Never Live It Down / Tabletop Games

• Warhammer: In the early edition, it was implied (albeit never outright stated) that leaders of the Dark Elves, Malekith the Witch-King, and his mother Morathi might be lovers. Mind you, the only thing that was said was that there were rumours of such. The subtext was removed from later editions, but that Malekith fucked his mother is one of the things many fans choose to remember about him.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • It seems that some people seem to have taken the Clap Your Hands If You Believe element of Orky technology to mean that ALL of it runs simply because the Orks believe it does, rather than being functional technology that works better thanks to the field. No, a stick will not fire bullets if you convince an Ork that it can, goddamnit (though a pipe would, as far as the second edition rules are concerned, which came out in 1993)! A lot of this is the result of a combination of Rule of Funny and a severe case of Depending on the Writer. Many sources do depict Ork tech as functional, if unreliable, including instances of regular humans using it with only minor difficulties. Others will depict Ork tech as essentially non-functional, and in particular humorous takes will often depict the psychic field as an incredibly powerful form of reality warping
  • The Imperial Guard will never escape their reputation as a Red Shirt Army who easily fall to any other force. Granted, that's mostly how they were depicted in the early editions, but later editions solidified their nature as a Badass Army fully capable of holding their own. The only reason they die so often is because the enemies of the Imperium are all incredibly badass, incredibly numerous, or both in their own rights.
  • The Planetary Defense Force (a.k.a. the PDF) usually present on Imperial worlds as a first line of defense kept their Red Shirt Army status. This is to the point that they are considered incredibly incompetent at best in-universe by both the Imperial Guard and Space Marines, since PDFs have a reputation of being mainly comprised of soldiers who couldn't live up to the standards of a Imperial Guard regiment, along with never actually succeeding at planetary defense.
  • Matt Ward is not a bad writer: he's done work involving Trazyn the Infinite and Castellan Crowe, and had a hand in the plot of Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2, all of which were very well received. But his reputation will always, ALWAYS be defined by his take on the Ultramarines, a take that can charitably be described as divisive, and an infamous incident involving Grey Knights and Sisters of Battle.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar has a number from the early days of the game, as the reboot of Warhammer Fantasy into Age of Sigmar resulted in a very Broken Base. The deliberately silly real-life requirements, like needing to have a bigger mustache than your opponent for certain units rules to work, are probably the most infamous example. Despite the fact that the game launched in 2015 and the General's Handbook which eliminated those rules came out less than a year later, they're still commonly brought up by disgruntled fans.
• Many Magic: The Gathering sets suffer from this.
  • Legends for the vanilla legends, but it's still known as a good set, despite them.
  • The Dark for Sorrow's Path, at one point considered the worst card in Magic (at least, that isn't an outright joke).
  • Fallen Empires may have given us Hymn to Tourach, but it also gave us the ability to pay life to put a creature in play to put counters on that we could sacrifice to gain life equal to the number of counters. Guess which one got remembered more.
  • Homelands for, well, everything.
  • Mercadian Masques for the Power Seep.
  • Kamigawa for the awkward "splice onto arcane" mechanic, and for One with Nothing, also considered one of the worst cards in Magic.^note One with Nothing is a spell that reads only "Discard your hand". That's it. No one at the time could see any situations where this is useful. These days... well, it's still not useful at all, but it's now considered Magic's "best worst card" because even 16+ years later, people still talk about it and try to make it work.
  • Meanwhile, the Magic R&D team has several moments for overpowered sets, specifically Urza's Saga block and its "free spells" that let you untap lands equal to their mana costs...with several lands that could tap for more than one mana. This helped usher in "Combo Winter," one of the more miserable tournament environments in Magic history.
• Despite Rule Zero technically protecting any given RPG from one bad rule ruining the bunch, splatbooks can have over two hundred pages of great material, and only be remembered for one bad rule or feature. It can get even worse if the feature isn't itself bad, but synergizes with another book's rules to create an unintended Game-Breaker.
  • For example, Frostburn is a very well done feature book on cold weather terrain and characters in Dungeons & Dragons. At this point it will seemingly only be remembered for providing two minor feats that contribute to making the Locate City Bomb.
• BattleTech has "Mad" Maximilian Liao. The man was canonically a legitimate Chessmaster in his younger years, may well have suffered from a medical condition explaining his decline if some of his descendants are any indication, and finally only really lost it at the very end of his career — but the fandom will always remember him for his "grab the wedding plates, they're military intelligence!" moment in the Warrior trilogy and being notionally played for a fool at every turn by Hanse Davion & Co. during the disastrous (for House Liao) Fourth Succession War.
  • The Lyran Commonwealth will always be remembered for their ''Social Generals'', who got their rank through money and connections than by experience. While the Lyrans have several formidable Mech Warriors and even the merger of the Federated Commonwealth gain them some reasonable commanders, the Lyrans are mostly known for simply sending Heavy and Assault mechs as their primary tactic.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • As a writer for Dungeons & Dragons, even though he publicly apologised for it, Colin McComb will probably never be truly forgiven for his AD&D 2nd Edition splatbook "The Complete Guide to the Master Race". Uh no, sorry, The Complete Book of Elves.
  • A rule from Advanced D&D 1st Edition penalized Demihuman female characters on their Strength score: -1 for dwarves, -2 for elves, and -3 for halflings and gnomes. While the rule was misremembered as all female PCs having their strength subtracted by four, it remains a fact that female PCs of a few races still had their Strength reduced as a game mechanic. "Minus Four Strength" was even the former trope name for Game-Favored Gender. TSR dropped this rule when they realized what a bad idea it was; from D&D 2nd Edition's release onward, a player character's gender has had no effect whatsoever on their stats or abilities. The concept is now an Old Shame for TSR and longtime fans of D&D, yet it still gets brought up from time to time.
  • "Bear Lore" in Fourth Edition is remembered as writing that's unintentionally funny. Most editions of the game have a mechanic where you can roll increasingly difficult checks to learn useful information about the monsters you're fighting. In Fourth Edition, the provided information on bears are things that anyone who's even heard of a bear would know, such as "cave bears live in caves" and "bears attack with their claws". By contrast, the same checks for a manticore would reveal genuinely useful information that a manticore can talk and that it's susceptible to illusions and trickery. As such, the "bear lore" was subject to a lot of mockery and memes about other extremely obvious things (such as rolling a check on fire to learn that fire is hot). Even after the statements were taken out, "bear lore" remains a black eye on Fourth Edition's reputation.
  • The Paladin class as a whole got itself a reputation for being Lawful Stupid thanks to the game's mechanics in D&D. In the First through Third Editions of the game, not only did a Paladin always have to be Lawful Good, but they could lose their powers forever if they let any lawbreaking go unpunished. As a result, the class was the bane of many a D&D player for a long time, as the arguments around what to do in any given situation were complicated by this mechanic. Paladins thus gained a reputation as the class of "Stop Having Fun" Guys, and the Lawful Stupid behavior is one that people still believe that Paladins are saddled with. Even after Fourth Edition and beyond changed this mechanic so that a Paladin's Character Alignment just has to match the alignment of the god they serve, the Paladin's reputation as a Lawful Stupid class hasn't gone away.invoked

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