But moving on to this surprising inventory:

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition (my own fantasy system of choice)

Character creation.

For a so-called “classless” game, there is a gob-load of “careers” to slog through. For new players, I can only imagine this would be overwhelming, as it still can be to me, and I’ve ran it a number of times. Say what I will about D&D, Fighter, Thief, Cleric, Wizard has a certain simplicity, and even the more current 10 or so class framework with Paladins and such is still a good mix of manageability and variety. Warhammer’s Rat-Catcher and Toll-Keeper, while surely historically accurate, are completely irrelevant and definitely not worthy of being actual significant player career choices, set apart by themselves. There should be maybe a Peasant class (which there is in a later bit) and sub-types given and broken down into things like this if a player wants, but it would still use the same template). This would severely curb the authors’ fetish for careerizing everything under the sun into an adventuring motif, and cut the career part of character creation in half, at LEAST. You could still buy a Small But Vicious Dog as a pet or a special ability or something.

Stats.

Oh boy, a max of 2D10 + 20 for all my stats if I’m a human. Out of 100. So up to 40%. So not quite half. Neat… You know, “gritty” is one thing, but incompetent is another. Combat is already still potentially deadly at any level of achievement, proficiency, experience or armament, so why give me less than a 50/50 shot to hit the broad side of a barn? And don’t say that the enemies and other citizens also have that, that doesn’t help, that just means EVERYBODY will be rolling dice a LOT and saying “Damn I missed AGAIN too, your turn”. I think this was a horrible, HORRIBLE mis-calculation and mistake on the part of the creators. It takes SO long to up stats significantly, and they’re split into either your main stats or your secondary stats. You also have to choose to do that instead of buy abilities.

Those secondary stats, which are the tens digit of your main stats (Toughness Bonus, which reduces damage, is taken from your Toughness) are also superflous. Just ALWAYS use the tens column and you won’t even have to have this on the sheet, just look half an inch up and see that your toughness is 32 and know your TB is 3. Presto! But no, you can increase these, which begs the question – what the f*k is Toughness for?!

Percentiles.

Yeah it’s 100% but I don’t like it. It’s not a roll and sum system, it’s not even a count successes. It’s roll two dice and read them, it’s essentially purely random, more random than random, if you know what I mean, and if you don’t, I’m not going to go into the math. It’s not bad, and if you have a 72% Weapon Skill, you’re still going to hit a lot of the time, but it feels so cold and spartan, there’s no dominance like 5D6 in Weapon Skill, where you just know you’re gonna roll a shitload at some point and be like “Oh yah, that’s 52, out of 19, suck it!” Their critical hit system is a mess, you reverse the dice for hit locations or use doubles or – it’s complicated and steps over its own feet and my group tends to use the old BRP system of 10 or less is a critical hit, or 10% of your skill is, depending which is better or more dramatic at the time and/or the old Warhammer every time you roll a 6 (well 10 now that is uses D10 for damage) it “explodes” and you roll an extra die – Ulric’s Fury I think it’s called now. But the system isn’t consistent, to make skill checks, you don’t roll percentile, it’s a roll and add skill bonus setup – way to keep a mechanic simple and intuitive for us, jerkwads.

Is this another hatchet job? Yes. Why? Because I can. Because it’s true. Because I’m playing in two play-by-post AD&D 3.5 games right now on what I call “The Mormon Forums”, actually International Discussions RPG/Member Wars section, and my half-orc rogue just lost all 6 HP in two turns and went down, in one game.  Because I participated in a realtime virtual tabletop session a few weeks ago, and spent an hour and a half AFTER COMBAT trying to figure out how to get our dwarf cleric out of the dead giant’s mouth and THEN how to extract the giant’s teeth from him, causing him damage every time we did – BEFORE we even got to the “looting”.

“But, JP,” you may say, “that sounds like shitty GM’ing!”, and you’d be right and then I’d tell one of your parents or legal guardians that you’re using naughty words. But I’ve had worse GM’s (though not by much), but he couldn’t DO half that shitty GM’ing if he didn’t have an abortion of a gaming monstrosity that encouraged that kind of ridiculous fiddly pixelbitching. Can you blame a game system for the user misusing it? Yes, if it is made badly enough. Some would say you can’t blame someone for misusing a tool. You couldn’t blame a hammer’s manufacturer for someone using it to kill someone else – that’s true, but you could blame the maker of a frisbee with deadly razor blades that squirt acid and shoot laser beams for killing a crowd of ten people.  God, that’s awesome – where was I going with this? Oh, yes…

So What is Wrong with D20?

Needlessly overcomplicated, intimately inter-dependent to the point where it almost gets to the point one rule refers to another rule that relies on the rule you’re referring to in the first place.  “Help! I’m at the corner of First and First, how did I get here?!”

Everything needs a Feat or you get a massive penalty to do something most other games foolishly think heroes or even normal people do can without tripping over their own feet and impaling themselves with a plastic ice cream spoon. Where did you get that anyway, cheater? You only start with 3D6 gold pieces, which is actually enough to feed 3 medieval families for a year each, but in D20 land can only buy half a cow. Need to sneeze? Better have the Sneeze Feat  or you’re out of luck and your head will just implode for 10D12 damage. How do you get them? You level up and get them arbitrarily, even though you did nothing during all the intervening time to work toward getting them.

Sorry you can’t use a sword, you’re a wizard. It’s against wizards’ religion to use weapons that can provide effective self defense and don’t make them look like weenies. You memorize a certain number of spells per day and have to sleep to get them back, or read them off a scroll, which usually disintegrates – just like all the famous stories and movies! Oh wait… You can’t read or detect magic until you cast a spell that lets you read or detect magic – since you cast a spell, isn’t IT magic? Shouldn’t it be glowing and detecting itself?

Clerics have actually improved somewhat from how they used to be treated but they’re not in any better positions than wizards, really.

Weapons in D20 systems have more stats than ACTUAL real-life weapons. That’s too many.  Why do weapons do less damage to larger creatures? It’s almost like they feel it less, or they have more Hit Points. Oh wait… THEY ALREADY DO.

Attacks of Opportunity! Everything you do gets them! Whisper to your friend? ZAP! Move 10′ and attack? POW! Backstab? GANK! Breathe? AoO!  If you don’t happen to have a micrometer on you, just assume that your character can move one foot in any direction, then cut that in half to be safe, and now you can perform any single action, knowing you won’t draw any AoO. Probably.

Critical Hits are awesome – except when they’re not! Except when it looks like a critical hit but NO it wasn’t after all. You have to make TWO successful hit rolls in a ROW, with one having to be 19 or better. That seems very realistic, seeing as how this is being done on one twenty sided die, which generates a purely random non-bell-curve distribution comparable to the size of the Gulf of Mexico – thank goodness they’re all about realism.

McMagic Items. Sunrods. Thundersticks. Gluebobs, Taffyjerks. Why go adventuring to find cool magic items when you can buy them off the shelf at your local general store like you’re stocking up on batteries or ramen noodles?

You’re good at what I say you’re good at.  Level up, here’s your new stats! Wait, what? No, I’d like to up these things over here. What – those – oh no, I don’t think so. You’re going to take Improved Extreme Ballroom Dancing and like it.

Thanks to the F.A.T.A.L. tabletop role-playing game, known alternately as either Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery, or From Another Time, Another Land. Neither one makes it a better game, sadly.

I wanted to see if it could be done, if a character could be made, without cutting a LOT of corners, and in fact, it can, and moreso, none of it was actually all that involved, it was just tedious and a long process (won’t get those hours of my life back)  – I do admit rolling 1D10,000,000 was beyond ridiculous, but luckily the online dice roller I found was able to do it – I have no idea how many D10 that would be to get that max.

Gromdar Ballparts
Male, Young Adult, Half-Orc, Age 18, 75″(6’3″), 214 lbs.

Physique 114.125
Physical Fitness 141.5
Strength 136
Bodily Attractiveness 72
Health 107

Charisma 100.25
Facial 129
Vocal 67.5
Kinetic 101.5
Rhetorical 103

Dexterity 101.375
Hand-Eye Coordination 40.5
Agility 133.5
Reaction Speed 90.5
Enunciation 141

Intelligence 108.875
Language 119
Math 98
Analytic 94
Spatial 124.5

Wisdom 102.625
Drive 88
Intuition 103
Common Sense 85.5
Reflection 134

Base Life Pts 22

Disposition Mods -25 Ethnicality and -50 Morality
Temperament Mods -50 Sanguine and -25 Melancholic
Disposition (Ethics/Morals) Neutral w Moral
Temperament: Sanguine 11
Choleric 73
Melancholic 41
Phlegmatic 18
Overall Temperament Choleric-Melancholic
Piety Points 9 (believes in a god but doesn’t care)

Birthday 12-24-5082
Birth Status illigitimate, bastard (-2 Soc Cls)
Birthplace village
Social Class peasant
Literacy Illiterate
Money 18 GP
Siblings 3 sisters, 3rd born
Marital Status unhappily married
Languages Black Speech

Offspring: single (out of 1d10,000,000: 9,074,942)
Offspring Gender: female
Family Occupation Hierophant, out of 146 occupations
Personal Occupation Level 1 Inititate
Skill Pts 46
Skills *handwaved*, out of 211 skills

Starting Items, 1 bookcase, 4′x1′x8′
-2 tent for two humans
-3 gloves, leather
-4 bracers, leather
-5 shirt
Beverage 1/2 gal bottle of wine
Food, 1 meat chunk: 1/2 lb, walnuts: 1 lb, 1 lb caviar

Animals: camel, adult male slave
Transport: chariot, barge (he owns quite a bit of stuff)
Weapons: polearm: poleax, broken bottle
Armor: none

Example Chant: 15 chars (. . . U D . M E . T O . W H I E)
Magic Item: ointment of magnetic attraction

Most Attractive Feature: Waist (what a … sexy waist?)
Most Repulsive: Crotch (considering its dimensions, I concur)
Skin: Greenish Tan
Hair color: dirty blonde
Hair Length: 23-30″ or lower back
Hair Thickness, Type: medium thickness, straight
Eye Color: brown
Vision: near-sighted, 600 feet (-20 Aim, Sight)
Characteristic: distinct eyebrows, prominent arch
And now the strange:

Sexuality: strongly heterosexual (94)
Debauchery: gives oral sex (oh how controversial!)

Areola Diameter: 2″
Areola Hue: difficult to identify (err…wha? why?)
Cup Size: A (if needing to dress up as a female half-orc I guess, no doubt that’s come up)
Nipple Length: 1/2″
Tongue: 1/2″ (Ol’ Tiny Tongue they called him)
Anal Circumference Potential: 5-6″
Manhood, Length: 8 1/2″
- Circumference: 8 1/4″ (! almost same around as long !)

Foot Size: 11-12″
Handedness: left
Head Circumference: 25.1″(important when looking for bitchin’ hats)

Since he’s not a female, I didn’t need to determine Hymen Resistance, Vaginal Depth Potential, etc. Pity.

And it only took two and a half hours – cheap at twice the price. Thank god for Excel and an excellent online die roller. And Pandora’s tunes. No way I was trying to figure out how to roll randomly for skills or spells or anything, half the charts have no dice roll prefixes. I added in a bunch of random items for him, just to see what he would wind up with, and so the camel, slave, bookcase, etc.

So there he is, in all his fantasy adventure lecherous glory. “It’s the best roleplaying game that I have seen”, in that this guy might *almost* be halfway interesting to play in pretty much any other system on the planet, at any time in history.

I cannot imagine even an attempt at spellcasting or combat.

Just one more reason why FATAL is something that should never have existed, but does, and it is brought up now and again at RPG.NET, and more people, thinking, “how bad can it be, all this being warned away is ridiculous”, come away with a little bit of their soul having died. It is truly a magical thing.

It is a bit unusual in that it wasn’t comments or even the forums – it was the user blogs section. Somehow, spambots got into and created their own countless blog entries on RPG Life, from the looks of it, for the sole purpose of shilling brassieres to all those tons and tons of young, teen and adult women who play tabletop role-playing games.

Because they don’t know where to buy them. Apparently. Auto accessories and cupping couches, no doubt very closely related to the bra industry as a whole, are also included in this helpful intervention aimed towards RPG Life’s fairer gender, most of whom are without neckbeards.

The internet is such a large place, and websites and URLs so confusing, it is a good thing some enterprising individual or group of pre-pubescent script-kiddies launched this bold endeavor in order to ensure that our front-bumpier (usually) fellow gamers are able to maintain proper form and suspension with cutting edge lift-and-separate technology.

Tutorial: How To Play A Tabletop Roleplaying Game

Random Magic Item Generator

http://www.rpglife.com/epublish/Humor

I emailed Mr. Gygax once about a decade ago, because a friend and I had seen different spellings of his name, and couldn’t figure out who was right. I was surprised to actually get an e-mail back from him (along with a blurb for whatever convention he was going to be at next, naturally), explained (and I’m paraphrasing here):

“Gygax is pronounced with a hard g, a soft middle g and a soft ending o, “gi-gawhh”
Game On Awesomely, good knight.

I read it here first: Lesbian Geek.

Note: I changed the name of my title about Mr. E-G-G’s passing to -10 HP as everyone had done the failed saving throw/vs. death thing.

Want to try out a new tabletop role playing game where you play an androgynous, nymphomaniacal, sadistic, superhuman, anime-type hero whose greatest threat is boredom? No? I can’t say I blame you. Want to read a hilarious review of such a game instead? Now we’re talking!

Role playing game reviews on the internets, while not as numerous as movie or video game reviews, are everywhere, within the role playing game niche, but some stand out from the crowd – for me, these are either amusing reviewing styles of otherwise “normal” games, or, the more hilarity-prone “Reviews of BAD Games” – it is this second option we’ll look at in this article.

At the forefront of these types of game reviews, which have practically become their own genre of specialist humor, are veterans and luminary members of RPG.NET, two of the most commonly-known names being Darren MacLennan and Jason Sartin. If you’re in the mood for Misters MacLennan’s and Sartin’s rather lengthy but entertaining review of a tabletop RPG that would have been far better off remaining in the author’s head as “one of those crazy thoughts”, but instead became an overpriced 400+ page bad idea given it’s own print run, I invite and encourage you to visit the link below:

Darren MacLennan’s and Jason Sartin’s RPG.NET Review of Wraeththu

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=244590

Visit Middle Finger Evolution for more great reviews of bad RPGs like this one!

Also be sure to visit RPG.NET – easily the largest, most comprehensive tabletop role playing game site on the internets, with huge, active forums, reviews, articles and more!