I like various systems for various reasons.
I like ShadowRun because it's a game where you play people who shoot other people in the face for money (or as it was put once, "This is an industry based on face shooting for fiscal returns"). It's like what would happen if Lord of the Rings and The Matrix had a bastard child. It's fucking awesome (I mean, hell, a fucking dragon got hit by an orbital laser
and survived! Another dragon gifted him "the fruitcake we've exchanged each year since 2020" in his Last Will with the comment "unlike you, I'm really dead."
I'm not kidding)
Why I dislike ShadowRun: sometimes the rules are ambiguous, or the developers were clearly on crack (when they aren't
embezling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company), or the rules are incomplete (
"what happens when a shapeshifter in armor shifts to animal form? How long does the shift take?"), or just
make no fucking sense.
D&D 3.5:
Why I like it: Flexibility of unique character concepts, class choices, and stuff.
Why I hate it: Sheer number of class choices, items, feats, and the bloody mess of finding that One Last Thing.
D&D 4.0:
Why I like it: Clean and easy to use choice selection. Interesting effects and monsters.
Why I hate it: Half the choices are clearly bunk. Not that it matters much, your class defines half your character, your items the other half. "Paladin-chu has reached level 8. Paladin-chu can learn a new ability, but Paladin-chu already knows its maximum number of abilities. Forget one? Yes/no"
Alpha OmegaWhy I like it: It's a really well written rather obscure game. It has a great setting. It's got huge character potential. It's got a rather interesting sense of balance (tests are "roll your dice, add your modifier." Do you want bigger dice, or a higher modifier?)
Why I dislike it: The balance....doesn't work in some places. I found a "spell" that I could cast to give the entire party "make your stat a d%" 4 times in the next 2 hours. At the cost of about 8 "endurance" (of 70, before I needed to cut myself to cast more spells (mmm, blood magic)). Making stats d% basically means that for the "I have high modifier" characters I just gave them "big dice" too. That they could use 4 times anytime in the next 2 hours. It basically made the game unplayable, as with one spell I made the "stat vs. skill" issue moot.
Pathfinder:
See D&D 3.5
XCrawl:
See D&D 3.5, only with fucking awesome setting.
Blue Planet:
Reasonable game. Kind of World of Darkness style mechanics, but set
In Space with gene-lifted animals (specifically dolphins and orcas, nothing else (WTH?)). Problems I have with it are that the rules didn't go far enough. There were only three races you could play: human, dolphon, orca. Or a gene-tweaked human who had cat genes, but you were still, basically, human. The setting was also weak (there were no overarching themes that could be played to, like some vague Evil out in the world: just a habitable water-world with some rather primitive natives). GM I played with was also a douche (he, honest to god, couldn't figure out how to run a voice-chat game; 90% of everything that happened happened via private text chat, to the
utter exclusion of the main channel).
Side note: characters do not have a "health" value or really any kind of damage mechanic. Damage just induces penalties, you die when those penalties are large enough that the GM declares the character dead (i.e. the penalty is so large that they could never succeed at even basic tasks).
Humorous antecedent: I, as an anthro komodo dragon (GM added more races, as the system theoretically supported it: human baseline was 0 in everything) stupidly accepted a boxing match with his polar bear boss. I spent two months in the hospital recovering after the
first round of combat.
World of Darkness:
Meh.
Brontosaurus Rex:
Why I like it: You
can play a mother fucking velociraptor. Also, it's the Wild Wild West, but In Space (see previous In Space link), with dinosaurs.
Why I don't like it: I don't own it, no one I know will run it. No one I know has even heard of it.
Serenity RPG:
Why I like it: It's based on Firefly
Why I dislike it: There's nothing to do, and money is meaningless. We made Tech x5 booze, sold half of it for a pile of money (1000 credits?) but had no idea what kind of buying power that had, because anything that was within that price range we already had, and anything outside of it we didn't want, or was so ungodly expensive as to Not Be Acquirable Through In Game Advancement (i.e. a new spaceship).
Traveler:
Why I like it:
you can die in chargen. It's kind of funny if you do.
Why I dislike it: Money is meaningless because we broke the system. Our barterer could go to an iron-starved world, buy all of the iron on the market, pay
less than normal market price for it, ship it to a iron-mining asteroid and
sell it for a profit, after expenses.
See also: Serenity.
Dresden RPG:
Why I like it: the scribbled notes in the margins of the book from the characters if fucking awesome.
Why I dislike it: it's too easy to create characters of vastly different power levels. I was ineffectual in all ways, another character was a glass cannon. Another character was slightly less deadly, but basically unkillable.
Side notes: interesting combat/damage system. I'm not sure it works, but it was different.
Albedo: Platinum Catalyst
Why I like it: You play
five characters, that's right, a whole squad. You have one main character who's fleshed out, and then four supporting characters--generally of the same "class" as you (though not always, you can be a soldier with three other soldiers and a medic)--who simply have a name, an occupation, and a general "this is how good they are" stat. Oh, and Moral. They have 1 moral, if it goes to 0 (by being shot at, for example) they freak out and cower in a corner (and they're
not green recruits; green recruits
start with 0). If they survive enough missions with you, they get a boost. To 3.
Why I dislike it: The setting is weak, there are no stated enemy monsters. Your simply a Guy In The Military who does whatever his commanding officer says (which is usually shooting at the other guys, which tend to be rabbits, because rabbits breed too fast and thus declared war on everyone else--yes, it's a furry game, you can actually play any animal you can think of; it's supposedly based off some comic book and has plot, blah blah blah, but....as a game it's weak).
Iron Claw/Jade Claw
Another furry game. Decent mechanics.
Lack of defined things to fight. Low following (it's a
nitch game for a nitch market, competing with all the other furry-centered games), but will designed.
World Tree
I've played this once, and I wasn't allowed to make my own character, because apparently doing that is a 4 day grueling exercise (under the assumption that a character for any RPG mentioned above can be reasonably created in under 4 hours, a
simple, bare bones World Tree character takes
14). Avoid it. It's...meh. Although I did get some humor out of it, as my sister didn't quite "get" it and tried to sniff everyone to root out the BBEG (dogs can do that, right? That's socially acceptable! Not. She also played a horse in Iron Claw who "stayed outside and ate grass." The rest of us made "this beer tastes like horse piss" jokes that went right over her head).
...and I think that covers it. Every RPG game I've ever played (and one that I haven't and would like to).
Wait, no, one more. Didn't play this one, but sat in on about 60% of each session (I had class).
Scion
Why I like it: You play godlings, that is, the children of gods. Hercules and the like.
Why it's fucking awesome: you can play at three power levels: Hero (Xena-like), Demigod (Hercules-like), and God (Zeus). Entire campaigns spanning
years of real-life sessions can be played in each power level. The game I watched went from starting-hero to ending-god
in 11 weeks. It was the most epic game ever run by the one and the only Jim. Who, last I knew, was working for the Secret Service as a translator (he speaks...Arabic?)
Why I dislike it: I....I have nothing bad to say about this system. I didn't play it, so I didn't get a good dig into the rules. And Jim ran it, so even if there were flaws, he ran it like a fucking madman (Jim is the only person that should ever be allowed to drink at a table-top RPG game, and even then, only when he's the GM). This game had the greatest NPC ever devised. Our "straight man" Dan (Dan is the straightest arrow ever forged) was playing a character who had a raven familiar. That raven was a drunk, womanizing, racist bastard. He once created a portal to somewhere in a puddle of hobo urine. They found the raven eating a steak (with fork and knife) one time. His ex-girlfriend (one of) was a Roc.
Oh, and the best line of the game (well, one of, and the only one I can remember), from Dan using Epic Manipulation (as a GM note): "If my friends (the other PCs) end the world, I want to be the first one back when it restarts." And yes, it came up.
Oh, a few more:
RIFTS:
Why I would play it: you can play a dragon. Or a time-traveling velociraptor.
Why I wouldn't: the rules are worse than GURPS
Road Hogs (or: The I Can't Believe it's Not a TMNT: After the Bomb Expansion
1)
Why I would play it: It's a game entirely based around vehicular combat in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where everyone is a mutant (get it? Road
hogs?). The rules are incredibly detailed (including hit tables for bullets hitting the engine block, or the fuel line, or the exhaust...)
1It technically is, but the base game was intended for younger audiences and the expansion really...wasn't. Or After the Bomb was that game. I don't really recall now.