What are your favourite flawed gems of tabletop games, Veeky Forums?
They might be a bit rough around the edges or unpolished or janky, but you love them anyway. Those games that you know aren't great but you've had amazing times with, or have managed to make work despite the problems they suffer.
Adeva is a bad system, but by god that campaign was probably the most serious RP I have ever been in, with some fights that were real nailbiters.
pic
Abandon All Hope. Its just so unique. Purpose-built systems with a tone and setting in mind are always more fun than generalist systems, and AAH has such a specific microcosm of its setting that it focuses on and it kinda pulls it off.
Man, AdEva. I was in the IRC community years ago. Had some great games, had some awful games, saw the community tear itself apart wanting the game to be a dozen different things. It was a strange experience.
Context?
RIFTS and WoD. Both are retarded clusterfucks of a setting with messy to nonfunctional rules, but I can't help but adore both.
Surely you're aware of Savage Rifts right? At least that transplants many elements of the north American setting into an actually functional ruleset.
Literally anything by John Wick. I love 7th Sea and L5R, and some of the best game I've ever been in were those settings and systems. But holy shit are you wading through a lot of awful to get there.
AEG never seemed to think proofreader was an important job, and both games first editions are loaded with trap options, and way too many NPCs that are more powerful and important than players could ever be, and yet.
Pathfinder.
It's a clusterfuck of a game, it takes time to find the exact thing you need, I'm the only one at the table who knows most of the content to use it properly, but I've played some of the best campaigns using it.
I helped write and playtest AAH. Even did some of the (shit) art on commission I never actually got paid anything for.
Anyway, did it as a favor as one of the two creators who's an old high school bud of mine, and the other's a good friend too (whom I met through gaming).
It's a pretty wonky little system and some of the mechanics choices make zero sense which I brought up during test, but ultimately most of my suggested changes/additions didn't go in. I'm fine with that, not my game anyway and it's fun enough for one shots as-is.
Ongoing campaign viability is another story entirely, however.
Anyway, tl;Dr yeah it's an amusing enough little game for "in between" sessions if you like the setting style and quirky chargen.
B.E.S.M.
I always liked Houses of the Blooded, despite John Wicks reputation as an asshole.
Such a gem, but so fucking flawed.
Aren't 90% of that games problems just piss poor editing and formatting?
75%. There's also some real mechanics issues that should have been playtested more, exacerbated with unclear phrasing and awful editing that leaves some rules buried and indecipherable. Learning to play the game is hard, and the more you learn the more you realise a lot of the amazing ideas the system has just don't quite work, which is a crying shame. It can be made to work, of course, but you can't excuse a system its flaws just because you can houserule.
It's really quite good, especially for a fantasy heartbreaker, but the combination of the abortive Usenet marketing campaign, the slightly odd writing style, and some odd balance issues mean that it's basically doomed to never get much market share at all.
bump
I can't help myself, I love everything it's trying to do. Even the "meh" out of combat stuff.
Cthulutech
For me, I think Feng Shui falls into this category. Maybe it's not hidden, but I think there's a lot to love about the system, despite some ass-backwards design choices (like penalizing stunts in one version of the game) and flaws (like the rampant typos and need for errata that replaces whole stat blocks).
The setting alone is amazing. I love the blend of martial arts, action movies, and supernatural time traveling shenanigans. I means, when one edition has a future full of evil scientists enforcing a world-wide dystopia through geomancy and embedding demon parts into plastic weapons...and the follow-up edition has that future replaced by a Mad-Max world ruled by warring factions of cybernetic apes, the leaders of which are named Battlechimp Potemkin and Furious George, you know it's fun.
Anything by FGU
FGU?
Fantasy Games Unlimited. The guys who make Bushido, Aftermath, Villains & Vigilantes, and other games nobody plays.
TRoS
What are the flaws of TRoS? I've only ever heard it and its successors praised for their excellent combat system.
Any details on what those are or why they're fun yet flawed?
3.5
That fruit's so low-hanging it's underground.
That doesn't make it inaccurate though
Eclipse Phase. It combines a broken system and a retarded setting and somehow emerges more than the sum of its parts, even though each of those parts is awful.
D&D 2e
Everything earlier D&D. Everything's very fun and sincerely created, even though it doesn't always have the balance that comes from playtesting and professional review.
This. Eclipse Phases premise is fucking fantastic. Some of its mechanics are very obtuse, and the personal politics of the developers come through very heavy handed. Anarchist paradises are boring, rather run a campaign in the inner system or extropia. Also, I personally don't like the inclusion of Factors, aliens, and exo-planets. Much more interesting to me if 'aliens' were post-humans instead.
Any sign that the second edition will be any better?
Tribe8. The world is wonderful. The campaign is incredible. The system, whatever you might otherwise think about SilCore, just doesn't fit.
Rewrote the whole thing to fit it into Mouse Guard. Actually worked pretty decent all things considered.
Did 1e fit any better?
Aliens are actually former humans that went overboard with changes that just want to fuck with their former brethren.
Could that work as a campaign set up?
I think so, if only because of the survival aspect being hard-coded in the game. The growing old too - which if you know anything about the setting can matter a lot for RP opportunities, especially with the Children tribe (and boy did that take a dark turn).
Not optimal, but people generally found it good around the table.
My bad, read the question as
>Did it fit any better?
I guess I'll get that coffee before doing anything else.
You might want to check out Transhuman Space then. Eclipse Phase draws so much from it that it's practically a "thirty years later" horror spinoff.
It's far more balanced in how it treats ideology and societies (no apocalypse to get rid of nations, religions don't forget how to change with the times, no group has the moral high ground).
Cardfight Vanguard
V&V was one of if not the first superhero RPG. Haven't played it since I was a kid, so I couldn't comment about it beyond that, except to say that it seems like it was an application of AD&Dish rules to superheroes.
Huh, interesting. Might be worth a look, if only out of historical interest.
I've only started getting into it, but Exalted. I like how the system encourages roleplaying in combat, but FUCK is it full of TL;DR content. just reading the 3e rulebook is a chore. Just give me the fucking mechanics and let me read the lore on my own. It tries to blend the two things together and trying to wrap your head around the system takes forever.
You can no longer play as the ultimate faction because "they're too facist" according to the devs
So in fact worse
That's what makes it Exalted. "Natural language" is a meme because of how 2e and 3e are written. The game line is in dire straights because the two devs primarily responsible for writing the 3e core have quit or been fired, leaving the tertiary devs to step in and take their place. Now consider 3e had with secretive, non-public playtesting. It was leaked a year and a half before the book actually released, and while Veeky Forums was able to find many of its flaws, none of them were corrected in the final release. They cut 200 pages of content but didn't think to clarify or rewrite how their confusing mechanics worked - clashes, counter attacks, etc. Now combine this with an intense hatred of and utter refusal to release errata, and you have Exalted 3e's position right now. You have people who didn't write the game having to work with this ugly monstrosity that could have been far, far better if the primary developers weren't paper-skinned cunts - and the new guys have release schedules going up to 2020 to fulfill. Exalted is the number 1 game for "love the setting, hate the game." Hopefully the new guys can carry it, but I doubt it.
Jovisn chronicles for me fellow silfag though I honestly think the system,isn't bad for mecha
It's a real fucking shame because the old Devs clearly liked the game, just didn't stop to think how new players would react to the game.
Shit, it took me months to realize that technically you have a move and an action *in the round* of combat, and you take them on your turn in initiative, if a charm allows you to take a move or an action earlier in initiative, it still eats up those actions.
That information is spread out between three sections of combat rules.
FATAL
CthulhuTech. The idea is so much more interesting than what we got. The mecha game could have been great.
Mekton Zeta. Nice, healthy crunch in chargen, all wasted on a shit system.
Roll for shoes. Or Final Stand. Or even Returner's FFRPG.
THS is a great setting. Just a little dry and a little dated.
Exalted as well. Between not being able to find fucking consistent information or just any at all (because fuck wikis right?), the mess of rules, language BS and other things it's just hostile to new-comers.
That's ignoring the shit of lore differences between writers and God. I want to love Exalted and play it but Jesus it's like trying to pitch making love to a bramble patch at times.
3.5
That's an ice cube.
Is there any chance we might get Adeptus PacRim?
4e is my absolute favorite system both to play and run. However, the sheer number of house-rules that have needed to become standard to make the math work right reveal some flaws. Still love it. I've never found another game that can do what it does with the standard house-rules.
Definitely. They're a post-human x-threat
I wish that there was a mechanically consise RPG that handles mythical fantasy like Exalted.
4e is certainly a flawed game, but the only mathfix houserules I'm really aware of are 'MM3 Math' and 'Free Expertise/Improved Defences', which I wouldn't call extensive.
Perhaps I should have said "total ubiquity of house-rules" rather than "sheer number"
I misspoke
d20 modern I had a lot of fun with. Same with D&D 3.5, because my group weren't powergamers and didn't know which spells were good or how to abuse them. Also Savage Worlds.
That's fair. They are utterly necessary not to have a shit experience with the game.
Though WITH the house-rule fixes, the game is fantastic. My absolute favorite. I don't see myself switching to something else as a DM any time soon.
40k
Shit game, good setting
it's not even that he's an asshole, it's just there's so much mechanical baggage. As I recall, HotB actually has less of one Wickian problem that his other games have: powerful NPCs. When "the best duelist in the world" is already a character that is literally mechanically unbeatable, making your character arc "becoming the best duelist in the world" doesn't work.
Pic related. The game may be tables upon tables upon tables for resolution, but I've yet to see a combat system with more realistic penetration and damage models, even with the massive american bias and now far outdated ballistics data.
I've only played BESM d20. It was an unbalanced nightmare, but fun.
10/10 thread op, so many great games here!
Twilight: 2000, I'll add. It's system was a bit technical for my group's taste but we do have player's that love it over everything else.
Might be a bit difficult using AdEva as a chassis.
A friend of mine mentioned a game he played at a convention a few years ago, no, called Atlas Rising, which was a straight up PacRim RPG, including mechanics for synchronising between pilots. IIRC it used a deck of cards, and the synchronise step had both players pick a card, trying to get as close to the same card without actually being allowed to communicate, but with certain incentives to stop you just picking the same number every time. I thought it sounded kinda neat.
Myfarog
The most fun RPG I've ever played was All Flesh Must Be Eaten. It just doesn't scale very well. At all.
What parts of it are at all gemlike?
>missing the joke
That's from a youtube channel "le bazar du grenier".
He and a bunch of friends are playing.
It's in french.
Not terribly good and but still nice enough to watch.
All I'd ever really heard about the game was that it was kinda crap and just got posted as a meme
I kinda love that Phoenix Command exists. I would never play it, but it is still fun that it is a thing.
It's funny, because it's not even in the top three of Most Complex LEG Games.
Their main Aventures campaign is definitely much better, glad they went back to it after that.
Twilight 2013. It has one of the greatest combat systems and a super cool life path character generation system, but it died fairly early so you have to homered nearly everything and it's base setting is shit.
This game is actually about 90% dumb luck on dice rolls, but it somehow manages to be fun while adventuring around fantasy Britain, and engaging despite about 20 rolls for every decision you actually make.
Mekton Zeta.
Broken, overly crunchy in places and utterly undefined in others, important and critical descriptions and system specs are placed in examples, sidebars, and other tangentially or completely unrelated systems, easy as fuck to game, the mecha creation process is autism intensified without an automatic sheet, and the characters themselves are severely underdeveloped and unappreciated in the system, and rules so obnoxious at times that it feels like they change every time you read it.
I love every bit of it. Played in two campaigns (that went under with a shitty GM), run one to completion, and am currently running two more, one of which has 4 separate groups of people acting their own goals in the same universe.
I'm insane, the system is broken, and it's great fun.
The joke is that the name I posted with was Euronymous, he was a musician who was killed by Varg Vikernes (fellow musician and the creator of Myfarog).
Well that's fucking horrifying
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.
It's basically a time attack system with a balance that entirely relies on the DM pulling enough stuff out of their ass to deal with player characters and player characters playing like gamblers.
Varg also burns churches, right? Or am I mixing him up with Monte Cook?
Depends on who you believe. Varg himself claims self defense. Others claim premeditated murder.
It was never proven iirc, but yeah he probably did imo.