Hi folks,

My group has spent the last 30-odd years playing Traveller and variants of BRP.

I had bought most of the Vaesen books over the last few years and was really looking forward to giving it a go. I finally got to run five published adventures including the one in the starter set but by the end, all of us thought it was OK but no-one wanted to play it any more - least of all me.
I found it to be really hard work to GM and my players were not terribly excited by the vague setting.

Slightly weirdly, I had previously run a couple of Alien one-shots with great success, so I was quite happy with the Year Zero ruleset.

What RPG have you looked forward to and was underwhelmed when you got round to playing or GM'ing it...and why?

Avatar Legends feels both so right and so wrong at the same time and combat is finicky.

Vaesen has this reputation unfortunately.

Mothership. I've always associated RPGs with laughs at the table and and inside jokes. MoSH didn't facilitate that style. I thought I was going to play Expanse with the cast of Aliens. Instead it felt like going to work!

Public Access was the game that sold my group on Carved from Brindlewood, and we loved it in one-shots, but after the campaign of fellow CfB game The Between we did first, a full run at PA fell kind of flat for us.

We really felt the absence of distinctive playbooks for everyone. My players struggled to inhabit the kind of Twin Peaks-y tone the game's NPCs demand. Too many of the Mysteries I chose were abstract phenomena; everyone had the most fun when an unstoppable demonic serial killer was on their tails, but the bombastic Gothic fun of Victorian London really outshone small town New Mexico creepiness for us.

I'd love to redeem myself someday... but I'd sooner run a second game of The Between.

I thought Forbidden Lands was much less interesting at the table than I thought it would be. The game is trying to achieve something I quite like, but it was just a bit flat.

The Middle-earth 5e game was also boring (mechanically), but that was less of a surprise.

Expecting laughs and inside jokes from a pretty grim horror game is interesting!

I've definitely run a whacky Mothership one-shot or two, but 99% of the time, it plays the genre straight.

I believe it was revised somewhat recently, but the Vaesen corebook I read a while back was in the running for worst-organized rules I'd seen in years.

I've never laughed harder at a table than my years running Shadow of the Demon Lord. Nihilism is hilarious when you aren't an edgelord.

Totally. I'd never dabbled in horror RPGs and naively thought it would just work itself out!

It ended up like a bureaucracy simulator though because every little item had to be discussed. It didn't feel fun but it didn't feel like grim horror either. More like role playing the Vogons form hitchikers guide :)

Really looked forward to Blades in the Dark but once I got it to the table it was super procedural and a pain in my ass to run. It lasted as long as it did because the player-facing stuff is excellent.

Very cool an interesting! My Public Access campaign was intensely belove, but it was just the right group of people for the right genre.

His majesty the worm fell really flat for me. I found the structure of the phase system to be too rigid and not very much fun, and the amount of prep I had to do was slightly insane.

Coriolis The Great Dark for me. I really wanted to like it, got super hyped on the idea and the kickstarter, backed all-in… but the more I interact and play with it the less I like it.

I didn’t like the setting changes that much. The new setting feels a bit bland, shallow and artificial. I didn’t like some of the simplifications to the system, like 1 action round, no fast/slow actions, no spending extra successes, generic supply pool, removal of Skills, etc. I think I prefer more crunchier YZE games.

I was also really hyped for the delving mechanics, but in the end I found them boring and uninteresting with a string of random rolls and random stuff happening without much player choice. It’s more of a system made to glance over exploration, when it should be the opposite based on the game’s premise.

Can you elaborate on how Blades was difficult to run for you? I feel like I could almost run it in my sleep.