[prismite]

As I think back on all the games I have played, I find at least one good thing about them. That being said ... the worst I ever played had to be "Rogue Trader". There are multiple reasons, but it boils down to a day where everyone at our table was rolling high 90's in percentile game where you want to roll under your current skill. The game starts you off in the 30's and 40's on average, so 90 is hella-bad.

The GM had to manually step in and alter our 'destiny' more than half a dozen times in the opening scene of the game as we tried to navigate through an asteroid field. So lame.

[ChewyGranola]

None of my games have ever really been dumb bad.

The closest I got was on purpose. We played a single session of Dudes of Legend from White Wolf.

The characters were the following:

M!-Bop Winnebago: Wandering desert warrior who had a laser beard, a liquid metal honey badger mount and a energy staff.
Priscilla Dangerously: Macho, tattooed Girl Scout whose main weapons were explosive cookie dough and detachable razor merit badges.
The Pun-asist: This is a superhero who can't stop making puns. Deadly puns. That's his only super power.
Tex: The most stereotypical cowboy ever. He had six-shooters than never ran out of ammunition, a handlebar mustache that doubled as a weapon and a Hat of Infinite Holding.
Kiki: Cheerleader ninja who could envelop enemies in her vagina and occasionally gave birth to strange monsters.

The group was working for the President, hunting down Black Hitler (stole that from Jimmy Kimmel's Movie: the Movie). As it turned out, Hitler is actualyl a symbiote that makes people racist and evil, and the weak spot is (obviously) the little bit sticking out of the nose that resembles a small mustache. The characters tracked Black Hitler to the Wild West, where they picked up Tex and fought off a town of super zombies and flying Nazi saucers from Mars. They then tracked Hitler to the Time of Dinosaurs. Sadly, in addition to flying Nazi saucers from Mars, the Hitler Symbiote had reproduced and infected an army of t-rex's.

We picked the traits out of a hat and didn't bother with character sheets. The players just had to describe a crazy action and the better the group thought it was the more dice they got. It was a fun night.

[FrostyTheDragon]

RIFTS...completely gonzo setting, with absolutely no balance (SDC vs MDC) but had an awesome time playing it...go figure

I'll extend this one to Palladium in general, as I've been involved in one campaign and one isolated adventure with the Heroes Unlimited and After The Bomb (which is what "TMNT and Other Strangeness" turned into post-license) variants respectively.  "No sense of balance" can actually get entertaining if the GM and players know how to approach it, but something about the Palladium rules seems... either ridiculously incomplete or overly convoluted, to the point where I'd argue that substantial house rules are more or less mandatory.

Maybe I'm not reading into the rules enough.  Oh well.



There IS one tabletop game I've played that is dumber, but it's so bad I refuse to name it openly.  I think the words "egregious and repulsive" describe it well enough to be honest.

[MijRai]

RIFTS...completely gonzo setting, with absolutely no balance (SDC vs MDC) but had an awesome time playing it...go figure

I'll extend this one to Palladium in general, as I've been involved in one campaign and one isolated adventure with the Heroes Unlimited and After The Bomb (which is what "TMNT and Other Strangeness" turned into post-license) variants respectively.  "No sense of balance" can actually get entertaining if the GM and players know how to approach it, but something about the Palladium rules seems... either ridiculously incomplete or overly convoluted, to the point where I'd argue that substantial house rules are more or less mandatory.

Maybe I'm not reading into the rules enough.  Oh well.



There IS one tabletop game I've played that is dumber, but it's so bad I refuse to name it openly.  I think the words "egregious and repulsive" describe it well enough to be honest.

Is it an acronym that starts with F and ends with L?

[FrostyTheDragon]

Is it an acronym that starts with F and ends with L?

Actually, no, but thanks for reminding me that there are in fact worse RPGs than the ones I've ever played.


I'll add in a hint that when I said "egregious and repulsive" last time, that phrase is actually in the subtitle of the game itself.  No hints beyond this, though - the game I refer to is one of those parody ones that I doubt anyone would care about anyway.

[Sendaz]

Which is why I always preferred Greg's novels to his RPGs.

[MijRai]

I need to find a MurderHobos game sometime.  A great parody, right there.

[iamfanboy]

Ah, Rifts - I had some fun in that, ran three groups simultaneously with around 25 people in them, all against each other. When that campaign wrapped up, someone (who was sick of me talking about how Rifts was filled with munchkin characters) volunteered to run a game, and wanted us all to make the most munchkin characters we could scrounge up.

Then he said, "Oh, if you find something neat on the Internet (this was '98 by the way), run it by me, and I'll probably let you do it."

It got BAD, real quick.


I'd have to put a vote in for GURPS, actually - GURPS. The name of the game even SOUNDS like something you'd do while bent over a toilet. It's a rules-heavy mess.

One of my friends was running a superhero game, and I wanted to be a mage. "Okay," he said, "here's the book!" I larned me the rules, and just starting out my character had some 30 spells, most of which he had an 85% chance of succeeding on with only a single point in 'em. Kinda bad, having that many 'powers' when the other players only had five.

Though looking at some of the other games suggested here, GURPS isn't THAT bad.

[Imveros]

Ah, Rifts - I had some fun in that, ran three groups simultaneously with around 25 people in them, all against each other. When that campaign wrapped up, someone (who was sick of me talking about how Rifts was filled with munchkin characters) volunteered to run a game, and wanted us all to make the most munchkin characters we could scrounge up.

Then he said, "Oh, if you find something neat on the Internet (this was '98 by the way), run it by me, and I'll probably let you do it."

It got BAD, real quick.


I'd have to put a vote in for GURPS, actually - GURPS. The name of the game even SOUNDS like something you'd do while bent over a toilet. It's a rules-heavy mess.

One of my friends was running a superhero game, and I wanted to be a mage. "Okay," he said, "here's the book!" I larned me the rules, and just starting out my character had some 30 spells, most of which he had an 85% chance of succeeding on with only a single point in 'em. Kinda bad, having that many 'powers' when the other players only had five.

Though looking at some of the other games suggested here, GURPS isn't THAT bad.

I played a single game of GURPS Space several months ago. It took me like 10 hours to make a chief engineer and when game started we renamed it Excel spreadsheet 2250... Everything action made me feel like an accountant and not like Scotty, the character i modeled the PC after...

[iamfanboy]

I know. It's all accounting, no gaming - Accountant: The Accountening would be more fun, because at least there's the POSSIBILITY of things like elves and vampires and werewolves and Chun Li existing somewhere out there...


For FUN-fun, I've really enjoyed old BESM - before the d20 bug infected it. Paranoia is good, but the GM really has to handle the rules. I'm actually quite liking D&D 5th - the advantage/disadvantage mechanic is so intuitive that you find yourself WANTING to use it as much as possible.

Lately, I've been liking Savage Worlds a lot. It's one of two so-called 'universal' games that passed my superhero test, where I try to make four characters: The 1930s Shadow (to see how the game handles ordinary humans), Dr Manhattan (to see how godlike omniscience is handled), Jubilee (to see how it handles juveniles), and the Tick (for goofiness!) It's simple, it's cinematic, and it runs smoooth...

[Sendaz]

I know. It's all accounting, no gaming - Accountant: The Accountening would be more fun, because at least there's the POSSIBILITY of things like elves and vampires and werewolves and Chun Li existing somewhere out there...

Sounds like a session of Papers & Paychecks™


Tim, roll to see if your accountant spots the error on the invoice.

Does the bonus from my Cerebral Boosters count?


Roddy, the vending machine makes a grinding sound as it tries to dispense your candy bar and freezes up, your treat hanging barely onto the end of the feeder coil. What do you do?

My orc  has 5 Str  and 2 Agil so I am going to try and give the machine a light shake and see if we can dislodge it without wrecking the machine again.
I can't afford another one coming out of my paycheck. 

Dan, the manager has called you in to fix the broken cupholder on his computer and he has picked up another couple viruses you are going to need to sort out. Seems he fell for the 413 again.

GAH!  How the hell did he ever make it to manager and I keep telling him he can't be opening unchecked files coming out of Lagos like that....

[iamfanboy]

I know. It's all accounting, no gaming - Accountant: The Accountening would be more fun, because at least there's the POSSIBILITY of things like elves and vampires and werewolves and Chun Li existing somewhere out there...

Sounds like a session of Papers & Paychecks™


Tim, roll to see if your accountant spots the error on the invoice.

Does the bonus from my Cerebral Boosters count?


Roddy, the vending machine makes a grinding sound as it tries to dispense your candy bar and freezes up, your treat hanging barely onto the end of the feeder coil. What do you do?

My orc  has 5 Str  and 2 Agil so I am going to try and give the machine a light shake and see if we can dislodge it without wrecking the machine again.
I can't afford another one coming out of my paycheck. 

Dan, the manager has called you in to fix the broken cupholder on his computer and he has picked up another couple viruses you are going to need to sort out. Seems he fell for the 413 again.

GAH!  How the hell did he ever make it to manager and I keep telling him he can't be opening unchecked files coming out of Lagos like that....

As always, Robot Chicken beats us to the punch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKrUug8lHjA

[SlowDeck]

I think my face-to-face group managed to top the stupidity last time.

We were trying New World of Darkness, under the God Machine Chronicle rules. One of the characters was a male stripper-turned-werewolf.

His reaction to the first angel we encountered? He began to do a strip tease, and ended by, um, doing a version of Leek Spin... without a leek... And then, when the Storyteller's sanity rejected visualizing it, the player demonstrated...

That is quite possibly the only time the Expression skill has been successfully used to cause aggravated damage.

[Eurydice]

Someone decided to try out a vampire tabletop rp. They turned it into Smuttiest, stupidest, rubbish I've ever rolled a dice to and you couldn't really do much with it. Unfortunately I can't remember the name.