I’ve never played SenZar, but I’ve heard all sorts of things about it that suggest it deserves a mention.
My favourite broken rule has to be the “shotguns” rule from FASA’s Star Trek game. Basically, any game system that worries about such things has to account for the way that shot from a shotgun spreads out and can hit a target adjacent to the one you’re aiming at …
The FASATrek way of dealing with this was simple: a shotgun blast had a 90-degree arc of fire. Everything within the arc, and within the gun’s range, was eligible for full damage from the gun … since a shotgun did (IIRC) about 30 points of damage on average, and since your normal mini-maxed FASATrek character had 60 Endurance (= hit points) … it was, therefore, possible for one bloke with a double-barrelled shotgun to wipe out an entire landing party (or even an entire ship’s crew, if they were standing close enough together) without having to reload.
I don’t know any FASATrek GM who actually used the shotgun rules, but I know they were a running gag in my campaign - shotguns were terror weapons outlawed across the galaxy, the Romulans were rumoured to be abandoning their plasma torpedoes and outfitting their ships with giant shotguns instead … that sort of thing.
Those damned Romulans… is there no villainy too great for their twisted minds?!
Although its nowhere near a top contender (actually being a good game), I nominate on general principle “Shadowrun”. BY second Edition, there was so much magical crap, cybernetic enhancement, and bioware modifications running around that the game tended to devolve into a giant game of finding new and improved enhancements, just so you could get your 1 Int Troll up to 35 Strength.
In the original printing of Palladium’s first edition of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, there was a table for random forms of insanity your character could acquire through the course of a game. One of the ways in which you could go insane was blunt trauma to the head. Stay with me here.
One of the forms of insanity was “homosexuality.” Yep, that’s right: You could make people gay by bopping them on the head hard enough.
I think they removed that one after the first run.
Indeed. My copy of TMNT has a pasted-in corrections slip on the insanity table; if you hold it up to the light and squint, you can, in fact, make out the list of Nameless Perversions deemed Too Racy to include.
IIRC, the “homosexuality” entry includes a rider: “* or heterosexuality, if your character is already gay.”
Villains and Vigilantes, my friend! First superhero RPG I owned (I have since moved on to Champions / Hero system). I can even remember the calcuation of which you speak- Carrying capacity, which determined basic HTH damage, was the cube of 1/10 of your strength score, added to one tenth your endurance score, the entire number multiplied by one half your body weight.
I finally had a chance to read over the F.A.T.A.L. rules – excruciating technical detail for everything, including nightmarishly deviant sex. Now I know what it would be like if Tom Clancy took to writing hardcore porn.
When the author entered that review and hit the submit button, the rpg.net text/database engine stripped out all the “+” signs.
So some, but not all, of the numbers in that article were supposed to have + signs in front of them (e.g. where the article says that his attack roll gets 6 for attempting to attack the torso, the author originally wrote that his attack roll gets +6 for attempting to attack the torso, which makes more sense). This unfortunate turn of events also ruined a joke about Construction Workers (a real character type in Spawn of Fashan) getting +2 on their wolf-whistle rolls.