RPGPundit's post on house rules got me thinking.  Was there a game you played that was so awesome except for some rule set that could have ruined the game (for you) if it was used.

 
Mine was the way Bio-E points were set up in TMNT: AOS.  It was as if any cool animal had too high a cost to be any good.  You'd have to lower their size, add addictions and other crap just to get a fleshed out character.  (Not counting team creation that only felt helpful with 4 or more players)

What is that one for you>

Quote from: rway218;838956RPGPundit's post on house rules got me thinking.  Was there a game you played that was so awesome except for some rule set that could have ruined the game (for you) if it was used.

 
Mine was the way Bio-E points were set up in TMNT: AOS.  It was as if any cool animal had too high a cost to be any good.  You'd have to lower their size, add addictions and other crap just to get a fleshed out character.  (Not counting team creation that only felt helpful with 4 or more players)

What is that one for you>

That was the whole point of bio-e, to allow for the big powerhouses. But at more manageable sizes. So you have an elephant who can actually enter a house rather than being 20ft tall and not much use for anything other than demolitions.

FENG SHUI: It rocked... except for the entire dice mechanic at the heart of the system. In what was supposed to be a fast-moving action-movie game set in a gonzo Hong Kong funhouse world everyone's sitting there counting on their fingers to figure out what 16-6+13-14 is for each and every action.

SAVAGE WORLDS: It rocked... except for the weirdly complex vehicle combat system that felt like it wandered in from a different game.

HEROES UNLIMITED: It rocked... except that if you rolled up most character types, character generation would take about 30 minutes, but if you rolled up certain character types... well, break out the calculator, grab a lot of scratch paper, and don't make any plans for the next few hours.

TSR'S CONAN and GAMMA WORLD 3RD EDITION: They rocked (Well, OK, maybe it's more accurate to just say they didn't suck)... except that like a lot of TSR products at that point in the 80's they were sloppily rushed out and had chunks of the rules missing. Big disappointments as a teen, fatal to my interest in subsequent TSR games.

SEVENTH SEA and BRAVE NEW WORLD: They rocked (Or at least were an interesting oddity, in the case of BNW)... except for both of them being burdened with the 1990's pox of metaplot, so thick that the game's audiences were left feeling more like passive spectators than players and quickly stopped caring. These were the games metaplot strangled, dismembered, and left by the side of the road in garbage bags... look upon their bodies, oh future game line developers, and learn.

Pretty much any game with a passive defense system, which doesn't allow the defender to react in any way to an incoming attack. Yes, that includes D&D. Passive defense almost inevitably leads to boring, unengaging combats lacking the dynamic and tension of a more proactive combat system that allows dfenders to have some influence in their own fate, even if it is only roling a die and hoping for the best.
I can tolerate passive defense, if I have to, but switching to an active defense system is such a steep upgrade for any combat rules that it is definetely preferable to include those.

Likewise, any character creation system that is solely point-buy based or otherwise free of random elements can be improved significantly through the inclusion of at least some random elements, if only to destroy the idiotic delusion that the game could or should be "balanced".

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1ed rocked...apart from trying to parse all the stealth/moving silently rules - which were a mess and seemingly plain broken in parts. And the 'whiff' factor too.

Quote from: rway218;838956Mine was the way Bio-E points were set up in TMNT: AOS.  It was as if any cool animal had too high a cost to be any good.  You'd have to lower their size, add addictions and other crap just to get a fleshed out character.  (Not counting team creation that only felt helpful with 4 or more players)

What is that one for you>

I think that's the first time I've seen someone NOT like the TMNT character-creation system.  Or the 'mutant animal' part of it, at least.

The later editions of the Moorcock inspired Chaosium RPG were fun, I love Moorcock's world and cosmology... Except they chose to call the game 'Elric!' instead of the much cooler 'Stormbringer'. Who in their right mind would do that!?

Quote from: Beagle;839009I can tolerate passive defense, if I have to, but switching to an active defense system is such a steep upgrade for any combat rules that it is definetely preferable to include those.

What's your favorite example?

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;838978FENG SHUI: It rocked... except for the entire dice mechanic at the heart of the system. In what was supposed to be a fast-moving action-movie game set in a gonzo Hong Kong funhouse world everyone's sitting there counting on their fingers to figure out what 16-6+13-14 is for each and every action.

SAVAGE WORLDS: It rocked... except for the weirdly complex vehicle combat system that felt like it wandered in from a different game.

HEROES UNLIMITED: It rocked... except that if you rolled up most character types, character generation would take about 30 minutes, but if you rolled up certain character types... well, break out the calculator, grab a lot of scratch paper, and don't make any plans for the next few hours.

TSR'S CONAN and GAMMA WORLD 3RD EDITION: They rocked (Well, OK, maybe it's more accurate to just say they didn't suck)... except that like a lot of TSR products at that point in the 80's they were sloppily rushed out and had chunks of the rules missing. Big disappointments as a teen, fatal to my interest in subsequent TSR games.

SEVENTH SEA and BRAVE NEW WORLD: They rocked (Or at least were an interesting oddity, in the case of BNW)... except for both of them being burdened with the 1990's pox of metaplot, so thick that the game's audiences were left feeling more like passive spectators than players and quickly stopped caring. These were the games metaplot strangled, dismembered, and left by the side of the road in garbage bags... look upon their bodies, oh future game line developers, and learn.

For Heroes Unlimited I have found it works better not to bother with the random rolls for everything unless you really just don't give a shit and have time to kill.  We generally just eyeball what seems fair enough and make whatever sounds fun and then get into that wacky action.

Quote from: Beagle;839009Pretty much any game with a passive defense system, which doesn't allow the defender to react in any way to an incoming attack. Yes, that includes D&D. Passive defense almost inevitably leads to boring, unengaging combats lacking the dynamic and tension of a more proactive combat system that allows dfenders to have some influence in their own fate, even if it is only roling a die and hoping for the best.
I can tolerate passive defense, if I have to, but switching to an active defense system is such a steep upgrade for any combat rules that it is definetely preferable to include those.

Likewise, any character creation system that is solely point-buy based or otherwise free of random elements can be improved significantly through the inclusion of at least some random elements, if only to destroy the idiotic delusion that the game could or should be "balanced".

Yes, especially games where combat is expected and common. It's an area where Palladium beat the pants off D&D.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;838978SEVENTH SEA and BRAVE NEW WORLD: They rocked (Or at least were an interesting oddity, in the case of BNW)... except for both of them being burdened with the 1990's pox of metaplot, so thick that the game's audiences were left feeling more like passive spectators than players and quickly stopped caring. These were the games metaplot strangled, dismembered, and left by the side of the road in garbage bags... look upon their bodies, oh future game line developers, and learn.

I've never played BNW, but in 7th Sea my brothers and I got around this by simply ignoring the metaplot and going from the basic setting. Did the same thing with Earthdawn, which also fell prey to the depredations of metaplot (albeit not to the same extent). I honestly can't think of any game I've played that we haven't chucked the metaplot going in. Games are just better that way.

Quote from: Matt;839542For Heroes Unlimited I have found it works better not to bother with the random rolls for everything unless you really just don't give a shit and have time to kill.  We generally just eyeball what seems fair enough and make whatever sounds fun and then get into that wacky action.

Sorry to get off-topic, but is there any web resource with pre-generated HU robot and power armor "Packages" where the purchasing decisions and math have already been done? That would save untold shitloads of time.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;839487What's your favorite example?

For active defense? I think the newer Runequest versions and Legend do it reasonably well, when a successful defense can have a direct tactical application. For an upgrade from passive to active defense, we played a lot with those during the glory days of D&D 3.5, but true to the whole rule set, these rules were quite complex. I can post them if you're really interested.To summarize: Defense works like a saving throw; characters ave fewer hitpoints at high levels; combatants can either take a penalty to attack rolls or sacrifice iterative attacks to gain defense bonuses and armor offers both an increase of defense and damage reduction.
IfI ever write yet another  D&D clone that is totally needed and not at all redundant, it would probably include similar, if significantly simplified rules.

For my personal tastes:

* High-powered psionics. Rules for this always remind me of what our 5th Grade class lore thought the OSR D&D psionics rules were, which was something like "when you roll up your character, if you roll 00 on a pair of 20-sided dice, you're psionic and you can make other people's heads explode my staring at them". Probably I was just scarred for life by that and by watching "The Fury" in a double feature with "Alien" and being freaked out as "The Fury" basically uses that same mechanic. I don't want to live in a world where arbitrarily some people can make you die with psionics and you can't do anything about it. (This spoils X-COM for me - I don't want to play when the aliens start mind-controlling my men to shoot each other, and I can't do much about it.)

* Almost any game without a relevant tactical combat map. I feel out of control when I can't decide where to move and how to fight and have that mainly determine what happens.

* Almost any game where combat involves slowly whittling down hitpoints with no real other effects or tactics until the enemy runs out of hit points.

* Almost all computer RPGs, because they almost all expect you to die several times but to then just restore from a saved game and pretend it didn't happen, and if you do start a new character, you basically have to re-do everything in the same world state as your first game started. That just seems to make all such games so utterly pointless to me. The only thing at risk in a combat is the player's time and annoyance of having to replay since the last save game, and in my case, my sudden complete lack of interest in continuing playing at all.

* STAR FRONTIERS - I thought it rocked that they had tactical maps and counters for both space and personal combat, with city maps, and lots of content... but then practically all of the content I thought sucked so hard that it was utterly unusable, and even the maps and counters were tainted with association with so much suck. Reading an adventure module was like an example of what not to do in any RPG ever.

* Combat (or in D&D, initiative) systems where an entire enemy side gets to act while the other side waits, and targets can be ganged up on and destroyed helplessly. I can't play Conquest of Wesnoth because of this, and it goes with wanting a map, etc.

Quote from: Battle Mad Ronin;839485The later editions of the Moorcock inspired Chaosium RPG were fun, I love Moorcock's world and cosmology... Except they chose to call the game 'Elric!' instead of the much cooler 'Stormbringer'. Who in their right mind would do that!?

Elric is more identifiable, I think.