This

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!I'm gonna totally go on the record and say that while I don't think I, personally, would ever buy RIFTS, I can totally, totally see why people love it and I ain't gonna hold that against 'em.

I see some value in the setting.  At least, I can appreciate how a hormonal, 15 year old adolescent might find it kewl, with juicers and glitterboys and big guns and blowing shit up.

But the system is a mind-boggling piece of shit.  IMHO, easily the worst system to actually achieve any kind of serious popularity.  How players can make it much past the first session and still consider it worth playing is completely beyond me.

But then, my tolerance levels are dropping rapidly as I get older.:rolleyes:

Quote from: David Johansen9. Silcore: No I didn't play this one.  It's damn hard to play a game that doesn't include any examples of weapons, armour, equipment, or vehicles.  Also dice pools =

That's so funny, I never noticed. I guess that's being too close to the source material. Of course the published settings are chock full of that kind of stuff, sso that kind of thing has always been at my fingertips. And the Deluxe edition does at least have weapons and IIRC some equipment. As far as the dice pools go, they're rarely any higher than anything you would roll in GURPS, Hero or D&D. There's no counting successes or any other other wonky ways of reading the dice.

Quote from: SettembriniThat´s interesting: Is there a backstory? Did Ron try to market Sorceror to WW?

Maybe confusing it with Ars Magica?

1 to 10 from the absolute worst to lesser grades of badness.

1. Over the Edge. (for horrible mechanics, setting, and general tone of the book)
2. Call of Cthulu (A game with the only point of slaughtering the PCs unfairly.  Until I came online, I had never heard anyone praise this piece of shit.  In fact, I thought it had rightfully died in the mid 80s.)
3. Gamma World 3rd Edition (utterly crap ass mechanics.)
4. Marvel Universe (even the designers didn't have a clue how this game was supposed to work.)
5. the current version of the Palladium system (an unplayable mess.  To even begin to play you'll have to write your own rules.)
6. Living Steel (the game is probably playable, but too complicated for its own good)
7. Battlelords of the 23rd Century (same notation as Living Steel, but isn't as bad due to the enjoyable style of the book.)
8. BESM2 and Tri-Stat (They're basically the same game.  And they're completely unbalanced, character generating mathterbation systems which don't work worth a damn in actual play.)
9. Universe (crunchy as fuck for no reason whatsoever.)
10. Amber (Amber doesn't rank higher because the book is extremely entertaining and has valuable advice for running actual RPGs.  However, this game starts with some meaningless mathterbation character construction elements, and ends up giving the sole rule of the game: "Anyone with a higher rank always wins, except when they don't."  In practice, the real rule of the game is "The GM determines everything arbitrarily."  In other words, it has no rules whatsoever.)

edit: Mechwarrior barely missed the list.

Okay here goes:

1) Palladium of any stripe. I played multiple Palladium games throughout high school and while the "hey, it's like D&D but different!" thing didn't last past Rifts and I gave up. Palladium Fantasy was so-so and didn't suffer from the worst system problems. Any modern game - TMNT, Heroes Unlimited, Robotech - was just a disaster. Robotech in particular is the worst of the pre-Rifts Palladium games.

2) Living Steel. This was demoed for me at a convention and it seemed to run really smooth. I didn't know they weren't using all of the rules. I bought almost everything they had for the game because it seemed cool and tried to put a campaign together. It lasted all of two sessions and we gave up. Living Steel did have some great ideas though.

3) Fuzion. Fuzion was a half-aborted mess. It's probably for me comparable to the way that David sees SilCore. By attempting to graft Hero to Fuzion it lost good parts of both. It was probably usable with a lot more work thatn I was willing to put into it. Dream Park was a better generic game.

4) Immortal: the Invisible War. About as piss-poor White Wolf plagiarism as you can get. The system was atrocious, there were Too Many Capitalized Obscure Synonyms For Common Concepts, the premise that gamers are really hidden demigods that are expressing their forgotten memories while playing, the whole thing stank.

5) Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth. When you're in college and avant-garde a game that tries to get all Joe Campbell seems like a good idea. The reality is that it's like a story gamer or whatever they're called's worst nightmare - espousing all of this stuff about narrative history and tied to a system that makes Byron Hall weep. We actually never got through character creation.

That's really about it...unless I dredge up some repressed memories or something.

Quote from: Tyberious FunkI see some value in the setting.  At least, I can appreciate how a hormonal, 15 year old adolescent might find it kewl, with juicers and glitterboys and big guns and blowing shit up.

I'm sure large elements would and do appeal to that subset of gamer.  However, you should look at something like jgants' Rifts Actual Play Thread.   I've played low-power, deep engrossing games with Rifts, and I've also played Kewl, Shoot-Em-Up Mindless Blockbusters with many, many explosions.  Usually, it ends up being a bit of both.

QuoteBut the system is a mind-boggling piece of shit.  IMHO, easily the worst system to actually achieve any kind of serious popularity.  How players can make it much past the first session and still consider it worth playing is completely beyond me.

But then, my tolerance levels are dropping rapidly as I get older.:rolleyes:

Eh, that happens.  I run a fast and loose campaign, so that rules just don't bug me as much.  But then again, I also agree with Jim Bob's rankings (in decreasing importance) for what you need for a good campaign/session:

1) People
2) Snacks
3) Setting
4) System

Hey, I don't want to turn this into a thread with me defending Rifts or Palladium, and I don't want to take away for the process.  So I might start another thread, might not, but I'll self-police for now and bow out.

Quote from: Gabriel2. Call of Cthulu (A game with the only point of slaughtering the PCs unfairly.  Until I came online, I had never heard anyone praise this piece of shit.  In fact, I thought it had rightfully died in the mid 80s.)

You got unlucky, the game as written is not a slaughterfest and I've ran fairly lengthy campaigns in it in which the PCs made a real difference to the world.

I mean, the end result for most PCs does eventually tend to be death or insanity, but along the way they did a hell of a lot of good.

Two characters in fact survived intact, albeit lost in space and time I admit.  The players liked it though, and they took some pleasure in the survival of their characters, who were last seen wandering in some part of North America long before European settlement arrived.

Quote from: BalbinusI mean, the end result for most PCs does eventually tend to be death or insanity, but along the way they did a hell of a lot of good.

That tends to be the end result in any game i'm playing or running, no matter the system. Play 'till we get bored and retire the characters or they die!

I've been re-reading Spawn of Azathoth recently and they are some mad deadly scenarios in there, the sasquach chapter in particular and that's only the second chapter of 7! I'd love to run it some time though, haven't up 'till now.

I think CoC is one of the greatest games ever made precisely because of the 'slaughterfest' mode. It was the first game that broke the idea of long-term character identification in RPGs - you're just playing this guy, now, and having fun with it on the way to going mad or dying.

People play it Balbinus' way too and I don't hold that against them, but the reason CoC was historically a 'theoretically important game' is the former. It broke an assumption shared by all other games before it came out.

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Very few games have ever damaged my fun extensively. D&D 3 did this for me, but it gave me a lot of fun before we reached that point, so I'll call it even. GURPS was a big disappointment after Fantasy Trip. Aftermath was too hard  to make characters for so I never got to find out. And then there were several games, like Traveller 2300, Twilight 2000, and one or two others that just didn't seem to actually support any adventures once we got our cool characters and situation set up - I didn't know what to do to run or play them. It was like, here we are, now what do we do?

Hackmaster was one where I really wanted to like it but the experience the game was offering wasn't worth the huge amount of bookkeeping overhead. (Because, frankly, nothing that doesn't pay six figures is.)

But none of those games is so bad I wouldn't try it again. The RPGs that have looked like real stinkers to me I just don't pick up in the first place.

QuoteBut the system is a mind-boggling piece of shit. IMHO, easily the worst system to actually achieve any kind of serious popularity. How players can make it much past the first session and still consider it worth playing is completely beyond me.

Urban myth.
It´s playable, even after the RAW. Making characters is lengthy. With some houseruling, it´s a blast!

So, has the point of this thread to refute other people's experiences?

Because I could have started in on that a long time ago.

Side note: the OP's requested criteria was actual play experience. Mythusmage, am I to understand you actually tried THE GAMES THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED?

Quote from: Caesar SlaadSo, has the point of this thread to refute other people's experiences?

Because I could have started in on that a long time ago.

Side note: the OP's requested criteria was actual play experience. Mythusmage, am I to understand you actually tried THE GAMES THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED?

To clarify, I personally regard honest attempts at actual play that didn't get past character gen (or even digesting the rulebook) as being fair play. What I'm trying to avoid is people voting for games which they don't have any experience with but nonetheless don't like the idea of.

I think it is much more common for people to bitch about games they aren't actually familiar with than it is for them to praise games they haven't played or read. Most of my "top 10" votes, at least, are for games I have actually played, and I suspect that's the same for most people (or at the very least, if you haven't played a game on your top 10 list you've nigh-certainly read it and would be keen to play it).

Quote from: SettembriniUrban myth.
It´s playable, even after the RAW. Making characters is lengthy. With some houseruling, it´s a blast!

With a little houseruling, AD&D 1e is indistinguishable from Rules Cyclopedia D&D, yet both games fared very differently on the "top 10" poll. "You can houserule out things you don't like" is the number one most-used copout whenever criticisms of a game come up, and it's one I particularly despise: it's acknowledging that a criticism is valid, but denying that it's at all important.

Quote from: TonyLBmythusmage, Warthur:  You've played FATAL?  Duuuuude ... :eek:

I made a valiant effort once to read it. As the revenant said in An American Werewolf in London, "It's boring." The author's attitudes towards sex, procreation, race, and RPGs are about the only interesting things about FATAL. Indeed, if he hadn't included such FATAL would've faded away without comment. FATAL was written by a man who thinks you can get socks pregnant.

His skill at English composition is such that it could take a simple instruction like, "Roll the die and try to get a number that beats the task's difficulty.", and make it impossible to understand. It is not just that he overwrites, but that he overwrites badly. Nor is his overwriting entertaining. He is, in short, linguistically tone deaf. I suspect his mother was frightened by tax code when she was expecting him.

Not only that, but FATAL includes ideas and mechanisms that have been done before, and much better by most any game published previously. Including Cyborg Commando and Synnibar. Even sex has been handled much better in various fan works, and subsequently in a professionally published effort. Though not as professionally as it could be.

FATAL is, to sum up, a prime example of what happens when you let the self-esteem movement get carried away with itself.