You liked the idea at first; but after numerous hours of gameplay, you changed your mind.

For me, it was the 2d6 Mechanic of Dungeon World / PbtA.  I thought it was as neat as could be, at first.  I thought, "Man, this is awesome!!!".  After so many turns of "success with a hitch", I burned out on it.  It's too common of a result.  2 to 6 = Failure.  7 to 9 = Success with a Hitch.  10 to 12 = Complete Success.  Every other turn, some hitch or negative consequences have to be explained and factored in.  Then I realized, why I started to not like it.  It was too much like real life.

I play RPGs for escapism, at least to an extent.  Success with a hitch, or negative circumstances; describes every day of my life.

Success with a hitch is why I dislike PbtA and the BitD games. What should be a quick encounter always turns into a struggle to deal with mounting problems. Even good GMs fall into the trap of just making the situation have more problems.

As for mechanics that I thought I would love. But ended up hating. A few for me. Sorcerer in D&D 5e sounded so neat, I can spend some extra points to cast stronger spells without meta-magic fests? That's awesome, it finally makes the sorcerers feel different then a wizard. And then I realized yea I can do this but I force the party to rest all the time and I have far less utility then the others casters. Nice.

Palladium Rifts SDC and MDC. I like the concept. Let's make certain weapons deal HUGE amounts of damage and show that off in combat. Great! But let's make every weapon but niche weapons and clubs deal that mega damage. So you don't have armor? You just die instantly. Do have armor? Don't worry you can survive a tank cannon. Have fun.

Popcorn iniative. The idea of letting the person who just finished their turn choose who goes next (bad guy of good guy), I like the concept because it makes you think it's tactical like a turn based strategy game say XCOM. But I'm reality it's just side based initiative with the draw back of people procrastinating even more. I would love to find a happy medium with it, but everytime I try it, it just feels like "we choose this order" with sometimes the players choosing to do half of their turn then let the baddies go and it becomes like a war game where you don't want to overextend so you keep swapping sides. It's just. I feel like it has potential.

Shared Narrative control between players and GMs. Like the PbtA and other "Trust me it's a story game bro" games. The idea of players moving the story forward and making bigger splashes is so nice as it saves on prep time. But in practice it never works out like that and instead normally turns into players breaking the narrative flow or just unloading all the work to the GM again and only doing anything when they are in danger.

I'm playing in a game of Forbidden Lands now, and the Willpower Point system is something I thought sounded neat at first, but I'm growing to dislike.

For those unfamiliar, FL uses d6 dice pools. 6s are successes, 1s are fails. 1s don't usually mean anything unless you decide to Push your roll (i.e., reroll the whole pool EXCEPT for any 1s). Any 1s from a Pushed roll cause damage to the Attribute used for the roll. However, each point of damage also awards the character a Willpower Point, which is needed to activate certain abilities. Sleeping heals all Attribute damage (though exceptions exist).

So basically, you need to hurt yourself in order to gain the points needed to use some of your class's core abilities. If you don't have any Willpower Points, you better make some stupid meaningless rolls, Push them, and HOPE you get a couple 1s. But because WP and damage go hand-in-hand, you don't really want the use your character's prime attribute... but the prime is going to have the higher dice pool and better odds of getting 1s. So you want to use your secondary attributes, with their lower pools. But even THAT'S a gamble, since if attribute damage equals the attribute's score, you become Broken and completely useless for at least a full day, which causes everyone to stop and wait for your stupid ass.

FFG's Star Wars games. The dice resolution system sounds good on paper, but having the dice roll "success with a side effect" or "fail with added side effect" the majority of the time gets really tiresome. It's just not fun anymore, either to play or GM. These things should be arbitrated by the GM/DM as and when necessary, IMO.

Quote from: Jam The MF on August 19, 2022, 12:32:11 AM
You liked the idea at first; but after numerous hours of gameplay, you changed your mind.

For me, it was the 2d6 Mechanic of Dungeon World / PbtA.  I thought it was as neat as could be, at first.  I thought, "Man, this is awesome!!!".  After so many turns of "success with a hitch", I burned out on it.  It's too common of a result.  2 to 6 = Failure.  7 to 9 = Success with a Hitch.  10 to 12 = Complete Success.  Every other turn, some hitch or negative consequences have to be explained and factored in.  Then I realized, why I started to not like it.  It was too much like real life.

I play RPGs for escapism, at least to an extent.  Success with a hitch, or negative circumstances; describes every day of my life.

Definitely PbtA. I think it works for short multi-session games or one shots but long campaigns can drag.

The mechanic that really bugged me was the experience system of getting XP points for playing your archetype.

In theory it encourages roleplaying but in practice it makes PCs compete with each other for the limelight. The Barbarian wants to go Berserk while the Rogue wants to solve everything in a stealthy manner. It just got very tiresome. It's a classic example of using an in game mechanic to solve an out of game problem. I.e players "not" roleplaying.

The irony is that in my experience it narrowed the scope of roleplaying and caused an ingame problem that didn't need to exist.

Experience points for failing works quite well though as it can mitigate the misery of a gaming session where you can't roll anything but trash.

The other mechanical system that I liked the sound of but didn't work for me was 2D20 in the Dune rpg.

The combining Skills and Drives (or whichever the two stat blocks are called) always had a bit of negotiating with the GM why the combination made sense which slowed the game.

Assets I liked the idea of but in practice felt far too abstracted and a bit strange.

Luckily the Dune game I played had a great GM so we still had a lot of fun. But the mechanics I was take it or leave it.

Conversely I wasn't convinced by the Numenera GM never rolls and single stat Level Stat for NPC mechanics but I've grown to quite like it, along with the use of Interventions to add excitment.

Incidentally I think Interventions for XP points/spend XP points to avoid gives many of the gaming benefits of Succeed with Complication with fewer drawbacks.

For me it's tactical encounter maps and minatures. I don't have a problem with genral encounter maps and rough positioning with minis (or other markers), but when the EXACT position is absolutely necessary because the mechanics don't allow for interpretation (IOW, why have a GM?), then my mind pulls out of roleplaying mode and switches to tactical boardgame mode. Don't misnuderstand; I enjoy tactical boardgames. but I play them quite differently than I play/run RPGs. When I'm doing tactical boardgaming, I'm very competitive and not very concerned with the fun of others--so not a great situation.

DW on paper is cool and I still quite like it but it does need a good GM that knows when to ignore some of the elements that can slow down the game.

In some of the other PBtA games, one feels like they are traveling through a quagmire. So hard to get anything done.

Attacks of Opportunity/Opportunity Attacks. These just tend to slow the fuck out of play in my experience, and IME they also tend to push play back towards tactical maps.

Hmm, the things that fit "played for hours but no longer like" is too long to list.  I'm not sure many of them fit the spirit of the question though.  It wasn't as if on most of them that was blown away and then suddenly soured.  Rather, it was that the mechanic had pros and cons from the beginning, but for what I was willing to do, it was a good fit at the time.  Nothing wrong with the mechanic, but my preferences changed. For example, I like the Hero System 3d6 roll under skill/attack mechanic for a decade because of the nature of the curve it produced.  I like it much less now--because of the nature of the curve it produces.  It's not the mechanic, it's me.

One mechanic that might fit the bill is the early Rune Quest advancement scheme, built around d100 skills and then rolling over your skill to improve it.  The higher the skill goes, the harder it is to improve.  It's got a lot to recommend, but the pros are all obvious and the cons are somewhat hidden.  Plus, the implementation in the RQ 1E an 2E started characters a bit low, and had the advancement too slow.  (This is one of the few things I can think of where Mongoose analyzed a mechanic and produced something outright superior to the source material--if I'm remembering the evolution correctly, which I might not be.)  Of course, the bigger issue is that a d100 roll under system doesn't work all that well if you let it climb too high into the upper part of the range, with advancement only a part of that problem.  It's also a little tricky to hang onto the simplicity of the mechanic while distinguishing different difficulties of certain skills, though that can be mitigated by careful curation of the skill list.  (Mongoose did a fair job of this.  The Mongoose designers did and even better job when they went their own way with Legends.)

Reaction roles in D&D 5e.  Feels like a ret-con and it lengthens combat, especially at mid and higher levels there are so many more opportunities for reaction roles

Quote from: HappyDaze on August 19, 2022, 09:01:08 AM
Attacks of Opportunity/Opportunity Attacks. These just tend to slow the fuck out of play in my experience, and IME they also tend to push play back towards tactical maps.

Agreed. They also heavily bias combat against retreat or repositioning, so they're a major contributor to D&D combat degenerating into JRPG-style hit trading.

My homebrew rule on it in recent games is that an attack of opportunity is only incurred if you try to move past an enemy that is already alert and paying attention to you.

Quote from: Visitor Q on August 19, 2022, 05:42:07 AM

Definitely PbtA. I think it works for short multi-session games or one shots but long campaigns can drag.

The mechanic that really bugged me was the experience system of getting XP points for playing your archetype.

In theory it encourages roleplaying but in practice it makes PCs compete with each other for the limelight. The Barbarian wants to go Berserk while the Rogue wants to solve everything in a stealthy manner. It just got very tiresome. It's a classic example of using an in game mechanic to solve an out of game problem. I.e players "not" roleplaying.

The irony is that in my experience it narrowed the scope of roleplaying and caused an ingame problem that didn't need to exist.

I don't know if there's a single game out there where the marketing hype matches up less with the actual playing experience than Dungeon World (and possibly other PBTA games). It markets itself as a storytelling game about awesome characters doing heroic things. In practice, it's about characters with extremely static power-levels that fail or partially succeed about 20 times more often than they actually succeed, and it shoehorns players into their class stereotypes more than any other game I've ever played.

Death in character creation.

Classic Traveller grognards (and I've been called an anarchist over this) will swear that it is the One True Way to create characters. I had only been playing for a year, had just gotten Supplement 4 Citizens of the Imperium and wanted to roll up a Belter. After several hours and almost a hundred characters dying before finishing their career - I decided that it was a stupid rule and have hardly used it in the forty years since. You fail your survival roll, you're out of that career and don't get a benefits roll that term. It is far less aggravating.

Quote from: ForgottenF on August 19, 2022, 10:50:53 AM

Quote from: Visitor Q on August 19, 2022, 05:42:07 AM

Definitely PbtA. I think it works for short multi-session games or one shots but long campaigns can drag.

The mechanic that really bugged me was the experience system of getting XP points for playing your archetype.

In theory it encourages roleplaying but in practice it makes PCs compete with each other for the limelight. The Barbarian wants to go Berserk while the Rogue wants to solve everything in a stealthy manner. It just got very tiresome. It's a classic example of using an in game mechanic to solve an out of game problem. I.e players "not" roleplaying.

The irony is that in my experience it narrowed the scope of roleplaying and caused an ingame problem that didn't need to exist.

I don't know if there's a single game out there where the marketing hype matches up less with the actual playing experience than Dungeon World (and possibly other PBTA games). It markets itself as a storytelling game about awesome characters doing heroic things. In practice, it's about characters with extremely static power-levels that fail or partially succeed about 20 times more often than they actually succeed, and it shoehorns players into their class stereotypes more than any other game I've ever played.

I played a Sword and Sorcery PBTA game that worked really well because it was so genre driven and only had a couple of players. But then I played a scifi game with about 6 players and it was a bit of a disaster. Archetypes in stories work best when there's a small focused group of them. After a certain point it becomes clichéd and messy.

Also the Complications mechanics starts to trip up on itself if every player is rolling mid range, again why I think Numenera Interventions works in a better way to produce the same effect.

Quote from: jeff37923 on August 19, 2022, 11:11:03 AM
Death in character creation.

Classic Traveller grognards (and I've been called an anarchist over this) will swear that it is the One True Way to create characters. I had only been playing for a year, had just gotten Supplement 4 Citizens of the Imperium and wanted to roll up a Belter. After several hours and almost a hundred characters dying before finishing their career - I decided that it was a stupid rule and have hardly used it in the forty years since. You fail your survival roll, you're out of that career and don't get a benefits roll that term. It is far less aggravating.

Got to love death in character creation in Paranoia games though.

...hell try death before character creation.