FATE.  Wushu.

And I think I agree with Daniel about M&M, actually.

Quote from: VectorSigma;488722Wushu.

Oh man, Wushu is a great pick.  I hardly think it actually qualifies as a game at all, yet some people think it's the best thing ever written.

I always thought the gushing that went on about Shadowrun was incredibly misplaced.  Terrible narrative voice in the rulebooks, the mishmash of D&D+(bad) Cyberpunk* went together like peanut butter and cat litter, and the BIG FIST O' DICE resolution mechanics left a lot to be desired for what was ostensibly supposed to be a fast paced game.

...


*=there are no good RPGs that set out to be specifically Cyberpunk RPGs.  At all.  Some are just less bad than others and I say that as someone who was an insufferable Cyberpunk 2020 fan for a few years.

I don't think the thread is supposed to be "rant about your least favourite game", so I'll try to summarize: M&M 2E & 3E simply do not have mechanics for most of what happens in a superhero comic.  It's an abstract version of the d20 combat system with Champions' unbalanced and broken superpower creation system tacked on.  There isn't actually a superhero game in there, which may be why the vast majority of its fans seem to be using it for some (any) other genre.

Quote from: misterguignol;488724I hardly think [Wushu] actually qualifies as a game at all, yet some people think it's the best thing ever written.

It's an important idea ("so-called 'action' games don't reward you for action stunts, they punish you less") that should have been applied to another, complete game.

Quote from: VectorSigma;488722FATE.  Wushu.

Oh yeah... they're on the list too... though I'm guessing way fewer people have heard of Wushu.

Also, Savage Worlds... not that it's a bad system, but you'd think it's the cure for cancer the way some (a lot of) folks go on about it.

Quote from: Simlasa;488733Also, Savage Worlds... not that it's a bad system, but you'd think it's the cure for cancer the way some (a lot of) folks go on about it.

Yes.

I was ready to play a game of Twilight:2000 and had a player practically insist we use SW for the rules.

I did, and regretted it.

RE: D&D being over rated. I'm tempted to agree, but then again, I suspect that just about every iteration* of the game (even those I personally dislike) has provided more people with more hours of gaming satisfaction than just about every other (non D&D) game combined. It's hard to accept that something that has delivered so much to so many for so long could be thought of as overrated.



*I'm including PF and all the other retroclones in here because they are all D&D.

None of them are necessarily bad systems or games but yeah, all iterations/clones of (A)D&D and D20 seem pretty overrated to me as well. The same goes for Savage Worlds, Fate and WoD.

Exalted I'm not so sure about. Sure, it's quite an abomination of a game but I haven't seen it get much praise except on RPGnet.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll go ahead an say Pathfinder.  I enjoyed the hell out of 3.5 but it's still a bloated mess.  PF doesn't really address the problems of 3.5 in any real way IMO.  There are times when I think people praise it just to counterbalance what they don't like about D&D 4e.  On a very personal level my gaming group consistently talks about wanting a PF game despite the fact that our last three 3.5 games were boring, frustrating, failures.

See as I see over rated, it's not just sales but expectations. Problem is I've no idea what kind expectations the community has because frankly I've never really cared what the "RPG" community as a whole does.

So from my own perspective the game I thought would be alot better than it turned out to be would have to be Shadowrun 44, the game I'm currently playing. Supposedly they were going to address a variety of known issues-poor editing, poor indexing (Something the guys at D20 deserve credit for-they can index like demons!), and the scattering of rules through out books. The idea was that the core book really would be usable as a stand alone. Except the whole time they knew they were going to follow the formula from the first three editions-core book, gun book, magic book, vehicle book, etc... and once again the rules are spread all over the place.

I'll try to stick with games I've found to be over-rated in person, as every corner of the net has its followings.

D&D is the top one for me.  Trying to get anyone to play a different fantasy game is like pulling teeth.  I would understand if D&D was really good, but to me it's always been a rather mediocre system (I like about half of the editions, avoid the other half).

Star Wars d6 comes a close second for basically the same reason - any time I want to play a science fiction game, it's impossible to get anyone to play anything else; and I find it to be a rather mediocre system overall.

Edit: Two more I could list include Paranoia (talk about one-note) and Savage Worlds (savagely bland and gimmicky, perhaps).

Quote from: jgants;488777Star Wars d6 comes a close second for basically the same reason - any time I want to play a science fiction game, it's impossible to get anyone to play anything else; and I find it to be a rather mediocre system overall.

I ran a game of it once where we retooled it to use the D6 Legend mechanics and made a couple tweaks to the Force rules (roll lowest of the relevant Force Skills instead of all the relevant ones, plus Force skill dice add directly to relevant skills rather than there being Force Powers for detecting lies, affecting weak minds, or jumping).  Suddenly the game went ten times faster and throwing the dice was exciting instead of a math chore.

It's my favorite game/system, but I'm going to go ahead and agree with 3.x/D20. 3.x was fun, but I've got some issues with the design where small fixes would have made it so much better. And as others have said, D20 was used as if it was a generic system when it really wasn't very good for that. What made D20 into the behemoth it was had less to do with the system and more to do with the support of D&D.

But then there's what Aos said. Hard to call a game overrated that got so much use and was so much fun.

Earthdawn: made out to be a game that Finally Does Legendary Fantasy Adventures Right, it was a largely boring Shadowrun-rerun. I don't begrudge anyone for enjoying it, but it just didn't do anything really special.