worst game mechanic ever

[Rob Lang]

[kumakami]

in the USA we call it the IRS.....all that paper to tell you nothing about the rules you need to use

[Evil_Lawyer]

I doubt I can match the sheer cumbersome of 5000 pts to spend on a cross referenced childhood, but Exalted sometimes does it for me

I need to add this attribute modifier, to that situational modifer to this weapon mod and so on ad nauseum till you realise you need a wheelbarrow just to hold the D10's neccessary to make one roll.

4th Edition DnD has a lot of tactical intereaction on a battleboard....okay great if you like that thing, but absolutely NO basis for social interaction or talking your way out of a fight.... "Scuse me, the Lich upstairs says you all suck and he's sent us down here at wand point to tell you all to get out"

EL

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Two More concepts occurred to me - one situation with too many rules, and another with too few.

Let me pose a question - how often do satisfactory vehicle design systems show up? There are some good ones, but generally speaking, such rules are over-complicated, math heavy, and time consuming. More often then not, they lack a means to set priorities beforehand, making it very easy to arrive at a conclusion where you need to start over again because you went over price/cost/weight etc.

Mekton Zeta is a very flexible system, but if I address all the options in the tech book, robots can take over 45 min to design (that might only last about 4 turns/40 seconds in game time - combat is quick). Walking peed is mostly based on weight, (a few expensive items like trubochargers can add slightly). Adding thrusters, is nearly the last step, at which point the mech is probably rather heavy and short on spaces to place them. I've generally found that adding wings and the armor for them slows the mech down even when wings give a +2 speed boost.

GURPS and TInker's Damn are even worse, as they consider engine output, meaning you can find out your design isn't up to spec and then go back to the beginning to start over and recalculate.

Dream Pod 9 had a design system for heavy gear and Jovian Chronicles. It was one of the few times I saw a need for square and cube roots in a game, and many d20 feat style abilities (ie Haywire Resistant, Armor Crushing). To their credit, DP9 outright said that the limitation was a matter of cost - finding room and proper parts was the fictional engineer's job.

Big Eyes Small Mouth designed vehicles exactly like characters, with a few more possible attributes (humans generally aren't rated for passenger capacity...) and a higher base speed. The oddity here was that the games assumed any vehicle started out as a humanoid robot, so if you wanted to make a motorcycle, you needed to include disability level two "no arms" and probably "reduced toughness" as well. BESM also doesn't really scale well, so a several hundred meter space ship tends to only have about three times the HP as a star fighter. (Then again, this could be in line with some universes...)

One of the Best systems I've seen was in the game "Random Anime". (At least the basic game, the mecha book beta seemed to change towards a Mekton Zeta approach.) In this one you had to prioritize between Attributes, Movement, and Arsenal when you began creating the robot.

The offers several war-games for free - Full Thrust (one of my favorites), Dirtside II and Stargrunt II. At lest the first two have nice design systems for making your own units. (If fact, DS2 pretty much requires it - only a few sample units are provided.)

Going in the opposite direction, perhaps we should examine the classic Rule Zero/Golden Rule (Make up or change elements of the game as you see fit.) The intent is correct - our emphasis should be on having fun despite what the rules say. However, the point of having a book is to avoid arguments by having a printed reference. Stopping to debate can breaking the flow of the game, and there are plenty of GMs who would be reluctant to improvise (new to the game, bad sense of equipment balance, too methodical for snap judgments, etc.) Its also a little insulting to readers - "thanks for buying $60.00 of books - feel free to ignore them and play by ear".

I'd really like to see more games include an afterword, if not who chapter or series of footnotes that explains their design choices or how they came up with certain rules. This would help limit some frustration with the rules you don't like, or at least give a guideline for how to replace them.

[kumakami]

I know its been said but I've got to stress....palladium!!!

first off its the only game system I know thats got the character creation system right and the game machanics wrong....the reverse of nearly any bad game I know. The game machanic still escape me, growing in level does little to improve you...and their base setting can be described as "throw every consept in writing into a blender, hit liquify, wait 1 min, now game!"

which sucks cause I loved both TMNT and NIght Spawn...er bane (F*** you Mcfarlane)


.. I need to clone Night bane one of these days....

[SheikhJahbooty]

I like rule zero.

I know I don't include it in my own manuscripts, but that's only because I don't think it needs stating in the cinematic rules-light games I tend to write.

I remember once playing Shadowrun and I had to appeal to rule zero. It is impossible in Shadowrun to create a small remote-controlled helicopter (the kind that you occasionally see demonstrated at kiosks in indoor shopping malls), that can stick a small camera to a wall with tacky. This is something I could easily buy myself and set up, walk into a room and use my helicopter to place some tiny cameras in innocuous places around a room, but according to the rigger book, such a thing was beyond the technological capabilities of Shadowrun's 2050. But AI is fine, just cube the proposed intelligence value of the remote and multiply that by the nuyen constant, bla bla bla...

But rule zero - "C'mon GM, just give me the tech." - "Yeah, sure."

And often I find that those who have the biggest problem with rule zero are the same people who are most into Ron Edward's Big Model thingie. It's just another example of their hypocrisy. GNS says nothing about rules and everything about experience. Supposing that hit points help you address a narrative premise and you want to include them as a house rule, if I smugly tell you good luck having fun with your broken version of my game, I'm just being a jerk. It's as if we learned nothing from how stupid and selfish Gygax looked back in the early days of D&D. "Everyone playing this game agrees that the thing we find most fun is telling an interesting story, so to that end I'm going to insist that everyone play with the rules that help me focus on the story, and if your group finds slightly different rules helps you better, go play a different game, because this game can't have house rules."

I've gotten so sick of that dictatorial attitude towards RPG design that I'm becoming uninterested in games that are under a closed copyright. "You want to run a fantasy campaign in which the characters slowly learn that they arrived on their world from outer space and what they think of a magic is actually the remains of a super advanced construction system to help the settlers establish safe habitats? You want to use a closed rules system? The problem is, if we put a campaign guide up on Lulu so we can have a physical book of our game at the table for reference or to show new players, we can get in trouble for violating the copyright."

But to end on a more positive note, if a game has an unstated rule zero (or is unofficially open, like ORE iirc), just because the people who made it are cool, that's good enough for me.