Doctor Who RPG, FGU’s Chivalry & Sorcery and Space Opera
It was really hard to narrow this one down, so I didn’t. Each of these is a game where I feel like you do a lot of math for no discernable benefit. Doctor Who is the worst culprit; as far as I can tell, in chargen you do a huge amount of derived number-crunching that’s basically: spend points to spend points so you can spend points on whether you are a) GOOD or b) BAD at a couple skills. C&S likewise would require massive sliding-scale-as-you-went math just to determine whether, e.g., your magic-user started the game with a wand. And, of course, the trigonometry (literally) you needed to do spaceships in SO.
Ref: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BrandRobins/posts/QQexibUjjMV
]]>
13 thoughts on “#10RPGs — 6/10 Clusterfuck — FASA’s Doctor Who RPG, FGU’s Chivalry & Sorcery and Space Opera”
You must log in to post a comment.
< ![CDATA[The "why all this math?" stuff seems very late-80s. I wonder if anything being actively sold and run today has that problem? I honestly don't know.]]>
< ![CDATA[I remember that, a little, from Villains and Vigilantes, like calculating hit points.]]>
< ![CDATA[Fucking Space Opera. One of the few games that we put in the box after character creation without rolling a single die in play.]]>
< ![CDATA[Matt Wilson In V&V, carrying capacity is calculated thusly: [(S/10)^3+(E/10)] x W/2]]>
< ![CDATA[Dave Turner Same.]]>
< ![CDATA[C&S certainly required a lot of math. Especially for wizards. But I love it anyway. I love the way it incorporates character classes and mechanics with the the feel of medieval Europe.]]>
< ![CDATA[Nicholas J The veneer of medieval-ness in C&S was certainly the draw for me. I think I owned everything for 2e at some point.]]>
< ![CDATA[Mark Delsing I wish I did. I only have the main three books from the 2nd edition, and a copy of the 1st edition hermetically sealed in a ziplock bag.]]>
< ![CDATA[Nicholas J Most of the 2e stuff seems to be reasonably priced. waynesbooks.com – Chivalry & Sorcery – Wayne’s Books RPG Reference]]>
< ![CDATA[I remember having to take square roots during character creation in K.A.B.A.L. (Knights and Berserkers and Legerdemain)...]]>
< ![CDATA[Matt Wilson hey, you only needed to divide an attribute by 10 and cube the result ONCE PER CHARACTER.]]>
< ![CDATA[Aftermath was the worst for me less for the math and more for the dependence of everything to everything else. You change one thing and that forces you to change 4 other things derived from that first thing, then you have to change the things derived from those 4 things... And so on...]]>
< ![CDATA[Brett Slocum Was going to comment on the very same game that didn't know it was punning itself with its name.]]>