# What is your biggest RPG heartbreak?



## Marc_C (Apr 27, 2021)

My biggest rpg heartbreak happened with Star Frontiers. I was really into the d100 system and the primary plus secondary skill builds. I hand drew many new equipments, robot models, ships. Bought several official modules. I was designing a BIG space opera campaign. This is going to be great!

After two games the players didn't like the game and told me unequivocally they wanted to play AD&D instead. The first heartbreak is always the hardest. I've had RPG rejection in later years but it didn't hurt that much. I DMed AD&D but wasn't really into it. Took me several months to get back on my feet.

What is your biggest RPG heartbreak?

[edit: typos]


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## Morrus (Apr 27, 2021)

One player who insisted we play a particular game. Nobody else was that into it, but neither were we particularly against it, so I acquired the game, and set up and started to run a campaign.

The one player who really wanted to play it? He never showed up. The rest of us played a game we weren't really all that into for about 6 weeks before we decided to just go back to something we knew we liked.

Maybe not a heartbreak (it's not like we had a terrible time or anything) but it was just one of those moments when we all looked at each other and said "Remind me why we are playing this?"


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## Umbran (Apr 27, 2021)

Not having my group play for the past year.

I know that's not what you're looking for, but it is truth.


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## Sacrosanct (Apr 27, 2021)

The GM and the other players really psyching me up to play RIFTS.  Never played it before, and they kept pushing it as this great game.  So I did my reading, got excited to play, etc.  The GM even let me play a werewolf PC at the start, which I thought could be pretty awesome.  Got my PC created and we started our first session.

The rest of the players had a Glitter Boy, Juicer, etc.  And I had this PC who at _best _might be able to do 1d4 MDC while everyone else was going crazy.  I was literally just a cheerleader on the sideline, as if I got into combat, I died right away.

Yes, I understand this was a failure on the GM's part, but it forever tainted RIFTS for me, and I will always have that bad first impression for a game I was excited to play at first.


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## Retreater (Apr 27, 2021)

Let's see...

Wanting to run The Enemy Within (WFRPG) for decades, finally starting a game, having one of the players move away after two sessions, ending the campaign.

The announcement of 4e and pulling of 3rd edition stopped a big project I was writing dead in its tracks. Took me nearly 15 years to start writing again.

The Fantasy Trip. Bought the big boxed set because I heard it was awesome. Played a few combats and found it terribly imbalanced. Put it in storage.

Altar Quest (boardgame). Yeah, something which was billed as a spiritual successor to Hero Quest is a bloated, slow-paced, mess of a game. At least I got some cool minis from it.


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## Manbearcat (Apr 27, 2021)

Our hobby's deranged revolt against 4e and the bending of the knee to the worst behavior possible.

Not that people didn't like it.  That is fair enough.

But the behavior of our community was utterly nuts.  Embarrassing both virtually and in person.  The fact that there was no shame for the behavior but rather a perpetual engine of self-immolation and then a subsequent folding to the endless siege was the worst thing.

If people would have just said "yeah...I don't like this", functionally articulated that, and left it up to WotC...and then WotC said "yeah...no good...lets get back to nostalgia"...great!  

No problem.  But the scale and tenacity and lack of shame of the revolt and WotC's capitulation was pretty terrible.


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## Sithlord (Apr 27, 2021)

4E


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## Blackrat (Apr 27, 2021)

Every time a regular group falls apart for whatever reason:
Highscool graduation. Everyone moved away, me included. The group did not survive that.

Another group ended with a break up of two of the players. It just didn’t work out anymore.

Covid almost killed the current group, but technology came to the rescue.


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## kenada (Apr 27, 2021)

Old-School Essentials, maybe. While my players haven’t demanded we do something else (yet?), there have been a few comments on the lack of options or the (in)capability of their characters. That’s why we’re giving Worlds Without Numbers a try in a few weeks. It has more of the stuff they like while still being GM friendly and OSR-adjacent. Of course, that could also turn out to be another RPG heartbreak. Hopefully not because I’m running out of ideas for things that would make everyone happy.


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## Fenris-77 (Apr 27, 2021)

Spending far more time generating my first Champions character that I ever got to spend playing him.


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## Marc_C (Apr 27, 2021)

Retreater said:


> The announcement of 4e and pulling of 3rd edition stopped a big project I was writing dead in its tracks. Took me nearly 15 years to start writing again.



I don't understand that one. You could have kept on playing 3e until that campaign was finished. Or was this as a publisher?


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## Marc_C (Apr 27, 2021)

Morrus said:


> One player who insisted we play a particular game. Nobody else was that into it, but neither were we particularly against it, so I acquired the game, and set up and started to run a campaign.
> 
> The one player who really wanted to play it? He never showed up. The rest of us played a game we weren't really all that into for about 6 weeks before we decided to just go back to something we knew we liked.
> 
> Maybe not a heartbreak (it's not like we had a terrible time or anything) but it was just one of those moments when we all looked at each other and said "Remind me why we are playing this?"



That really sucks.

I had one guy who insisted we buy and paint the miniature to represent our characters for a new campaign (4e I think). He was a very good painter and insisted he couldn't play if we didn't do that. We painted our miniatures to the best of our abilities. When time came to play he never showed up.


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## billd91 (Apr 27, 2021)

4e
I was skeptical about 3e when it was first announced but WotC sent out some early announcements and guides that impressed me. Eric Noah's site was also a big help. And, in the end, WotC won me over to the new edition.

So I was excited when the 4e announcement came out. Plus, a friend of mine was working on it (we were working together when he left for the job at WotC). But the early information coming out did the opposite of what it had done for 3e - it just showed me more and more that the upcoming edition was not what I wanted. The marketing was terrible. And the end product was extremely disappointing from my perspective. It was the D&D that I was never looking for.
In the end, we played it because a couple of players in the group were really interested in it. But after 9 months, we were all pretty united in deciding to go back to 3e.


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## Reynard (Apr 27, 2021)

Numenera.

That game should be right in my wheelhouse, as both a gamer and a writer (my post-post apocalyptic novel shares some sensibilities with it). It is gorgeous and the art is inspiring and Monte Cook is a really great designed.

And then I got it and read it. Unplayable.


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## J.Quondam (Apr 27, 2021)

Every time I get a new RPG that I'm excited about, only to discover it doesn't come with half a dozen good players in the box. 
That's always something of a heartbreak for me.


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## Retreater (Apr 27, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> I don't understand that one. You could have kept on playing 3e until that campaign was finished. Or was this as a publisher?



This was being written for publication. It was almost finished for 3.5. Everything was put on hold at the publisher until the license and ruleset for 4e was released. Then cancelled until PF came out. By that point there was a lot of conversion work to be done to the project, and my ex-wife deleted most of my files.
Then I found the files, got it converted to an OSR system, expanded it, and got it "almost" ready for publication. Then a very prominent OSR author announced his Kickstarter for his next project - which sounds almost exactly like what I was writing.
So I'm putting it back into storage until I see what this new Kickstarter is actually like. Presumably, it is coincidentally so similar in scope, theme, and story to the new project that I will not want to release it. It will be two people in a small, niche industry releasing a superficially identical product. 
That book is cursed. Probably best to just let it die.


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## darjr (Apr 27, 2021)

TORG. Love the idea and the style but wow when I ran it I just didn’t like it.

GURPS 4e. I had a long history with GURPS running and playing, but I should have known with 3e being a bit too much for me already. I made it through the 4e core books and was excited to play and the game hit me like a lead balloon. Haven’t looked at it since. Note that my ideal game changed too, it took playing GURPS 4e to make me realize how much.


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## Retreater (Apr 27, 2021)

kenada said:


> Old-School Essentials, maybe. While my players haven’t demanded we do something else (yet?), there have been a few comments on the lack of options or the (in)capability of their characters. That’s why we’re giving Worlds Without Numbers a try in a few weeks. It has more of the stuff they like while still being GM friendly and OSR-adjacent. Of course, that could also turn out to be another RPG heartbreak. Hopefully not because I’m running out of ideas for things that would make everyone happy.



My group's experience with OSE is with a GM who doesn't "get it" and isn't adaptable to the tastes of the players. As a result, they hate it. It has likely soured all of them on OSR systems - they're already talking about going back to 5E (or PF1).


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## Snarf Zagyg (Apr 27, 2021)

I have a few.

As mentioned above, TORG (original). Box looked awesome. Materials read awesome. West End Games was awesome. Never could get a game running.

Also, GURPS. I loved the generic idea, and loved the Car Wars / Autoduel supplements. Never got a campaign running, and no one I played with wanted to generate characters for it.

The post-Gygax TSR run. I remember wanting to like Unearthed Arcana so badly, even when I knew it (mostly) sucked. But then they pumped out the hardcovers afterwards- _WSG, DSG, DLA, GHA, _and _MoTP_. I got them all, and even though all of them had decent bits here and there, they were just ... ugh (okay, _MoTP_ was fine). That, combined with WG7 were the end for me. I chose to skip out on 2e entirely (although years later I did go back and see check out the products, many of which were fine, if you're into that sort of thing). 

The last TSR product I remember purchasing was the _Ravenloft: Realm of Terror_ boxed set, and thinking that it was incredibly stupid that they took a great module and made it into a campaign setting. Apparently, this is an exceedingly unpopular opinion.


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## Marc_C (Apr 27, 2021)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Also, GURPS. I loved the generic idea, and loved the Car Wars / Autoduel supplements. Never got a campaign running, and no one I played with wanted to generate characters for it.



Same for me. Not a heartbreak but a disappointment. I bought 4e books. Only created one character. Decided not to create the others. Too time consuming if you never played the system.


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## Emerikol (Apr 27, 2021)

Numenera is probably my biggest heartbreak too.  I really like Monte Cook so I want to buy stuff from him.  I realized right away though that Numera had been infused with a lot of "modern game design" assumptions.  A lot of player make choices and not the character making the choices.  So I bought the original books but no more.   Still like Monte and hope he puts out something I will like eventually.


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## Parmandur (Apr 27, 2021)

billd91 said:


> 4e
> I was skeptical about 3e when it was first announced but WotC sent out some early announcements and guides that impressed me. Eric Noah's site was also a big help. And, in the end, WotC won me over to the new edition.
> 
> So I was excited when the 4e announcement came out. Plus, a friend of mine was working on it (we were working together when he left for the job at WotC). But the early information coming out did the opposite of what it had done for 3e - it just showed me more and more that the upcoming edition was not what I wanted. The marketing was terrible. And the end product was extremely disappointing from my perspective. It was the D&D that I was never looking for.
> In the end, we played it because a couple of players in the group were really interested in it. But after 9 months, we were all pretty united in deciding to go back to 3e.



Similar experience, except I just stopped playing until 5E came out.


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## payn (Apr 27, 2021)

Battletech. Never found a group to play with.


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## TheAlkaizer (Apr 27, 2021)

I unfortunately have not tried that many systems yet (bought a ton though). So I don't have heartbreaks for a _whole_ system. However, when I invested in Starfinder and book literally all its books, one of the fantasies I and my players were excited about was space combat. After reading it and playing it, it's probably our least favourite part of the system.


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## Sithlord (Apr 27, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> Same for me. Not a heartbreak but a disappointment. I bought 4e books. Only created one character. Decided not to create the others. Too time consuming if you never played the system.



Only books I ever returned to a store


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## Marc_C (Apr 27, 2021)

Emerikol said:


> Numenera is probably my biggest heartbreak too.  I really like Monte Cook so I want to buy stuff from him.  I realized right away though that Numera had been infused with a lot of "modern game design" assumptions.  A lot of player make choices and not the character making the choices.  So I bought the original books but no more.   Still like Monte and hope he puts out something I will like eventually.



We played it a bit. For us there was a disconnect between the illustrations and the system. I liked that the GM never rolls dice.

It is based on Jack Vances Dying Earth and Books of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I can play that type of setting using Fantasy AGE and mixing in Modern AGE.


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## Emerikol (Apr 27, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> We played it a bit. For us there was a disconnect between the illustrations and the system. I liked that the GM never rolls dice.
> 
> It is based on Jack Vances Dying Earth and Books of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I can play that type of setting using Fantasy AGE and mixing in Modern AGE.



I love the setting and the concept.  So sure you could probably revamp the concept into a game of your choosing.  I see where he is putting some of it into 5e rules but 5e is problematic for me too so I doubt I ever play it.


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## Marc_C (Apr 27, 2021)

Emerikol said:


> I love the setting and the concept.  So sure you could probably revamp the concept into a game of your choosing.  I see where he is putting some of it into 5e rules but 5e is problematic for me too so I doubt I ever play it.



If you prefer older systems I would probably go with Gamma World to do Numenera.


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## kenada (Apr 27, 2021)

Retreater said:


> My group's experience with OSE is with a GM who doesn't "get it" and isn't adaptable to the tastes of the players. As a result, they hate it. It has likely soured all of them on OSR systems - they're already talking about going back to 5E (or PF1).



If it doesn’t work out, I may seriously consider pitching 3e (not 3.5e or PF1). WWN has enough “greatest hits” elements from 3e and 4e that I’m hoping it won’t come to that.


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## Retreater (Apr 27, 2021)

kenada said:


> If it doesn’t work out, I may seriously consider pitching 3e (not 3.5e or PF1). WWN has enough “greatest hits” elements from 3e and 4e that I’m hoping it won’t come to that.



Unfortunately, I downsized my gaming collection during that era. Basically I got rid of all my 3.0 and 3.5 stuff, switched everything to PF. 
So I've kept all my TSR era stuff, Pathfinder, 4th edition, and 5e (along with pretty complete collections of other systems that we'll probably never touch unfortunately - SWADE, WFRPG, Forbidden Lands).


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## kenada (Apr 27, 2021)

Retreater said:


> Unfortunately, I downsized my gaming collection during that era. Basically I got rid of all my 3.0 and 3.5 stuff, switched everything to PF.
> So I've kept all my TSR era stuff, Pathfinder, 4th edition, and 5e (along with pretty complete collections of other systems that we'll probably never touch unfortunately - SWADE, WFRPG, Forbidden Lands).



I’ve still got my old 3e books, but they’re _old_. I’d just … hmm. Looks like DM’s Guild is missing a lot of 3e stuff. That complicates things.


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## Reynard (Apr 27, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> If you prefer older systems I would probably go with Gamma World to do Numenera.



I feel like Numenera would be better played with something like Fate, since it is intended to have some narrative elements baked in.


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## Emerikol (Apr 27, 2021)

Reynard said:


> I feel like Numenera would be better played with something like Fate, since it is intended to have some narrative elements baked in.



I'm probably wanting to escape the narrative elements if I'm right about what you mean by that term.  

I love Fate except for the Fate Points which are deal breakers and are essential to Fate.


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## innerdude (Apr 27, 2021)

Savage Worlds, but probably not for the reason you'd think.

I've owned three different editions of Savage Worlds --- Explorer's, Deluxe, and Adventure.

From 2013 until 2021, it was the only system I GM'd. I GM'd 4 different settings/campaigns, 2 of which lasted at least 14 months.

I loved Savage Worlds. Still do in many ways. It's the first system that I ever truly made "my own." Savage Worlds was _my system_. The core of the rules and the freeform, skill-based character creation was a dream.

But by the end, my heart was broken, because somewhere along the way I fell out of love with Savage Worlds combat.

I don't know if something just got lost in translation moving from Deluxe edition to Adventure edition, or what, but where I'd never minded or cared about the swinginess of combat, suddenly it began to feel . . . not forced, exactly, but random. It no longer felt like player skill and tactics were making the difference, so much as just players waiting around for the dice to explode. My players knew all the min-maxing tricks, so it was getting harder to challenge them in combat without "over-tuning" the encounters.

And so at the start of this year, I began to feel my prior ardor just slipping away.

Early in 2020 we tried Edge of the Empire, and we really liked it. It was fun, and new, and fresh again, and the narrative dice really added something new, but when Covid hit, it threw everything into a loop. I ended up having to reorganize our gaming group.

Earlier this year, I convinced the group to try out Ironsworn, and it's gone so much better than I could have imagined or hoped. Our group is _stoked_ to play Ironsworn now.

It's just been time to try new stuff. For sure Ironsworn will continue. We're going to play some Tiny D6 / Tiny Frontiers Sci-Fi. We're definitely going to jump back into FFG Star Wars / Genesys at some point. The combat model in Spellbound Kingdoms sounds different and intriguing enough that I'm definitely going to give it a shot, even though I think the setting is kind of whack. My kids love the Dragon Prince cartoon, and I've been intrigued by the Cortex+ system for a long time. And if Swords of the Serpentine ever makes it out of "beta preview", I'll probably buy a copy of that too.

Savage Worlds will always hold a fond place in my heart, but at the end, in 2021, it was just time to move on and try something new.


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## Sithlord (Apr 27, 2021)

innerdude said:


> Savage Worlds, but probably not for the reason you'd think.
> 
> I've owned three different editions of Savage Worlds --- Explorer's, Deluxe, and Adventure.
> 
> ...



I love savage worlds but boy do i agree with you about the swinginess of combat. I adored the settings, especially hellfrost and slipstream. If you ever want more cool setting and you can convert to 5E then get some savage world books and just convert to whatever system you want. I loved 2E because Of the settings. I steal settings from savage worlds for my high technology planescape game.


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## Marc_C (Apr 27, 2021)

innerdude said:


> Savage Worlds, but probably not for the reason you'd think.
> 
> I've owned three different editions of Savage Worlds --- Explorer's, Deluxe, and Adventure.
> 
> ...



Same for me. We played Interface Zero with SW 2e but combat was too swingy. TPK without any reason for it. PCs didn't do anything wrong. I was turned off.


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## bulletmeat (Apr 27, 2021)

Sithlord said:


> I love savage worlds but boy do i agree with you about the swinginess of combat. I adored the settings, especially hellfrost and slipstream. If you ever want more cool setting and you can convert to 5E then get some savage world books and just convert to whatever system you want. I loved 2E because Of the settings. I steal settings from savage worlds for my high technology planescape game.



Ditto that.  I ran Hellfrost SW and just kept thinking this would make a great 5e setting.  And not 'to' hard to convert.


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## pogre (Apr 27, 2021)

For me it was third edition warhammer fantasy roleplay. I actually liked a lot of the game mechanics, but my group absolutely hated it and we only played one session. I still don't think it is that bad of a system, but I will admit it failed to capture the atmosphere of the warhammer world.


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## Reynard (Apr 27, 2021)

Emerikol said:


> I'm probably wanting to escape the narrative elements if I'm right about what you mean by that term.
> 
> I love Fate except for the Fate Points which are deal breakers and are essential to Fate.



My problem with Fate is that as I get older I am sort of returning to want a little more immersion and negotiating Aspects and other meta-currencies pulls me out of the game. For some reason I recently find that unacceptable (whereas it was a draw for a while).

That's something I feel like we don't talk a lot about: how our own changing tastes impact how we feel about games over time.


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## Retreater (Apr 27, 2021)

pogre said:


> For me it was third edition warhammer fantasy roleplay. I actually liked a lot of the game mechanics, but my group absolutely hated it and we only played one session. I still don't think it is that bad of a system, but I will admit it failed to capture the atmosphere of the warhammer world.



I tried WFRPG 3 and wasn't immediately turned off by the components and changes to the game. What did it in for me was trying out a combat with a dwarf slayer, and I was able to solo kill a dragon. Then I tried a solo fight with a rat catcher and got killed by a goblin. Any system with that level of disparity with 1st level characters wouldn't fly in my group, so I boxed it up and resold it that week.


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## BookTenTiger (Apr 27, 2021)

For a while in my gaming circle there were two ongoing weekly D&D games: mine, and the Other Game. There were a few crossover players, but mostly folks played in one or the other.

Over time, the players in my game became more difficult to schedule. Eventually I had to fold my game. I tried to join the Other Game (again, made up of my friends), but they already had six players and decided seven would be too many. So I wound up with no D&D group for a while.

Now that was heartbreaking... Still stings to this day! As a result, I always make my campaigns open to new players or drop-in guests.


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## billd91 (Apr 27, 2021)

BookTenTiger said:


> For a while in my gaming circle there were two ongoing weekly D&D games: mine, and the Other Game. There were a few crossover players, but mostly folks played in one or the other.
> 
> Over time, the players in my game became more difficult to schedule. Eventually I had to fold my game. I tried to join the Other Game (again, made up of my friends), but they already had six players and decided seven would be too many. So I wound up with no D&D group for a while.
> 
> Now that was heartbreaking... Still stings to this day! As a result, I always make my campaigns open to new players or drop-in guests.



DAAAMMMMNNNN. That's cold.


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## Sithlord (Apr 27, 2021)

BookTenTiger said:


> For a while in my gaming circle there were two ongoing weekly D&D games: mine, and the Other Game. There were a few crossover players, but mostly folks played in one or the other.
> 
> Over time, the players in my game became more difficult to schedule. Eventually I had to fold my game. I tried to join the Other Game (again, made up of my friends), but they already had six players and decided seven would be too many. So I wound up with no D&D group for a while.
> 
> Now that was heartbreaking... Still stings to this day! As a result, I always make my campaigns open to new players or drop-in guests.



I once ran a game with 12 players plus henchman. And if anyone else dropped by they would have been more than welcome to play.


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## The-Magic-Sword (Apr 28, 2021)

How much faster 4e ended than it should have, and the direction they went in for 5e, I didn't like it, then for various unrelated reasons (my 4e book having memories of someone specific who I didn't want to think about) I ended up playing 5e a few years later, but looking back on it, my first instinct about the direction it was going in was right.


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## Sithlord (Apr 28, 2021)

The-Magic-Sword said:


> How much faster 4e ended than it should have, and the direction they went in for 5e, I didn't like it, then for various unrelated reasons (my 4e book having memories of someone specific who I didn't want to think about) I ended up playing 5e a few years later, but looking back on it, my first instinct about the direction it was going in was right.



It wasn’t my edition. But there are things they did well I would like to see


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## Disgruntled Hobbit (Apr 28, 2021)

More than a little weird so many peeps are saying "4e."
Think most gamers would be thrilled to have a game that got half as many books as 4th Ed got. Even without counting all the online content
If I get a book each year for some of my faves I feel blessed


My heartbreaks are the usual. Groups that fall apart just when things are getting good. Workin towards a big storyline climax and the game falls apart. Just getting into the groove with the party and my character and someone moves away or gets a new bird and doesn't have time to hang anymore
Boring really


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## The-Magic-Sword (Apr 28, 2021)

Disgruntled Hobbit said:


> More than a little weird so many peeps are saying "4e."
> Think most gamers would be thrilled to have a game that got half as many books as 4th Ed got. Even without counting all the online content
> If I get a book each year for some of my faves I feel blessed
> 
> ...



Context changes it, its plenty of content and time, but the way it ended was very sudden and it was after they had discussed having plans for years to come, so i think that's a sticking point.


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## BookTenTiger (Apr 28, 2021)

billd91 said:


> DAAAMMMMNNNN. That's cold.






Sithlord said:


> I once ran a game with 12 players plus henchman. And if anyone else dropped by they would have been more than welcome to play.



Okay I'll admit this is pretty validating! Thank you for sharing in my pain!


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## Fenris-77 (Apr 28, 2021)

Not having anyone to play HoL with when it came out.


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## aco175 (Apr 28, 2021)

I have not played that many other roleplaying games over the years.  Back in the 80s we played Twilight2000, Marvel superheroes, Rene Quest, and a couple others.  These mostly lasted only a couple weeks before going back to D&D.  None were terrible, but just were not D&D.  

I did play in a Dark Sun campaign my friend ran for a few months.  It was not my thing, but he was part of the group so we played what he wanted before someone else got to choose what they wanted.  

I do not like having a convention and not have D&D slots for the whole day and then I feel like I'm cheated when I need to play something else.


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## Marc_C (Apr 28, 2021)

Fenris-77 said:


> Not having anyone to play HoL with when it came out.



What is HoL?


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## Fenris-77 (Apr 28, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> What is HoL?



Human Occupied Landfiil.


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## overgeeked (Apr 28, 2021)

Not playing with more friends.

How 4E played at the table. I loved literally everything about the game. Everything. But it was so grindingly dull to actually play.


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## Eyes of Nine (Apr 28, 2021)

innerdude said:


> Earlier this year, I convinced the group to try out Ironsworn, and it's gone so much better than I could have imagined or hoped. Our group is _stoked_ to play Ironsworn now.
> 
> It's just been time to try new stuff. For sure Ironsworn will continue. We're going to play some Tiny D6 / Tiny Frontiers Sci-Fi. We're definitely going to jump back into FFG Star Wars / Genesys at some point. The combat model in Spellbound Kingdoms sounds different and intriguing enough that I'm definitely going to give it a shot, even though I think the setting is kind of whack. My kids love the Dragon Prince cartoon, and I've been intrigued by the Cortex+ system for a long time. And if Swords of the Serpentine ever makes it out of "beta preview", I'll probably buy a copy of that too.



Off topic, but @innerdude you may be interested in this if you like Ironsworn AND Scifi. It might be your peanut butter and chocolate: Ironsworn: Starforged


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## Eyes of Nine (Apr 28, 2021)

No heartbreaks, but I def share some disappointments with many here especially re: Numenera, GURPS 4e, early ending of D&D 4e (ameliorated by the fact that 5e is pretty darn good).

I guess my MegaTraveller game never completing due to me moving away (back in early 90's, no online gaming then).


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## Richards (Apr 28, 2021)

For me, it was when Dave Gross stepped away as the editor of _Dragon_ magazine.  One of the very first things the new editor did was to kill the "fiction and footnote" format of the "Ecology" articles in the magazine, making them into what I considered to be dry, encyclopedic entries that were kind of boring to read.  It was particularly painful for me because at the time I had six "Ecology" articles sitting on Dave's desk that had already been revised to meet his editorial change requests and which would have been published had he remained at the editor's desk, but which the new editor just flat-out bulk rejected.  And, having had more "Ecology" articles printed than any other writer (at least in the print version of the magazine - I haven't kept up with it since it went digital) and having been pretty instrumental in getting the "Ecology" series revived (it had been fallow for 17 issues in a row when my first "Ecology" article was published, and then I was responsible for writing 24 of the next 39 entries in the series), I kind of took the new format rather personally.

So that took away the vast majority of the articles I'd been writing for _Dragon_.  And then a few years later when 4E came along, I saw right away that was nothing I was going to be interested in, and just like that my freelancing career was pretty much over.  (Bummer, too, because it was really nice having a hobby I really enjoyed that also came with a paycheck as an added bonus - most hobbies don't work that way!)

But, on the plus side, shortly after the death of my freelancing career I gained my current gaming group, so all of the effort I would have put into getting articles and adventures published in _Dragon_ and _Dungeon_ magazines was now able to be channeled into making a good gaming experience for them.  And I have certainly had a blast gaming with my current group.

Johnathan


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## thom_likes_gaming (Apr 28, 2021)

Warhammer frp. I love that game, always wanted to play more or it (we had a small 2 playees, 1 GM thing going during highschool), never got a group for it going. So, I'm buying TeW campaign books for 4th edition again, they'll look splendid next to all my other unused 1st and 2nd edition stuff


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## Fenris-77 (Apr 28, 2021)

Nobody want to talk about HoL? I am disappoint. Before I even knew what hacking was I was messing with that basic rules set to run Horror Cthulhu stuff. It's actually a great basic mechanic, way before that was a thing that mattered.


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## corwyn77 (Apr 28, 2021)

J.Quondam said:


> Every time I get a new RPG that I'm excited about, only to discover it doesn't come with half a dozen good players in the box.
> That's always something of a heartbreak for me.



You need more malleable players. I once ran 6 consecutive campaigns without repeating systems once. But then, they enjoy my games and none of them wanted to gm.


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## delericho (Apr 28, 2021)

Shadowrun for me. I've run it exactly once - I had what I thought was a cool concept for a short campaign, but I hadn't banked on (1) my players knowing _much_ more about the quirks of the system than I did and (2) their tendency towards power-gaming.

It took us hours to get through character creation, and about half an hour for me to realise that it just wasn't going to work.  Oh well, you live and learn.


Sacrosanct said:


> So I did my reading, got excited to play, etc. The GM even let me play a werewolf PC at the start, which I thought could be pretty awesome. Got my PC created and we started our first session.
> 
> The rest of the players had a Glitter Boy, Juicer, etc. And I had this PC who at _best _might be able to do 1d4 MDC while everyone else was going crazy.



The one and only time I played Pathfinder felt a lot like that. I had a character that was actually pretty good, all things considered. Unfortunately, the DM was of the school that accepted anything that felt cool, even if it wasn't balanced, so all the other characters were comparative gods. In particular, there was one guy whose character could do _everything_ mine could do, but better. Oh, and he could fly, too.

(The difference, I think, is that RIFTS had that stuff baked right in to the rules, whereas this case was about the DM selectively disregarding the rules.)


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## John Dallman (Apr 28, 2021)

Disgruntled Hobbit said:


> More than a little weird so many peeps are saying "4e." Think most gamers would be thrilled to have a game that got half as many books as 4th Ed got. Even without counting all the online content.



If the core of the game doesn't work for you, add-ons for it are pointless. I bought the 4e three-volume set, started reading it, and realised rapidly that I didn't want to play it, at all. I gave it away; if I'd been given all the add-ons, I'd have given them away too.


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## Ruin Explorer (Apr 28, 2021)

*Vampire: The Masquerade Revised*, and the Revised editions of World of Darkness in general, are the biggest actual "heartbreak" in TT RPGs for me.

Not because they were particularly bad, nor that we didn't play them, but because they were just nowhere near as good as we'd hoped. I mean, my brother and I were super-hyped prior to Revised. We thought this would finally be the WoD system that fixed all the little issues and annoyances and even some of the bigger problems, maybe even bring the increasingly-dated-seeming setting up to date a bit, because that's basically what the writers said it would do. We ended up pre-ordering two of the fanciest copies of the corebook set for VtM Revised, at what was great expense for whenever it was (1998 maybe?). And... meh. It didn't fix much at all. It made the setting more boring and dull. It attempted to "crack down" on people "doing it wrong" gameplay-wise, and reinforced that by insisting on various lore changes that made vampires more "walking corpses" (which was very much against the zeitgeist, whereas WW had basically sailed the seas of zeitgeist, and very successfully). Even the art wasn't as good as the 2E line, and had a less consistent vibe.

It was notable that when a decade or so later, the 20th-anniversary editions came out, they basically ignored the lore changes from the Revised editions (for the most part, though a couple made weird decisions of their own), and featured actually-improved mechanics.

So that was the biggest heartbreak, because we were so invested in it being great, and it was profoundly "meh".

Next biggest after that would be *Cyberpunk V3*, because Cyberpunk 2020 was getting a bit dated by the early '00s, arguably by the late '90s, both in mechanics and in details, and R. Talsorian/Mike Pondsmith seemed weirdly disinterested in doing anything about it. Finally we hear about Cyberpunk V3 and we're cautiously excited (Cybergeneration was kind of cool in a weird way so wasn't really disappointing), but what we actually got? A really "far-out" post-Cyberpunk setting which wasn't either believable, compelling, or connected to our world, with epically bad art (photographs of action figures, literally) and visual design. The mechanics were also not particularly good. Cyberpunk RED pretty much has the setting we were hoping for 15 years ago, i.e. an updated and actually _more-playable_ version of the 2020 setting. It also has not-great rules by 2021 standards, but only mildly so, and if we'd got it in 2005, it'd have been amazing.

Finally, *D&D 3E*.

That might seem ironic in certain ways, including that it caused this site to exist, but as excited as I was before it came out, as we got closer to release, and post-release, decisions I felt were "bad" just increasingly started to pile up, and of all the editions my group really played, 2E through 5E, it's the ones we spent least gaming time on, by far (even if we including PF1 as the same thing), and the one we had the least actual_ fun_ whilst playing, which was largely because of the kind of characters and style of play we had (which tended towards martials and stunt-y).

4E not lasting as long as it could have was a disappointment, but one significantly mitigated by the fact that by then, the indie RPG scene was considerably more exciting, and also 4E itself mitigated it a bit by making it so it was increasingly less fun to play at levels above about 11, as more and more Immediate and Interrupt and Reaction and so on stuff came in and bogged combat back down to 3E levels of time-taken. If they could have kept the fun of 4E 1-10 at all levels I'd have been a hell of a lot more disappointed.

The funniest disappointment will always be *Champions: The New Millennium*, a FUZION-based re-working of Champions, which superficially seemed like it might be a great superhero game, ditching the problem HERO/Champions had of always feeling like a fairly serious squad-combat game that happened to feature superheroes, but keeping much of the flexibility (it was 1997, cut us a break!), with more accessible mechanics.

Except as it turns out they were just as bad, but in a different way.

We took something like 5 hours to run a combat which, in-setting, took maybe 3 minutes, and just was a spectacularly knock-down drag-out fight. Sure it was four supers vs six serious villains, but good freaking lord. It just went on and on and on endlessly, and the fact that everyone got different numbers of actions at different times in the round (something inherited from HERO trying to "simulate" speedsters - which in retrospect was dumb as hell because that's not how speedsters work in comics) really massively contributed to the bogging down everything. The fight was a hell of thing, but it would be basically one issue of a comic book, if the entire issue was one long fight. It was one of those games where you did like different damage with different modifiers with different moves and stuff and created all sorts of analysis paralysis situations. I'd expected the whole thing to take maybe 2-3 hours tops, including the rest of the adventure and another, smaller fight.

It remains the only time my group has ever said "We are never playing this system again..." after a single session.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Apr 28, 2021)

The *Americana* RPG. I backed it on Kickstarter and when it arrived, it was everything I could've hoped for and more. I go to my one gaming group and said that I'd like to take a break from D&D that summer and run a short campaign of Americana (by nature, its campaigns are short). Everyone was on-board except for one player who said "if you want to run this, I'll just sit the game out." This player is a longtime friend and a backbone player, so I couldn't bring myself to run it knowing he was just going to drop out for the duration.


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## uzirath (Apr 28, 2021)

I'm in the 4e boat. 

I started gaming with AD&D and BECMI in the early '80s. Played until around 2005 using various editions of D&D and other games (mostly GURPS and Call of Cthulhu). Then started a new career and a family and moved to a new state all at the same time. Gaming fell away for a while.

In 2011, students at my middle school wanted to launch a role-playing game club. I managed to get funding to buy the latest rulebooks and dove in with the students. For two years we tried to make it work, but most of the kids and I just didn't get it. To me, it felt like it was trying to be a video game with so many ability timers and whatnot. Also, requiring grid-based tactical combat wasn't great for a school environment. I kept scratching my head, wondering whether I had "outgrown" ttrpgs altogether. The hilarious thing is that I wasn't at all engaged with gamers on social media at the time. Had no idea that there were "wars" going on virtually over the edition. Didn't know what Pathfinder was. 

When 5e came out, the school wasn't ready to pitch in for new books again, and I wasn't sure I wanted to go in that direction because of my experience with 4e. I bought it myself, though, and thought it was much better. Ran a few campaigns with friends and family. Ultimately, though, I realized that I preferred the advantage/disadvantage/skill model of GURPS, so I ported things to GURPS 4e (which had come out during my gaming hiatus) and have been mostly playing that ever since. Still keep up with the 5e material and occasionally play and run games with it. 

The ironic coda to this tale is that when the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game came out in 2017 (a GURPS boxed set for D&D-style dungeoneering) I was able to convince my school to dive in and purchase four copies. I was worried that the GURPSy elements would be too complex for middle-schoolers, but that proved to be untrue. We've been running with it ever since. It's a bit ironic that I had a harder time teaching kids to play D&D4 than this GURPS offshoot. (Since GURPS has a reputation for being "complex.")

It wasn't until recently that I've become more interested in looking back at the 4e material again. I hear enough people around here chiming in about things that they liked about it that I'm curious if I didn't give it enough of a chance.


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## Jack Daniel (Apr 28, 2021)

I'm currently in one of my collecting moods, and the number of RPG manuals on my bookshelf is experiencing a sharp upswing, so right at the moment my biggest RPG heartbreak is the number of times in the past that I've pruned my collection (and how much more it costs to purchase those selfsame rulebooks or adventure modules on Ebay today vs. when I first acquired them).


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## Reynard (Apr 28, 2021)

Jack Daniel said:


> I'm currently in one of my collecting moods, and the number of RPG manuals on my bookshelf is experiencing a sharp upswing, so right at the moment my biggest RPG heartbreak is the number of times in the past that I've pruned my collection (and how much more it costs to purchase those selfsame rulebooks or adventure modules on Ebay today vs. when I first acquired them).



Yup. So much seller's remorse.


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## DrunkonDuty (Apr 29, 2021)

Mine is that I almost never get to play Champions (or any other HERO system.)


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## Nytmare (Apr 29, 2021)

Sacrosanct said:


> The GM and the other players really psyching me up to play RIFTS.  Never played it before, and they kept pushing it as this great game.  So I did my reading, got excited to play, etc.  The GM even let me play a werewolf PC at the start, which I thought could be pretty awesome.  Got my PC created and we started our first session.
> 
> The rest of the players had a Glitter Boy, Juicer, etc.  And I had this PC who at _best _might be able to do 1d4 MDC while everyone else was going crazy.  I was literally just a cheerleader on the sideline, as if I got into combat, I died right away.
> 
> Yes, I understand this was a failure on the GM's part, but it forever tainted RIFTS for me, and I will always have that bad first impression for a game I was excited to play at first.



I absolutely love the setting of Rifts.  I have never ever ever come across a game that someone else was running however that sat well with me.

The first time I ever tried a play by post forum game, it was a Rifts Atlantis "Splugorth prison break" game.  For those not familiar, they're one of the introductory bad guy "cover of the base book" monsters.  A race of interdimensional slavers who live in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, who capture people and perform terrifying turn-them-into-monsters experiments on them.

The GM told us to all make our characters separately, but to make sure that we focused on role-play over roll-play because he wanted interesting characters, not just gonzo over the top powers and combat abilities.

So I used the "make a Splugorth monster" rules and made a super depressed human sculptor who had been captured by the Splugorth and had his arms lopped off and replaced with sentient lobster claws.  

Intro session, the rest of the party goes supernova (if I remember correctly it was Mecha-godzilla, a Scarecrow/Burster (immune to any damage but fire/pyrokinetic psychic who is immune to all fire damage, and Kitt, the car from Knightrider).  They level the prison, free all the slaves, sink most of the island, and completely murderlate all of the evil slaver monsters before my character has even had a chance to mope around and sigh dramatically.

I didn't bother sticking around for the rest of the campaign.


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## Retreater (Apr 29, 2021)

My limited knowledge of Rifts (I've never played the Palladium version, though I have read their sourcebooks for inspiration when running it in Savage Worlds) suggests that a GM needs to be very careful about the power level and make sure that you don't get Glitter Boys and regular "MARS" characters in the same party, at least not without taking that into account with the adventure design.


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## R_J_K75 (Apr 29, 2021)

Shortly after 3E came, when the 3PP publishing glut was starting there was a book announced. I believe it was called Windhaven and its description sounded like Waterdeep part 2.  I thought this seemed great and would be a perfect book to supplement a campaign set in Waterdeep or use as is.  The art was really nice and I think there were a few previews as well.  But the website always said coming soon, and I checked for updates every few weeks to a month  and nothing ever materialized and eventually after a few years the website was nuked.  I wonder happened and why it never made it to market?  At the time it was announced it seem a good deal of work was already finished.


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## ECMO3 (Apr 29, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> My biggest rpg heartbreak happened with Star Frontiers. I was really into the d100 system and the primary plus secondary skill builds. I hand drew many new equipments, robot models, ships. Bought several official modules. I was designing a BIG space opera campaign. This is going to be great!
> 
> After two games the players didn't like the game and told me unequivocally they wanted to play AD&D instead. The first heartbreak is always the hardest. I've had RPG rejection in later years but it didn't hurt that much. I DMed AD&D but wasn't really into it. Took me several months to get back on my feet.
> 
> ...



Tasselhoff Burrfoot in one of the 1E Dragon Lance adventures falling off a good dragon during an ariel battle over the city of sanction and landing in a Lava river so his body could not be recovered and raised.


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## happyhermit (Apr 29, 2021)

It would have to be 4e D&D for me I guess, only because unlike pretty much all the other systems I am really not into, I kept getting roped back into it.

The only actual play podcast I stuck with for years (Critical Hit) played it until very recently. Mountains of "You just played it wrong" arguments online. The fact that I am the kind of person who likes to be able to find enjoyment in all sorts of games. Whatever else, somehow converged to keep bringing me back to a game that in the end just isn't any of the things I want from ttrpgs, and each time I noticed more things I don't like. Coupled with the attitudes I later read about from the advertising, and the behaviour of it's fans, it just kinda got pushed into a different category than other games which I generally can only get worked up enough to say "meh" or "not something I would want to play all the time".

ETA; Burning wheel


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## Older Beholder (Apr 29, 2021)

I played a Kenku dragon-blood sorcerer a few years back which was a lot of fun, but just as he was starting to come into his own (around level 6 or 7) our DM wanted to make the switch to Traveller, and so his story line ended with being stuck as a prisoner to a bunch of Yuan-Ti. 

The idea for the character was based around the idea that at level 14 a dragon-blood sorcerer can sprout wings, thus breaking the part of the Kenku's curse that stops them flying. Not that I ever expected to make it to level 14. It was just a bit heartbreaking to have to retire the character I cared so much about.


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## bulletmeat (Apr 29, 2021)

Retreater said:


> My limited knowledge of Rifts (I've never played the Palladium version, though I have read their sourcebooks for inspiration when running it in Savage Worlds) suggests that a GM needs to be very careful about the power level and make sure that you don't get Glitter Boys and regular "MARS" characters in the same party, at least not without taking that into account with the adventure design.



I always started Rifts in or around Chi-Town so that super-powerful beings had to stay under the radar or get hosed pretty quickly.  I always wanted to do a True20 Rifts game because I think that system had enough flexibility to run a fair amount of items (once I simplified the damage track).
For me True20 is my heartbreak.  I'd love to run Star Wars or a Rifts clone but it was too much for my OSR group or not enough w/the 3rd edition group.


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## Emerikol (Apr 29, 2021)

bulletmeat said:


> For me True20 is my heartbreak.  I'd love to run Star Wars or a Rifts clone but it was too much for my OSR group or not enough w/the 3rd edition group.



Pretty neat you got both a 3e "heavy rules" group and an OSR "light rules" group.


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## bulletmeat (Apr 29, 2021)

Emerikol said:


> Pretty neat you got both a 3e "heavy rules" group and an OSR "light rules" group.



I had one then the other.  Now neither.


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## dragoner (Apr 29, 2021)

bulletmeat said:


> I always started Rifts in or around Chi-Town so that super-powerful beings had to stay under the radar or get hosed pretty quickly.



Chi-town burbs were a good adventure area, I played a lot of Rifts from mid-90's to mid-2000's; usually we kept the imbalance more to have the powerful RCC/OCC's be foes, and not PC's. That said we had a lot of fun, stuff like Juicer, Mind-Melter, etc. taking a Triax dimensional bathysphere to Worm Wood to find a magic flute that would lead the Gargoyles out of Europe; or a baby dragon, ley line walker, taking on Archie at Aberdeen.


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## bulletmeat (Apr 29, 2021)

The shortest RIFTS campaign had us locked in a secret mountain vault in the NGR controlled by a nuclear powered brain.  Couldn't roll to figure out how to get out so I shot it.  Nuked us all only an hour in a half in.
Good times.


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## TaranTheWanderer (Apr 29, 2021)

Being in a campaign for 3 years and being 5 or 6 sessions from completing the main story line with 16th level characters (the highest I ever played) and then 2 people moved away.  We never got to finish.  


kenada said:


> Old-School Essentials, maybe. While my players haven’t demanded we do something else (yet?), there have been a few comments on the lack of options or the (in)capability of their characters. That’s why we’re giving Worlds Without Numbers a try in a few weeks. It has more of the stuff they like while still being GM friendly and OSR-adjacent. Of course, that could also turn out to be another RPG heartbreak. Hopefully not because I’m running out of ideas for things that would make everyone happy.



I have been playing World Without Numbers on and off for the last few months.  Our group absolutely loves it.  We are doing a rotating DM thing so I’m not sure if it’s the game itself that I love or if it’s the DM who is running it.  I love the toned down stat bonuses, the carrying capacity rules or the hit point/stress system.

have fun with it!


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## Blue (Apr 29, 2021)

Sithlord said:


> I once ran a game with 12 players plus henchman. And if anyone else dropped by they would have been more than welcome to play.



Curios, did you ask for player buy-in for that many?  When the DM needs to divide their attention that many ways, work in character arcs for that many characters, when combat is soooo long between actions.  That impacts them greatly as well.

I probably would have skipped on a 12 player game.


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## Sithlord (Apr 29, 2021)

Blue said:


> Curios, did you ask for player buy-in for that many?  When the DM needs to divide their attention that many ways, work in character arcs for that many characters, when combat is soooo long between actions.  That impacts them greatly as well.
> 
> I probably would have skipped on a 12 player game.



We were 1E/2E players. We did that plus henchman. And as for backstory. It either unfolded throughout the course of play or u had none.  In any game I played players did not give the DM a complex background or much of one. It developed or it didn’t.

the most complex background was I am from specularum or I am from minrothad. And then I worked with that if it was important.


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## Marc_C (Apr 29, 2021)

TaranTheWanderer said:


> Being in a campaign for 3 years and being 5 or 6 sessions from completing the main story line with 16th level characters (the highest I ever played) and then 2 people moved away.  We never got to finish.



That hurts.

Maybe you could finish it online, if it's something they still want to do.


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## Eyes of Nine (Apr 30, 2021)

TaranTheWanderer said:


> Being in a campaign for 3 years and being 5 or 6 sessions from completing the main story line with 16th level characters (the highest I ever played) and then 2 people moved away.  We never got to finish.



Oh this reminds me of a GURPS game I played in that was so weird. We were travelling on the backs of some sort of somethings, and then these things would slash out of the sky. And the GM would NEVER tell us what the hell was going on, even now, 20+ years later. I should call him again and see what the heck was going on with that game. If I recall the last time I asked him, about 5 years ago, he had forgotten what that game was about


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## Azuresun (Apr 30, 2021)

In terms of the game itself, _Exalted 3e, _beyond a shadow of a doubt. Story time:

I loved Exalted when it first came out. It was a really fresh take on fantasy RPG's, with a setting I can still lose myself in, years later. But the rules system was always....White Wolf levels of quality, and the setting went to some very dumb / off-putting / puerile places as second edition wore on. I was seriously hyped for third edition, anticipating a sleeker ruleset that shed the cruft.

First, there was the Kickstarter, which is almost an object lesson in how _not_ to run them. Delay after delay after delay, a virtual communications blackout about how things were going, no spoilers to keep the fans eager beyond things like a low-res version of the same setting map that the artist had posted on his own website months earlier. The promised fiction anthology came out in advance of the rulebook and it was mostly bad. Rudimentary setting errors (like if the most powerful political figured in the setting was an Emperor or Empress), and stories that seemed to be just generic fantasy short stories with a few names changed. And then there was the dreadful conduct of one of the authors when addressing concerns about a previewed power having....really uncomfortable implications _and that's all I'm  going to say about that!_

Then the book finally came out, and I jumped right into a campaign with it. And it was....a glorious, noble _failure_. As for why--



Spoiler



--Complexity was up across the board. Two different types of experience, HUNDREDS of powers, most of which were uninspired dice-fiddlers, all with sloppy mechanics and overwrought descriptions ("You are the most awesome sword dude in the history of sword duding! Sword dudes and dudettes attracted to your gender want to do you, the rest want to be you! Reroll 1's on your Melee dice."). And heaven help you if you were playing a crafter, in which case you had to narrate how you were making dozens of trivial dice rolls to make arrows before you could produce that magic sword you really wanted. And now your artifacts have their own powers, martial arts styles have their own dice pools....
--White Wolf'isms that people had been complaining about in 1992 hadn't been touched. Bonus points at character creation worked differently from experience points, meaning you could easily fall into traps at character creation. Dexterity was still the god stat.
--The new setting was better (for me) but still grossly underdeveloped. Countries got maybe three paragraphs each, and were separated by France-sized expanses of "dunno, make something up". And though it's a matter of taste, some of the retconning of 2e's tendencies to over-detail the setting went way too far ("Some mortals know minor magic that can create potions, make prophecies or summon a ghost, at significant expense or risk." was brutally ripped out of the setting and reduced to "One mortal in a million knows how to turn one loaf of bread into two."), and it got downright absurd when it insisted characters didn't know how their own powers worked or that they were even doing anything supernatural, even when they were summoning energy swords or a horse out of thin air.
--The art was very often baaaaad. Poser 3d models from the depths of the uncanny valley, inconsistent art direction that led to one character changing ethnicity, and notably, a piece the artist just copied from a children's book on dinosaurs.



It badly needed an editor to take a scythe to it, and a round of playtesting, and to me, it stands as a living testament to why authors should kill their darlings.


And in an entirely different way, _Fading Suns_. Love the setting, have an involved campaign in mind, I've tried it three times and _every time_, one or more players drop for reasons unrelated to the game.


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## Marc_C (Apr 30, 2021)

There was a kickstarter called *e20* by G. M. Sarli which was supposed to be the d20 system evolved. Sarli was involved in some of the SW SAGA books. Started great. I even designed the logo for it. The product never came through. He didn't finished the PDF version. The author claimed misdiagnosed mental illness issues for not completing.

I was really hoping to do all the interior layout of the book and the cover. A missed opportunity. So a professional heartbreak.


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## TaranTheWanderer (Apr 30, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> That hurts.
> 
> Maybe you could finish it online, if it's something they still want to do.



We could but we all live in different time zones and it’s been over 20 years.  There were so many small details that we will have forgotten.   I can’t even find the character sheet anymore.


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## Scott Christian (May 1, 2021)

The most recent was the hardest - The Witcher. Everyone was excited, and then, like as we played, the system pulled the oxygen slowly out of the room. After two sessions we couldn't even continue. 
So, at least it was just a book giving me a heartache, and not my players.


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## Jackdaw McGraw (May 1, 2021)

Mage the Ascension. It has so much potential but it's incredibly difficult to get a game off the ground for all but the most focused groups.

Love to read it, hate to play it.


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## Warpiglet-7 (May 1, 2021)

BookTenTiger said:


> For a while in my gaming circle there were two ongoing weekly D&D games: mine, and the Other Game. There were a few crossover players, but mostly folks played in one or the other.
> 
> Over time, the players in my game became more difficult to schedule. Eventually I had to fold my game. I tried to join the Other Game (again, made up of my friends), but they already had six players and decided seven would be too many. So I wound up with no D&D group for a while.
> 
> Now that was heartbreaking... Still stings to this day! As a result, I always make my campaigns open to new players or drop-in guests.



“Friends?”  My God I would have got you a folding chair and a beer.  

efficiency should not trump friends.


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## Eyes of Nine (May 1, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> There was a kickstarter called *e20* by G. M. Sarli which was supposed to be the d20 system evolved. Sarli was involved in some of the SW SAGA books. Started great. I even designed the logo for it. The product never came through. He didn't finished the PDF version. The author claimed misdiagnosed mental illness issues for not completing.
> 
> I was really hoping to do all the interior layout of the book and the cover. A missed opportunity. So a professional heartbreak.



Ah, Kickstarter heartbreaks - that's a whole other thread possibly  

And a whole OTHER thread is professional heartbreaks related to gaming - probably best discussed over favorite drinks at some future convention...


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## messy (May 2, 2021)

This not being finished.


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## aramis erak (May 2, 2021)

For me as a GM?
really hard question.

The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition is pretty far up the list: the changes are pretty fundamental. Not huge, but they have far reaching impacts that make play of campaigns result in very different characters.
GURPS OGRE. the setting in the GURPS RPG Supplement is rather notably different from the one in the boardgames... the lack of tacnuke infantry, the much more fragile battlesuits, and just SJG changing the fundamental relationships of the setting...
GURPS Vorkosigan Adventures. I was hoping for it to have more information about the setting. What it has is almost all (I can't think of any non-mechanics bits that aren't) in the Vorkosigan Companion. Thus it was a total waste of money.
Dragon Warriors. The numbers just don't work that well. The concepts are fine; the actual values used are the issue.
Traveller T5. I wanted to like it, but the core mechanic is retained from MMT ("T4"). It's just so damned much crunch.


----------



## Stormonu (May 2, 2021)

Probably trying to play the Dragonlance modules.  I tried at least twice, and we'd maybe get as far as Que-She village outside of Solace and everyone would just lose interest.

As for game systems that broke my heart - Fading Suns.  Wonderful. character world that strikes me as pre-Dune.  Mechanically, the game is flat and I have been unable to get player interest in playing the game.


----------



## aramis erak (May 2, 2021)

Stormonu said:


> Probably trying to play the Dragonlance modules.  I tried at least twice, and we'd maybe get as far as Que-She village outside of Solace and everyone would just lose interest.



I got to the point where they met the Gully Dwarves, and half my group was unhappy with the setting, and the other half had schedule changes.


----------



## werecorpse (May 3, 2021)

Pendragon, specifically the Great Pendragon Campaign. I love the setting, the base mechanics and the scope of the multi year/generation campaign and managed to convince my D&D centric group to give it a try - they enjoyed the start but trying to integrate the more detailed manor rules and winter phase stuff ended up dominating the game to the exclusion of roleplaying. Campaign derailed it is tainted now and will be tough to go back.

Call of Cthulhu. I’ve played in a couple of one shots and gmed it a little but I would love to play or run a campaign. Just can’t ever seem get any traction in my group.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (May 3, 2021)

Biggest gaming heartbreak?

In the 1990s, I used HERO to run a supers campaign set in the Vernesian/Wellsian version of 1900, sourcing mainly from Space:1889 and a host of other contemporaneous settings- The Difference Engine, Wild, Wild West, Adventures of Briscoe County Junior, Kung Fu- and storylines I could yoink and reset in that era.  I stole freely from Marvel & DC comics, Alien Nation, The Man With The Golden Gun, novels by Michael Moorcock and Harry Turtledove and more.  The PCs were part of an INTERPOL-like group.  And the players bought in 100%.

It was my magnum opus as a GM.

15+ years later, with a different group in another city, I was given an opportunity to run a Supers game again.  My first thought was to dust off the 1900 campaign for this group.  But nobody was interested in HERO.  I suggested M&M 2Ed due to its evolution from D&D 3.5- the group’s preferred system- and that was greeted warmly.

I figured I should update things a bit, so I chose 1914 as the date for the new campaign.  I created new enemies & rivals, like Spring-Heeled Jack (with a pneumatic exoskeleton) and Dr. Zeus (a classic evolved orangutan with a glass-domed brain who had weaponized the inventions & ideas of Nikola Tesla).  There was a time traveler.  This group’s organization was more akin to the X-Men.

...it was a disaster.  The game crashed after 6-8 sessions.

Player buy-in was spotty.  One guy paid almost ZERO attention to the setting.  Another designed a character who was going to be a big problem for the local authorities...even after I pointed this out.  Some players opted not to show up at all.  Despite its relation to 3.5Ed, the differences irked several of the players.  And the final nail in the coffin was that my mastery of the system was not sufficient to the task- I started running the game before I was truly ready,


----------



## Mind of tempest (May 3, 2021)

that every campaign I have ever been in just goes wrongs, first we had too many and no one knew what they were doing and I need something more complex than fighter.

the second time was better till the muderhobo ruined everything and I went to college and no one has clubs at UK college apparently.

In the third campaign I had to cancel my participation because of too much college homework plus the dm should have just have said humans only and low fantasy if that is how he builds his settings.

and the fact that nothing in anything quite fits me in any setting I have ever heard of.
so now I just sit online and buy d&D 5e book like a mad man.


----------



## S'mon (May 3, 2021)

Hm, probably White Star (OSR space opera) - looks fantastic on paper, started two campaigns but could not maintain them.  I think I have a problem with SF in general; I don't think I've run a really successful SF campaign since Star Wars d6 in the late '80s.


----------



## Mind of tempest (May 3, 2021)

S'mon said:


> Hm, probably White Star (OSR space opera) - looks fantastic on paper, started two campaigns but could not maintain them.  I think I have a problem with SF in general; I don't think I've run a really successful SF campaign since Star Wars d6 in the late '80s.



any idea why?


----------



## Nytmare (May 3, 2021)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> I created new enemies & rivals, like Spring-Heeled Jack (with a pneumatic exoskeleton)




Not sure if you read it or not, but "The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack" might tickle your fancy.









						The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


----------



## S'mon (May 3, 2021)

Mind of tempest said:


> any idea why?




I think I know how to set up and run a typical D&D-fantasy style campaign: starter village, local dungeon, more dungeons etc on a wilderness map. PCs get XP and loot from exploring the dungeons; rinse and repeat. With SF I don't really have the same competency; campaigns tend to feel linear, which doesn't generate the same energy. Compared to fantasy sandbox campaigning I think there is a profound lack of material for SF sandboxes, at least material that works for me.


----------



## John R Davis (May 3, 2021)

Savage World. The ooh look I've hit, oh no you haven't melee combat

WHFRP has an awesome look. Then in a combat there it's like SW except you potentially hit less. Then you spend 2 sessions in a canal boat healing up


----------



## Mind of tempest (May 3, 2021)

S'mon said:


> I think I know how to set up and run a typical D&D-fantasy style campaign: starter village, local dungeon, more dungeons etc on a wilderness map. PCs get XP and loot from exploring the dungeons; rinse and repeat. With SF I don't really have the same competency; campaigns tend to feel linear, which doesn't generate the same energy. Compared to fantasy sandbox campaigning I think there is a profound lack of material for SF sandboxes, at least material that works for me.



maybe it is the scale of sci fi anything more than a solar system and it gets hard to build stuff well.


----------



## John Dallman (May 3, 2021)

S'mon said:


> Compared to fantasy sandbox campaigning I think there is a profound lack of material for SF sandboxes, at least material that works for me.



The difficult thing with "generic SF" is that different settings have very different technology and assumptions. You could write generic adventures for Star Trek-like settings, and you might be able to make those work for Traveller-like settings too, but getting them to work for Star Wars as well would be very hard.


----------



## S'mon (May 3, 2021)

Mind of tempest said:


> maybe it is the scale of sci fi anything more than a solar system and it gets hard to build stuff well.



Yes, scale is a big issue. Also SF has lots of different scales - planetary & space, notably. With fantasy you have limited mobility and I find it easy to create a fantasy sandbox with a home base, not so in space.

Mind you I haven't really done a fantasy seafaring campaign/sandbox either, maybe you need to be able to do that before you can work up to doing it in space.


----------



## John R Davis (May 3, 2021)

Yeah. Often thought I should create a Sandbox in Space. Have some scribbled ideas for a " Sector Hack" based on Black Hack / Hex Hack ideas


----------



## Retreater (May 3, 2021)

Tried to run a SF GURPS game one time. Characters ended up having tech that could just completely negate every challenge I could imagine. Oh, I can unlock that door. Oh, I can find any missing person or object. Oh, I can cut my way through those walls. Oh, I can remotely disable the engines of that escape pod. Oh, I can exist in the vacuum of space. 
This is why I don't run SF.


----------



## werecorpse (May 4, 2021)

Yeah I struggle with SF spacefaring as well, specifically Traveller space truckers style.


----------



## Fenris-77 (May 4, 2021)

John R Davis said:


> Yeah. Often thought I should create a Sandbox in Space. Have some scribbled ideas for a " Sector Hack" based on Black Hack / Hex Hack ideas



Stars Without Number might help there.


----------



## Lidgar (May 4, 2021)

Two systems that I was really excited about but alas:

MERP. Awesome lore! Not so awesome rules IMO. At least I can reuse those awesome maps.

Dangerous Journeys. Probably the less said the better.


----------



## MNblockhead (May 4, 2021)

My first time going to Gen Con when I was in high school I got a chance to play a short demo of Gary Gygax's new game with Gary as game master. It was awesome to met and speak with him, but the game was...

Cyborg Commandos

I lied about liking the game and said I was going to buy it after getting money from my parents, which was another lie.


----------



## John R Davis (May 4, 2021)

Fenris-77 said:


> Stars Without Number might help there.



Yeah. Played a campaign of that. The system generation stuff was fine, a lot about the rules I wasn't a massive fan of.


----------



## Warpiglet-7 (May 4, 2021)

MNblockhead said:


> My first time going to Gen Con when I was in high school I got a chance to play a short demo of Gary Gygax's new game with Gary as game master. It was awesome to met and speak with him, but the game was...
> 
> Cyborg Commandos
> 
> I lied about liking the game and said I was going to buy it after getting money from my parents, which was another lie.



I was probably 20 and went to Gen Con in Milwaukee.   I had my AD&D players and other books ready for an autograph, just in case.

In a booth was Gary Gygax and one other individual. There was no line at this moment. I debated with a friend about getting his autograph and ultimately decided _not to bother him.  _

a quarter century later I am still annoyed with my youthful social anxiety.  Some years later I sent an email and got a response from him.  

He said if you are at a con “do buttonhole me.”

classic gygax.  I had to look up “buttonhole” though I was able to infer the meaning.  But bottom line: he would have gladly signed my books.  And now of course it’s too late.


----------



## Eyes of Nine (May 5, 2021)

Warpiglet-7 said:


> I was probably 20 and went to Gen Con in Milwaukee.   I had my AD&D players and other books ready for an autograph, just in case.
> 
> In a booth was Gary Gygax and one other individual. There was no line at this moment. I debated with a friend about getting his autograph and ultimately decided _not to bother him.  _
> 
> ...



Was the other individual Dave Arneson?


----------



## aramis erak (May 5, 2021)

Lidgar said:


> Two systems that I was really excited about but alas:
> 
> MERP. Awesome lore! Not so awesome rules IMO. At least I can reuse those awesome maps.



Oh, but the rules are awesome, too. Just not a good fit for the awesome setting work! 

The rules, as a game not set in Middle Earth, are excellent. At least at low levels, which is as much as I've played/run.

It's Rolemaster Light. With a number of streamlining elements making it approachable. Run some D&D modules with it, and it shines.


----------



## Warpiglet-7 (May 5, 2021)

Eyes of Nine said:


> Was the other individual Dave Arneson?



Don’t think so.  The other guy was younger.

if I figure out the year, I might be able to pair it with one of his projects.  Could have been dangerous journeys actually.

I bet it was:  I was there in 93.


----------



## Marc_C (May 6, 2021)

Minor Heartbreak: I played a lot of Infinity the miniature game. Loved the rules, loved the setting. When Corvus Belli announced a RPG I was super hyped. But when I saw it would use the 2d20 system by Modiphius I was turned off. Infinity already has a d20 roll under system integrated in it. They should have used that as basis for their RPG.


----------



## Scott Christian (May 6, 2021)

Lidgar said:


> Two systems that I was really excited about but alas:
> 
> MERP. Awesome lore! Not so awesome rules IMO. At least I can reuse those awesome maps.
> 
> Dangerous Journeys. Probably the less said the better.



We played MERP for years. What a taxing system, but for some reason, we didn't mind it when we were young. (Magic system was so terrible too.) Then, we switched to Dangerous Journeys. We used Thunder Rift from D&D as the setting. It might have been some of the best gaming we have ever done. We loved the ruleset. That said, it was lopsided to say the least for assassins and magic-users that had that special bonus (forgot what it was).


----------



## MNblockhead (May 8, 2021)

Warpiglet-7 said:


> I was probably 20 and went to Gen Con in Milwaukee.   I had my AD&D players and other books ready for an autograph, just in case.
> 
> In a booth was Gary Gygax and one other individual. There was no line at this moment. I debated with a friend about getting his autograph and ultimately decided _not to bother him.  _
> 
> ...




That's a bummer but also cool that he responded to your e-mail so positively. 

I did get him to sign my issue #1 of Polyhedron. Not sure why that, it is just what I had handy, I suppose. I wish I would have brought one of the Greyhawk booklets from the boxed set or a module like Through the Looking Glass.


----------



## Tonybro001 (Aug 3, 2021)

Being forced to play in VTT and my old club collapsing during lockdown.  Now restrictions have been lifted I am back to face to face gaming at my new club Dragons Keep Roleplay Club 

When life gives you lemons make lemonade


----------



## Committed Hero (Aug 4, 2021)

For a few years I lived an hour away from Milwaukee while Gen Con was there, but lacked the time to game - so it never occurred to me to attend (during the dame period, I ignored my friend telling me how great this new Magic the Gathering game was for about 6 months).


----------



## Lord Mhoram (Aug 4, 2021)

Lidgar said:


> Dangerous Journeys. Probably the less said the better.




I actually ran that for a while, then taking the first edition of Rolemaster (where each subsystem was modular to plug into other systems) I merged Mythus and Rolemaster. Why? I had way to much time on my hands... and I guess a masochist.


----------



## Lord Mhoram (Aug 4, 2021)

My biggest was probably HERO 6th. I loved 5th and 4th, but while I understand the changes made to 6th, those minor changes were enough to make it feel like a new game, and not the game I'd been playing for a very long time.

I'll throw my hat* in the ring for 4E D&D (for reasons mentioned) and Savage World (a little bit in chargen, but I just didn't like the way combat worked)


No - not the hat of D02, which know no limit.


----------



## schneeland (Aug 4, 2021)

D&D - probably 3e and 5e to an equal extent (you have to love something first before it can be heartbreaking, dont you?).

3e is probably the edition I loved most, but in retrospect I had to realize that it was not the game as written that I loved, but rather the ephemeral version of the game that emerged from a group of people with AD&D, The Dark Eye and Warhammer Fantasy backgrounds collective remembering parts of the game, but forgetting and misremembering others, and being willing to twist D&D for about any setting we wanted to play. I bought back a lot of the old books, but while there is still this fuzzy warm feeling of nostalgia for many things, the magic is gone and I don't think it will ever come back.

For 5e the love waxed and waned faster. But mostly this is the edition that made me realize that D&D is really no longer made primarily for people like me, but rather people that are now in their 20s (like I was when 3e came out), and that their preferences and mine don't align in many regards. At the same time, there is no official version of D&D that I would go back to without reservations, even though I still like D&D conceptually (I do enjoy DCC, but I think this does not count).


----------



## aramis erak (Aug 5, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> What is your biggest RPG heartbreak?



As of this week, The One Ring 2E.
It's been oversimplified. It's lost its charm. It's also gone a bit too random.
My players and I agreed that the descriptors for the skill levels were really poorly chosen for the target number system 2E is using.


----------



## Jaeger (Aug 5, 2021)

Lord Mhoram said:


> ...
> No - not the hat of D02, which know no limit.




Damn that brings back memories...

Some seriously hilarious threads back in the day before that place went insane.

The Snake Ghandi posts were pure gold.


----------



## Ixal (Aug 5, 2021)

Most heartbreaks involve not finding players to try out systems which sound interesting. Rifts, Shadowrun (apart from some short campaigns), etc.

And also, as it was already mentioned, the changing target group of D&D.


----------



## Gnosistika (Aug 5, 2021)

Last night actually. My long time group, last night decided that they feel they want to stay with one system going forward. Not a problem.
Thing is, they decided on D&D 5e and I just don't run it - ever. A kick in the gut after running for 20+ years. I would've been okay with Symbaroum or even return to Genesys.


----------



## TheSword (Aug 5, 2021)

It’s not a group related but product related.

My group played through The Way of the Wicked by Gary McBride and Firemountain Games and got all the way to the end of six books - level 19, pretty awesome campaign that took us 2 years or so.

Gary launched a Kickstarter for a drow campaign called Throne of Night, that made the excellent Rise of the Drow look like a minor spelunking expedition. Full Hexploration over hundreds of miles of detailed caverns. Amazing locations, demons, a secret aberration threat from below, a ruined dwarf city and a wicked drow city and kingdom building rules. There were options to play as heroic dwarves settlers or to build a new drow house from the ashes.

I went all in with several hundred other people, I think £180 for hard copy books, PDFs, poster maps etc. it started well, if slowly. The first pdf was released and was everything I’d come to expect - absolute quality adventure. The second pdf came out even later, also brilliant and imaginative so it was worth the wait… though no sign of the first hardcover. Then the wheels came off.

After promises of better communication Gary McBride just stopped talking to us. No updates were forthcoming, we emailed him, emailed Kickstarter no response. People wrote to him at the fire mountain games registered address, no response. We escalated the complaints to Kickstarter, they said they would reach out to the author… no response was forthcoming.

We contacted the artist working on the project who said he had delivered all the art for the project on time and had been paid for it. He promised to reach out to Gary but he too was unsuccessful. Eventually stopping responding to as his part in the Kickstarter had been fulfilled. The firemountain website was closed down, as was the Facebook page. A small number of backers still post five years later keeping the hope that one day we might see any more of this p. Gary sits on the $40,000 he defrauded from his backers without even the good grace to explain what happened and apologize.

Most heartbreaking of all, and the piece that makes me want to buy a ticket from England to Beaverton Oregan and hunt the man down, is that since he went silent, Gary McBride still has a Kickstarter account and has backed over 500 other kickstarters on the site. *Since he went silent!*  Presumably receiving all the updates from those projects and casually ignoring the emails from those he defrauded and Kickstart do nothing! 

I could weep!


----------



## TwoSix (Aug 5, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> There was a kickstarter called *e20* by G. M. Sarli which was supposed to be the d20 system evolved. Sarli was involved in some of the SW SAGA books. Started great. I even designed the logo for it. The product never came through. He didn't finished the PDF version. The author claimed misdiagnosed mental illness issues for not completing.
> 
> I was really hoping to do all the interior layout of the book and the cover. A missed opportunity. So a professional heartbreak.



Ooh, this is the one I was going to post.  (Minus the professional heartbreak part, of course.)  I loved SAGA Edition, and this was the very first Kickstarter I ever backed.  I was super-bummed by how poorly that whole fiasco happened.


----------



## Yora (Aug 5, 2021)

Planescape is not actually very suitable for play. 

It has fantastic worldbuilding, but there's really not much for PCs to do. All but a few of the factions have any motivations to do something that players can get involved with.
It says specifically that it's not a setting for mercenary dungeon crawling, but that's really the only thing that's available to PCs.


----------



## Ghost2020 (Aug 5, 2021)

darjr said:


> TORG. Love the idea and the style but wow when I ran it I just didn’t like it.
> 
> GURPS 4e. I had a long history with GURPS running and playing, but I should have known with 3e being a bit too much for me already. I made it through the 4e core books and was excited to play and the game hit me like a lead balloon. Haven’t looked at it since. Note that my ideal game changed too, it took playing GURPS 4e to make me realize how much.



GURPS 4e for me too. I was hyped for it, as I really liked 3rd ed. 

The core books were a terrible read. Just a chore, dry, and boring. The supplements, in my eyes, weren't much better. Good for reference, but an onerous task to get through. Eventually I just decided it wasn't worth it to go through 4e for how little we actually play GURPS in the first place. I have two sagging shelves of 3e and it's fine for me.


----------



## CleverNickName (Aug 5, 2021)

Buying Menzoberranzan on PC.
Then playing it.  

I'm trying to be funny, but I'm also serious.  I had such high hopes for that CRPG, and it was so expensive at the time (it cost me almost a month of allowance), and it just suuuucked.  I'm still sad about it.


----------



## Imaculata (Aug 5, 2021)

Me and my group had miniatures made of our characters and painted, for a sci fi campaign a friend of ours would run. They looked amazing.

But the campaign slowly started showing its cracks, and we started voicing our objections to how things were going. And eventually it all came to an end, as our DM also leaped onto the crazy covid conspiracy bandwagon, and severed all friendships. The minis are nice though.


----------



## Ghost2020 (Aug 5, 2021)

Jack Daniel said:


> I'm currently in one of my collecting moods, and the number of RPG manuals on my bookshelf is experiencing a sharp upswing, so right at the moment my biggest RPG heartbreak is the number of times in the past that I've pruned my collection (and how much more it costs to purchase those selfsame rulebooks or adventure modules on Ebay today vs. when I first acquired them).



Same.
I hate going back to re-buy something I sold for pennies on the dollar, only to find out it's considerably more expensive now.


----------



## Ghost2020 (Aug 5, 2021)

Nytmare said:


> I absolutely love the setting of Rifts.  I have never ever ever come across a game that someone else was running however that sat well with me.
> 
> The first time I ever tried a play by post forum game, it was a Rifts Atlantis "Splugorth prison break" game.  For those not familiar, they're one of the introductory bad guy "cover of the base book" monsters.  A race of interdimensional slavers who live in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, who capture people and perform terrifying turn-them-into-monsters experiments on them.
> 
> ...



That's insane.

I must be one of the half dozen moderate RIFTS GMs in the world apparently.  I was able to run a year(s) long campaign that had the characters rescue a town from bandits, then successfully defend it, and eventually were asked to run it. They did, and it was great! We had criminal factions, mercs, slavers, vampires, all vying for the area.

The characters were ley line walker, samas pilot, juicer, head hunter, and mind melter, and vagabond. Everyone had a chance to shine. Man, I don't get how people consistently ruin this game.

I'm sorry your session was so bad.


----------



## Ghost2020 (Aug 5, 2021)

TaranTheWanderer said:


> Being in a campaign for 3 years and being 5 or 6 sessions from completing the main story line with 16th level characters (the highest I ever played) and then 2 people moved away.  We never got to finish.
> 
> I have been playing World Without Numbers on and off for the last few months.  Our group absolutely loves it.  We are doing a rotating DM thing so I’m not sure if it’s the game itself that I love or if it’s the DM who is running it.  I love the toned down stat bonuses, the carrying capacity rules or the hit point/stress system.
> 
> have fun with it!



Same.
D&D 3.0, 16th level campaign ran for a few years, and we were literally 2-3 sessions, no more than 4, away from wrapping it up. Then work got in the way, a move, and a new born child. We talked it out once over supper as to the epilogue of sorts, but that was pretty lame after all that time.


----------



## S'mon (Aug 5, 2021)

schneeland said:


> For 5e the love waxed and waned faster. But mostly this is the edition that made me realize that D&D is really no longer made primarily for people like me, but rather people that are now in their 20s (like I was when 3e came out), and that their preferences and mine don't align in many regards.




When 5e came out I thought they did a great job making it inclusive. Not so much recently. I guess initially it was kinda amorphous, trying to be appealing to a wide variety of demographics, but since around 2018 it's settled strongly on a particular style, what I think of as Ginny D-and-D. 



			https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe5KNXqT7970K8vkHb5BQ5Q


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Aug 6, 2021)

Ghost2020 said:


> That's insane.
> 
> I must be one of the half dozen moderate RIFTS GMs in the world apparently.  I was able to run a year(s) long campaign that had the characters rescue a town from bandits, then successfully defend it, and eventually were asked to run it. They did, and it was great! We had criminal factions, mercs, slavers, vampires, all vying for the area.
> 
> ...



When I first decided to run RIFTS, I looked at ALL of my books for the player options available- including those from other Palladium games made available via the Conversion guide- and made a list of what was allowed.  I was thorough, including the name of the sourcebook, a page # to find the OCC or RCC, and a summary of 1-3 sentences.  It was a looooong list.

The campaign didn’t last long, but it _was_ fun.


----------



## Ixal (Aug 6, 2021)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> When I first decided to run RIFTS, I looked at ALL of my books for the player options available- including those from other Palladium games made available via the Conversion guide- and made a list of what was allowed.  I was thorough, including the name of the sourcebook, a page # to find the OCC or RCC, and a summary of 1-3 sentences.  It was a looooong list.
> 
> The campaign didn’t last long, but it _was_ fun.



That seems to be one of the common reasons why Rifts campaigns fail. GMs are not used to ban things.
Most modern RPGs, at least the mainstream ones, try to make everything balanced to each other and there has been a push for GMs to allow everything ("say yes").
Rifts on the other hand does not work that way. Its was not made to ensure balance. Balancing is the GMs job, the book just presents option. So the usual approach of "everything in the core book is allowed" does not work. You might get lucky and end up with a group which can tolerate balance differences or them picking characters of roughly the same power and usefulness level, but it can also go horrible wrong and you end up with a extreme power difference.


----------



## Azuresun (Aug 6, 2021)

Ghost2020 said:


> That's insane.
> 
> I must be one of the half dozen moderate RIFTS GMs in the world apparently.  I was able to run a year(s) long campaign that had the characters rescue a town from bandits, then successfully defend it, and eventually were asked to run it. They did, and it was great! We had criminal factions, mercs, slavers, vampires, all vying for the area.
> 
> ...




I think it's because it so often gets sold on the hyper-gonzo "you can do ANYTHING" aspect, and the range of PC options are so wide and wacky that you do kinda want to try some of the crazier stuff. It does do a bit of a disservice to the game, since there is a very solid sci-fi / post-apocalyptic game in there, and one that benefits a lot from having a firm focus and a limited campaign premise.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Aug 6, 2021)

Ixal said:


> That seems to be one of the common reasons why Rifts campaigns fail. GMs are not used to ban things.
> Most modern RPGs, at least the mainstream ones, try to make everything balanced to each other and there has been a push for GMs to allow everything ("say yes").
> Rifts on the other hand does not work that way. Its was not made to ensure balance. Balancing is the GMs job, the book just presents option. So the usual approach of "everything in the core book is allowed" does not work. You might get lucky and end up with a group which can tolerate balance differences or them picking characters of roughly the same power and usefulness level, but it can also go horrible wrong and you end up with a extreme power difference.



Gotta say, I really didn’t ban much of anything.  I mostly excised stuff I simply didn’t want to deal with.

(Nobody chose a Vagabond, though.)


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## Dragonsbane (Aug 6, 2021)

The crazy costs of some game stuff lately. MCG is always overpriced but $250 for Invisible Sun and 60$ just for Ptlous PDF? Crazy "deluxe" sets that are way more money with a trinket or two... the standard price of WotC books even has gone up.


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## Willie the Duck (Aug 6, 2021)

Dragonsbane said:


> The crazy costs of some game stuff lately. MCG is always overpriced but $250 for Invisible Sun and 60$ just for Ptlous PDF? Crazy "deluxe" sets that are way more money with a trinket or two... the standard price of WotC books even has gone up.



_Invisible Suns_ was definitely a heartbreak for my group. Cool concepts, inventive setting, kitchen sink of magic with a not-quite-steampunk atmosphere. And then you sit down to play it and realize it is an organizational mess; the balance is nonexistent; there are not just several, but _ubiquitous_ infinite character resource generation loops; and overall it just looks like the alpha, maybe beta version of what after months-to-years of playtesting and fine-tuning could turn into a very impressive game.


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## Mind of tempest (Aug 6, 2021)

Dragonsbane said:


> The crazy costs of some game stuff lately. MCG is always overpriced but $250 for Invisible Sun and 60$ just for Ptlous PDF? Crazy "deluxe" sets that are way more money with a trinket or two... the standard price of WotC books even has gone up.



some of it is a supply problem apparently but the rest is odd to me.


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## Willie the Duck (Aug 6, 2021)

Mind of tempest said:


> some of it is a supply problem apparently but the rest is odd to me.



My impression is that MCG is going for a 'boutique' economic model -- low volume, high profit sales of high cost products for people who don't care overmuch about the price (especially if they think then they are getting a high end product). Outside of my issues with the actual rules of _Invisible Suns_, it's not altogether wrong. The actual product from a production value is amazing -- full color everything, high quality hard bound books, colored non-standard sized character sheets, lots of full color glossy tokens and decks of cards for spells and items and little plastic skeleton keys representing character metacurrencies and a weird six fingered hand which holds the card denoting the current thematic atmosphere and so forth. 

It's an interesting model for so-called 'elfgames,' but given that the non-D&D TTRPG market seems to over-represent (compared to the general population highly compensated PhDs/Engineers/Computer People/etc. (as well as, I should stipulate, over-represent  struggling teens/college students/young adults), I can see a reason to try to market oneself as the Cadillac (or similar concept, for other countries) of RPGs.


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## Scott Christian (Aug 6, 2021)

Ixal said:


> Most modern RPGs, at least the mainstream ones, try to make everything balanced to each other and there has been a push for GMs to allow everything ("say yes").



This can not be restated enough. Which, if we reach out to another thread about 6e settings, cannot be understated. The say yes does not allow generic and specific settings. The say yes is also a way to keep campaigns going for many players. So it is a two-edged sword.


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## kevin_video (Aug 7, 2021)

TheSword said:


> It’s not a group related but product related.
> 
> My group played through The Way of the Wicked by Gary McBride and Firemountain Games and got all the way to the end of six books - level 19, pretty awesome campaign that took us 2 years or so.
> 
> ...



What I was most mad about all of this was Gary staying silent and not trusting us. I'm sure pride was a huge factor. I know a lot of people were angry and felt he took the money and dipped, saying he spent it all on the African safari, but that's not true. Safaris take time to plan and aren't all that expensive overall. The artist did the math and a large chunk went to him. KS takes 5% from every campaign so $2k was immediately taken. However, on the Facebook page, he mentioned that while he was gone he'd hire someone to look after everything. We never heard anything about that afterwards. Was Gary robbed? Was his stuff taken? Was there a fire? Did something happen to his wife and he lost control of his company? The safari was supposed to be an anniversary gift to the both of them, but did it end in divorce? So many things. So many people going without. And then he just immediately cut himself off from all of his friends. People who were always in contact with him from his hometown and elsewhere, just suddenly cut out of his life and he'd gone silent with them too, and they were worried. Almost panicking because there was no response. All they knew was Gary was still funding projects so he was at least alive. There's just such a huge shadow cast over this project now. 

But I'm with you. Biggest RPG heartbreak. I just hope that my posts and uploads helped people complete their game to a satisfactory conclusion.


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## Gnarlo (Aug 7, 2021)

Everquest. Yeah, it’s not a TTRPG but it’s the closest thing to online D&D I ever experienced. The chief founder Brad McQuaid said he based the world and lore on his old D&D campaign and everything about it in the early days was D&D with the serial numbers filed off  Classes, races, spells, abilities…
Made many a friend playing the game, a good half dozen of which I’m still friends with 22 years later. We enjoyed playing the hell out of it for a good 5 years or so, until the developers began listening to the hard-core end-raid guilds, and then all the expansions and new content coming out were 90%+ for the end game “elites”, whom the devs themselves eventually admitted were less than 5% of the player base… More and more non raiding, frustrated players on the forums they refused to listen to because they were the 800 pound gorilla—until WoW came out. The exodus was amazing; most of our guild left within 2 weeks. I tried it for a couple months, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for. EQ’s devs woke up and realized at last that it was the rank and file subscribers that paid their salaries, not the handful of L33t raiders, and started making low and mid level content again, but it was too late, most of us had left.
I have an emulator server I boot up a couple times a year and wander around in god mode through the old zones I played in and remember incredible nights of fun  But one of the biggest heartbreaks is that almost all the raiding guilds that basically killed the game for everyone else all left enmasse for WoW as well. Hell, the most vocal of the “end game all the time” guild leaders got a job with Blizzard as a raid developer after killing our fun… sigh…
Edit to add went to look up if he was still there, and found he is one of the Blizzard folks in the lawsuit charged with abuse and harassment of female employees and players… doesn’t that just fit…


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## glass (Aug 9, 2021)

Blue said:


> I probably would have skipped on a 12 player game.



I _did_ skip out on a 12 player game (well, it might have only been 10 or 11, but way to many to my way of thinking). TBF, my Mum was seriously ill in hospital at the time and visiting her was taking up a lot of my time so another RPG night was already putting a strain on things, but when the number of players shot up that was the final straw.

Anyway, my biggest heartbreak was the DDN playtest. 5e as published is a pretty decent game, but if they could actually have made the game they were promising early in the playtest it could have been amazing!  As the playtest went on, it became increasingly apparent that not only did they have no idea how to implement the features they had been touting a few months earlier, but they were not really interested in doing so. It was...heart breaking.

_
glass.


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## Chris Harris (Aug 11, 2021)

Age 11, buying T1: The Village of Hommlet right when it hit the shelves, and then waiting for the Temple of Elemental Evil to come out "soon." I squinted down that road to Nulb for a decade! I accidentally cut loose with a fairly loud "MFer!" in a game and comic shop in Austin when I saw it on the shelf after all that time, _and they understood._


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## Nilbog (Aug 11, 2021)

Not sure it classes as heartbreak, probably more regret, but anyways never buying Star Wars Saga Edition.  I've a Star Wars campaign I'm itching to run but none of the SW systems I have fit our group and Saga Edition from what I've read of it would be right up our street


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## overgeeked (Aug 12, 2021)

WFRP 4E. It's a gorgeous book and the supplements are amazing. Their update of Enemey Within is brilliant. But the WFRP 4E game itself is a nightmarish disaster. I really hope they update the hell out of it and streamline things a lot.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Aug 12, 2021)

I feel the same way about it. The book is lovely, and I was totally on-board with it to a point. When I saw just how many systems and subsystems were piling up, I stopped reading.



overgeeked said:


> WFRP 4E. It's a gorgeous book and the supplements are amazing. Their update of Enemey Within is brilliant. But the WFRP 4E game itself is a nightmarish disaster. I really hope they update the hell out of it and streamline things a lot.


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## Ghost2020 (Aug 12, 2021)

....Oof...i keep hearing this about WHFRP 4e. I have a few items for the line, was going to start on the Starter Set, but this complaint keeps cropping up.


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## overgeeked (Aug 12, 2021)

Ghost2020 said:


> ....Oof...i keep hearing this about WHFRP 4e. I have a few items for the line, was going to start on the Starter Set, but this complaint keeps cropping up.



The Starter Set uses a smaller version of the game (obviously) and does a good job of walking you through the system one bit at a time. For me the full version of 4E is way, way too much. So it's back to 2E with a few house rules.


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## Marc_C (Aug 12, 2021)

overgeeked said:


> The Starter Set uses a smaller version of the game (obviously) and does a good job of walking you through the system one bit at a time. For me the full version of 4E is way, way too much. So it's back to 2E with a few house rules.



2e is the Mongoose edition?


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## overgeeked (Aug 12, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> 2e is the Mongoose edition?



No. The Green Ronin / Black Library edition. I don't think Mongoose ever did a version.


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## Marc_C (Aug 12, 2021)

overgeeked said:


> No. The Green Ronin / Black Library edition. I don't think Mongoose ever did a version.



Thanks, I'll look it up.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Aug 12, 2021)

Yeah, I think I like 2e Warhammer best of all. I'd go with 1e, but while it's got the most attitude of all of the editions, 2e smoothes out the rough edges just enough, mechanically speaking.


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## overgeeked (Aug 12, 2021)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Yeah, I think I like 2e Warhammer best of all. I'd go with 1e, but while it's got the most attitude of all of the editions, 2e smoothes out the rough edges just enough, mechanically speaking.



2E mechanics with 1E setting.


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## Ghost2020 (Aug 12, 2021)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Yeah, I think I like 2e Warhammer best of all. I'd go with 1e, but while it's got the most attitude of all of the editions, 2e smoothes out the rough edges just enough, mechanically speaking.



Too bad it's almost impossible to find now. 

Also, we felt it was pretty "whiffy", as in hard to hit, lots of misses.


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## overgeeked (Aug 12, 2021)

Ghost2020 said:


> Too bad it's almost impossible to find now.
> 
> Also, we felt it was pretty "whiffy", as in hard to hit, lots of misses.



Except as a PDF. Which I linked above. And Amazon. And Ebay. And Noble Knight. 

All you’d have to do to decrease the whiff factor is add an escalation die style mechanic. Every round you get some stacking bonus to hit.


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## Eyes of Nine (Aug 12, 2021)

The end of support for the D&D 4e character builder (ok, not really, but I wish they still had that - it was very useful).


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## Ralif Redhammer (Aug 12, 2021)

Definitely. There were some solid setting books for 2e, but 1e just felt way more grim and cheeky at the same time.



overgeeked said:


> 2E mechanics with 1E setting.




Glad I didn't get rid of any of my books! I don't recall the combat too well, years later. But Warhammer Fantasy combat has always been something way more rough and brutal than D&D. It was something you wanted to avoid, what with those gruesome crit tables.



Ghost2020 said:


> Too bad it's almost impossible to find now.
> 
> Also, we felt it was pretty "whiffy", as in hard to hit, lots of misses.


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## Retreater (Aug 12, 2021)

For those of you experienced WFRPG folks ... I have the bestiary and core rules for WFRPG, but I have the current 4e release of The Enemy Within. Do you think I can just run the campaign with the 2e rules?


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## overgeeked (Aug 12, 2021)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Definitely. There were some solid setting books for 2e, but 1e just felt way more grim and cheeky at the same time.
> 
> Glad I didn't get rid of any of my books! I don't recall the combat too well, years later. But Warhammer Fantasy combat has always been something way more rough and brutal than D&D. It was something you wanted to avoid, what with those gruesome crit tables.



Especially if you use some of the expanded critical hit tables.


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## overgeeked (Aug 12, 2021)

Retreater said:


> For those of you experienced WFRPG folks ... I have the bestiary and core rules for WFRPG, but I have the current 4e release of The Enemy Within. Do you think I can just run the campaign with the 2e rules?



There are some differences between 2E and 4E in regards to damage output and wounds.

Wounds. In 2E your starting wounds are between 8-14. In 4E you generally start with more. It's a calculation based on three different stats, but it's usually around +2-4 in 4E when compared to 2E.

Damage. In 2E a sword does 1d10+SB (strength bonus, the tens digit of your strength score). In 4E a sword does SB+4+SL (success levels, how much your attack tens dice beats your target's tens dice to defend themselves). This is effectively 1d10+SB+4...but you're generally going to get on the lower end of that 1d10. So damage is a bit more in 4E.

Comparing the starting Mutants from the Enemy Within 1E and 4E (there was no 2E Enemy Within, but it's close enough)... we get...nearly identical stats...except wounds are basically doubled.

Same move, weapon skill +15% in 4E, same strength bonus, same toughness bonus, intelligence is the same, dex is +1% in 4E, willpower is +5% in 4E, and fellowship is +20% in 4E. 

So if you're running Enemy Within 4E using the 2E system, I'd halve the baddies' wounds and give them a -15% on combat skills as a baseline and adjust from there. But that's from literally just glancing at two stat blocks, so take that with a big grain of salt.


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## Ghost2020 (Aug 12, 2021)

overgeeked said:


> Except as a PDF. Which I linked above. And Amazon. And Ebay. And Noble Knight.
> 
> All you’d have to do to decrease the whiff factor is add an escalation die style mechanic. Every round you get some stacking bonus to hit.




Oh yes, PDF is there, that's fine.  The hardcopies are difficult to find for less than $100 for the corebook.
That's what I meant as impossible. I should have stated 'financially impossible'.


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## Emirikol (Aug 22, 2021)

Ive spent TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars on rpgs and related things since 1981.
My biggest heartbreak: my kids dont want to play.
Otherwise, by games that my players played once or declined that I really wanted to work out: Dark Eye, Top Secret, every zombie game evAR, and Indy jones.
I just donated 20 bankers boxes of books to the thrift stores including 2 boxes of old CoC (kept my recent stuff). Most of the rrst was donated to game convention charity auctions or 'whichever kid sat at my convention game table that day.'
All that remains in my collection:
Complete dnd collection
WFRP all editions
Old Top Secret 1e
and a couple reference books for oddball systems where I may get to play: TOR, star wars. Dark Heresy, Colonial Gothic/Zweihander.

Moving to PDFs has really softened the blow..sadly.


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## GrahamWills (Aug 22, 2021)

For me, the biggest disappointment has been when Wizards decided to stop supporting the Living Campaign model; specifically the player-run aspects. Those volunteers who designed modules, ran interactives and all kind of weird events made the campaigns unique and fun. I miss the days when I would try and get a business trip to coincide with a weekend I could play in a different state so I could play in the modules that could only be played there. I miss the fervor with which local leaders would push their agendas and organizations. I understand that it was a bit exclusive and probably a pain for WOTC to run. But, basically,

I miss Verbobonc


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## TheAlkaizer (Aug 22, 2021)

Emirikol said:


> My biggest heartbreak: my kids dont want to play.



Ooof, that hurts.

I'm nowhere near having kids. But it's something I've been thinking about and dreading; having kids and them not having any common interests with you, or finding what you liked lame.

When I was young, my dad would spend all his weekends with me and show me old movies, music, etc. I'm a naturally very curious and interested person, so I loved everything he showed me. I'd hate not to have that with my kids.


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## Marc_C (Aug 22, 2021)

I'll add *Symbaroum* to my list. After only 2 games we had a TPK and my lead player said he didn't like the system and the dark fantasy setting. Campaign ended for good. Big disappointment.

I'm not selling my books. I'll run solitary adventures for myself. Maybe I'll find other players some day.


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## TheAlkaizer (Aug 22, 2021)

Marc_C said:


> I'll add *Symbaroum* to my list. After only 2 games we had a TPK and my lead player said he didn't like the system and the dark fantasy setting. Campaign ended for good. Big disappointment.
> 
> I'm not selling my books. I'll run solitary adventures for myself. Maybe I'll find other players some day.



I bought the books a month ago. Excited to try it.

If all goes wrong and I can't get to play it, I'll steal the setting and adapt it to other TTRPGs.


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## DammitVictor (Aug 23, 2021)

Biggest for me is always-- I _hope_, bright gods I _hope_-- always going to be *Gamma World *6e. I'm not interesting in rehashing any of the old arguments about it, but it contained _absolutely none_ of what I was looking for in _Gamma World_ (especially after _Alternity Gamma World_ disappointed me)  and _absolutely nothing _that I could salvage and transplant into a better d20-based post-apocalyptic game. Maybe not as morally and aesthetically offensive as _Book of Exalted Deeds_ and _Book of Vile Darkness_, but still takes the "most disappointing" spot by virtue of replacing what was once one my most beloved RPGs of all time.

The only positive things I can say about it are that it's made of high-quality paper and doesn't contain toxic mold, so I can't honestly call it the _worst_ post-apocalyptic survival game ever made.

On a less vitriolic note, *Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangness* and/or *After the Bomb*, for which I cannot fault Erick Wujcik; my failure to grasp the Palladium house system well enough to successfully run a campaign with it is solely my own, and I have _hopefully_ found a willing instructor to correct this deficit. I really, really, _really _want to love this game but I just can't get far enough into to it to do so.

Finally, I feel like this is the wrong place on the internet to be saying it, but I'm not the first in this thread: D&D 5e. I had basically fallen out of love with 3.5 before the release of 4e and the rise of Pathfinder, and never cottoned to 4e much at all, but I followed the D&D Next playtests with some enthusiasm and it looked like a promising new beginning. Seeing that they'd just reinstated the multiclassing mechanics from 3.0 whole cloth pissed me off _something fierce_, but I ran a game for almost eighteen months before giving up on it in disgust.

I have _never_ had a publisher or a fandom make it more clear that their products are _not for me_, and I'm content to restock my library of all of the TSR-era products I've missed or missed out on-- for old time's sake-- and otherwise consider it mutual.


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## humble minion (Aug 23, 2021)

Hmm, the abrupt cancellation of the 3.5e Ravenloft Gazetteer line was one of them.  I genuinely loved those books, and aside from an interesting 'metaplot' and narrator, they gave a lot of depth, verisimilitude, and atmosphere to a setting that had often been a series of loosely-connected adventure sites.  I did have hopes that they'd eventually go up on DMGuild and maybe the original creators would consider completing the series, but VRGtR took the whole setting philosophy in the 100% opposite direction to the Gazetteers (one I personally don't care for), and while the books were on DMGuild for a little while, they got suddenly yanked a while back, and as far as i know there's never been any explanation as to why.  I occasionally harbour dark and probably overly-paranoid suspicions that WotC want to keep the new 5e incarnation of Ravenloft front and centre and don't WANT the Gazetteers competing.

The other is probably Mutants and Masterminds.  Yes, it's still around, but the line is basically a shambling zombie at the moment with very little life in it.  I discovered M&M at the very end of its 2e 'golden age' and got right into it.  But while there was a lot to like about the 3e system, it could have used a little more playtesting in a few places, and the sales model that Green Ronin used for it (lots of tiny $5 PDFs which _maybe _get released later as a compiled hardback) was extremely corrosive to the quality of the product line, and left a very bad taste in the mouth from a value-for-money point of view.  And these days, Green Ronin is much more interested in its licenced properties and the AGE system, and M&M really just stumbles on as a neglected afterthought.   Very few people seem to play it these days - back in the 2e era it was everywhere.


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## FitzTheRuke (Aug 23, 2021)

My Play By Post games here on ENWorld. I've had a few players that played solidly for multiple YEARS spontaneously disappear. It's one thing when they're still posting here (so I know they're okay, even if they quit the game) but it's another thing when they post a turn for their character, and then... never again. I wonder what happened to them.


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