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Dumbest Games you've ever played

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Coengar2

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« on: <03-15-14/2209:12> »
I've been a gamer for over 30 years now and I have played and/or GM'd  tons of games in my time. At one time my RPG collection had over 80 games in it. During that time I've played some real doozies thought i'd like to share a few of the dumb ones I tried over the years.

Ghostbusters (West End Games) Based on the movie,this game threw away any sort of horror or supernatural elements and went straight for pure slapstick comedy. Too many bad jokes and stupid puns made it a game that was hard to take seriously for most gamers I knew. One sad side note: The game used a special ghost die (A d6 with the ghostbuster logo replacing the one pip) that was to be included with every dice roll. The problem was the logo was only printed on the die,not engraved, and wore off after a few rolls. Talk about a cheap gimmick.

Street Fighter the RPG(White Wolf): Made by the same people who made VtM and the other WoD games. It used the exact same mechanics for character creation and game play as the other White Wolf so you could add a street fighter to a VtM game. Which I did and thouroughly upset the GM by taking out his big bad guy with thrown fireballs and Chun Li style lightning kicks. Other than that,there were only a few brief notes on how to run this game as anything more than glorified gladiator fights (just like the arcade game)

Macho Women with Guns: Pretty much a shoot em up game played with card board fold up characters of scantily clad women carrying guns. It was totally sexist with art work just made to titillate the early teen age crowd who couldn't get their hands on a sports illustrated swimsuit issue. Had at sequal called Renegade Nuns on Wheels that added vehicle combat and divine intervention,i kid you not.

THE DUMBEST GAME I EVER HAD THE MOST FUN WITH:

Tales of the Floating Vagabond (Avalon Hill) It's about a bar,that sits in the middle of an interdimensional nexus, run by a barkeep named Hawk Luger (just call him Spit) and the madcap adventures that the patrons of the bar get into. It's Callahan's crosstime saloon meets the restruant at the end of the universe. We ran games that had the players raiding King kong's island for a ton of wine to finding themselves waking up from a bad hangover to find out that they had enlisted in the military and just about everything in between. It was weird and down right crazy at times but man did we have fun. That game campaign lasted for two years before I moved away.

SO, those are a few of the dumb games that came to my mind,i'd love to hear about what dumb ones have crossed your path.
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AJCarrington

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« Reply #1 on: <03-16-14/0831:41> »
RIFTS...completely gonzo setting, with absolutely no balance (SDC vs MDC) but had an awesome time playing it...go figure ;D

Reaver

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« Reply #2 on: <03-16-14/1156:16> »
D20 star wars.....

now there is a setting that should just stay away from D20 all together...
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CanRay

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« Reply #3 on: <03-16-14/1259:09> »
D20 star wars.....

now there is a setting that should just stay away from D20 all together...
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WellsIDidIt

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« Reply #4 on: <03-16-14/1338:53> »
Hands down:

The World of Synnibarr
Where even the GM has to roll to figure out what the story offers.

firebug

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« Reply #5 on: <03-16-14/1409:03> »
Hands down:

The World of Synnibarr
Where even the GM has to roll to figure out what the story offers.

I'm reminded of this one RPG I saw...  Can't remember the name of it.  But it wasn't fully made and the website was showing "sneak peeks" of it.  The character sheet has a huge area on it with dots to fill in for all your character's emotions...  So apparently in that game you weren't even allowed to decide how your character feels about stuff unless their stats said so.
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Jeeze.  It would almost sound stupid until you realize we're talking about an immortal elf clown sword fighting a dragon ghost in a mall.

Sendaz

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« Reply #6 on: <03-16-14/1631:35> »
Battlelords of the 23rd Century.

The fluff was good reading, the game mechanics themselves were not too bad.

The high end though was crazy.. with 9 pt (max type powers) literally being godlike, from KA which could turn a dead world into a fruitful one to Space Fold that brings two distant points in space together, destroying anything that happened to be in between when the two points join.
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WellsIDidIt

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« Reply #7 on: <03-16-14/1647:23> »
Hands down:

The World of Synnibarr
Where even the GM has to roll to figure out what the story offers.

I'm reminded of this one RPG I saw...  Can't remember the name of it.  But it wasn't fully made and the website was showing "sneak peeks" of it.  The character sheet has a huge area on it with dots to fill in for all your character's emotions...  So apparently in that game you weren't even allowed to decide how your character feels about stuff unless their stats said so.
I only tried The World of Synnibarr once. One of the newer members of our group brought it up in a similar conversation, and I didn't believe it could possibly be as bad as he made it out. I was kind of right...it was worse. I could launch into a review of it, but the work has already been done here. Despite appearances, that's about as close to a glowing recommendation as this game could get.

Coengar2

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« Reply #8 on: <03-16-14/1805:39> »
The sad news is that I've owned Star Wars D20, World of Synnibar and Battlelords of the 23rd Century (In fact, my 1st Ed copy of the rule book was autographed by the author)

Here's a few more bad games to send your way:

Aliens (Leading Edge Games): Based on the movie. The game mechanics came from another LEG game that never really went to far in terms of popularity and the Hit points system was way screwed up. I'm serious you could take 50,000 hp to the head for a serious wound while 26hp to the chest was fatal. Also a gunner with a machine gun and an autogyro stabilizer harness who did nothing except stand still and fire full automatic mode only had a 28% chance to hit an alien coming straight at him.

Attack of the Humans (Can't remember the publisher): Another attempt to mix horror and humor. This time the player characters are average joes hunting monsters. The characters were uninspiring, the weapons list was silly (included the weed whacker,5 iron and pruning shears) and the monsters were down right stupid. Although the undead tree weasel did live on as a running joke in several other game campaigns I've run over the years.

As I first posted there was a game called Macho Women with Guns, kinda fun if you like your cheesecake with a big bang. I just remembered that it also had a second expansion called Bat Winged Bimbos from Hell which added succubus and a minor magic system. It's just as sexist and ecchi as the rest of the series and just as dumb.
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Bewilderbeast

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« Reply #9 on: <03-18-14/1114:56> »
I played an All Flesh Must Be Eaten game once. I was excited to try a zombie doomsday scenario simulator in pen and paper form.

At one point, my character, armed with an AK-47 and specialized for automatic weapons, was standing over a completely prone, helpless zombie, firing full auto bursts from about four feet away. He missed. He missed three times.

I'm not sure if we weren't following the rules right or the GM was being a dick or I was just supremely unlucky, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. Way too complex a system for something that's only going to tell one kind of story, you know?
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CanRay

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« Reply #10 on: <03-18-14/1122:10> »
We surprised the GM with the one game of All Flesh Must Be Eaten.  We only got to choose generic average people.

Instead of charging to save the town from the horde, we stole dirt bikes and got the hell away by staying away from the roads and other congested places.

Also, I saved Doctor Who for the generation that is victorious against the Zeds.
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Reaver

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« Reply #11 on: <03-18-14/1138:25> »
Who did you save?
Where am I going? And why am I in a hand basket ???

Remember: You can't fix Stupid. But you can beat on it with a 2x4 until it smartens up! Or dies.

Backgammon

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« Reply #12 on: <03-18-14/1937:25> »
As a.. I dunno, break from regular stuff, the GM once did a "whose line is it anyway" style mission. Without telling us why (no idea it would be related to Shadowrun) he had us write, you know, like 5 nouns, 5 verbs, 5 settings, etc. Then we played shadowrun, and he would pull papers out of a bag and built the story that way. And this was totally in-campaign, events would stick.

It was pretty wacky but it worked. It was a while ago, I'm fuzzy on the details, but I remember ending up with a pet monkey called Furious George that ripped the throats off my enemies for a while, but I was never sure if he would turn on me. Unpredictable monkey.

EDIT: never noticed "monkey" is 1 k away from "money"
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CanRay

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« Reply #13 on: <03-18-14/2055:36> »
Who did you save?
Noone.  But I had a backpack full of Doctor Who on Betamax and DVD.
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Longshot23

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« Reply #14 on: <03-21-14/0634:15> »
Who did you save?
a backpack full of Doctor Who

Weird West game, anybody?  ::)  ;)

 

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