I was just thinking, again, about the first edition AD&D rule that female characters aren't allowed to have high strength, which is a horrible rule, one that made many female players not want to play, and one that was frequently rule zeroed by the DM. I am wondering what other bad rules that have been encountered in tabletop RPGs; that is, rules that make the game worse, say by limiting character options without good justification, make game play clunkier without any real benefit, exclude certain types of players (like the female strength rule having the effect of excluding female players), and any other rule that just makes the game less fun.

One other obvious one, again from AD&D (but which persisted into second edition), is the racial level limits. At low levels, where the advantages of demihumans are most apparent, and where, to my understanding, most campaigns are played, level limits do not come into play; at high levels, they basically make characters completely non-viable. How is your level 5 half-elf cleric (who has already reached her level cap in 1e) supposed to contribute when the rest of the party is around 15th level? I note that the Infinity Engine games do not implement this rule, and I believe that is an intentional decision; this is in contrast to Pools of Darkness, where only human characters are viable (for the most part).

Now, there are a couple rules for this thread:
1. This thread is about tabletop RPGs, not computer RPGs. Hence, if you are going to mention a rule, it must be present in a TRPG.
2. Please try to avoid rules from systems that were deliberately designed to be bad (like FATAL (TW: rape if you decide to search for this online)); I am mainly interested in games that at least *try* to be fun to play.

Edit: After doing a simple Google search for FATAL, I decided that the mere mention of it warrants a trigger warning.

Anyone?

Eh, I'll bite.

You reminded me of these with your mentioning of old DnD rules.

The first was the whole dice rolling for stats. Just.... if you got bad rolls you could possibly be very well screwed.

Yes, you could work with what was dealt and make something that has flaws, but the idea that it as possible to roll a character with everything below ten before any other rules changed it?.... (I seem to recall various re-rolling rules for low stat characters, but even then ending up with something just barely good enough when you're in a party with a super intelligent high Dex wizard or something? It feels like a way to make you feel inferior, which is a quick way to detract from the fun for many people.)


Second was the Dual classing rules for humans. I seem to recall it having requirements such as not using any of your old powers/abilities until reached the same the level of your old class in your new class? Effectively making you, say, a level 1 fighter in a group of level 6 characters because you couldn't use any of your rogue/thief/whatever they called in in ADnD powers?

I also remember the DM guide for the old DnD having rules for XP that were very very class specific. Like fighters getting xp for killing things, but not Wizards, and then wizards got XP for doing different things.

I prefer the idea of getting xp for simply overcoming obstacles in whatever way, with maybe a bonus for creative solutions (so long as the DM handles that well).

Finally there was the way that some rolls and stats were better high, while others were better low. I'm looking at you THAc0, you annoying bastard.
Granted I was young when I was first exposed to DnD back in the day, so the idea of anything more complicated than "beat this number" annoyed me, but simplicity is best when it comes to number systems (IMO obviously). Dice rolls should simply be a vehicle to help roll the story along whenever RPing cannot resolve things well enough.

I sometimes see people moaning and groaning about the direction of DnD from 3e forward, but I remember the first time I saw the new rules in 3e in college and thanking the RP gods. Not a perfect system, but so many things they changed felt so much better to me. Especially what you mentioned about racial character limits.

OH, that reminds me of one other thing. In 2e only humans could be Paladins. Something something only they were devout enough or some junk I can't remember. Always annoyed me since I was a big elf fan boy back in the day. The lack of racial class restrictions was so lovely for me.

Note: It has been so long since I've really dealt with these rules that I may be missing some detail or another, but even with rules to mitigate the badness I think I hit the salient points.

Shadowrun: The ridiculous amounts of dice rolled for a given attack was ludicrous. Attacks of over 30d6? Ain't nobody got time for that!

That sounds like a really good rule, it bothered me that in Baldur's Gate you could create a female warrior with 18/00 strength or something like that...that's just not realistic (at least for humans, maybe it would be for half-orcs). Women have much lower upper-body strength than men, even the strongest women still have lower grip strength than most men:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303

The thing is, why shouldn't I be able to create a female warrior who is stronger than most men? In any case, this rule is bad because, among other things, it alienates female characters. I, for one, will refuse to play under any DM that enforces this rule, and if I ever run 1e AD&D, I will remove that rule. Remember, realism is less important than fun when it comes to designing games.

There is a good reason why the rule was removed in 2e; it made the game worse, rather than better. It has occurred to me in the past that there could be a problem at character creation; what if your character doesn't qualify for any class? The 2e PHB says to ask your DM to reroll in that case (and what if she says no?), but doesn't otherwise let you reroll.

I also don't like the fact that stats are pretty much set in stone at character creation; I prefer it when stats can grow over the course of the game, and where your initial stat rolls don't matter much in the long run.

Actually, the rules do allow you to use your old class abilities before exceeding your highest former level; you just forfeit your XP gain for the encounter and much of your XP for the adventure (IIRC) if you do. (AD&D CRPGs that implement dual classing don't let you do this because it would probably be too complex to implement.)

Also, don't forget that the 1e Bard actually required that you use the dual class mechanic to gain access to it.

Then again, from what I've read, the 1e Bard was in an appendix, along with 1e psionics, which, from what I've read, were a mess. 2e psionics were better, but even then you could get access to effects like disintegrate at low levels. That actually reminds me of a spell from D&D 3e's Epic Level Handbook that does 305d6 damage. Of course, that spell requires a 419 DC Spellcraft check to cast (which I think is actually too high for its power) and does 200d6 damage to the caster (more dice rolling needed; this is going to take a while). Fortunately, well before that spell becomes realistically castable, game balance has already broken down to the point where the DM and players will likely just agree to end the campaign before that point (or switch over to a completely different system).

Then again, the ELH had other bad rules, like giving all characters the same progression past a point (which means that Fighter 20/Wizard 20 is clearly better than Wizard 20/Fighter 20; what?), and making spellcasting suddenly depend on Spellcraft, which before was a skill that Clerics and Sorcerers could safely ignore.

I'm trying to thing of one, but can only remember the cool ones.

Feng Shui (A RPG based around Eastern Action films) had a rule where Shotguns do an extra point of Damage is you spend a turn reloading to go "Ker Chink"

Making Call of Cthulhu D20 was really bad.

A friend of mine, back in the very early 1990s, made his own roleplaying ruleset. I think it incorporated the single worst "realistic" rule that I've seen consistently badgering players. My friend thought that of the 40+ skills on the character sheet, each skill not used in the game should decrease at the end of the session, i. e. use it or lose it. You can imagine how unpopular this rule was. The style of play this fostered was immeasurably... stupid... as well.

We were young and game design wasn't our forte. Back then. :)

From what I remember Arnold Schwarzenegger would have had 16 or 17 Strength. 18 (%%) Strengths where heroic and god like, think Hercules.

Also Strength, indeed all of the DnD rules, is an abstract. Not just raw strength but an ability to use it.

In that linked article those Trained female Athletes would have been capable warriors.

Lastly Grip Strength is one limiting factor for manual lifting and carrying loads. I can grip thing much heavier than I can lift (not sure what activity has led to such strong forearms). The wording of the study makes it sound that a 75% of untrained men are stronger than trained female athletes.

Though I do not disagree in the real world the biological limits of physical strength is higher for men than it is for women.

I feel this is a much bigger problem in CRPGs than pen & paper games. A good, creative DM and a group of motivated roleplayers could adapt and make it fun to play characters with weaknesses - most videogames won't though, they're inflexible,heavily focused on combat and will just make life harder and more tedious for a character with bad stats.

A better rule would be to have the skills not decrease from non-use; instead, have them increase through use. Of course, this can still lead to strange gameplay, like players prolonging fights just to improve their skills (as happens in Wizardry 8 and the SaGa 3 remake), but it at least is more fun.

I can think of a few other instances of this sort of reversal. During Civilization 3's development, there were Dark Ages, in which your science would slow down for a certain number of turns; the playtesters found this not to be fun, so they were replaced with Golden Ages. During Shovel Knight's development, the original idea is that checkpoints would cost money to use; they decided to invert it by making checkpoints free, but allowing you to break the checkpoints to get some extra money.

Going back to tabletop RPGs, we can actually see this when it comes to human versus demihuman characters. In 1e and 2e, level limits were used to punish players of demihuman characters; 3e, instead, rewards players of human characters by giving them an extra feat and some extra skil points.

In other words, rewards are more fun than punishment, and as a game designer, you should therefore favor using rewards over punishment; when you have an opportunity to replace a punishment with a reward, do so!

Yeah, think Morrowind or worse, Daggerfall where one may spend a few hours in a inn casting fireballs at a wall and taking damage, healing the damage, resting for a few seconds to recover the Magicka and starting the cycle over to level destruction and Restoration to usable levels. Also Final Fantasy 2 levels of stupidity where you keep punching your white mage in the face to bolster his HP.

I was working on a Wheel of Time game that used the psionics rules (2e) as a base for calculating the "One Power" abilities. A point based system with an over all pool and an immediately usable pool. Spent LONG hours on it, got to play testing and it actually worked and was playable. And then there was the official WoT tabletop game release and no one wanted to use mine anymore. :P talk about disheartening.

Except that that is actually not the best strategy in that game. The problem is that some enemies (including the final boss) have normal attacks that act like the Blood Sword; with each hit, the enemy steals 1/16th of your HP (calculated based off max HP). This means that, if you have more HP, those enemies will hit for more damage, which will be more expensive to heal (assuming you didn't level up the Raise spell to 16 on a different party member or use an Elixir), and will recover more of their HP, making the enemy in question harder to kill. Instead, you are best off working on evasion.

Well... I've over 20 years of tabletop RPG on my back, and litterally hundreds of books of different systems.

Define "worst", as everyone tastes are different, but here a few I classify as bad.

* Imagine RPG
* Hero system: the game is not bad per se, but is an unbelievable mess of maths, that make the whole thing suitable for a cRPG
* Burning wheel: very intersting system full of flavour and options. But you need to stop live and learn the system for a month
* D&D 4
* D&D 3.5
* D&D 3
* WFRP 3rd -> really a tabletop RPG...