What is the most hilariously bad tabletop RPG you have played and why?

[MaddMann]

For those of us that get into tabletop gaming, we are always seeking that next game that can be close to perfect. A system that has lots of flexibility and allows you to do heroic (or extremely stupid) things you could never dream to do in real life. During our search for this utopia of social gaming we come across many systems that are either too complicated, broken, or just generally terrible.

For me, it was The World of Synnibarr
This was a game that was so absolutely terrible, one of our poor players literally ate his character sheet after going into a terrible drunken stupor that required medical attention. So, to get this started, you have to try and understand the World of Synnibarr, fair warning, trying to figure this part out is quite painful. To save you this pain, essentially think of Synnibarr as Mars in some 50,000 years (The things that must have happened during those 50,000 years to make things such as Giant Mutant Fire Clams is something I don't think can be discussed in polite company). Anyway, so fist is character creation, which you really don't have much choice in, you just roll the dice and hope for the best. During creation you make quite a few rolls, these rolls will determine what class you will play... I managed to roll a Golden Tiger, which is basically a monk. The character creation... took about 2 1/2 hours for the 5 of us. There is a simple 22 step process you just have to follow! I will not regale you with all the steps, needless to say my one time getting waterboarded was bringing back fond memories in comparison. We only got to around step 13 before one of our players was in a drunken stupor and the rest of us were really thinking about joining him. After we got our characters created, our DM took us to the planet and rolled our first adventure (tables for creating "adventures" are also in the book that way the DM can be played by anybody who has dice and no will to live). We were supposed to *rolls dice* save a town from *rolls dice* 3 *rolls dice* rust dragons. What is a rust dragon you may ask? It's a dragon... that looks rusty and is on mars because reasons. Anyway, we encounter the first rust dragon, our party of level 1 freaks ranging from a rhino space bus driver to a telepathic surgeon sturgeon, rolls for initiative. We all loose. The first rust dragon spews out fire and instantly evaporates 3 of our party (and I think they all embraced it). So it was just me (a punchy punchy golden tiger who can fly) and my friend (who was some kind of space wizard). I don't remember exactly what lead up to it, but we figured out I can punch part of a glacier in half. We also figured out that the wizard can make a dome that can life said glacier, but only I could carry it. So we flew across some kind of arctic environment, threw a giant (I mean around 4000lb) chunk of ice at a flying over oxidized Mars lizard with me riding the glacier to I could punch him in case the ice missed. Well, the dragon dodged easily, I missed with my punch, and we got vaporized. Best worst game experience ever.


TLDR version: World of Synnibarr will make you get drunk and eat your character sheet rather than actually have to play it.

 

[Mazer]

I've never played it myself, but honourable mention needs to go to F.A.T.A.L for it's horrifically sexual nature. Any game which includes a table for calculating rectal diameter is clearly something very special.

 

[Frindis]

Well, it would have to be one of the adventures I made for my nephews. I mentioned in another post about how I wanted to make my own adventure (a mix between Divinity: Original Sin 2 ruleset and an easy to understand GURPS character sheet) but while some of the adventures worked good, I failed at one particular event and since I am horrible at calculating:

So, the event I had made was basically a puzzle my nephews had to solve in order to progress further in the story. It was made up of three stone statues that were immune to any type of damage from the players and the only way to destroy them, was to make them crash into each other. I wrote it all up on a sheet of paper, to make it easier for them to see how the statues moved around and as to how much action points the statues had each round. Basically the players had to kite the stone statues around. based on their own action points. All sounds good, right? Well, not so much...

My oldest nephew started pointing out that based on how I had put them on the paper, it was impossible for the last two statues to crash into each other after the first statue was destroyed. He told me it as easy as he could and while I argued for a bit, I sighed and agreed that it was actually no way they could do that. Later on, he told me that he knew this because they had worked one something similar at school - I have forgotten what it was called. Basically: I managed to make an impossible quest for them to solve and it took over 1 hour of discussion to make me realize my error.

 

[MaddMann]

Well, it would have to be one of the adventures I made for my nephews. I mentioned in another post about how I wanted to make my own adventure (a mix between Divinity: Original Sin 2 ruleset and an easy to understand GURPS character sheet) but while some of the adventures worked good, I failed at one particular event and since I am horrible at calculating:

So, the event I had made was basically a puzzle my nephews had to solve in order to progress further in the story. It was made up of three stone statues that were immune to any type of damage from the players and the only way to destroy them, was to make them crash into each other. I wrote it all up on a sheet of paper, to make it easier for them to see how the statues moved around and as to how much action points the statues had each round. Basically the players had to kite the stone statues around. based on their own action points. All sounds good, right? Well, not so much...

My oldest nephew started pointing out that based on how I had put them on the paper, it was impossible for the last two statues to crash into each other after the first statue was destroyed. He told me it as easy as he could and while I argued for a bit, I sighed and agreed that it was actually no way they could do that. Later on, he told me that he knew this because they had worked one something similar at school - I have forgotten what it was called. Basically: I managed to make an impossible quest for them to solve and it took over 1 hour of discussion to make me realize my error.

Ah, the glories of DMing

 

[MaddMann]

I've never played it myself, but honourable mention needs to go to F.A.T.A.L for it's horrifically sexual nature. Any game which includes a table for calculating rectal diameter is clearly something very special.

That just sounds like an experiment to see how twisted your Game Master is

 

[Pifanjr]

I haven't tried many systems, so the worst wasn't that bad, but the Unofficial Elder Scrolls RPG had the slowest combat of any table top I've played. It has a ton of good ideas (and I think a completely new version by now), but there were way too many rolls involved in making just a single attack.