Mirroring the session question from last week, this week we are once again looking at individual mechanical components and subsystems, but this time with an eye for the ones we don’t like. After all, even some really decent games have individual subsystems that can rub you the wrong way. So, what is your least favorite system for X and–more importantly–why?

Subsystems and components to consider:

• Least favorite character creation system?
  
• Least favorite character advancement system?
  
• Least favorite stat or skill system?
  
• Least favorite combat system?
  
• Least favorite system for handling powers, special abilities and other traits?
  
• Any other least favorite system components that stand out? Social encounter systems? Mass combat systems? Equipment systems?
  

Examples:

• Least favorite stat or skill system? D&D 4e. I have two large problems with D&D 4e’s system for stats and skills. The first is that stats are so far removed from the simulation that they’re virtually meaningless other than as some arbitrary category associated with classes. (Paladins swinging a sword with Charisma, how does that work?) My second problem is that target numbers and bonuses both scale with level. Because of this they are so far removed from the simulation that they’re virtually meaningless other than as a game artifact. (Why does jumping over a pit have a higher target number just because you’ve been killing orcs?) I know this system is supposed to provide the illusion of advancing, since your bonuses are getting higher, but it’s a pretty thin illusion—and pretty annoying.
  
• Least favorite system for handling special abilities? FATE. The fact is that there a lot about FATE that I like on paper, but which drives me up the wall in play. Aspects are really at the core of it. My fundamental problem with aspects is that there is a lot of player incentive to try to force individual aspects to apply to as many situations as possible. And chances are some players will be a lot more okay bending plausibility to do this than others. At the same, if you’re not one of those people at the forefront of bending plausibility, you have the double-whammy of both having to swallow the bends in plausibility you’re not comfortable with, and being mechanically shot in the foot by your aspects being applied less often.
  

Least favorite character creation system?

Warhammer 2e and Traveller

Ok, I'm going to make up some terminology here. Let's say that a “narrow lifepath system” is one where you get to choose your niche/class, and then roll for some events and flavors within that class. For example, the Trystell lifepath we used was more or less this. I'm fine with narrow lifepath systems. Let's say a “broad lifepath system” is one where even very basic aspects of your character, like basic archetypes, are subject to random rolls, like Warhammer 2e. It also includes systems that pretend to let you choose an archetype, but you can easily fail out of your first choice, like Traveller.

I hate broad lifepath systems, because there are often real OOG reasons why I do or do not want to play a given archetype. For instance, maybe I think the magic system is really cool and I've been dying to try it. Or maybe I don't want to deal with the complexity of a spell list. Or maybe I just played a scientist in the last campaign, and I don't want to play one again. Broad lifepath systems remove this choice.


Least favorite character advancement system?

I'll put D&D 4e here, for the same reasons that beholdsa puts it under skills: I hate that everything advances by a flat number every other level. It makes no sense and it means that either old threats quickly become meaningless, or else the GM just has to scale the DCs with level too and it becomes transparently meaningless.

Least favorite stat or skill system?

Gurps.

Wayyyyyy too many skills. The system is way too granular and it's extremely easy to forget skills your concept would have. Also, many of the skills default to specific other skills, and you need to know that set of dependencies. I find it completely overwhelming and very burdensome in play.

Least favorite combat system?

My gut reaction is Savage Worlds. Though individual rolls can be fast, in whole it often features combats that take a really long time to resolve (both because of the number of enemies, how long certain enemies take to go down, and also because of slow decision making). Combined with lots of “miss your turn” mechanics (lackluster healing, and the “shaken” mechanic), it feels like I spend an inordinate amount of time doing nothing.

Least favorite system for handling powers, special abilities and other traits?

Maybe gurps again? I tend to prefer flavorful mechanics to generic ones, and I find the amount of customization and math required before play to be a hassle.

Maybe what I need is for someone to play the “make a gurps ability” minigame for me before the gurps campaign. Make up two abilities, do all the customization, give it a flavorful trapping, and tell me to pick one of the two. I'm looking at you Mkamm.

Any other least favorite system components that stand out? Social encounter systems? Mass combat systems? Equipment systems?

Equipment: GURPS. “Oh god, it took me 3 hours but I finally finished my Gurps sci fi character. Now I just have to pick some…DAMN IT!”

Mass Combat: Weapons of the Gods. I just didn't get how this system was supposed to work.

Social Encounters: Warhammer 3rd? I prefer to just roleplay out this stuff, I don't generally think a game benefits by making talking to a guy into a little minigame.

Misc.: 4e skill challenges. Never could get these to make much sense, despite wanting to like them and really trying hard to make them make sense.

Least favorite character creation system?
I once played in a BattleTech: A Time of War campaign. That game was a lot of fun, but character creation was so painfully intricate and mathematically complex that it made me nearly throw up my hands in frustration - and I've already said how much I love GURPS. It took me the better part of five hours, with all the books, the GM, and several experienced players pitching in, to finally finish “creating” my character, after which we discovered he was several dozen points overspent (and only discovered that due to a custom auditing spreadsheet the GM had created for exactly that purpose). This system has ridiculous point inflation (you start with thousands of points, and even the most basic traits cost a hundred or so) to allow for the even-more-ridiculous traits that give you % discounts on other traits. For example, you can pay a certain amount for “Fast Learner” and receive a flat discount on all Skill purchases, so it becomes a binary optimization choice - Fast Learner is always worth it if you would save more than it costs by getting it. Don't even get me started on the way the Lifepath component changes things up…

Least favorite character advancement system?

Dragonlance SAGA. It encourages everyone to go for universally-high stats, punishes people for specializing, and is almost entirely random.

Least favorite stat or skill system?

D&D 4E, for all the reasons Thorin stated, plus skill challenges. As Brian mentioned, it was something I wanted to like but really couldn't stand, and the reason why was this: because your party needed X successes before Y failures, if you had less than a 50% chance of hitting the level-dependent target number, you were actively hurting your party by attempting to help with the challenge. Like, if you don't have the two skills this challenge requires or the third that can give someone else bonuses, sit down and shut up. Attempting to participate will make your team lose. I don't think I could have designed a better system to kill people's fun if I tried.

Least favorite combat system?

Assuming this is shorthand for “conflict resolution system,” Freemarket. It relied on two things, namely 1) the player's ability to BS their characters' traits into being relevant, and 2) having more turns than the other guy. I've played systems that have one of these problems (Fate and MERP, respectively) and didn't like either, putting both of them together was even worse. By the last session we were all going in as a group on every challenge, which made us win by landslides. This can be countered by us being outnumbered, but then we're losing for the same arbitrary reason we were winning, and literally the only fun thing about winning for arbitrary reasons is that you still get Flow/Gold/XP/whatever. Losing for arbitrary reasons doesn't even net you that much.

Least favorite system for handling powers, special abilities and other traits?

FATE. I could just copy Thorin's response word-for-word, really, as he states my feelings pretty much exactly.

Brian, consider me at your disposal for any all future GURPS outings.

Any other least favorite system components that stand out? Social encounter systems? Mass combat systems? Equipment systems?

Equipment: I think I'm the odd man in out in our gaming group, in that I like systems like GURPS and Shadowrun that offer you tons of different tools and options, each slightly different and optimized for a different situation. I get a real rush of joy from feeling “prepared” when an item I thought to buy becomes useful in play. To that end, the core D&D 3.5 ruleset always furstrated me, because there was a “best” weapon or armor in every category and the rest were just for NPC's, poor people, or aquatic creatures who have to use tridents because genre. Shopping's no fun if there's an obvious best choice.

Mass combat: I seem to recall that the D&D 3 and 3.5 rules were pretty messed up, but nothing specific.

Social Encounters: What Brian said.

Least favorite character creation system?

I dislike systems that favor heavy optimization while making tweaking such characters difficult with requirement trees, derived stats, and not a lot of standardization across elements. I think D&D 3.5 fits with this. While I've made character I liked with the system and liked the flavor of the material, I never really liked building higher level characters in the system. It may be that I dislike level systems and prefer various build point systems.

Least favorite character advancement system?

I disliked MERP. While the actual advancement part was actually quick and simple, it was hurt by a problematic experience distribution system.

For actual advancement, I would say the original nWoD system where depending on what you wanted to buy, the rules could be completely different. Some things had to be bought in order, some didn't, some required other things to be bought up. This was combined with the fact that some things were cheaper to buy at character creation.

Least favorite stat or skill system?

I think GURPS has too many skills. There have been campaigns where I have asked to take a bang skill simply because I didn't want to worry about whether something fell under biology, archeology, or paleontology. I also dislike that different skills cost more based on their real world difficulty rather than their in-game utility. A decent shooting skill will cost a lot less and be rolled a lot more times than that odd-ball science skill that cost as much. Those extra experience could be used to purchase even more skills or abilities that would add additional options or mitigate situational modifiers.

I have heard the argument about verisimilitude (science is hard, shooting people is easy), but honestly, the game has magic Oz particles and super powers.

Least favorite combat system?

MERP. MERP. Even with imperfect combat in other places, MERP is the only system that made me angry.

Where do I begin? I randomly rolled up a dwarf for my race. I went with “Warrior” since it was the last unchosen profession. I went with chain armor since it seemed like good protection and it was favored for dwarves. I went with the best weapon I could afford (not much given the random rolls). I put all my little check boxes into the stuff warriors were supposed to be good at.

I lost actions because all my combat skill was spent parrying blows that still crippled the character. I lost actions to moving. I lost actions to the system's many stun effects. Being usually next to last in initiative, I lost actions because my target was dead.

If I had gone with a less optimal warrior build, but I don't think it would have helped combat. It probably would have just meant I would have died sooner, and gotten to start fresh at 0 XP! One session, I managed to hold back half of the dozen bandit horde that would have destroyed the squishy archers. My reward: less experience, crippling wounds, and having the campaign I wasn't enjoying drag on another session.

Maybe the system has some nice elements, but the problem elements made the combat pretty miserable for me.

Least favorite system for handling powers, special abilities and other traits?

GURPs magic's spell tree is frustrating at times. I want to take a certain spell, but the pre-req tree to get it is a strange branching creature. When the book has to have a special table with the minimum pre-req number, a system may have a problem.

Any other least favorite system components that stand out? Social encounter systems?

Most social systems can feel a bit gamey. None stand out as particularly worse than any other.

Mass combat systems?

Savage Worlds worked, but it was a little high in the damage output. Usually, the group healer would spend his or her rounds healing people because of this. It was very abstract and artificial with a lot of random rolls. There was an incentive to roll whatever you were best at since there was no real tactical element.

Equipment systems?

I agree that GURPs had a lot of stuff to wade through, and I often found a lot of it rather dry. For some GURPs games, it would almost make more sense to write down a reasonable list of what the character has, and let the GM guess at a price. Or assign equipment like in Infinite Worlds.

The random money system in MERP seemed problematic. The table has 1 tin piece on one end and 100 gold and really valuable gems on the other. The order of magnitude difference in dollars is a table with $1 on one end and a million bucks on the other. I have a problem with a random table with that much disparity.

Other?

I agree that 4e skill challenges were pretty poor.

Mkamm
Equipment: I think I'm the odd man in out in our gaming group, in that I like systems like GURPS and Shadowrun that offer you tons of different tools and options, each slightly different and optimized for a different situation. I get a real rush of joy from feeling “prepared” when an item I thought to buy becomes useful in play.

I'm right there with you… about half of the time. Broadly speaking, there are games where thematically equipment really matters and games where it does not, and I find I enjoy both extremes in equipment lists a lot more than the middle ground.

For example, in a near-future sci-fi game I really enjoy long equipment lists with the ability to customize caliber, sights, different types of ammo, etc. I also enjoy this in a more “realistic” fantasy game, where there's a real difference between the normal arrows or the bodkin tips.

In general, I think the less abstracted an equipment system is, the more I enjoy it for the simulation aspects of it. I don't even really care if there's a mechanically “best” weapon, so long as it isn't game-breaking.

On the other hand, in a genre like supers, I'd rather the listing simply be something like “light weapon” or “heavy weapon” and everything else is abstracted away as a matter of fluff and not mechanically important.

If dealing with equipment isn't really a theme of the game, I'd then rather just abstract it away and mostly not worry about it, other than as fluff.

What I like the least tend to be systems that try to strike a balance between the two. Often these end up sacrificing the aspects that made the simulation interesting, while at the same time making equipment meaningful enough that you have to worry about the uninteresting stuff.

Least favorite character creation system?

I really disliked the Traveler Lifepath system. It felt like it took away a lot of choices, since it was very possibly to basically have the game tell you “Nope, you can't play the thing you want to” by having you fail out of your chosen career. I find broad life path character creation interesting. Any life path that can kill you or kick you out of your chosen class I very much dislike.

Least favorite character advancement system?

MERP. The way they handled EXP was really painful and unfortunate. It encouraged uncomfortable group dynamics, encouraging people to look out for themselves and their own exp interests rather than working together as a cohesive group.

Least favorite stat or skill system?

I've never really encountered a stat or skill system that bothered me, but I haven't played many of the things listed here.

Least favorite combat system?

Freemarket. I hated the Freemarket. For most of the reasons Matt listed. I also just felt like the GM had to play to lose if the PCs wanted to get anywhere, which is not a mindset I enjoy.

Least favorite system for handling powers, special abilities and other traits?

I haven't really encountered a system that bothered me on this front.

Any other least favorite system components that stand out? Social encounter systems?

I dislike any system that turns a social encounter into a mini-game.

Mass combat systems?

I have only seen Savage Worlds, which I actually really enjoyed.

Equipment systems?

I agree with Micah's assessment of the MERP random money table at chargen. A lot of the tables of MERPs at Chargen were kind of unfortunate, but this was one of the worst.