At a convention recently I played a game of Stargate SG1 and man, did it ever have a stupid, clunky game mechanic. Attend:

If you roll a critical in SG1 it doesn't become a critical unless you spend some sort of point to 'activate' it. I can't recall exactly what the system was, but whenever someone rolled a great hit the GM is like "Does anyone want to spend a point to activate the critical?" and if no one did it was just an ordinary hit.

I mentioned my opinion of the system and was told it was to keep criticals from coming up every 5% of the time. predictably.

OK, I can see that, but I think that gurps had a better critical system, the chance of a critical was based on your skill, the more skilled you were the better you chance you had at getting a ritical success and the less chance you had of a critical failure.

I just thought it was a very bad mechanic, the idea that a critical has to be 'activated' to be more than a regular hit. Anyone else have any clunky mechanics they want to diss?

Ohh, take cover, someone doesn't like the Spycraft Action Points system, Caesar Slaad won't like that...

There are lots of clunky mechanics, but the first that comes to my mind are the skill tests of The Dark Eye, Germany's most popular RPG. This was my introduction to role-playing, although they didn't introduce skills in that form until a few years later. There's a reason why I didn't mention it in the kickass foreign language thread...

Anyway, skill checks in that system were based on three attributes, with doubles possible (climb could be strength/strength/agility). You had a value from about -7 to 18 in each of those skills. To make a skill check, you had to roll three times on a D20, and if the total amount of points you went over your attributes was higher than your skill level, you failed.

The calculations weren't exactly rocket science, but three rolls for every skill check? Clunky...

Iterative attacks in d20 really irritate me.  Most of the time they all miss anyway as AC/defense is scaling up to meet the first attack, so you have a bunch of rolls that don't do anything.  I'd rather do without them, preferring penalties for multiple actions instead.

Quote from: MaddmanIterative attacks in d20 really irritate me.  Most of the time they all miss anyway as AC/defense is scaling up to meet the first attack, so you have a bunch of rolls that don't do anything.  I'd rather do without them, preferring penalties for multiple actions instead.

Indeed at higher challenges Iterative attacks really are just an extra 5% chance you roll a 20 to hit.  Against creatures where your Iterative attacks typically work they pose little challenge for you anyway.

I still think the dumbest and clunkiest is the "G.I. Joe Rule" in Rifts.

More or less, everyone in Rifts wears armor.  The G.I. Joe rule states that a suit of armor will always protect the person wearing it from any damage from an attack.  The damage will never carry over.

At it's most basic, this means, quite literally, the following: you can drop a nuke on a character in tatterred body armor having 1 MDC and there is no way of eliminating the target in that single shot.  The attack does thousands of MDC of damage, but the armor still fully protects the wearer before ablating. The end result is that the character is standing there naked and unharmed on a glass blasted plain.  The scary thing is, this is exactly how the rule is intended to work.

That's more of a Murphy's Rule than a clunker.

Quote from: SosthenesOhh, take cover, someone doesn't like the Spycraft Action Points system, Caesar Slaad won't like that...

Damn straight!

Yeah, some people like that HP/Vitality/Whatever represents a pool and likes that "one shot lethal hits" are reserved for special characters instead of mooks. For some people, getting gunned downed by a lackey with a lucky shot is anti-climactic. (/me waves at Chuck.)

If you think about it, Dominus, your assessment of what is going on here is about 180 degrees out of phase with what actually is happening. You say you want to make skill important, but what this mechanic does is make luck less of a factor... only the true heroes (or villains) can inflict criticals. Which is the way it should be if you are trying to emulate heroic action.

Skilled characters will have modifiers that bring their threat range down. Some even will have abilities that make activation free. These characters will have more opportunities to activate their crits. So the "skill" you speak of here is more than just a raw modifier.

Quote from: MaddmanIterative attacks in d20 really irritate me.  Most of the time they all miss anyway as AC/defense is scaling up to meet the first attack, so you have a bunch of rolls that don't do anything.  I'd rather do without them, preferring penalties for multiple actions instead.

Well, obviously they do do something... they make a sort of back door armor/damage relationship.

But ultimately, they are burdensome and I find that tracking the different numbers is difficult in play and I find myself wanting to do without them. So I'll go with the clunky assessment.

I'd like to add some of the most basic harbingers of clunk: adding and subtracting. Seriously, I'm not that bad at math, but when I have to do something like add 15d6 or subtract a DB of 34 from an OB of 87 and add my roll of 71 to it, I kinda blank out for an instant. Which is an instant I spend calculating instead of gaming.

That was one bad thing about the Masterbook system. You roll two dice, add them, look up the associated number on the table, add this to your skill level, possibly add or subtract a modifier from this roll...

Quote from: Elliot WilenThat's more of a Murphy's Rule than a clunker.

Half and half.  It was intented to decrease lethality where it takes about 20 shots to deplete someone's armor in the first place.

When they're throwing more damage around than a battleship broadside.

I'll add one just to make Pundit happy - Exalted's dice pools.  Now I love Exalted both for the setting and some of the interesting things the rules do.  But damn, counting successes when someone has a 17 dice pool on their attack AND they're boosting it with a charm AND they're flurrying gets old.  I'd convert it to unisystem and count it all on one roll if I wasn't a) afraid of fucking up something of the things I do like about the rules and b) lazy.

Quote from: MaddmanI'll add one just to make Pundit happy - Exalted's dice pools.

I made my own dice for SR4 specifically because you can now with a fixed TN and because the dice pools can get fairly large. The dice do verily rocketh for much faster counting. Much faster.  Just a glance and I see how many hits on a dozen dice or more, and what to reroll if I'm using Edge.  It certainly feels faster than rolling a D20 and adding the bonus. But just using regular dice, especially ones with poor color choice to start with, it can slow things down at the table with the big pools. However in the end I'm just glad it now doesn't involve reporting a string of numbers to the GM, rarely involves rerolling, and when it does involve rerolling it doesn't involve adding.

As for my first choice for clunker rules that I haven't seen posted yet I keep it in that vein and nominate all of SR3. Ok, I'll narrow it down to the worst offender of the pack. Vehicle Combat with a huge nod towards the entire Rigger 3 splatbook.  Even in a system where few played the actual rules as written (even people that thought they were playing as written often weren't) and the Decking rules had you doing beatcounting that would make your accountant sweat, the Vehicle Combat rules stand out as a climatic clusterbang of clunk that the very, very rare attempted to fully implement as written.