Broken games?

[Guts]

What games are absolutely broken in your opinion? Like in, say, "This is a Supers game" and nothing the game does actually delivers anything resembling Supers. That kind of stuff.

Can you remember some you have read or played that's like that, and why?

[Koumei]

Well RaHoWa is a racist power fantasy game in which the white people are statistically inferior to the racial stereotypes so it fails at its own ideas, it's just funny because its ideas are terrible.

There is at least one game out there that isn't actually a game, it's just a rambling set of... fragments of formulae and ideas, kind of like Time Cube, where you're left wondering if the creator is actually insane or doing a good job of pretending to be. That's a pretty good level of "broken".

The basic idea of Mage has generally been "You're a mage - a spellcaster. Now, don't cast spells. And if for whatever reason you DID cast a spell, try to hide it and explain it away in such a way that you can convince everyone you DIDN'T cast a spell and no magic happened."

[K]

I'd say that of the Storyteller games Except Werewolf don't deliver on their core premise. Vampire is a dark superheroes game and not a game about politics or personal horror. Exalted is about low-level adventures and not about epic storytelling and kingdom building. Mage is about not casting spells and not about casting spells. Wraith is about how no one is going to play Wraith because you are utterly not a playable character and no one is that emo in RL. The list goes on....

I mean, most games fail. It's easier to list the few that don't 100% fail: DnD, Shadowrun, and to a lesser degree, Palladium games that promise crazy shit and deliver crazy shit.

[Guts]

I'd say that of the Storyteller games Except Werewolf don't deliver on their core premise. Vampire is a dark superheroes game and not a game about politics or personal horror. Exalted is about low-level adventures and not about epic storytelling and kingdom building. Mage is about not casting spells and not about casting spells. Wraith is about how no one is going to play Wraith because you are utterly not a playable character and no one is that emo in RL. The list goes on....

Don't know if I'd call them broken but yeah, they have big problems in my book. I've heard Vampire 5e is the first to actually deliver on the personal horror, but I couldn't play it yet.

I mean, most games fail. It's easier to list the few that don't 100% fail: DnD, Shadowrun, and to a lesser degree, Palladium games that promise crazy shit and deliver crazy shit.

Don't know, I find it hard to find a 100% fail game. Most have problems and can be improved, sure, but I honestly can't remember one that's totally broken. Shadowrun and Palladium also have their share of problems but I also wouldn't call them completely broken. If you ignore the most baroque Shadowrun subsystems and stick to the basic resolution it runs fine in my experience.

[Stahlseele]

The Mechwarrior RPG / A time of war or however it is called nowadays.
The Character Creation is completely ass backwards and you will end up with something that is not even remotely connected to being able to do what you want that character to do . .
And the resolution mechanic is bad as well because they try to make it compatible with the CBT Wargame as well . .

[deaddmwalking]

We know it's a fallacy to say that a game 'works' because a competent GM can make it work - the game isn't doing any of the heavy lifting. But it is also true that even if a game is completely broken, a competent GM can PROBABLY make it function.

[Guts]

I agree with you there, Deaddmwalking. D&D and Shadowrun hit the nail in that respect for e.g., with easy and clear play structures. But lots of games from the 90s seem to fail in this respect (Vampire and Unknown Armies come to mind). Why is that?

I don't remember any recent game failing in this, though. *Fake edit: I lie, Numenera felt like that to our group.

The Mechwarrior RPG / A time of war or however it is called nowadays.
The Character Creation is completely ass backwards and you will end up with something that is not even remotely connected to being able to do what you want that character to do . .
And the resolution mechanic is bad as well because they try to make it compatible with the CBT Wargame as well . .

Oh man, I hear you. Now that you cited it, yeah, I think Mechwarrior is a contender for a 100% broken game. Thanks for the remind.

[jt]

Cthulhutech is a bunch of character types that can't be used in the same campaign and none of which has enough material to run a campaign for and none of the mechanics work either and it also finds other novel ways to be garbage on top of all of that.

[Libertad]

Big Eyes Small Mouth is meant to be an all-inclusive multi-genre anime system but whose dice-rolling system has scaling issues and it's way too easy to accidentally make a wildly broken character to one extreme or another. The ability to deal massive damage outpaces the ability to take it, resulting in some extreme cases of Rocket Launcher Tag than the cool drawn-out shonen battles an anime system should emulate.[/b]

[Leress]

Big Eyes Small Mouth is meant to be an all-inclusive multi-genre anime system but whose dice-rolling system has scaling issues and it's way too easy to accidentally make a wildly broken character to one extreme or another. The ability to deal massive damage outpaces the ability to take it, resulting in some extreme cases of Rocket Launcher Tag than the cool drawn-out shonen battles an anime system should emulate.[/b]

+1

That game system is a big contender for a Failure in Game Design thread.

[obexpe]

Well if we're going to operate under the broad assumption that any game which fails to live up to it's core premise is broken, literally every RPG I have ever encountered is broken.

As far as the most obviously broken games I've encountered go: Pokemon Tabletop Adventures has literally no balance in every system it implements (There is an obvious best trainer, obvious best pokemon, obvious best feats for each trainer, etc.), uses a goddamn d20 system for Pokemon which is automatically a trainwreck waiting to happen, and seems to be actively trying to totally ignore the premise of Pokemon. On top of this the rulebook is so poorly written that I thoroughly believe no group has ever played the game as was actually intended.

[Guts]

What are the usual problems that such games tend to present in your opinion?

Lack of a structure of play is one of them, I think.

Which is the case of Vampire the Masquerade IMO. It seems the devs created a cool setting & splats plus a resolution system but never told anyone what players are supposed to do with those in a clear and unambiguous manner. In other words, no structure/method was ever provided to tie those elements together into a functional game. Its like VtM lacks the "Run" part of Shadowrun.

Curiously, I see lots of other games from the 90s that do that. It seems the 2000s changed that, with D&D 3e/d20 and light-/Forge/indie-games all presenting those missing structures. It's like the 90s was the fluff-decade, and the 00s was the actual play-decade, if that makes sense.

[shinimasu]

Mutants and Masterminds
I don't know that it necessarily fails to deliver on its premise, but the amount of times a GM needs to say "no not like that, the game breaks when you do that" during character creation is staggeringly high.

[FatR]

Mouse Guard was the only game I've ever played or run that had literally non-functional rules, that is, rules which could produce a divide by zero situation naturally (it is possible for both sides to achieve win conditions in a conflict simultaneously, which is ok in a duel to death which authors clearly had in mind, but not at all in every other form of conflict, where goals may be easily defined as mutually incompatible).

As about the games where rules technically worked but produced results different from those intended or appropriate for the supposed genre, this is true for most TTRPGs.

[Stahlseele]

A complete and utter disregard for fact checking, making sure fluff and crunch mesh in a nice way . .
Trying to shoehorn it into something completely different and trying to make it compatible through game mechanics that simply do not work for this kind of game.
No understanding of how a character generation system should work and why it should work that way.
Trying to force a specific premise on to the players through attemts of usually poorly thought out "balancing".

[jt]

What are the usual problems that such games tend to present in your opinion?

I think you correctly identified missing structure as the biggest one. What do the characters actually do? On the second session? When the GM is running low on inspiration?

Most games that aren't trying to be D&D fall over here. Dungeon crawls are a strong enough concept that even bad D&D clones don't have this problem. (Instead I see them fail by referencing rules that don't exist. Even 5E does it.)

Dogs In The Vinyard managed to structure a game around marital disputes and exorcisms so it can't be that hard. I don't think I've seen a game structured around Scooby Doo mysteries, or shounen anime monster of the week plots, even though those seem like obvious easy structures. Shadowrun is of course structured around heists (runs), which seems like it should be more popular.

Pokemon Tabletop Adventures really is as bad as obexpe says, yet I've heard of lasting campaigns in it, because anyone who has seen the Pokemon anime can figure out how to write a hundred adventures.

[Guts]

JT, perhaps the problem with structures were the non-combat based / more social themes that eventually appeared? The farther from the wargaming roots, the longer it took to authors to create solutions?

VtM and Unknown Armies come to mind as examples of games with themes strongly directed at social interaction but with little structure to support that, which resulted in the notorious "Supers by night" mode of play. As no structure was provided, players resorted to what they knew at the time.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Pokemon Tabletop Adventures really is as bad as obexpe says, yet I've heard of lasting campaigns in it, because anyone who has seen the Pokemon anime can figure out how to write a hundred adventures.

Pokemon Tabletop Adventures is literally the TTRPG I've played the second most amount of times, after 3.5/Tome D&D (does that count as one game?). I can confirm that the rules are a total mess but every game I've played has been a blast (although I don't think anyone would dispute that broken games can still be fun, it just doesn't make them "not broken").

Posted a couple of them in In The Trenches (does this count as self-promotion? I am shameless.)
First game
Second game

I actually might play another game with Shrapnel and another member of our gaming group in the future.

[jt]

JT, perhaps the problem with structures were the non-combat based / more social themes that eventually appeared? The farther from the wargaming roots, the longer it took to authors to create solutions?

I think the problem was more that D&D did it so well that people didn't realize that having a basic default adventure was so important. Non-fantasy combat-oriented games still fall over due to lack of structure. I've seen a lot of martial arts games that fail to show up how to set up a monster of the week / arrogant kung fu guy of the week, or superhero games that don't give enough rules for how a super villain plot of the week is structured for you to actually interact with it.

If it's combat-oriented you can at least shoehorn it into a dungeon crawl, but the Justice League doesn't actually spend long stretches of time fighting their way through the Joker's warehouse full of traps, so it feels weird.

My Little Pony has a good structure for a social game - someone's going to have a problem, you'll help them out, and by the end you're all going to learn something about friendship. You could also make something like Seinfeld, where all the PCs are friends with a Kramer-esque character who gets everyone wrapped up in a dumb scheme every session.