Fantasy Heart Breakers - mechanics that break the heart

[Tanarii]

Shamelessly doing that thing where I want to post about something, and trying to generalize a thread out of it.

I have a collection of old Plladium books, and sometimes when I'm smoking a cigar I browse through one for nostalgic reasons. Palladium is one of my favorite Fantasy Heart Breakers. It's a series of wonderfully evocative settings, all with Siembieda's clunky Palladium system rammed down them.

I was going through Beyond the Supernatural, a book about Supernatural Horror, and using your carefully build Palladium System Martial Arts Physical Program Modern Weapons master to shoot up a series of eldritch abominations. Or at least, that's how we played it when I was a teenager.

Palladium system has many mechanics that break the heart, from the slow and buggy combat system, to the kludged together skill system, to horrific balance issues.

But the mechanic that really breaks my heart is how poorly ability scores were done. There are 8 of them, you're supposed to roll old school with 3d6, and on a 16+ you roll another d6 and add it on. In the vast majority of Palladium games, other than 17+ scores, and whatever scores you need to qualify for a class, only three scores matter. Physical Strength for carrying capacity, Physical Endurance for HPs, and Speed for ... well, running speed.

Unlike older D&D (which I gather the system was derived from), there are a plethora of % based skills for doing things. I've never seen a hint you're supposed to roll d20 under an ability score to do something, unlike AD&Ds NWPs later formalized for that system. So you can literally erase any of the other 5 ability scores that are 16 or less off your character sheet once you pick a class.

To wrap up this ramble, the general question: what's your favorite fantasy heartbreaker poorly designed mechanic?

[Erulasto]

Shamelessly doing that thing where I want to post about something, and trying to generalize a thread out of it.

I have a collection of old Plladium books, and sometimes when I'm smoking a cigar I browse through one for nostalgic reasons. Palladium is one of my favorite Fantasy Heart Breakers. It's a series of wonderfully evocative settings, all with Siembieda's clunky Palladium system rammed down them.

I was going through Beyond the Supernatural, a book about Supernatural Horror, and using your carefully build Palladium System Martial Arts Physical Program Modern Weapons master to shoot up a series of eldritch abominations. Or at least, that's how we played it when I was a teenager.

Palladium system has many mechanics that break the heart, from the slow and buggy combat system, to the kludged together skill system, to horrific balance issues.

But the mechanic that really breaks my heart is how poorly ability scores were done. There are 8 of them, you're supposed to roll old school with 3d6, and on a 16+ you roll another d6 and add it on. In the vast majority of Palladium games, other than 17+ scores, and whatever scores you need to qualify for a class, only three scores matter. Physical Strength for carrying capacity, Physical Endurance for HPs, and Speed for ... well, running speed.

Unlike older D&D (which I gather the system was derived from), there are a plethora of % based skills for doing things. I've never seen a hint you're supposed to roll d20 under an ability score to do something, unlike AD&Ds NWPs later formalized for that system. So you can literally erase any of the other 5 ability scores that are 16 or less off your character sheet once you pick a class.

To wrap up this ramble, the general question: what's your favorite fantasy heartbreaker poorly designed mechanic?

Oh god. I got my RP start on Rifts, and as much as I have a nostalgic love for everything Palladium (especially Nightbane, mostly because I loved the complexity of options that you could use to put together a character), it really isn't a great system. And I will always love the Adventure in the Northern Wilderness book because of the adventure: The Forest of Broken Wings.

Loved the idea of players getting cancer from fighting a radioactive dragon in a fantasy setting. Hehe

I used to use Hero's Unlimited for all my superhero needs, up to and including within the last year or two. But that's because I'd been living under a rock and hadn't heard of Mutants and Masterminds yet.

I think the MDC > SDC = HP system was one that bothered me a lot. The idea that a vagabond with a Wilks Ion Pistol (1d4 mega-damage, IIRC) could absolutely vaporize any normal human who was caught with their proverbial (or literal) pants down sucked.

I always appreciated Physical Prowess as well as a stat, however, because of the bonus to hit/parry/dodge.

[Friv]

Years ago, one of my first RPGs was the Advanced Fighting Fantasy (First Edition) roleplaying game. It was designed to take the solo player game, and turn it into a multi-player game.

The core system was almost beautifully simple, aside from one glaring disaster. You had scores for Skill, Stamina, and Luck. Skill determined how good you were at taking action, Stamina determined your ability to survive battle and hardship, and Luck determined your ability for random things to go your way. To further differentiate players, you had individual Skills - things like Climb, or Swords, which boosted your Skill rating for that specialty. Magic was in the game, but taking it reduced your Skill rating for every non-spell action, and casting spells cost you Stamina, so while it was very powerful, you couldn't do a lot of it. It was a pretty good trade-off.

Except that the game also had random character creation. Skill 1d6+6, Stamina 2d6+12, Luck 1d6+6. And you got skill specialty points equal to your Skill rating.

The result was that if one player rolled Skill 7, and another player rolled Skill 12, the Skill 12 player was better than the Skill 7 player at literally everything. It was theoretically possible for the Skill 7 player to put all seven skill points into one category in order to have a single thing they were better at than the Skill 12 player, who was still crushing it everywhere else. It was also possible for the Skill 7 player to also have a lower Luck than the Skill 12 player, making them worse always for the whole game.

(The sample pre-created characters all had balanced stats, on the assumption that 1 Skill = 1 Luck = 2 Stamina. This was the first house rule I ever created for a game - point-buy character creation.)

[gkathellar]

Can I just nominate Exalted 2E's entire combat system? The game's writing does such a good job of selling you the idea that this is going to be something kinetic and exciting and then ... ten-step attack resolution. Motes as HP. The mistakes just pile on, ad infinitum.

Standing above all are the Sidereal Martial Arts in Scroll of the Monk, which are visually exciting, thematically and metaphorically rich, take a wide variety of anime fightan mans tropes and gives them a real context, and are completely nonfunctional. Worst (best?) of all is the capstone charm for Border of Kaleidoscopic Logic Style, which basically forces everyone to resolve combat through an awful minigame.

[Particle_Man]

I can’t remember which version, but one of them for Usagi Yojimbo managed to break the rock-paper-scissors mechanic such that one of the three options guaranteed that you would win or tie no matter which option your opponent used. I mean, how can you mess up this mechanic?

[Kaptin Keen]

To wrap up this ramble, the general question: what's your favorite fantasy heartbreaker poorly designed mechanic?

Anything in Shadowrun. Magic doesn't work, matrix doesn't work, vehicle combat doesn't work, game balance doesn't work, target number 7 doesn't work - it just basically never ends. For all that, it's the system I've played 2nd most after D&D.

[Tanarii]

Except that the game also had random character creation. Skill 1d6+6, Stamina 2d6+12, Luck 1d6+6. And you got skill specialty points equal to your Skill rating.

The result was that if one player rolled Skill 7, and another player rolled Skill 12, the Skill 12 player was better than the Skill 7 player at literally everything. It was theoretically possible for the Skill 7 player to put all seven skill points into one category in order to have a single thing they were better at than the Skill 12 player, who was still crushing it everywhere else. It was also possible for the Skill 7 player to also have a lower Luck than the Skill 12 player, making them worse always for the whole game.

Oh yeah, that's a bad one. The odds of someone having significantly higher Skill and Luck when there are only two d6 involved total is fairly high. It sounds like it's more the opposite problem of my OP, in that the ability score rolling stage matters way too much.

[Florian]

Ok, we already had RIFTS. So cool, so damned flawed....

L5R is using a roll and keep mechanic. Basically, you build a pool of d10s based on the sum total of your Attribute + Skill (roll), then you take a number of those d10s equal to the sum of Attribute points you have and discard the rest (keep). The flaw here is very obvious, EXP spent on Attributes are vastly more effective than EXP spent on Skills.
At least hey partially fixed this in the 4th edition by A) directly mentioned this as an unwanted side effect and B) Adding some small boons to actually advancing a skill.

Pendragon has one of the most beautiful "Alignment"-Systems I've ever seen. You have a mirrored pair of each seven Virtues and seven Sins. Basically, should a scene come up that deals with one of the Virtues or Sins (the higher, so "dominant" of the two), you make a check by rolling under to see if your character will automatically act according to his nature. Should you fail at this roll, you check the counterpart to see what happens. Should you check, the player may choose freely. You mark the one that "won" and at the end of the session, make a special check to see if your Virtue/Sin will change one point up or down.

All in all, it is such a beautiful approach to the whole topic, it flaws are what is so heart-breaking here: At character creation, when you set a Virtue/Sin pair to absolute min/max 20/0, there is no way in hell that "Sir Florian the Chaste" is ever falling for the seducing witch. At the same time, a straight 10/10 gives you the most flexible options and you can pretty much choose your result and ignore the dice.

[Hunter Noventa]

Ah yes RIFTS, the system where your supposedly competent pilot has a 20% chance to properly fly their plane. We had some great times with it in college but we haven't touched it in years in my group.

And I echo Shadowrun being kludgy, but for different reasons. The real problem with it is that it's basically three games in one. You have the regular combat that everyone participates in, in theory. then you have the Matrix, where everyone sits around while your decker does their thing. Then you have astral projection/combat where everyone sits around while the mage does their thing.

[Florian]

The real problem with it is that it's basically three games in one. You have the regular combat that everyone participates in, in theory. then you have the Matrix, where everyone sits around while your decker does their thing. Then you have astral projection/combat where everyone sits around while the mage does their thing.

Back in the days of SR 1st/2nd, we actually had a very good *cough* house rule to deal with the situation.
Our weekly gaming club met at a italian restaurant, so we had the simple arrangement that the Deckers and Mages got their spotlight and everyone else was busy with food while they were at it, then we switched when the more "physical characters" went to work. In addition, should one of them still stick along for the physical part of the run and garner even more spotlight, they had to pay for either a Pizza Pane or desert. All in all, that worked out rather well and no-one really was bored. (Oddly, we had a rotating group of around 13 players and all we ever ate over some years while playing was Salade Nicoise, Pizza Margherita and Pizza Pane with extra garlic)

[Arbane]

Any game which makes you spend your Experience Points to use them as Luck Points. I hate that mechanic, as it pretty much guarantees that if your character has a run of bad luck, they'll end up even further behind everyone else burning XP trying to survive. (IIRC 7th Sea did this, and I've seen other games with it. My preferred fix is to say that you HAVE to use up Luck Points to make them into Experience Points.)

[OutOfThyme]

Can I just nominate Exalted 2E's entire combat system? The game's writing does such a good job of selling you the idea that this is going to be something kinetic and exciting and then ... ten-step attack resolution. Motes as HP. The mistakes just pile on, ad infinitum.

Standing above all are the Sidereal Martial Arts in Scroll of the Monk, which are visually exciting, thematically and metaphorically rich, take a wide variety of anime fightan mans tropes and gives them a real context, and are completely nonfunctional. Worst (best?) of all is the capstone charm for Border of Kaleidoscopic Logic Style, which basically forces everyone to resolve combat through an awful minigame.

I'm not really sure how I feel about Exalted 2E's Martial Arts charms. I dug the idea, but it always kinda fell flat mechanically, IMO. It seemed to me that you're better off not investing in a martial art if you were a non-Sidereal Celestial Exalt. Maybe there's something wrong with my understanding of the system (and it's also been years since I've looked at Exalted 2E/2.5E), but it always seemed like you were better off just investing in charms from your native selection.

As for Sidereal Martial Arts, they're so poorly made it's laughable. At worst, they're unusable. At best, you get Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick.

[gkathellar]

I'm not really sure how I feel about Exalted 2E's Martial Arts charms. I dug the idea, but it always kinda fell flat mechanically, IMO. It seemed to me that you're better off not investing in a martial art if you were a non-Sidereal Celestial Exalt. Maybe there's something wrong with my understanding of the system (and it's also been years since I've looked at Exalted 2E/2.5E), but it always seemed like you were better off just investing in charms from your native selection.

IIRC, the premise was always explicitly, "these should be roughly Celestial-level, and so the only reason a Solar would ever have to invest in them is versatility."

Unfortunately, versatility in combat didn't really matter at all So Yeah.

As for Sidereal Martial Arts, they're so poorly made it's laughable. At worst, they're unusable. At best, you get Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick.

FWIW, though, you can punch someone into a duck.

[Anonymouswizard]

Hit points in D&D and it's ilk. It's a great mechanic in wargames, where you measure a unit's fighting spirit instead of remaining strength, and translating that to the roleplaying arena makes sense. The problem comes when you combine treating hp as meat with rapidly increasing totals, so that a 10th level Fighter can survive multiple Fireballs.

4e gets a pass, as it's built around hp not being meat, but 5e doesn't due to removing most of 4e's 'morale boosting restores hp' abilities.

[Talakeal]

Sorry to be that guy, but I am pretty sure this is the opposite of what the term "fantasy heart breaker," is intended to mean.


Iirc it refers to genuinely good ideas wasted on games that are attempting to compete with D&D and thus will be ignored and quietly forgotten.



On the topic of mechanics that drive me up the wall:


How in White Wolf character point costs are linear at creation but exponential over the course of play, so that someone who starts out incredibly min-maxxed and then flushes their character will be significantly stronger than someone who starts out well balanced and then decides to specialize.

[Particle_Man]

Any game which makes you spend your Experience Points to use them as Luck Points. I hate that mechanic, as it pretty much guarantees that if your character has a run of bad luck, they'll end up even further behind everyone else burning XP trying to survive. (IIRC 7th Sea did this, and I've seen other games with it. My preferred fix is to say that you HAVE to use up Luck Points to make them into Experience Points.)

+1. I loved 7th Sea but it has some flaws, to say the least.

Another, shared with Exalted and other point buy systems, is to make the point-cost at char gen different from point-cost for character improvement, leading to some lop-sided characters at char gen (that then "even out" and surpass characters that were more realistic at char gen).

Another was the "legion of knacks", when the roll and keep (mentioned above) emphasized abilities scores over knacks, you add an extra kicker that there are so many knacks you can't possibly spend well on them and are pretty much coerced into increasing ability scores (again, at chargen this is far easier to do!).

And yet I love 7th Sea 1st edition . . .

[Max_Killjoy]

FWIW, though, you can punch someone into a duck.

So, you punch them so hard they end up trapped inside a duck, or you punch them so hard they become a duck?

[Tanarii]

Sorry to be that guy, but I am pretty sure this is the opposite of what the term "fantasy heart breaker," is intended to mean.


Iirc it refers to genuinely good ideas wasted on games that are attempting to compete with D&D and thus will be ignored and quietly forgotten.

I've never seen it used that way. Always for games that seem like they have such awesome promise, until you get down to the nuts and bolts, and then they break your heart. Usually because they're D&D derivatives that tried to "fix" D&D ... but failed.

[Max_Killjoy]

Sorry to be that guy, but I am pretty sure this is the opposite of what the term "fantasy heart breaker," is intended to mean.

Iirc it refers to genuinely good ideas wasted on games that are attempting to compete with D&D and thus will be ignored and quietly forgotten.

My understanding has always been that it was a system that was supposed to "fix" everything that was wrong with past systems, or that had mechanic(s) that looked brilliant on the surface, but either way it ended up being deeply flawed, a big letdown. Thus, a heartbreaker.

[BWR]

L5R is using a roll and keep mechanic. Basically, you build a pool of d10s based on the sum total of your Attribute + Skill (roll), then you take a number of those d10s equal to the sum of Attribute points you have and discard the rest (keep). The flaw here is very obvious, EXP spent on Attributes are vastly more effective than EXP spent on Skills.
At least hey partially fixed this in the 4th edition by A) directly mentioned this as an unwanted side effect and B) Adding some small boons to actually advancing a skill.

Actually, Mastery abilities were added in 3e. There were generally more of them and they did more than the 4e variants. And you could call Raises equal to your Skill rating, not just Void. Also, 3e introduced Emphases (though handled differently than in 4e). So all in all, there was a good reason to spend xp on Skills instead of just Traits, apart from them being a significantly cheaper and faster way of getting good at something. We never had any problem with people advancing Traits at the expense of Skills.

[Max_Killjoy]

Actually, Mastery abilities were added in 3e. There were generally more of them and they did more than the 4e variants. And you could call Raises equal to your Skill rating, not just Void. Also, 3e introduced Emphases (though handled differently than in 4e). So all in all, there was a good reason to spend xp on Skills instead of just Traits, apart from them being a significantly cheaper and faster way of getting good at something. We never had any problem with people advancing Traits at the expense of Skills.

On the flip side, the paired Traits with the "element" being pegged at the lower one, seemed like it would put a lot of pressure on people to raise Traits to get that Fire, Water, etc, up for various reasons.

Of course, at this point, FFG is doing their own edition using their circus dice from their Star Wars games.

[Talakeal]

My understanding has always been that it was a system that was supposed to "fix" everything that was wrong with past systems, or that had mechanic(s) that looked brilliant on the surface, but either way it ended up being deeply flawed, a big letdown. Thus, a heartbreaker.

The original essay that coined the term can be found here:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/9/

Upon rereading it, it seems to have elements of both.

[LibraryOgre]

Unlike older D&D (which I gather the system was derived from), there are a plethora of % based skills for doing things. I've never seen a hint you're supposed to roll d20 under an ability score to do something, unlike AD&Ds NWPs later formalized for that system. So you can literally erase any of the other 5 ability scores that are 16 or less off your character sheet once you pick a class.

To wrap up this ramble, the general question: what's your favorite fantasy heartbreaker poorly designed mechanic?

Oh, man, so much I can say about how Palladium breaks my heart.

My bonafides.

I mean, let's start with their hand to hand system, which is in some ways revolutionary, from a 1e AD&D perspective. You can have a variety of different martial arts styles! You can emphasize combat and get better scores! You can learn different techniques! But, in the end, there's just a few points of difference between them.

Levelling is either vitally important for your class (psychics) or mostly irrelevant (the difference between a 1st level Juicer and a 15th level Juicer is roughly 45 HP out of hundreds and maybe +5 to a few different things).

The HP/SDC divide, which still had you gaining HP per level instead of SDC.

Having a fungible resource like skills built into your system and then using them for so few things.

Having a mechanic like "Spend two skills to make Domestic Skills professional quality and get a +10%" and then applying it nowhere else.

Just so goddamn much that they left on the table because they play fast and loose with the rules at their own table, and they don't write or edit with rigor.

[The Glyphstone]

So, you punch them so hard they end up trapped inside a duck, or you punch them so hard they become a duck?

Yes.tenletters

[Talakeal]

Actually, upon rereading the original article more closely, I think the definition of Fantasy Heartbreaker is a product that hit the market 10-15 years too late before the OSR made throwback games cool.

[BWR]

On the flip side, the paired Traits with the "element" being pegged at the lower one, seemed like it would put a lot of pressure on people to raise Traits to get that Fire, Water, etc, up for various reasons.

This varied between Schools, but in general you are correct. Most Courtiers would only use Rings for Insight, for instance, so they could focus on the necessary Traits and easily have a ton of skills to be good at without sacrificing effectiveness. Shugenja were pretty much forced to increase Rings because spell slots and casting were directly tied to them. Bushi would want a high Earth in any case, but other than some Void, the other Rings varied from good-for-nothing-but-Insight to really-really-useful (mostly due to adding X Ring to Y roll). 3e actually increased the value of Skills compared to editions 1 and 4, and XP wasn't really common enough in most games (IIRC) that people could afford to just dump it all in Traits at the expense of Skills. There was some serious math done to determine the usefulness of Skill vs. Trait and how to get most bang for your XP-buck when increasing either.
Then you had 2e where you rolled Skill and kept Trait, so you couldn't skimp on Skills if you wanted to be good at something.

The point is that while Traits and Rings are important, there are good reasons not to neglect Skills.

[Lapak]

My understanding has always been that it was a system that was supposed to "fix" everything that was wrong with past systems, or that had mechanic(s) that looked brilliant on the surface, but either way it ended up being deeply flawed, a big letdown. Thus, a heartbreaker.

I had always understood it to be this, with the understanding being that it wasn't a commercial product but one of the umpty-zillion labors of love that individuals worked on - "I love D&D, but it could be so much better if [X] and [Y]!" where X and Y can be anything from tweaks to full restructures. With the inevitable heart-breaking realization that there is no such thing as a perfect design; fixing a problem with how the world is simulated may end up being mechanically clunky, fixing a problem with the mechanics of gameplay may lead to exploits in character construction, and so on.

[Yora]

Of course you can't possibly call the original a fixup, but the most painful mechanic I ever encountered is TSR style attack rolls in D&D.

[Max_Killjoy]

This varied between Schools, but in general you are correct. Most Courtiers would only use Rings for Insight, for instance, so they could focus on the necessary Traits and easily have a ton of skills to be good at without sacrificing effectiveness. Shugenja were pretty much forced to increase Rings because spell slots and casting were directly tied to them. Bushi would want a high Earth in any case, but other than some Void, the other Rings varied from good-for-nothing-but-Insight to really-really-useful (mostly due to adding X Ring to Y roll). 3e actually increased the value of Skills compared to editions 1 and 4, and XP wasn't really common enough in most games (IIRC) that people could afford to just dump it all in Traits at the expense of Skills. There was some serious math done to determine the usefulness of Skill vs. Trait and how to get most bang for your XP-buck when increasing either.
Then you had 2e where you rolled Skill and kept Trait, so you couldn't skimp on Skills if you wanted to be good at something.

The point is that while Traits and Rings are important, there are good reasons not to neglect Skills.

RINGS, thank you, I knew there was an official name, but I'm away from the books and it just wasn't clicking.

[gkathellar]

So, you punch them so hard they end up trapped inside a duck, or you punch them so hard they become a duck?

So as Glyphstone said, yes. More specifically, the Charcoal March of Spiders style was a Sidereal Martial Art focused on imitating pattern spiders, the divine clockwork guardians and maintenance crew of the Loom of Fate. That style’s penultimate charm, Pattern Spider Touch, was a hit that allowed you to turn the victim into an animal or any of the five elements, poofs them out of existence, or makes them an entirely different person via cosmic retcon. It’s actually pretty fitting for the power level it shows up at, and it does jive with the setting’s internal rules, but it’s also extremely silly and the only way to undo its effects is with another Pattern Spider Touch.

I love 2E’s Sidereal Martial Arts almost unreservedly for their high-concept nonsense (another style includes the ability to karate chop off someone’s short-term memory) and how well they utilize Creation’s fluff, but they’re also extremely stupid and variously unusable, undefeatable, or completely useless in practice.