing forward

>nothing happens
No, you fail to hit, the obvious negative consequence is that you miss.

Thats not railroading though, railroading is a literal forcing of someone to only be able to take one path.

Failing forward is a way to advance things and keep them interesting instead of having the rogue roll twenty times to pick the lock. Failing forward doesnt necessitate that the forward be the direction of the story, merely that you dont stop the game while someone rolls over and over and instead keep things rolling.

Hell, most of the time the failing forward will end up having things take a tangential path from what you had planned because suddenly theres guards chasing the group or the person they were trying to persuade now wont talk to them and they need a workaround.

Also, of course a story expects the players to succeed. No one wants to just sit around and fail constantly same as no one just wants to breeze through with no effort. But expecting success and having them actually succeed are two very different things. If you have a DM that abuses failing forward to mean you always succeed easily then thats on him. Same as if he was using plot armor to make you invincible or said 'you cant do that cause its not part of the story' and railroaded you.

Like most things, the instrument was meant to be used one way but people can use it different ways or even use it wrong or abuse it. Sometimes its right to blame the instrument, but this isnt one of those cases.

I absolutely agree with that approach to story. You know what else agrees with you?

Apocalypse World, one of the most notable failing forward systems
In it, "Play to find out what happens" is a rule the GM is expected to follow.

Nothing happens as in there is no situational change. Everything is exactly the same as if you hadn't rolled at all.

Slavery, segregation and Eliteism aren't natural, nor are they good. He may be an idiot, but he's an idiot with a point.

And you're going to try and argue that community, altruism, family and empathy, all natural parts of humanity, are somehow morally wrong?

Neither 'nature' or 'creation' is inherently good or evil. It is necessary to examine ourselves, our thoughts and our actions, as they develop and change and determine what is good and right and what needs to be pruned, lest it twist into a cancer.

But hes not wrong. Natural =/= good same as natural =/= bad. Its a case by case thing and I assume that even that 'degenerate' user would agree that altruism isnt a bad thing, he was merely pointing out your fallacy.

>D12
Mah dark skinned ethnic individual.

>everything is the same
Wrong, in the literal sense the character has done something that is distinct on its own, in the mechanical sense your turn has been used ineffectively which can disadvantage you compared to opponents that have yet to act.

>Point buy systems
>Over 1 hour to make a character
>Spending entire sessions on shopping

I don't need to argue that x thing is wrong. The point is that x thing can be anything and it's equally as inherently valid/invalid as any other thing.

Some other user already said this, but right and wrong are value judgements, preferences that stem from arbitrarily selected axioms. What is good is only good according to a particular conception of good, and what is popular is not inherently superior.

There are plenty of systems where it represents actual injury and characters who have taken damage become less effective, and most of those are pretty abstract systems.

In Eclipse Phase, for example, damage in excess of your wound threshold causes wounds which give -10 on all actions per wound.

>>He thinks using THAC0 requires charts

I tried to get into eclipse phase.
>Needed to hire moving men to get the book into my house.
>Immediately began reading.
>Three hours later
>I'm done with the introduction, but there's more setting for me to read! It's pretty fun, and I'm getting excited about the idea of sleeving into different bodies!
>My eyes begin to ache.
>Eighteen hours later
>I'm wondering if there's any RPG in here and it's not all setting info.
>I'm starting to hallucinate- I've got my own shoulder-fairy AI telling me all the cool things about Eclipse phase.
>Sixty-two days later
>I've finally finished the setting info about the cool solar whale critters and the advanced production.
>Cataracts are forming from constant reading,
>Forty years later
>I'm on my death bed
>Everyone I love around me
>I mindlessly finish reading about the not!psychics, my dried finger tracing the ink. I have long since gone blind.
>Finally, I'm about 98% through the book
>Turn a page...
>CHAPTER 2: Creating a character!
>Die.

Not that user but personally I prefer the chart from 1e to THAC0 from 2e, for what it's worth.

>all natural parts of humanity, are somehow morally wrong?
I'm actually no sure if the word "nature" as any meaning at all in those contexts.

Hates failing forward, loves FFG Star Wars: failing forward the game.

>Any system that goes "Do what's best for the story!"
If I wanted to run a story I would have written a novel. Even in heavily railroaded pre-written modules I switch things up and make it more player-driven. The story is what the players do and how the GM's world interacts, not a set script.

>Character creation rules aren't right at the start of the book
As a GM, the best way I learn the system is to create a character myself to see how it works. If I can't find the rules to make a character in ten seconds and it's not clearly labeled in the table of contents I rapidly lose interest.

>Dice pool systems where any mechanic requires you to subtract dice from the pool BEFORE rolling. This inevitably gets forgotten and unlike flat numeric modifiers can't be applied after the dice are rolled. The entire pool must be rerolled.
>50+ pages of metaplot, setting, or short stories before any rules are discussed
>The GM has to pick out a skill for the players to roll for most activities. Skills aren't 110% clear what each individual one is for or have defined mechanical aspects they are always allowed to cover.
>Having skills for shit that everyone should be basically competent at (such as driving cars or having a high school level of education)
>The ability to succeed or even critical on an attack but deal no damage because of unfavorable damage rolls / resist rolls
>"The Feat Problem" where every so often as you progress you get to pick another character improvement from a list. You always pick the best/most useful one first and arrange things so that if you need multiple to function you can get them all fairly early in the game. After that though you end up picking things that are less and less desirable, stalling your character's power growth.
>"Everyone make an X check" There's no point in being good at these skills. Someone is usually going to pass them and it often enough won't even be you simply because of random chance.
>Combat that requires looking up the rules in a book for my power/ability every round.
>Combat where 99% of the time your only option is "I hit it with my axe" or some variant thereof.
>Combat that takes 10+ minutes to get around the table on average
>In a game where fighting is expected, the mere ability to make a non-combat character is ridiculous

>Having skills for shit that everyone should be basically competent at (such as driving cars or having a high school level of education)
>Everyone can drive and finishes high-school
What planet are you living on and is there any way for me to get there? It sounds nice!

It actually works pretty well if you know what your doing I like it a lot better it discourages wealth hoarding

A well-known one, but it kills any interest immediately:

>characters have a stat that determines order of actions
>characters decide which action they are going to use when it reaches their go

Congratulations, designers. You've just made slow situationally rewarding and fast situationally punishing, putting the speed stat a neutral. Given that the speed stat will inevitably cost players to raise, the result is almost everyone playing a slow build unless they can guarantee wiping out all enemies with an alpha strke before they can react, which is boring and wanky in any case. Bad player incentives 101.

Credit goes to actually using the DnD alignment table in any year after 2000. The Tin Lizzy is an important and attractive milestone in motor design, but you don't actually drive one for the practical purposes of getting from A to B. DnD alignment was a crucial step towards motive specification in gaming, but for practical purposes is limited, foggy and at times contradictory.

luck points/moxie/fate points/get out of jail free currency to stop "muh bad things" happening.

That paragraph about using certain gendered pronouns. Seriously. Grow up and start writing in the third person, it sounds better.

>Games with super special snowflake options that no sane GM would ever allow, but are legal by RAW and just create a shitton of arguments.
Take shadowrun for example. Things like reverse furries, drakes, AIs, free spirits etc.

This. I remember summarising to a group of friends back in high school that abstract hit points basically treat all injuries as if they have perfectly diffused throughout the victims body, making every bit of them *slightly* bruised or tattered. The counter hitting zero is when enough tiny cuts have emerged all over them that they can't move anymore.

The Wound stat in Warhammer makes more sense for characters than it does for large targets and monsters for the same reason. It reflects the character having been injured and in sticky situations before, and rolling with the blows, using a prepared counter to get in the footing where an otherwise less experienced soldier would fall in shock. The Toughness stat is perfectly adequate for representing physical bulk.

>Any system that goes "Do what's best for the story!"

>The story is what the players do and how the GM's world interacts, not a set script.

These aren't actually opposed you know.

Every game that Ive seen driving as a skill its meant advanced driving techniques. Not trained doesnt mean unable to drive, it just means you have the basic drivong education everyone gets to get a liscense.

>>rolling high is always best EXCEPT one thing where you want to roll low (or vice versa)
I think striving for consistency does more harm then good. Substraction is not that hard, but it's tedious and eventually tire people out, so when rolling for probability, die should roll under the given number. Probability of good thing or bad thing? Doesn't matter.

OD&D thac0 and saves does require the DM to have a chart for the monsters. Players got it easy.

No it's not you fucking dimwit. Just because Lovecraft describes his creations as eldritch and there is a Lovecraftian board game called Eldritch Horror does not mean it's synonymous to Lovecraft.

That shit is cosmic horror, bruh.

Right, but if your character had instead sat there contemplating their navel on their turn, it would have had the exact same result as their failure to hit. The two would be literally indistinguishable. In a fail-forward system, the failed roll to hit has different consequences than inaction.

Congratulations on engendering strong and opposite feelings with your two points! I fucking HATE IT when the chargen rules are buried somewhere three or four chapters into the book. If they're immediately after setting information, it's almost okay, but if the setting information is literally half the book, I will actively skip it. The problem with that is that most books with that much setting information want you to know a huge chunk of it before you create your character, so you're sitting their going "what the fuck is a Demorthèn?"

Your first point, though, is hilariously myopic, even if it is based in an unfortunate reality.

>WoD
>not horror

What the actual fuck am I reading.

That doesn't make sense. If you have two characters fighting, and the action order goes A, B, A, B, etc., then A is obviously better off. The fact that A can't react to B on their first turn is meaningless since B can't do anything for A to react to.

What system doesn't have the option to wait, anyway? Depending on the system, A may be able to do something like waiting for B to close the distance but before B gets to attack.

You are reading someone who has somewhat decent taste in horror.
Even if he is still fucking shit opinions.

Bad horror is still horror; it sounds like he's trying to say that the WoD setting is more 'highbrow' than horror.

He also thinks that 'Lovecraft' and 'eldritch' are literally synonyms, though, so that's awkward.

Aren't the hit points in D&D explicitly abstracted aka plot armor until you reach 0 and the negatives?

So you're saying there's never any story where the protagonists fail, ever. That would be incorrect. I hope you realize how stupid that sounds. Just because the story is progressing doesn't mean good things is happening. If the PC trying to pick a lock to get into the castle, gets caught, and winds up in the dungeon, they have failed 'forward' because they are technically in the castle but definitely not in a way they want to be.

This allows them to progress from this point, but at a large disadvantage: Not having any equipment, needing to break out of the cell, etc. That's what failing forward means, not "oh you failed to pick the lock but it opened anyway lol". That has NOTHING to do with failing forward.

Yes. A lot of things in D&D are abstract.

>OP plays them

This. The more obnoxious the fanbase and the more they evangelize and try to convert me to their hot new cool system, the less interested I am in it. If a system attracts people that fucking obnoxious, then I want nothing to do with it.