Have you ever gotten really hyped up about an RPG and, after buying it, realized that it wasn't at all about what you thought it would be?
In such cases, did you feel cheated, or was it a pleasant surprise? Was it some combination of both, or neither?

What were these games?

For me, it would have to be "Nephilim."

A French game, I expected Nephilim to be about the conspiracies  and machinations of immortal beings from the dawn of creation. Which it kind of is, but really these immortal beings are - like - shapeshifting monsterheads who cast magical spells. Some of them have snake-heads, some of them other kinds of heads. It's like some sort of weird cosplay nightmare. My expectations were crushed. I was not happy.

You?

Brave New World--billed as low powered superhero game with grittyish world

What we get instead is "Deadlands: The Supers", too little setting in core book, too little rules design geared towards low powered heroes--instead artificially constricted PC design to enforce single focus heroes--not "low powered" but one trick pony's.

Weapons of the Gods...

I expected awesome Kung Fu goodness, loresheets were presented as 'one page bits of 'secret knowledge' that players could buy into, and maybe some cool chinese insight into RPGs due to pedigree...


What I got was an unexplained metaplot heavy eye searingly colorblind paint explosion over a game of Yahtzee with 'loresheets' that were essentially a way to pay Borgstrome to write a few hundred pages of short stories and resell you the exact same fucking generic non-rules over and over again.

Yahtzee, people. fuck my camel with a wooden spoon sideways Yahtzee. With d10's.

And they call it brilliant.  Only the lurid oh-god-my-retina's cover. yeah, that was brilliant. I hear they use copies of it in third world nations when the electricty fails to light up the room.  Once... then they burn it and curse america for sending them such tasteless crap.  I understand gitmo detainee's civil rights are violated regularly by forcing them to read the book, not even Dick 'I was torquemada's brother now I'm a zombie' Cheney is inhuman enough to actually make them PLAY it....


:barf:

Quote from: SpikeWeapons of the Gods...

I expected awesome Kung Fu goodness, loresheets were presented as 'one page bits of 'secret knowledge' that players could buy into, and maybe some cool chinese insight into RPGs due to pedigree...


What I got was an unexplained metaplot heavy eye searingly colorblind paint explosion over a game of Yahtzee with 'loresheets' that were essentially a way to pay Borgstrome to write a few hundred pages of short stories and resell you the exact same fucking generic non-rules over and over again.


:barf:

Well considering my experience with "Godlike" the mechanics I expected to be ---wonky. But goodlord, the eyesearing artwork, I wanted subtle woodcuts, beautiful water colors, and paintings on bamboo paper--not brain paining superheroes in psychedelic colors with Final Fantasy-ish weapons.

I want Qin...*sniffles*

Quote from: SilverlionWell considering my experience with "Godlike" the mechanics I expected to be ---wonky. But goodlord, the eyesearing artwork, I wanted subtle woodcuts, beautiful water colors, and paintings on bamboo paper--not brain paining superheroes in psychedelic colors with Final Fantasy-ish weapons.

I want Qin...*sniffles*

Yeah, me too. the PDF just isn't enough Qin for me... so far no one I've spoken too can get it hardcopy where I'm at, not even the experts at rare books...

Quote from: SilverlionBut goodlord, the eyesearing artwork, I wanted subtle woodcuts, beautiful water colors, and paintings on bamboo paper--not brain paining superheroes in psychedelic colors with Final Fantasy-ish weapons.

Eh, from what I hear, most of that artwork comes straight from the original comic...

Quote from: GrimGentEh, from what I hear, most of that artwork comes straight from the original comic...

Sadly, most people didn't exactly buy this because of its relation to the (relatively unknown) comic, but as a generic wu xia game. And I'll have to agree with Spike that the organisation of this book is simply dreadful. The only error it doesn't commit is 20 pages of useless in-game fiction before any crunchy tidbits.

I don't know whether I should really take the time to dig through that confused mess to find the shining pearls or just be happy with HKAT and DragonFist...

Quote from: SosthenesSadly, most people didn't exactly buy this because of its relation to the (relatively unknown) comic, but as a generic wu xia game.

Still, was WotG ever actually marketed as generic, or was that simply the way in which people wished to use it before discovering to their disappointment how much trouble that would cause? It seems a little unfair to blame the reaction entirely on the game itself.

I blame the bad illustrations on the comic. I can even forgive them the bad photoshopped borders (I've got an old book on typography that advises the layperson not to mess with colors. Mr. Tschichold definitely was right...)

But the game _is_ a generic wu xia game. A badly organised one. The comics have nothing to do with that.

Yo Spike, PM me if you wanna unload your WotG copy.  Spread the pain!

I never claimed it was generic or NOT based on an obscure Hong Kong comic book.  These are objective truths.

We could go on a weird tangent about whether or not it counts as a lisenced property if no one knows about the original and the merits of the case... but that is unimportant.

I sincerely doubt that the original comic book included d10 yahtzee. Then you could make a comment about the printed medium, how brazenly garish colors tend to be much less brazen or garish when printed on cheap paper (a la some comics) vs. high gloss paper (or intarweb screens everywhere) etc.

Whatever. It's ugly as sin and in gross violation of color theory everywhere.  the comic could be eight shades of awesome, and this book would still rape picasso's mother.

BESM 2nd Edition.  

My first real exposure to BESM/Tri-Stat was the Sailor Moon RPG.  SM was an absolutely fantastic game, well put together all around, great mechanics, well balanced, lots of source material.

So the idea of taking this elegant game, and having a generic version of it, appealed to be greatly.  I'd refused to buy 1st Ed, because it was a complete rip off, an amateurish glorified pamphlet littered with horrid marker drawn fan art.  It would've been pricy at half of what they wanted for it, so I passed.

Then BESM 2e came out, and that got my attention.  Seemed much more complete, and much more professionally assembled, like something that would live up to my expectations from Sailor Moon.

Well, appearances proved to be decieving.  The game is a goddamn mess.  Horrifically inconsistent, less balanced than a Palladium game, obviously never playtested, and probably barely edited.  It was very obvious they just threw a bunch of shit in a book without any consideration for how it would all fit together, and the result was an incoherent mess.  

Waste of my damn money.

Quote from: mattormegFor me, it would have to be "Nephilim."

You think you were disappointed?  I was writing for the game when the powers-that-be decided to change horses in mid-stream, and the game suddenly stopped being about immortal monster-heads and started being about human enlightenment.  Magic stopped being flash-bang and started being too subtle to be noticed.  I was in mid-translation of one of the French books that ran completely counter to what the new guard was proposing.

Ah, Nephilim -- the game that Chaosium borrowed from someone else and never could figure out what they wanted it to be.

!i!

Yes, those were all godawful games, that didn't give what they claimed to be selling to be sure.

But without a doubt the worst case of bait-and-switch in history would have been the latest edition of Gamma World.

In any case, as for Nephilim, I have to wonder if the original French version was better? It clearly read (in the english version) like it was two different games that had gotten mangled with each other, and I wonder whether the original french game was the good one?

It could be it was like In Nomine, where the english version had been altered to the point that it was almost nothing like the original.

RPGPundit

I'm going to nominate "Godlike" by Dennis Detwiller and Greg Stoltze.  I don't think the publisher was the one that pulled a bait and switch but the game was pitched to me, by a player who was either clueless or malevolent as "Superheroes in the Second World War, Y'know Like The Golden Age JSA from DC."

Ha ha ha.

It is set, ostensibly, in the WWII.  But it seems to be set in some weird alternate history version of WWII where every minute of the war is like the opening 15 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan".  Which, given the alternate history elements that do exist, may have been the only historical reference that the authors consulted.

Ah ha ha ha.

And as for the superheroes it has those too.  But they're that peculiar sort of superhero that exists in the writings of Garth Ennis or late career Frank Miller.  The kind of guys that exist only to be killed in dramatically gory ways to demonstrate the utter absurdity of trying to be anything other than an opportunistic foulmouthed misanthrope.  

And then there's the actual mechanics, which were not a bait and switch.  It was, in fact, a one-roll engine.  

The same player keeps trying to hype "Wild Talents", a sequel / supplement / whatever that, I guess, is supposed to be like "Godlike" only less sucky.  Kind of like ArcDream's version of True20.  But mostly we just throw dice at him when he brings it up.