This'll be a work in progress, so let's start with the low hanging fruit first.

In Nomine:

Horrific core book editing. Pain in the ass to find anything as a new player, typos, cross-chapter embedded info, etc.

A LOT of Do-It-Yourself creation for mundane world objects. Extra weapons, skills, human corporeal-familiarity advantages, etc.

Waaay too many Check Digit tables in early books. A great idea best left to GM discretion, not defined mechanics.

Dissonance calculation is overly complex and in the end provides little usable GM info. There should've been a gradated setting ratio for increased encounter probability. Also the math ends up with areas so small as to be negligible.

Requires intense GM oversight for character creation. Not only should powers not be mixed and matched without discretion during char-gen, but not all PCs or NPCs can play together without contrivance.

Further, campaign long parties that can never separate longer than going to the bathroom need not apply. Your D&D dungeon crawl, WW coterie pack, etc. play style fits either as a short term fling, a joke, or a terribly strained collection of contrivances. Does not play well with gestalt style play.

Ethereals were squeezed in by Borgstrom design in a way like sardines go with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Crazy, beautiful, almost incoherent; magically translated by a co-author so strongly grounded in mechanics and setting that it just. might. work.

Kyriotates might actually be unplayable for the vast majority of tables. Scratch that. They are unplayable for the vast majority of GMs and players. Too much head explodey built-in for most people. ("I'm gonna roleplay a sparrow across town, the shower figment of a dreaming woman dreaming of her morning shower, and the elevator in a downtown highrise -- all at the same time!")

Quote from: Novastar;626823Let's see...

Palladium game lines are a blast to read, fun concepts, wedded to a game system that feels like pulling teeth. Palladium works as a "rules-lite/rules-medium" system, but as it's gotten older, it's getting bogged down trying to go "rules-heavy".

Beat me to it. What the Palladium house system needs isn't so much a new edition or a revision, as clarification and pruning. Disparate rulings can be seen in different games, and even in different books in the same game line. The core of the system is rock solid, almost OSR-ish in its closeness to TSR-era D&D.

Also, tables. Palladium badly needs tables for skill levels and hand-to-hand combat modifiers. You know, like they had back in 1e PFRPG and stopped doing for no good reason at all.

Most versions of D&D seem to be built around a small level range where casters and warriors can both provide relevant assistance in a fight, before which casters are glorified flashlights and after which warriors are only useful when enemies have magic resistance.
That this never starts at first level is, to put it gently, an Issue.

Exalted.  Oh, boy.  Most entire interplay mechanics are flawed at the base, and need be cut off at the root : Mass Combat is incomprehensible, Social Combat allows casual mind control or requires you to kill anyone that talks to you, and Craft is simultaneously boring and tedious.  Grappling is simple, and also prone to the most overpowered and unfixable builds in the game.  The basic combat system itself can work in some situations, but the line and especially its print-book components show serious signs of uncoordinated rush, including at least one author that was told to write mechanics without having access to the core book.  Spells and Charms are supposed to be a very technically specific thing, and authors ended up giving dozens of conflicting definitions to terms like "Mortal" or "Attack".  Charm quality varies so dramatically that it took two-hundred pages of errata to get things into a remotely workable order.  The modern team has gotten a lot better-organized, so I'm holding out hope for E3, however.

And there's the fluff, which is supposed to be (and usually manages to be) the strength of the game.  When it works, you have a fascinating setting like Malfeas or Yu-Shan or even Luthe or Halta, or character types that have a nuclear-powered hammer and a lot of problems that look like screws.

  When it doesn't, you have Ma-Ha-Suchi, who, along with his 30,000-strong beastman army, is supposed to represent a specific and monstrous threat to the Scavenger Lands, and will get spanked if his troops get in unlead combat with most any of the places he's threatening.  Or if a lone Raksha, or anyone that can Wyld Stunt, attacks his Wyld-assimilated troops in the Wyld Zone they're standing in and dependent on for food.  And he's spent 700 years to do this, when he could have just screwed a herd of goats as a hobby and spent the rest of his time doing something more effective than raping random peasants and cannon fodder soldiers.  But rape and cannibalism are like salt, so they add flavour to the story.  Right?  Nevermind that you need substance to the soup, first.

Quote from: Crabbyapples;626810Pendragon...The child death rate is borked. While I understand a majority of children died before coming of age the medieval era, but it's really a lot of bookkeeping to keep track of which children dies from an illness each year.

The latest word from Greg Stafford (either online or in the Book of the Entourage, I forget which) is that you should only roll for child mortality up through age 5. That would definitely ease things a bit.

(That's actually one of my pet peeves, though--Stafford's constantly tinkering with the rules, which is great, but it's a bit like having a GM who's always introducing new house rules into their game.)

My main beef with Pendragon (maybe not my favorite, but definitely solid Top Three) is that its dice-rolling mechanics are so wonky. Sometimes a natural 20 is a disaster, sometimes it's a critical hit. Or, say you get a bonus to your skill; you then roll a number equal to your original skill before the bonus. This would've been a critical if you hadn't gotten the bonus! Or how a bonus to skill translates to a bonus to your dice roll if it takes the skill over 20. My players have the hardest time wrapping their heads around this. "Wait, sometimes a bonus modifies my skill and sometimes it modifies my dice roll?"

I love the system in all its wonky glory, but it can be a bitch to teach to new players.

Cortex+ & Don't Rest Your Head: Too many dice.

Apocalypse World: Not enough 'gamist' elements.

AD&D/D&D.  It's too difficult to represent a lower magic S&S style on a per-character basis.

That's really my only main complaint.  It can be worked around with extreme effort, but anything else usually takes just minor tweaking to accomplish what you want.  It really is the toolbox of games -- that's why I love it so much.   Mage:the Ascension on a lite tone as a D&D casting system would be...obnoxiously fun if it could be relatively balanced.

Continuum and Narcissist

For being amazing games about time travel, rendered unplayable by book-keeping.

Also Narcissist was never published, crying shame.

Fantasy Craft: The magic system is still a little too generic and the magic supplement I hope will fix this (Spellbound) is too long in coming.

Leagues of Adventure/HEX: Compared to bennies/fate/action points of other systems, style point are a bit too weak requiring the GM to spend even more time remembering to award them.

Pathfinder: Is like its big brother in good and bad ways. The main bad way being character wealth by level is too much of a player entitlement and the resulting magic item economy makes some game setups untenable.

D&D 3.x: See pathfinder

FATE/Spirit of the Century/Bulldogs/Diaspora: Too many people don't "get" aspects.

Traveller: Doesn't use a 3D universe.

D&D 3.5E
- Emphasis on miniatures
- Abstruse rules for combat maneuvers (the unfamous "grapple") etc.
- No "Disadvantages" (negative feats, even if UA patched it a bit with the Flaws system)
- Cool fluff not supported by sound mechanics (look at The Complete Divine for a sad example)
- Idiotic and meaningless "spend XPs for...!" rules. I PLAY SINCE I WAS 14 AND I NEVER USED XPS, WIZARDS!

My players don't give a flying fuck about balance, so I was never bothered by it ^^

TSR-era D&D/AD&D

Why, oh why can they not develop a good multi-class system?  The closest they ever came was making the Fighter/Magic-user hybrid a whole race of its own (Elf).  Even then, the Elf only worked in the B/X era, being underpowered in the Rules Cyclopedia and simply surreal in the older versions.  

Think very carefully about the rates of magic item placement that the game seems to suggest.  It works fine with a lot less and tends to avoid odd problems in doing so.  In particular, when a player adorned with magic items dies, the rest of the party has a windfall.  Helped somewhat by inheritance rules present in some versions of the game.  

Ability score generation.  Could you just pick a method and stick with it?  I am happy with 3d6 in order.  If that is too harsh, there are a number of small tweaks.  Do we really need a dozen methods, with little evidence of what makes sense?

Marvel SAGA is fantastic.

Except for the handful of busted powers, horrible character creation system and awful, completely out of step with the genre, advancement system.

Still the most fun I've ever had with a superhero RPG.

Hero System:
Much of what's been described with GURPS, except I always found HERO easier.  The corebook(s) cannot actually stop a bullet, but they can at least slow a 9mm.  I only started to become disenchanted once 6th Edition came out, and at least as many rules and stats were added in as were taken out to "simplify" things.  The deciding vote was cast by my gaming group, which has been playing since Champions 4th Edition came out, when they saw my gigantic copy of Volume 1 and my slightly-less-gigantic volume 2 and said, "screw this."

As estar says, hopefully making Champions Complete as a standalone book will resolve some of that issue.

JG

Anima: Beyond Fantasy has absolutely atrocious organization and more than a few pieces of entirely inappropriately sexxed up artwork.

Rolemaster has similarly atrocious organization, compounded by the fact that 2e never fully convinced itself it was an actual game instead of being a disparate set of supplements for use with AD&D. Also, while I appreciate being given options, dumping 15 mutually exclusive optional ways to handle a situation that weren't even slightly playtested may or may not be better than presenting only like 4 of them that were... but it's a complete bitch to try to select what you're actually using for the campaign.

Tenra Bansho Zero spends too much being up in your face about the SUPER RAD HARDCORE OPTIONS LIKE BEING A HUMAN SOUL ENCASED IN AN INVINCIBLE SHELL OF IRON WITH DRILL ARMS, OR SOMEONE WHO HOSTS A COLONY OF BUGS INSIDE THEIR BODY YOU CAN PUNCH PEOPLE WITH that it makes it hard for folks to realize that those aren't the only options and it is in fact perfectly possible to play an entirely "normal" human being and have it roughly balanced.

Dragon Warriors was... no, I can't actually think of anything really wrong with it

Mekton Zeta has some pretty bad cases of maths breaking down, and would have benefitted from a simplified creation system. Something like Tactical Display damage system but for EVERYTHING. Also, one stat for all combats everywhere ever was a little bit lame.

Rolemaster.

Tied for my favorite game with a few others....but....

Too cumbersome a system for my taste in my old age.

Love the skill system, maneuver system, critical hits, spell system.

But the addition...it burns!

GURPS.  Each version of it grew another core book.  First, Man to Man was a single book.  Then renamed to GURPS with more stuff added.  By 3rd edition (revised), two compendium books were needed on top of the core book.  4th edition is now two heavy core books (what's with the heavy paper guys?!  My Chthonian Stars book is just as thick and is very light to hold without wrist sprain).

Even though I like how strength, fatigue, hit-points, and health work now in 4th edition, I've since learned that I don't like hit-points.  GURPS is a great set of rules if you are designing a computer simulation game like Fallout 3 or Skyrim.  But I don't want to play GURPS manually with paper and dice.