Quote from: mhensley;401871T&T - combat is way too abstract for anything other than solitaire play plus there's no way that adding up 50 d6's is either fast or easy.

Awww. I love T&T, though maybe since I started gaming with it, and in the Calculator Age. If the monster gets 51 dice, just roll 3 dice x 17.
Plus in the solos you soon get so many Combat Adds that you usually just kill monsters automatically, without having to roll.

Well, I think that Traveller is boring as hell. And I've tried every version except the latest. New Era actually had a cool premise mired in craptastic rules.

But GURPS is certainly my least favorite system from the days of old. And that's saying something with Palladium being in the mix.

I might have said D&D (any/all) at one time but I don't have any animosity toward it anymore. In fact I like it.

So the only old game I really hate is Rhand: Morningstar Missions. It was a total waste of money, not only complex but incomplete. I'd have been better off with Sword's Path: Glory; at least then I could have had a more complete package.

I can work up "peeved" against Ysgarth because I paid for the game in person at a convention, took the first book home with a promise the publisher would send the other two, and never heard from them again. On the other hand I liked the rules that I got, and although I never played the game it influenced my thinking.

Oh, I also hate World Action and Adventure. Truly not worth the paper it was printed on.

Terrible:
Powers and Perils
The Sci-Fi furry FGU game

Boring:
Boot Hill
Star Frontiers

oD&D always gave me issues. AD&D was Byzantine enough that while I could dislike the mechanics I could find settings to enjoy. And entirely far too many 90's RPGs that had no basis in system logic and/or had settings so cryptic as to result in endless head scratching. Nephilim, Brave New World, Tinker's Damn, etc always left a bad taste in my mouth. Earlier editions of HERO also bothered, but 4th and the BBB did much turn me around.

Tunnels&Trolls. Exciting historical document (although Monsters! Monsters! is the more interesting one), but the super-minimalistic rules and tongue in cheek approach are a turnoff. OD&D didn't try to be all-comprehensive, but at least it advocated complex simulation. If I wanted an old school minimal system, I would probably like Advanced Fighting Fantasy more (and Titan is a helluva world guide, especially at the age of twelve).

Some aspects of Gamma World also bother me - again, a bit too tongue in cheek, and lacking a serious mode (this, not this). Axe Mental on the K&K board has proposed that TSR should have done a straightforward AD&D-level game with similar trade dress and all:

Quote from: Axe MentalImagine the PH cover with guys carrying laser rifles instead of swords around and an idol of some alien God, or maybe some crashed ship on a cool planet with weird purple and blue plants (hard cover by Tramp). And the same cover dress (in other words, it would have been three new books that had the same cover style and paper and black and white artwork as the 3 core books -nothing slick or soft).

That's the science fiction game I am missing grom the old school palette - neither Traveller-like realistic nor GW- or Star Frontiers-like cheese, just "adventurer fantasy" for spaceships and lasers.

Quote from: Melan;401918That's the science fiction game I am missing grom the old school palette - neither Traveller-like realistic nor GW- or Star Frontiers-like cheese, just "adventurer fantasy" for spaceships and lasers.

The game you're looking for sounds a lot like Starships & Spacemen.

Thank you. I will need to look into it.

AD&D1 as played by "old schoolers".  In other words: FATAL.
Paranoia
Gamma World 3rd Edition
Robotech
TMNT
Star Frontiers
GURPS

I didn't have the money to buy every game that came out pre 1990 so I missed most of the really bad ones.
 
Star Frontiers really disappointed me.  I was psyched for D&D SF.  I got silly species, a setting style that had been done many times before, and incomplete rules.
 
Rolemaster defined tedious gaming for me.
 
T&T is alright but I don't like the group combat and or the advancement.
 
Not quite old school to me but Rifts was "Really, you've gotta be kidding me."  It wasn't the gonzo and I could even accept the poor setting with unbelievable bad guys.  The mechanics were obviously crap from the initial read through.  Why have all these character choices when half of them will be splattered by 1 pt of megadamage?
 
Also not quite old school but Twilight 2000 and some of the other GDW games from the same time demonstrated that attempting too much realism destroys a game by slowing it to a crawl.  Who was driving the development then?  Chadwick?  But their setting ideas were largely decent.

Quote from: Nicephorus;401928Also not quite old school but Twilight 2000 and some of the other GDW games from the same time demonstrated that attempting too much realism destroys a game by slowing it to a crawl.  Who was driving the development then?  Chadwick?  But their setting ideas were largely decent.

 GDW seemed to do that a bit around that time... You had great setting stuff like space 1889, but with rulessets that didn't seem all that thought through. Or at least overly complicated for the genre by todays standards.

 Of couse now people are repeating the mistakes of the past by giving space 1889 the savage worlds treatment.

Quote from: Nicephorus;401928Also not quite old school but Twilight 2000 and some of the other GDW games from the same time demonstrated that attempting too much realism destroys a game by slowing it to a crawl.  Who was driving the development then?  Chadwick?  But their setting ideas were largely decent.

All "realistic" post-nuclear games from that era suffer from the same mistake: an obsessive dedication to niggling detail, and the desire to model all of them by the table. After all, creating a game that didn't account for the differences between 7.62x51mm NATO rounds and the 7.62x39mm Russkie surplus could get your Ronnie Raygun™ medal revoked.

Quote from: Melan;401936All "realistic" post-nuclear games from that era suffer from the same mistake: an obsessive dedication to niggling detail, and the desire to model all of them by the table. After all, creating a game that didn't account for the differences between 7.62x51mm NATO rounds and the 7.62x39mm Russkie surplus could get your Ronnie Raygun™ medal revoked.

Yep.  Though it didn't even have to be post apocalyptic.  Most modern and futuristic games from that era had super detailed tables trying to model differences between weapons.  I came from a wargaming background but it was still too much for me.

Quote from: Gabriel2;401924AD&D1 as played by "old schoolers".  In other words: FATAL.

What. The. Fuck? :rolleyes:

I think he was referring more to all the tables, AC vs. armor mods, surprise, etc. not the vaginal/rectal circumference of the Silver Princess stuff.