Quote from: RPGPundit;421831Yes on Blue Rose and on most Forge games, but to be honest nothing has bothered me more in reading tone than Savage Worlds. Its just fucking unbearable.

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I had this same problem with the Revised Edition. But the Explorer Edition reads a lot better. It actually surprised me.

I hate it when the author denigrates some other game, goes on about how his game 'fixes' it or is somehow superior... even with games I like, talking about games I don't like... I don't like that shit.

I guess I'd have to add pretty much every WW book ever in terms of godawful tone. Its pretentiousness dripping off every page.

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Quote from: RPGPundit;421938I guess I'd have to add pretty much every WW book ever in terms of godawful tone. Its pretentiousness dripping off every page.

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Let us not forget the lousy pieces of genre fiction, with which the rulebooks are laced, like bad acid.

Another vote for Burning Wheel. Crane's self-congratulation knows no bounds, and certainly not the bounds of good taste.

What also irks me are when the author inserts (imaginary) examples of play and adds, again, congratulatory adjectives to the DM and players:

Then Susie adds [the new mechanic just discussed] to the game. The other players are very excited and instantly like the idea.

Ken Hite's very prone to this.

Quote from: Windjammer;421966What also irks me are when the author inserts (imaginary) examples of play and adds, again, congratulatory adjectives to the DM and players:

Then Susie adds [the new mechanic just discussed] to the game. The other players are very excited and instantly like the idea.

Ken Hite's very prone to this.

Yes, that's annoying. I had not consciously associated it with Hite, but, it's now a "once seen it cannot be unseen" thing.

Quote from: Levi Kornelsen;421582You missed Aria, then?

Because it was mind-burningly terrible at just this.  I cannot do it justice.

Heh, actually no I didn't. Just blotted it out of my memory...until now. Thanks Levi!

Quote from: jgants;421337Oh, I agree with you there.  I couldn't stand anything Gygax himself wrote - wasn't worth the effort.  I strongly disliked the 1e AD&D books - I'm a firm Moldvay/Metzner (for basic) and Cook (for 2e) fan.  I also loathe the whole "Saint Gygax" phenomenon (along with its sister phenomenon - "O/AD&D was a pure, never-changing game of perfection that everyone loved") that has sprang up in recent years (that conveniently forget how both Gygax and AD&D used to be derided by a significant majority of people in the hobby throughout the mid-80s and 90s).

Yeah. Remember back in the day, when Gygax wrote bizarre articles about how if you were playing Traveler you were stealing from him? Or his tirade in the AD&D DMG about how no player would ever want to play a non-human for any reason other than power gaming shenanigans?

The guy was an asshole. He calmed down eventually, and near the end he and Arneson seemed to make peace with each other and the fact that D&D had moved on. But back in the 70s and 80s, he was a major tool. It drove me to 3rd party D&D variants like RuneQuest and Warlock right quick.

QuoteStill, I don't care for Crane or his style of writing.  Having things like calling the dice "traitors" and whatnot was like claws on a chalkboard for me.

It worked very well in Mouseguard. In Burning Wheel it just comes off like a flaming bag of dog poop. Sometimes writers mature, other times they just find a genre that is more suited to their style.

-Frank

EGG's essays from the early 80s are an excellent cautionary tale on how letting success go to your head can mess with your sense of judgement. They are also a treasure trove of logical fallacies and arguments resting on a false "game designer authority".

Warlock was horrible, though. One of the first attempts to "fix D&D" by replacing the mechanics that worked with mechanics that didn't. In "rationalising" D&D, Warlock turns it into something an unimaginative tech student with a slide rule up his ass might come up with. Lots of l'art-pour-l'art complexity, zero creativity. I own an early (and apparently very rare/unique) manuscript version I won on an eBay auction, and apart from the historical curio/collector value, it is basically worthless. Another example of the hobby gone wrong - just a different one.

Quote from: RPGPundit;421831Yes on Blue Rose and on most Forge games, but to be honest nothing has bothered me more in reading tone than Savage Worlds. Its just fucking unbearable.

RPGPundit

The SWEX did away with that, IIRC.

I was also bothered by Savage Worlds. I never liked that little clown graphic.
Luke Crane's self-congratulatory tone in BW bothered me, but Blake Mobley's tone in Metascape never did. It was certainly worse. Maybe it stepped over the line into self-parody, intentional or not. I don't know. Maybe he seemed a little more genuine.

Quote from: Phantom Black;422194The SWEX did away with that, IIRC.

Too little, too late.

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The free version of Barbarians of Lemuria. The game itself didn't really appeal to me. But the authors tone down right cheesed me off. This whole 'if you want a backpack full of equipment, this game isn't for you' attitude was openly insulting to the reader.

For 'old school' charm I would pick Mazes & Minotaurs.

Quote from: Tetsubo;422716The free version of Barbarians of Lemuria. The game itself didn't really appeal to me. But the authors tone down right cheesed me off. This whole 'if you want a backpack full of equipment, this game isn't for you' attitude was openly insulting to the reader.

Simon W's kind of a whiny bitch. I called his game a "heartbreaker" and he said that I wasn't qualified to make that judgment because I'd only read the free version of his game, and not the paid update to it.