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So Bad It's Horrible/Tabletop Games: Difference between revisions
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* RTG released a ''[[Dragonball Z]]'' RPG. The execution was just as ludicrous as it sounds — stat blocks for the characters from the series had attacks that required rolling upwards of thirty dice...and that was just for the Saiyan Saga. The book itself was poorly written and poorly laid out, and it suffered from a lot of filler devoted to only marginally relevant subjects, such as customizing action figures. Three sourcebooks were released (with more cancelled), but the system was ''horribly'' suited to ''DBZ''. The creators took a system with expected stat values between 1-10 (involving rolls of only 3d6 to resolve checks) and fed stats in the ''hundreds'' into it. "Power levels" [[Did Not Do the Research|amounted to nothing more than MP]], but were used as the basis for gaining XP from a fight. Ugh.
* ''Empire Of Satanis'', a game billed as being as being a mix of Lovecraftian horror and Satanism. What it actually contains is a nonsensical, derivative setting which has a puerile take on evil and horror at the best of times when it isn't just plain stupid. What makes it particularly bizarre is the designer, one Darrick Dishaw, a member of the 'Cult of Cthulhu' who claimed that he was "kicked out of the church of Satan for being too Satanic." His primary method of advertising the game consisted of yelling about how evil and artistic it is, using sockpuppet accounts to post positive reviews and, when all else failed, ''placing a curse on the people who disliked his game.'' A review can be read [http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11696.phtml here.]
* ''[[FATAL]]'' is, hands down, the all-time reigning champion of horrible RPGs. The rulebook consists of '''900''' agonizing pages of poor mechanics, a massive number of ill-defined stats, violations of common sense, [[Refuge in Vulgarity|and a total contempt for basic human decency]]. For example, one of the most basic rolls in the game is 4d100/2-1. That's right, roll a hundred sided die four times, sum the results, divide in half and subtract one. For all ''seventeen'' of your stats, and anything else requiring a bell curve. The creators, on learning the flaw of this system, decided to "improve" it to 10d100/5-1. For the record, if you are using real dice, that requires 20 d10 rolls. Character creation takes a while in this system, especially since (at least in the first version) each stat had four sub-stats (requiring ''more than a hundred'' dice rolls), and at one point it calls for a 1d10,000,000 roll. For the record, that's either 8 d10 rolls (one per digit), or one die that would be better [[Raiders of the Lost Ark|for crushing]] [[Indiana Jones]] than for getting a random number. Practicality is thrown out the window in favor of vulgarity and offense, a quality not helped by the creators' claim that only white, non-Christian people inhabit [[The Verse]] and their constant flip-flopping between claims that it's either "[[Dead Baby Comedy|controversial]] [[Parody Retcon|humor]]" (like the set of weapons whom cursed its users into becoming implausibly distasteful racist stereotypes, that was swiftly axed in the "reprint") or [[Deliberate Values Dissonance|historically]] and mythically accurate (which, by the way, [[Dan Browned|it utterly fails at being]]). Skills tend to be pointless and mundane (urination) and statuses are often every bit as bizarre as they are tasteless (fruit growing out of one's privates, a "scratch'n'sniff" vagina appearing on one's forehead, getting aroused whenever it rains.) The sheer amount of rules is ridiculous and makes the game incredibly difficult rather than giving it any challenge; to calculate the results of ''sex'', one must '''solve quadratic equations'''. But you don't have to believe us: just see [[McLennan and Sartin's Review of F.A.T.A.L.|McLennan and Sartin's review]] [http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14567.phtml
* ''[http://web.archive.org/web/20080212094700/http://atrocities.primaryerror.net/rahowasucks.html Racial Holy War]'', another member of RPG.net's Unholy Trinity on Awful Games. The title [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|speaks for itself]], but the concept warrants a fuller explanation: in the future, the minorities have conquered the world under the guidance of their Jew masters and reduced whites to a few small resistance pockets. But now the whites are going to strike back...and you're going to play them. The material seriously reads like someone who just finished the ''Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion'' and didn't feel up to tackling ''[[Adolf Hitler|Mein Kampf]]''. That's before you get to the horrible, broken, unfinished rules, including, but not limited to ''complete omission of rules regarding player-character attack resolution.''<ref>In short: you can't hit anything. Other gems: Players can be debilitated by body odor and will accept bribes to not attack ''during combat.''</ref>
* ''[http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_6157.html Spawn of Fashan]'' is a classic example from the early 1980s that has become one of the standards by which execrably bad [[Tabletop Games|tabletop]] RPGs are measured. It was an incomplete release — even though it had an example world, it didn't include enough in that sample for full use of the system. It took a long time to create characters and run combat because the stat tables were poorly organized and poorly labeled.
* ''[[Wraeththu]]'': The RPG [[Canon Defilement|"adaptation"]] of Storm Constantine's fantasy series about post-apocalyptic mystical mutant hermaphrodites with flower-like genitalia (no, seriously) ended up not realistically portraying the setting of the books at all, casting the player characters as [[Smug Snake|pretentious and glamorous sociopaths]], and going out of its way to be as unhelpful to the novice GM as possible. Of note are the gutwrenching mechanics: Among other transgressions, chain mail transfers a statistical immunity to flamethrowers
{{quote|'''Darren MacLennan''': I think that the next interaction between Storm Constantine and Gabriel Strange is going to involve Storm delivering a flying spin kick to Gabriel's windpipe. You could not make their work look worse if you actively tried.}}
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* ''[[Kult]]''. Scrye magazine once published a checklist of the game and its sole expansion "for when the subpoena comes". The game featured art that stretches the meaning of [[Gorn]]. Instead of being turned sideways, (which was copyrighted) cards would be placed face down...with counters already on them...so you'd better remember what the text on that card was!
* ''[[Spellfire]]'', a CCG based on ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' made in the [[Follow the Leader]] rush after ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' popularized the concept of collectible card games. Unfortunately, several factors helped kill the game — bad rules; artwork recycled from Dragon Magazine and old book covers; and very rare/powerful figures and items whose art were ''photographs'' of dressed-up employees, mundane items, and/or poorly made models. When your cards being as flimsy as photo paper is the '''least''' of your concerns, you know you're in trouble.
* In comparison, ''Super Nova'' was benign. Players drew from a single communal deck, but there was originally [[Unwinnable|no win condition]]...which was [http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Chort/SuperNova/part1.html#winning fixed in errata.] The artwork wasn't very good either.
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