Starcraft: Despite the availability of planetary-scale nuclear missile “ground-cleansing” attacks, the terran forces insist on sending small groups of soldiers into the middle of the Zerg. Although Nuclear Missiles are available, each one requires a massive Command center and missile silo, and has a blast radius less impressive than a powerful cruise missile today… not to mention that the actual blast won’t kill a single damned Zerg building.
You, sir, are wise in the ways of awful RPG’s. Have you ever successfully made a character in it?
I’d probably rate FATAL as lower than “Spawn of Fashan,” though. If you roll low on your intelligence score, you have a chance of gaining “retard strength.” And that’s not even the most juvenile part of the game. They included tables for hymen resistence and vaginal circumference. When did they start allowing junior high students access to printing presses?
Why is it in CRPG’s that the toughest, most bad-ass monsters are always in the enemy’s central stronghold? If he just let those monsters out on the front lines, the villain would sweep the world and win instantly?
FWIW, Palladium games have had some howlers in them. I recall one of the Rifts supplements that said something to the effect of “german shepherds, and other mutant dog breeds such as coyotes and bears do not…” Uh, Kevin…
Course, there’s always the fun parts of Warhammer 40k. If even one guy comes up to a unit of thirty people, and pokes them with a stick, the unit is forced to stick around and hammer at him until he dies, instead of walking away.
My favorite comes from an over-sensitive desire to put realism into the game. I’m talking about… X-Wing!
By this point in the game, I was the squadron leader, and we’ve been briefed to intercept and disable an Imperial ship. It’s never, ever that easy, so we rock up to battle in our Y-Wings to find the whole place crawling with TIEs. This presents something of a challenge, but following five or ten minutes of dog-fighting, the fighter cover is eliminated and we’ve disabled the target.
So far, so good. More fighters appear, and we dog-fight and disable them as well, while one of our transports occupies the disabled Imperial ship. Transport and Imp ship hyperspace out, and I’m lining up to follow them, when suddenly I’m taking hits again. Dodging and weaving like crazy, I look for the enemy… only to find my own wingmen gunning for me! Apparently I’d hit one of them during the melee, and so now they were out for revenge.
I’m not willing to engage and destroy my own men, so after frantic attempts to hyperspace out I’m disabled - apparently, they were still using ion cannons. Now comes the reality check: after a minute or two of silence, I look around to find that my squadron has lined up in perfect formation, dead still off either of my sides.
I always found it irritating as hell that you could equip a Hero with the biggest, baddest Wargear there was… mega-chainswords, super-powerful guns, whatever…
…and if your Hero dies, no one else in the unit may pick up and use that insanely powerful item of ordnance.
Stealing from Murphy’s Rules:
[ul]
[li]In Dungeons & Dragons, any attempt to parry is automatically successful.[/li][li]In Car Wars, if you shoot at the ground, you have a 1-in-6 chance of missing.[/li][li]In Ace of Aces, two airplanes on a head-long collision will fly through each other.[/li][li]In Warhammer 40,000, a soldier carrying an eight-foot-tall banner can hide behind a low wall and not be seen.[/li][li]In Illuminati: New World Order, you can deploy soldiers from “hidden salt mines” on a space station.[/li][/ul]
I know a lot of people don’t play it that way, but in Call of Cthulhu you are not supposed to retain control of your character when they become insane - the rules book repeatedly stresses that this is not how it’s supposed to be played. If your character goes indefinitely insane, they are out of play for the next 1 - 6 months (game time, of course). If your character goes permanently insane, you can’t play that character anymore, ever…they become NPCs.
Now, if your character goes temporarily insane (anywhere from a few minutes to a day or so, I think) you can retain partial control of the character, depending on what kind of insanity your character gets.
At one point you have to stop the launch of a nuclear missle and then have to use a trackball to deactivate each missle in their silos before they launch. It bugged me that the US government apparently has missle silos all over the globe, even in nations that don’t like nuclear weapons.
Plus, since the average late 20th century ICBM can hit any spot on Earth from it’s launching point, why bother to put missle silos in Hawaii(or Thailand, or Eithopia)?
You can set up your hospital so there are no beds (wards) and therefore no bedpans. But the thing is, they’re not crapping on the floors anyway, they’re puking. You can watch them puke and everything
And it’s a terrifying thing when that chain reaction erupts (so to speak)in a crowded waiting room. I mean, it’s like something out of some horrible cartoon John Waters movie…
Oh, you could do a whole thread on typos from various Rifts books. My favorite was from the description of the Bio-Regeneration psionic: “Bio-regeneration does not restore missing limbs, but does not restore 3d6 HP.” Real useful power, there.
There’s something similar in Heroes of Might & Magic III. This will take a little explanation so please bear with me…
One way of inflicting lots of cheap damage on a massive enemy stack is to have something with the Fire Shield spell wander up and hit is, as the attacked unit retaliates and then take back damage as a fraction of what it did with its counterstrike. With me so far?
So if one little Fire Shielded grunt tickles a legion of 4000 Skeleton Warriors, they will do several thousand points of damage back to him - a large percentage of which will bounce back onto them, killing loads - as, apparently, all 4000 of the offended skeletons consider it necessary to hit him back (and can do so).
Remembering the Murphy’s Rules cartoons, there’s scope for one there
