What would you say is the most broken RP system? The one with the most loop-holes...

What would you say is the most broken RP system? The one with the most loop-holes, game breaking interactions or obscure abusable rules? From what I've heard, D&D 3.5e seems to be the main one but that only get broken when you go through all the supplements, so I was wondering if there's one that utterly breaks sooner.

The most unbalanced and broken book of 3.5 is Core. Splats are actually more balanced.

I don't think dnd is nearly as broken as people seem to want it to be. It is still pretty broken though, but it doesn't come close to some games.

Palladium is the absolute worst broken, insane mess of rules and lore.

D&D 3.5 isn't really broken. It suffers from caster supremacy and it CAN be broken, but really its the divergent rules systems that hurt it most, and feat chains.

I still prefer it to 5e because of the options.

An alliance between 3.5 and 5e would be the most powerful game system ever to exist. It would rape every previous edition except maybe AD&D.

5e is nothing like AD&D, it has too much class feature bullshit to even come close.

M&M

You'll have to define "broken" more narrowly. There's lots of ways that a system can fail to live up to its claims but each does it in a unique way. Too many rules for actual play, not enough, bad rule interactions, and rules that arrive at a different place than the players want are just the tip of the iceberg of what can go wrong.

If we throw out 3rd part supplements (and we should otherwise this just gets silly) and stick with official publications 3.0/3.5 and PF aren't actually all *that* bad. The problem is that the actual game is slogging through literally 1000s of pages of rules texts in pursuit of powerful, ideally non-obvious combinations that provide a distorting effect on the game world.

If you're the sort of person who's into that sort of thing, it's exactly the sort of thing that you'd be into.

The problem comes in when it successfully markets itself as "He-Man/LotR/King Arthur but *you* control the characters!" and then RAW gives a very different play experience than that. People start houseruling trying to to the promise on the back of the book but each houserule solves some problems while introducing new ones and before long it becomes unworkable and either the group blows up or it just turns entirely into Calvinball.

Personally for mostly unplayable game ever I vote for Eoris. One glance at the character sheet will tell you in heartbeat there's too many game systems and you're tracking too much right from creation.

In Nomine

It does depend on how discerning you want to be. D&D 3.5 is definitely the most "broken" RPG that actually has a reasonable following and big market share.

If you expand it to tabletop games that are professionally-published but lesser-known (for a good reason), it'd probably be Synnibarr or something.

If you include everything that's even remotely an RPG, then FATAL. It's not just the content people object to. The mechanics are obtuse, ridiculous, and at times actually nonfunctional practically or mathematically.

And including everything that even purports to be an RPG: HYBRID. It's not a game so much as the ramblings of an unmedicated schizophrenic. Not as a joke, I mean it seriously has that word salad quality, and no one could figure out how to play it.

Sadly, FATAL wins over Eoris although that comes as a close second and is at least aesthetically appealing.
D&D 3.5 has the most loopholes that allow you to break the game wide open and do things that weren't intended but that requires a great deal of splats used in conjunction with one another that were never made to interact.
Mage in all versions of World of Darkness is probably the one that is the most broken with the least amount of reading material, with silly stuff like a nWoD mage being capable of casting a paradox-free spell capable of making everyone in the world bubbly and cheerful for months at a time.

By your definition, the answer is actually FATAL

Came here to say this.

People complain about wizards/clerics being OP in 3.5 and Pathfinder and like to ban all the splats that have BS like Divine Metamagic and Sacred Geometry, and yeah, those are bullshit abilities...but splats at least give nice things to martials outside of power attack, toughness, and combat expertise. Shit, look at Pathfinder Monks. Basically unplayable until Ultimate Combat and Magic gave them viable archetypes.

Shadowrun 4e with those bullshit chemicals.

Actually Pathfinder actually functions BETTER if you just use certain third party classes. The DSP ones, Radiant House, and and Drop Dead Studios spring to mind.

Read At Own Risk

Scion.

Problem is, a lot of 3.5 players I know literally think psionics and better martial classes are overly complicated and powerful and have this fucked idea of what martials should be

You mean aside from Palladium, Rifts, and WoD (looking at you, Mage)?

In all honesty every game has a broken element, but instead of getting angry about an oversight by the developers I just houserule things.

The book is just a suggestion.

DnD 3.0, followed by 3.5. In a distant third is the Palladium system as a whole (30 or 40 separate games all using the same mechanics).

Dark Heresy 1e, specifically the Latheworlds and Ascension splats.

The assassin and psycher classes in general.

Palladium?

Any super hero game with loads of customizations options are ripe for being fucked hard by rules bull shittery.

Hell HERO used to put fucking warning signs on certain powers just because they do have the potential to just take an absolute shit on the game.

Drakar och Demoner 6 was pretty broken. Thieves couldn't steal (but entertainers could), Hunters couldn't hunt, and a sufficiently strong character could fire a bow with one hand. It was such a mess that eventually even the designers gave up and threw out everything and started from scratch with a hip minimalist system.

>a sufficiently strong character could fire a bow with one hand
What's wrong there?

Palladium is the system that Rifts uses.

If you included all the sub systems into one game, WH40k rpgs.

He can hold the bow with one hand, and draw it with the same hand. A strong enough character can theoretically dual wield bows.

And?

It's silly, and caused by the developers literally copy pasting a system based on the Basic Role-playing system and then tried to force a horribly designed rigid level and class system into it without any idea what they were doing?

I mean, if he's strong enough, why couldn't he?

Mage: the Ascension

Because unless his thumb is incredibly long and capable of gripping objects, even the strongest man in the universe could do that?

*couldn't do that.

>do a little jerk forward to throw an arrow out of the quiver
>angle the bow in such a way that the arrow nocks itself due to gravity
>stretch thumb a good bit to bend the bowstring
>release thumb

>The one with the most loop-holes, game breaking interactions

That's Exalted.

>or obscure abusable rules?

That's GURPS.

You know that a mage with mind wins hands down in all situations in Mage games, right? That no other mage can even come close to approaching the sheer broken morass of pure win that is mind in any edition of mage?

A fighter can still do enough damage to kill shit. If you have a mage who specializes in mind, you win, period.

Explain.

Never heard of HYBRID, whats wrong with it, or give a few examples if it amounts to "everything".

Man, Ascension was godawful.

I remember being so excited for it and then when it was released it was this shitty mess of abstract/narrative rules (not that I hate gamism over simulationism but DH was consistently simulationist before that), there were only like three careers/roles that were POWERFUL AS HECK and the rest were absolute trash in comparison (vindicare, psyker, inquisitor) and even then the vindicare one was a bit lorebreaking in how it was implemented.

Ascension should've focused way more on large-scale intrigues and conspiracies and coordinating different arms of your influence, not God-mode psykers benchpressing demons.

See, that's way top creative for game where the designers flat out state "we want to make a game that goes to the root of folklore and mythology, rather than the standard Tolkien style modern fantasy" and then proceeds to make the playable races human, elf, half-elf, dwarf, halfling and half-troll (and trolls in this setting are just orcs with a tail, so they can pretend there's no orcs).

I've never needed more than 1 dot of Mind. Make a TV camera lens that makes whatever is viewed, or filmed, through it look more realistic and (more importantly) more BELIEVABLE. Then just film a bunch of low-budget Fantasy series for TV and let an entire generation grow up watching things and being subtly influenced that they are real. MAybe start with a modern-fantasy series about a group of special people. Immortals, who can only die under certain circumstances. Have the main character wear a trench coat and wield a katana. That'll keep kids and teens watching. Follow it up with the adventures of a famous Demigod from ancient mythology. Maybe create a spinoff starring an attractive Warrior Princess so that kids keep watching after puberty. But you know that there are dangerous supernaturals out there, and you don't want anyone taken advantage of, so you put out another modern-fantasy series about a cheerleader who hunts and slays monsters. Call it... Muffy: The Something Hunter.

I seriously did this in a Mage game in the 90's. Undermined the entire technocracy and gimped Paradox itself by making Sleepers more accepting of supernatural shit.

GURPS has obscure rules, however you are not supposed to use all of them because abuse comes easier in a complex system. Hell the basic set and GM imagination is all you need in a GURPS game.

Level 6 Wizard. Two feats: Arcane Disciple: Death and Leadership. He hires a cleric who casts desecrate for him and he then gets to have a 24hd undead skeleton or zombie dragon with an easy +20 to hit. Zombie dragons can fly too