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I don’t necessarily mean the worst or even one you consider to be bad: a game can be fun and enjoyable while still being a nightmare to balance.

Case in point, my vote goes to obscure Italian superhero TTRPG Urban Heroes, a game that my table picked up out of patriotic curiosity and ended up doing a year-long campaign on.

Compared to the other options on the market, Urban Heroes goes for a distinctly grittier take inspired by Watchmen, Kick Ass and The Boys, and it does so by heavily leaning into the “human” parts of the superhuman: there’s plenty of options for your character to have had traumatic events happen to them, physical ailments in the present and a whole slew of mental issues, not to mention that each superpower comes with a flaw that grows proportionately with your power.

Some flaws are less debilitating than others: one would much rather have a weird appearance than, say, cancer. So why would someone ever choose the worse option? Well, the game is explicitly designed with the old-school idea of rolling almost every single aspect of your character, down to the powers. Because of the aforementioned reasons, this can have you end up with a party where one person might have a few negative quirks with nothing too bad, while another is a barely functional liability. Fun, if the whole table buys into it beforehand, but obviously deeply, deeply unbalanced.

It doesn’t help that the powers vary from pretty much useless in all but the most niche of situations (like being able to put small objects inside you, but only for a few seconds), to pretty weak (being able to bounce onto enemies), strong and versatile (controlling electricity) all the way to downright broken (stopping time and interdimensional rift opening): with random selection and considering you can have a max of 4 powers per character, it’s entirely possible to end up with some joke of a shmuck who’s dead weight in a fight.

What’s funnier is that, considering all this, you’d think Urban Heroes to be a narratively focused, theatre of the mind kind of game, and indeed it is better played that way. The designers clearly did not think so however, because everything takes for granted that you’re playing on a grid with well-defined turns, which can be somewhat understandable at lower levels… but as soon as you truly develop some powers like super speed or super-size, it becomes asinine to keep it all confined to grids and turns (the former in particular can do crazy stuff like double-digit reactions per turn).

The dice and multiplier system does this no favors either: the game eschews traditional modifiers in favor of increasing dice size and a double digit multiplier on the result to indicate improvement, inviting at the same time insane swing on the low end (increasing the dice size can only help you so much if you keep rolling low) as well as on the higher-end (the difference between 1 x 60 and 20 x 60 is huge).

Despite it all, we still had a blast: it’s easy to have ludricrous funny moments on a system this absurd, and we still appreciated the genuinely well-built aspects of the system, such as the very wide selection of powers and the XP system allowing you to customize your powers to an incredible extent. Still very unbalanced, of course.

What about your examples?

I understand, conceptually, that the 90s were 30 some years ago- But it still hurts to hear.

That said- Any funny moments from recent games you wanna share to help soothe my old age?

I was watching the recent episode of Cyberpunk RED that Mike Pondsmith ran on the 2077 YT channel, and it got me wondering about this. I personally would go with the aforementioned Mike Pondsmith, because he seems like such a cool guy.

I love vampire stories and vampire games. I think Vampire: The Masquerade has had a stranglehold of the genre for so long. I am also an Ann Rice and Interview with a Vampire fan. Great movie, great to atrocious books!

My concern comes with this new TTRPG. First, a large publishing company is kickstarting their nigh on finished product. I know this is basically the norm now but we must point out that it is shitty and buried actual projects that need to be kickstarted to even exist.
Second, the campaign is to back a Starter set and a setting guide. When you strip all the extras away that’s the meat of the game you are left with. No core rulebook is a big red flag that is dyed extra crimson as they refer to it as the first instalment in the immortal line. It feels, to me at least, like a nasty little money grab scheme. Selling off a full core rule set and default setting over multiple books and boxsets. Monetising the now liberated copywrite to a thirsty audience.

It seems a shame too because they are exploring mechanics with vampires that are sorely underestimated. Having a timeline of a vampires long life you can jump between decades sounds really fun. Based on the character sheet, brooding, obsessing and being taken along by your dark fate are all baked in.

Am I just an old man yelling at clouds? I’d back this project in a heartbeat were it a full core rules with the New Orleans as the core setting as part of that core rules. But the aforementioned reasons have put me well off until I see a core rule book on shop shelves.

EDIT: I have messaged Renegade about the New Orleans book being a core rulebook or a supplemental/setting book.

I didn't see these shared yet so thought to do so in case someone else will find them interesting.

Vincent Baker, co-author of Apocalypse World, talks about what games originally inspired Apocalyse World and what kind of different game "branches" have followed AW.

The talk is split between two shortish videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8DmKH8FSnY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0UZiAJAssQ

Hi, this time I am looking for a game for more theoretical purposes than actual playing.

I am writting an essay into TTRPGs and in my current part I am explaining how fantasies are created and represented, and a common theme I have notice is self sufficiency. Wathever is the fantasy the player is trying to portrait, the satisfaction with that fantasy is based in the capacity to portrait it regardless of context.

So for example, if your fantasy is to be an stealthy rogue that can't be detected by anyone, games encourages you to reach that fantasy through its mechanics by increasing your stealth and taking feats, talents, edges and equipment that makes you stealthy.

So I wanted to know if there are games, succesful or not, that break this convention: My fantasy is being stealthy and to fulfill that fantasy I need to rely on my companions creating distractions that allow me to sneak up.

This can also be in a combat sense, I am a support but my healing isn't determined by my statistic but by the statistics of my companions, for example.

Thanks for all the help!

EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: I see some people hung up on the stealth example. What I am looking is for games where a player build is basically interdependent from other players.

Another example could be: A player wanting to be a healer depends in their companions taking a "I heal more when I am heal by others" perk/feat instead of having perk/feats that makes the healer heal more by default.

In the mood for some scheming eunuchs.

I have been looking at Triangle Agency and Cain and I was wondering what people think about them, especially since they seem similar on the surface.

As the title says - are there any systems where you get at a decent amount of tactics while still working well in theatre of the mind? A lot of the systems that work extremely well without a battle map have the combat reduced to a cycle of: I attack, roll dice, go next (unless spells are involved). This means that the survivability of an encounter is reduced to PC levels and chance. What are the systems that encourage a thought out decision-making from the players without needing a grid?

So I'm going to DM Shadow of the Weird Wizard in a Hexcrawl core, taking a lot from the forbidden lands system and etc. But the rest/healing system of SotWW looks really lenient, and seems to make things kinda easy, so I want some opinions about it

As the title says.

This, this and another post about a GM creating some handmade letter handouts for his players which I can no longer find recently all followed the same pattern. The posts were made by accounts created days ago, usually with multiple posts in very unconnected but popular subreddits. Usually there were some random comments made on other posts, done in french for some reason.

The posts all had a very similar pattern of complaining about some personal issue that demanded either sympathy or advice from their readers, always written in the most self-hating tone possible. If they described players acting badly, they always ruled out the immediate option of talking it over like adults.

None of these accounts seem to have any interest in responding to comments on their post, despite writing posts that are quite long about deeply personal issues. By the way, they seem to have a lot of deeply personal issues, judging by their other posts on other subreddits.

I might be wrong about some of these, but I would advice people to be skeptical about the stories that get posted here, and not let it distort their view of how other people actually play or interact. Bots like these can make dysfunctional groups seem way more common than they actually are.