Quote from: remial;919216Immortal the Invisible War.  First edition. Bad layout, bad backgrounds, bad color choices, bad fonts.

Sure the game was garbage, but you had to work hard TRYING to read it to find out.

I blocked that one out too.  Also, it was full of weird terms and the glossary was spread out over several pages in sidebars making using it a pain in the ass.  The character sheets were a nightmare too.

Quote from: remial;919216Immortal the Invisible War.  First edition.

I never did get a good look at that one... but it did intrigue me from across the aisle... mostly because the cover reminded me of a head shop I used to frequent.

I don't know if it's "the worst," but I was appalled at how bad most of the WotC "Star Wars d20" books were.  Many of them didn't even have INDICES, for Gods' sake.  And this is from THE LARGEST RPG company, well into the 21st century.  Inexcusable.

I won't try to claim it is the very worstest ever, but it is one that springs immediately to mind due to being fresh:   Fragged Empire.

Every single page is chock full of page links to whole other chapters.  NOthing is explained completely in any portion of the book, everything is refereced somewwhere else.

And not obvious at all?  A massive chunk of the rules... maybe two thirds of them?... is contained entirely in the appendix in the back of the book.  try making a character without looking at the appendix and you'll be scratching your head for hours trying to figure out what you are missing.

And once you've got that all figured out? Then you learn that a number of minor things you haven't even been introduced to properly (like Endurance, which is sort of hit points...)... can only be calculated by looking at the character sheet itself. The rule for dtermining your base endurance is listed NO WHERE in the rules. Not even MENTIONED.  Its just sort of assumed that you'll... I dunno... figure it out by osmosis?   I mean... sure, Endurance is mentioned a lot... weapon damages and bonus points and stuff... but the base? Official CharACTER Shett only.




apologies about teh quality of my post. My computer seems to have been possessed by half the legions of hell, I'm lucky it posts at all!

Space Opera, you would have more luck finding a virgin in a whorehouse than finding the section of rules that you need. I remember picking it up for the Jeff Dee artwork in the adventures and tried to create a character but it was almost impossible because the rules for character creation were scattershot throughout the two books.

Worst style was the adventure Scourge of the Howling Horde. The handwritten background art was so dark you could barely read the actual text that you needed. It suffered from the same problems that Secrets of Zir'an had.

Immortal. I forgot about that one. I was so excited right when it came out, thought it looked really different and interesting, and even though I was trying hard to get into it I just kept bouncing right off. I couldn't even get in far enough to learn how crappy the rules were (I still haven't been able to; I've just heard from those stronger and smarter than me).

Decipher's Lord of the Rings. Beautiful books with printing over full colour screen caps from the movies, but my god. Finding things in those books was not easy, and when you saw the PAGES of errata, it was not fun to add the errata to the book. These weren't small typos, some were fairly large revisions to the content. I ended up getting white out tape and writing them in, because there was no way to note the picture pages (not a lot of margins to use).

On a related note, the prize for best layout without any use of an editor ever surely goes to HoL: Human Occupied Landfill. Handwritten in it's entirety and a sprawling, unstructured, profane rant throughout. Brilliant!

Quote from: TrippyHippy;920964On a related note, the prize for best layout without any use of an editor ever surely goes to HoL: Human Occupied Landfill. Handwritten in it's entirety and a sprawling, unstructured, profane rant throughout. Brilliant!

and it had FARMING!!!! F-A-R-Mwhat? it's time for my pills?  oh, OK...
and Orcs public domain Orcs take THAT Tolkien estate...

Quote from: TrippyHippy;920964On a related note, the prize for best layout without any use of an editor ever surely goes to HoL: Human Occupied Landfill. Handwritten in it's entirety and a sprawling, unstructured, profane rant throughout. Brilliant!

And yet, despite all that, it is still very easy to understand the rules...

Well, that may be because its a pretty simple little game and most of that ranting was space filler to hide how little game there was in there...

fun though.

Worst Layout: Black Tokyo (Pathfinder edition)
Although now that you mention it, the biggest eyesore really was Immortal.

JG

There seems to be something about Sci-Fi games that creates bad layout?

I dunno. I got Outbreak: Space, which not only has some GM rules that make me think I'm supposed to be playing it like a tactical wargame against my players, but also is damn near indecipherable!   The biggest issue is the horrible, horrible misuse of custom acronyms?  Abbreviations. That's it, custom Abbreviations... most of which are only explained in one tiny place in the game, and forever after used exclusively throughout.  Do% checks?  What are Do% checks?!!!!  (for the record: Dodge skill checks...).

I already mentioned Fragged Empire, but I feel I should mention Polaris, which is the least bad of my recent purchases (I've got another sci-fi game, but its so small press it shouldn't be mentioned. I may have one of a dozen or so books printed out, for all I know!  Also, I can't recall the exact name offhand...).  Not too bad, one of the better French Translations I've seen in an RPG (not great, mind you, but better by far than most).  But for some reason you have to buy a two book set (only!), and all the equipment and 'critters' is in the second book, along with the rules that govern them.   Still: compared to Outbreak:Space, its a children's book in terms of understandability.

I've been pretty lucky in not having almost any of the books so far mentioned in this thread.

Worst I've seen is Role master.  I have a feelings it's nothing compared to what you are talking about though.

Kult: Purgatory.  It's gorgeous in its own way, but sacrifices actually being useful... there's big huge symbols in the background of most pages, which are so brightly colored it is nigh impossible to read.  It also is put together really flimsy, and roughly the same shape and size as a typical calendar, and actually reading through something like that with loads of little text is really difficult.  The though has crossed my mind that they actually expected people to pin the thing to a wall and read it like a calendar, ugg.