What are some mechanical or narrative things about certain games, worlds...

Rules that correlate to specific lore. Icons were the reason I couldn't get in to 13th Age. I don't want to play in your shitty setting, I want to play in MY shitty setting.

>this is a game about X
>oh, there aren't any mechanics for X or the things that relate to X
>it's just that the rulebook evokes the *feel* of X, and that should be enough
Bonus points if the game claims to be about something largely nonviolent and still puts most of its effort into the combat mechanics.

Number 2 is the only one I'd argue with even slightly, since being able to advance a skill without having to pull it out at every opportunity is helpful when that skill doesn't come up very often, or when a game doesn't focus on a particular skillset. The others are shitty, especially the "punishment as reward" mindset that the worst GMs get into.

Show me the game which doesn't need GM adjudication, and I will break it.

I'd prefer if you said why this triggers you so much. But you presumably aren't up to the task.

Caster supremacy bothers me on several levels and in ways that are difficult to put into words. It would bother me even if it wasn't casters, though, because it reeks of favouritism and a willful disregard for balance when it takes a full team of diverse characters to do what just one member of the developer's favourite can do. Casters just happen to be the most immediate and obvious example thanks to D&D's popularity.

Even if you think this is arbitrarly put on player (the GM) in most games, which doesn't make sense, it's pretty simple:

The whole lot of gmless games.

Like any BG, actually.

>specific rules for every tiny thing that doesn't need them
The worst thing is when they're clearly ignoring things that might be fun in favor of mundane crap.

Real talk, dnd writers will make a billion unique variants on the theme of "hit him with a sword, only better than normal this time" (the rationalization usually relating to anger or disturbingly violent religious ideology) while they won't even think about making usable rules for strangling or other submission holds.
>but cutting off the blood-flow to someone's brain is the same thing as punching them user, just use the rules for punching instead

At least it's easy to spot the 4rries I this thread.

You wanna try that again in English, boy?

No. If you can't understand the fact that i simply left out a "one", you're not gonna understand the point, which is so obvious that you shouldn't be playing RPGs altogether.

BG means board game

I honestly cannot see how the argument you give supports being irritated as rules-as-guidelines, except maybe how it gives the GM some undue control, but then why are GM-less games brought up, and where do Board Games (which generally aren't meant to simulate anything) fit into an RPG discussion.

If you can explain it one more time from the top, and it makes sense this time, I'll accept that I'm retarded and move on.

Because you said that in every RPG there is GM adjudication.

But someone that has a functional brain and like RPGs, in 2017, should know there are tons of GMless RPGs anyway.

So, in them there couldn't be "gm's adjudication by default" (which is an asinine concept anyway).

Like in BGs, of which pnp RPGs are arguably a subset.

Oh, so you're arguing semantics based on my off-hand response rather than attempting to defend your core point in any way.

Well, I said I'd admit I was retarded if it made sense, and you've proven you can only understand what's literally written there, so: I'm retarded. Not quite as much as you are autistic, by the looks of it, but there you go.

Now I am become bait, destroyer of threads.

Shadowruns matrix and astral rules. More the matrix than astral though.

>I will break it
How bad though? Like infinite cash or some other infinite loop? Simply an optimized character? Just curious how you'd "break" Shadowrun as an example.

I'm not intimately familiar with Shadowrun, but I'm certain that, based on it being fairly rules-heavy, there's something you can do that doesn't make sense. To clarify, I don't mean break as in being a perfect character who can do everything forever, I mean break as in doing something that's a clear violation of common sense. It could be as simple as the ability to move an object arbitrarily quickly as in D&D (toss an object over to someone else, they use their turn to pick it up and toss it to someone else, they [...] indefinitely).

Basically, rules can't be more than guidelines, because short of Dwarf Fortress levels of simulation, something's not going to add up in play (and even then, DF still has bugs and unintended interactions).

>peasant railgun
That was hilarious. There's probably something in the matrix you can run with, it's a mess even in 5th ed.

I shouldn't. A person with a decent brain activity should ask themselves where else he sees "oh and btw these rules might as well be shit" in a product, realize that it doesnt' happen anywhere else, and connect the dots.

You can't, tough.

>Bonus points if the game claims to be about something largely nonviolent and still puts most of its effort into the combat mechanics.

Decipher Star Trek system. All of science and engineering gets a couple of paragraphs tucked away in the skills chapter alongside swimming and performance. Ground bound combat gets an entire chapter. Tricorders and PADDs get a couple of throwaway bonuses to skills with vague effects. Phasers get a complete table of damage dice based on setting, another table for explaining which phasers have what settings, special rules for stun effects, etc. etc.

It's a Star Trek game. Tactical is *one guy's* job. Science, medical, and engineering combined should not have less rules than just tactical.

So what is metacurrency for? Just to get super lucky for one scene? Either there are serious hijinks, or the GM narrates it as some previously unknown element showing up, even if it's just something you had on you somewhere conviently stopping a bullet.

I prefer not having it, but I can't speak against rerolls.

>even if it's just something you had on you somewhere conviently stopping a bullet.
You misunderstand, clothing or the inventory are already present on the character and are normally in use during normal play.
I object to interference with the conditions the GM set. "Now the floor collapses under the troll." basically influencing something the PC couldn't normally have control over with a resource that doesn't represent anything in the game world. Stopping a bullet can normally be done just by dodging, or armor absorption. It can then be described as armor, the act of dodging or being deflected by a momento, all those things are on the PC and established.

I am guessing things like Hero Points or Fate Points if you wanna look those up.

>Lack of intermediate states between full fighting condition and capital-D death

The reason this is so frequent is that when getting injured makes you weaker, it snowballs into death, worst case. It turns a single mistake into catastrophe. It makes "come-back moments" more difficult. People would play more cautious over all.

However, these could be good things if that's what you're looking for. Casual games probably don't want to have such hardcore mechanics though.

>Like in BGs, of which pnp RPGs are arguably a subset.
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
What a good joke.
You dumbass.

>Adventurers are universally reviled because hurr hurr murderhobos

I just want to be a wandering hero for once. Fuck.

It's not really a part of my argument, so laugh at will.

I liked the Icon rules as a setting-agnostic thing, actually. Especially for a game that wants to go to the max level, having your starting PCs have a built-in relationship with a major player in the setting is convenient. And it's super-easy to just write your own if you want something different than the default, literally just a couple lines of fluff. Making up your own Icons is part of the rules, Pelgrane even has competitions to submit your home campaign ones to see whose is most interesting.

The long running connection between the LR5 card game and the RPG for the absurdity it inflicted on the RPG lore.
The Spider should never have been allowed to become a Great Clan in the RPG just because some ass won a CCG tournament.
Seriously how did no one see something this ruinous coming?

Poorly done morality / sanity systems. nWoD being a particularly bad example. I love that game but I refuse to play it without houseruling that clusterfuck of a system,

"Oh you stole food because you were starving? lol you have schizophrenia now." And killing a monster like a vampire is rated as a higher sin then torture or mass arson.

When a GM does a crossover with another splat that isn't balanced with your own. I'm looking at you, faggot who played a Mage in a Hunter game.

Narrative I'd say would be drama for the sake of drama, like killing off love interests or family with no chance for the player to save them.

Icons are pretty malleable. It's possible to represent icons as different nations or factions instead of just some super-important entity.

The big thing is that grappling rules tend to be broken, garbage, or both. It's a subset of combat that appeals to few, so sometimes they overcompensate like Exalted/Scion's clinching, and sometimes it just comes out boring and not effective compared to everything else, like Shadowrun.

That's because l5r is honestly shit run by shitty developers and they don't give a rat's ass about the inner logic of the game.

Case in point: the total absence of a real "japaneseque" folklore.

>Chaotic Evil Rogue
I get it. You just want to murder everything. Guess I won't need any social abilities.

>Mage in a Hunter game
That's just pants on head retarded

Setting-wise, when they take some historical-ish, don't understand it in the slightest, and use it anyway 'cause people use it stereotypically.

Strangely enough, fantasy setting are kinda... worse in this regard. DND polytheism is asinine, but what is bad is that you can't really point on how thing really were (like you could in an historical game) to correct it easy.

>Elves are hippies
>Humans are imperialists
>Dwarfs isolationists

Best campaign I had was with a friend as DM
>Elves were stereotypical germans but with a 1920 mindset
>Humans were based on Persians
>Dwarfs were Irish.

I was so pissed since I was playing a member of the Malaus and his and the GM's reasoning for allowing a Mage was "He has Benedictions!"
Yeah. Benedictions that fucking fail every second since he had to buff every encounter's stats up to retarded save levels so even with 5 dots it was a coinflip at best for any of my opposed powers to hit.

Exactly. It's just "your character can be something other than a dirt farmer, the mechanic".

Systems with death spiral mechanics as you described are in practice actually less deadly. Getting wounded puts you at severe disadvantage making you want to look alternative ways to end the combat, like surrendering or fleeing, instead of fighting on to the last hp and the following tpk. If you got shot you'd probably do more screaming than fighting back, so it's realistic too.

Class/Level systems that aren't meticulously balanced.

The one advantage of C/L is that you don't need to memorise the PHB to build a decent character. You can just pick a basic archetype and customise them through play rather than through gimmicks.

Then you have the typical problem where a class (such as core 5e ranger) is missing power, or versatility, or just isn't fun.

You're then limited in the ways you can change mechanically, but your core mechanics are unsatisfying.