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    Dungeons & Dragons 
  • THAC0 in First and Second edition was an infamously counterintuitive system. Every character has a THAC0 score from 20 to 1 defined by their class and level, which is used to determine what they need to roll to hit an enemy. Take your THAC0, subtract the target's Armor Class, and try to roll above that number. So the lower your THAC0 is and the higher the target's Armor Class is, the better for you. Armor Class goes from 10 to -10, so this little mechanic introduced many kids to the concept of subtracting negative numbers. Starting at third edition, THAC0 was replaced with an attack bonus added to your roll, and Armor Class was changed to the target number to beat, thus removing subtraction from the equation and making the numbers intuitively get better as they get larger.
  • First and second edition include rules that give bonuses and penalties to certain weapon types when used against certain types of armor, such as giving bludgeoning weapons an advantage against mail, since mail doesn't do much padding. These rules were almost universally ignored out of hand, and even the designers admitted to regretting including them in the first place.
  • Options for how to roll for attributes evolved greatly over the editions due to general discontent. In the various versions of Basic and the Original 3 Brown Booklets, the rules recommended simply rolling a straight 3d6 right down the line, meaning that your stats are utterly random and could produce a character that is either not the type you were hoping to play or simply unplayable. This mechanic was largely seen as bad only in retrospect, as the rule encouraged players in the dawn of tabletop gaming to see their characters as expendable. Over the years, more accommodating options were introduced to give players more control of their character's strengths and ensure that they have some decent stats, encouraging more long-form, character-driven campaigns.
  • Bonuses for high attributes was not a very well-liked system. Most stats provided no benefit to the character unless it's exceptionally high, so there is no difference between a character with 9 Dexterity and 14 Dexterity. Strength also has the bizarre inclusion of "Exceptional Strength," which is only available to Fighters with a Strength of 18. They get to roll a percentile to add a two-digit number alongside their Strength stat, which can confirm as much as three times the bonuses as a straight 18. No other attribute works like this. Characters also receive bonuses to their experience points for having a high score in their class's Prime Requisite, though the only possible outcome of this is to make parties unbalanced as the characters with high stats become even more powerful than their comrades over time. 3rd Edition put an end to all of this by providing a uniform +/- 1 modifier for every two attributes above or below 10 and doing away with XP bonuses.
  • In First and Second edition, non-human races have level limits depending on their class, so once you reach a certain rather arbitrary level, your character is prohibited from ever leveling up again. There is no conceivable gameplay benefit to this restriction, as it will simply cause certain characters to become unplayable once their party has reached higher levels. The rule seems to be a bit of strong-arming by designer Gary Gygax, who favored human-centric fantasy settings and wanted to encourage human-centric parties.
  • Favored class/multiclass XP penalty rules from 3rd edition are notable for completely failing at what they're meant to do and acting like a straitjacket on customization. Exotic base classes are rarely supported as favored classes, making them harder to use. Humans have no set favored class, whereas everyone else has a single favored class - which means that the already overpowered humans became even more dominant. And on top of this, prestige classes — which are generally more powerful than multiclassing anyway — don't take the penalty. Very few groups actually use this rule.
  • 3rd Edition's ruleset is open enough to allow the player to select just about any sapient creature to act as their base race. The designers knew this, and decided to balance it out by adding in two rules: racial hit dice (essentially, most monsters stronger than baseline humanoids start the game with "levels" in whatever type of monster they are), and level adjustment (a boost to the character's effective level when calculating things like XP gain). On paper, this is reasonable; that guy who wants to play a stronger race like a drow or a half-dragon or even big monsters like a fire giant or mind flayer can do so, but he'll only be able to do so in a game where that level of power is on par with the rest of the party. In practice, however, racial hit dice proved to be Empty Levels par excellence, since they provide literally nothing beyond the bare minimum of a new-level boost (i.e. extra HP, skill points, and attack bonus), and level adjustment was even worse, since it truly was an empty level that didn't even provide that. A 1st-level mind flayer psion is certainly far stronger than a 1st-level human psion, but not on par with a 16th-level one. Consequently, players rejected anything with a level adjustment higher than 1 or maybe 2 as gimping yourself, and playing as anything with racial hit dice (on paper, it's better, but monsters with racial hit dice almost always boast high level adjustment) is considered something only usable in the most casual games.
  • Savage Species is an entire Scrappy Book of poorly-balanced concepts. It's one book almost no sensible DM will allow, in large part because it's steeped in the above issue.
    • It has a ritual that lets you sacrifice XP (a level 1 template costs 1,000 XP, a level 2 costs 3,000, etc) to apply templates to your character. Kobolds are bad enough, but when you factor in that the character can drop from level 6 to level 5 and pick up the Necropolitan, Half-Celestial, and Weretiger templates without much hassle, maintaining balance in a party becomes pretty much impossible.
    • The entire "playing as monsters" rules (the reason the book exists to begin with) didn't exactly pan out well. Intended to show the flexibility of the system by letting you play as the iconic creatures of the game, the advancement tables for the monsters are extremely poorly-balanced and done with quantity over quality in mind. Some wind up rather pathetic (the medusa, whose entire existence is based on its petrifying gaze attack, can't do it until 6th level and can't do it regularly until 10th), and others hideously broken (the astral deva gets full cleric casting with eight skill points and full Base Attack), and all of them have to deal with irritating Level Adjustment setting their hit points, attack bonus, and skills well behind. To cap it all off, you're locked into your monster class and can't leave it until you finish advancement. It's hard to imagine how any of the designers could have imagined these characters would be fun to play. In fact, a blog post by the lead writer from the book reveals that he was opposed to the concept of monster heroes to begin with and intentionally wrote the rules to make them severely underpowered. Which only brings up the question of why Wizards of the Coast picked him to write the book in the first place. Unearthed Arcana in 3.5 Edition did, at least, offer some optional rules for spending XP to remove Level Adjustments, which helped a little.
  • There's a general theme with D&D of gradually learning that having mechanics based around "You'll suck/rock now, but rock/suck later" all ended up being a Scrappy Mechanic. In addition to Racial Level Caps and Level Adjustments, 4th and 5th Edition finally got rid of the idea of an entire Class starting weak or becoming obsolete in the concept of "They're good at different points of the game" as a form of balance. As with the Level Cap rules, if the game doesn't get into higher levels, the "balance" never comes into play. If it does, several of the characters are now worthless. 4th Edition tried to fix this by making all class mechanics more or less uniform, which became a Scrappy Mechanic in and of itself. 5th Edition's solution is to try to make classes more or less balanced but still unique at all levels of play. One way it tried to do this was by getting rid of the Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards rule. Spells will start out strong when you get them, but won't automatically improve just because you got higher level. Status Infliction spells are still really powerful, but the caster is limited in only having one in effect at a time.
  • Grappling rules in 3rd edition are infamously confusing because they introduce a completely different set of mechanics to combat that bear little relation to the standard rules. The rules are also so complex that it's not rare to see flow-charts created to help players understand what the hell is supposed to be going on. To top it off, the rules themselves heavily favor large creatures as well as those who specialize in grappling, so it's not rare for an otherwise powerful character to find himself completely helpless when grabbed.
  • Weapons of Legacy, another in the line of "really cool concepts where the mechanics just fall apart", introduces the eponymous items, legendary magic items that grow in power as the player does, and in exchange for personal sacrifices and lore-laden rituals, offer unique special abilities in the vein of their heroic origins. Problem was, every single one of them is awful. The costs are far too high, the rituals take too much work, and the items themselves don't stack up next to the stuff you can just buy. Helped a little by the fact that it includes guidelines to custom-make your own, but you'd have to clear it with your DM first, and the original items are so bad that most players never even got that far in the book.
  • Character Alignments generally started enough arguments as to become a Scrappy Mechanic before being tweaked. In early editions, there are certain classes and races that can only be one kind of alignment, like Lawful or Chaotic. The most infamous of these is The Paladin class, since they're required to be Lawful Good according to the game's mechanics. Not only that, but their Lawful Good alignment ended up becoming an Enforced Trope, since a paladin can potentially lose access to their most useful abilities if they don't rigidly adhere to Lawful Good tendencies. This makes the paladin get a rather-undeserved reputation as being a class used only by "Stop Having Fun" Guys who play Rules Lawyer with the rest of the party and ruin the fun. The creators ended up creating the Book of Exalted Deeds to show how the paladin is meant to be The Paragon instead of a rigid enforcer of any law, anywhere (which is closer to Lawful Neutral than Lawful Good), since even the creators were getting sick of it. Finally, 5th edition dropped such enforced alignments entirely by allowing any class to be any alignment, including the paladin, who got some Evil variants and builds to go with.invoked
  • The 3.0 Epic Spellcasting rules. The idea is that, once you've surpassed 9th-level spells, the only thing to do is start making spells of your own. The problem? The system to do so was totally, irrevocably broken. The idea was pretty simple - you have a number of basic "seed" effects, and you can stick them together or modify them to make new spells, as long as you make a Spellcraft check. For instance, if you want a spell that boosts your stats and AC, you just combine the Fortify and Armor seeds and modify either to suit your purposes... only to do so requires such a colossal Spellcraft DC that you would never consider using it. For comparison, the roll to make an epic spell whose effects duplicate a basic 10d6 Fireball would require a DC of 59note , at a level where spells with triple that damage are on the table.
    Thing is, they also include "mitigating factors", including increasing the casting time, lowering one of the involved effects, or making some kind of sacrifice - including having other casters donate spells for you. Once again, the idea is pretty simple - more impressive effects work more like rituals than simple point-and-go spells. In practice, it's really not hard to abuse mitigating factors, especially through effects like Leadership to give you a bunch of people donating spells or using a fast-time plane to fast-track spells with 100-day cast times. The result is a system that is essentially totally unusable to people who just want to have a good time mashing spells together, and incredibly abusable for people who want to invent a spell that makes them totally invincible forever. And to cap it all off, when you consider that epic metamagic effects are already plenty to keep the caster playable at epic levels, it wasn't even necessary.
  • Psionics, before 3.5's Expanded Psionics Handbook pretty much saved the concept, are pretty much always this regardless of edition. It mostly comes down to psionics being weird to work with, often either overpowered (ignoring magic resistance in 1st) or underpowered (every discipline using a different stat in 3rd), but the biggest of all is the "psionic combat" system that comes into play whenever two psionicists fought. The game is put on hold as the two psionicists stand in place, glare at each other, get Psychic Nosebleeds, and play the psychic equivalent of rock-paper-scissors until one of them falls over. When the EPH removed psychic battles, it was generally with a sigh of relief.
  • After several editions of averting Contractual Boss Immunity, 5th Edition has introduced it in the form of Legendary Resistance. Essentially, a limited number of times per day, powerful creatures can automatically resist any effect that requires a Saving Throw. In theory, this prevents disabling and status inflicting spells from ending fights immediately without making them completely worthless in important fights. In practice, it creates 2 different HP pools (actual HP and Legendary Resistance uses). Since classes like Fighter and Barbarian can't cause Save based effects without taking certain subclasses, while classes like Monk and Bard are very reliant on Save based effects, it's easy to end up in situations where players who are supposed to be on the same team are racing against each other. Not to mention, Legendary Saves can dramatically vary in effectiveness depending upon the party make-up. Have a standard 4-member party of Fighter/Rogue/Cleric/Wizard? Only the Wizard will typically be casting spells that can pretty-much require a monster to burn a Legendary Resistance, and that's only if they don't already make the saving throw with their improved modifiers. It could be in Round 5 or 6 before one of these spells finally takes effect, giving the Big Bad ample opportunity to be epic. However, if you have a party that has TWO (or God help the DM, or more) characters that can cast "Save or Suck" spells, you're pretty much going to be seeing this within a couple of rounds, especially if you have a Warlock casting Hex and/or a College of Eloquence Bard who can levy MASSIVE penalties on the saving throws, pretty much guaranteeing a failed save.

    Yu-Gi-Oh! 
  • For some inexplicable reason, official Konami rules state that OCG cards cannot be used in official TCG play for any reason even if the card exists in the TCG. Notably, the reverse case is not an issue, as TCG cards are completely legal in the OCG unless they are World Premiere cards that have not been printed in Asia. Given that OCG cards are much cheaper secondhand compared to TCG cards, the most common fan theory for this ruling is to force TCG players to buy the TCG product.
  • Missing the timing. Not only does understanding this ruling mean one has to pay very close attention to the Exact Words on card effects, but it also means a lot of potential combos are ruined and a strategy can fall apart with one misplayed card that violates the rule (particular examples include using Guardian Eatos' effect with Celestial Sword - Eatos, her intended equip). A further annoyance with this conflict is that most newer cards have their wordings phrased so you can't miss the timing while older cards tend to have their effects worded so they can, contributing to the Can't Catch Up problem outdated themes have against the faster new themes.
  • The Special Summon rule when it comes to public knowledge locations (Graveyard and banish zone, principally). When a monster cannot be Normal Summoned, then it must be Special Summoned by a procedure specified on its card text (Extra Deck monsters included). However, there's a subset of cards that include a stipulation that allows you to "ignore the summoning conditions". The issue being that even these cards can't summon those monsters from public knowledge locations because of some particular ruleset, basically contradicting written card text and originating multiple headaches for newer players.
  • The "Harpie rule"; Harpie Lady #1, #2, #3, and Cyber Harpie, all have their names treated as Harpie Lady. This also means for purposes of deck construction, thus you can only have three of any of them in the deck. The card makers thankfully realized this was stupid and started using the mentioned naming mechanics listed under Loophole Abuse in the main article.
  • Archfiend Cards are known as 'Daemon' in the OCG (Not the Type Demon), but since the TCG just couldn't print that, they changed their names with no consistency to such. A few years later Demons became an archetype, with cards that support them as such. In the end: All old Demon cards (such as Summoned Skull) became Archfiends, but couldn't have their names changed and while they are treated as such in official games there was nothing on the card that actually says they are Archfiends, so the only way to know that is to look it up on the Internet. Thankfully, reprints now have errata text that state plainly "this card is always treated as an Archfiend card."
  • While not technically a game mechanic, the large number of OCG exclusives is infuriating for many TCG players, since there's often no indication of when the TCG will get certain cards, while in comparison, any TCG exclusives can be reliably found in the OCG's Extra Packs. The D/Ds suffered greatly from this (detailed below), the Frightfurs had been affected by the holding back of ONE single support cardnote , while most of the introduced cards from the Kastle Siblings pack took over three years to be imported.note  This ties into a rather cretinous, though not technically illegal business practice. It's common to have certain cards in the OCG be of one rarity for a while in Japan as a testing ground to see what kinds of combos or potential the card itself has. Then, when it's time to come to America, the rarity may very well change and as a result, the price jacks up abnormally largely. Cases in point: the Qliphorts (Common and Rare in the OCG, all-foil in the TCG), and Dragonic Diagram, a card that when revealed to have unbelievable combo potential with Dinosaur cards, became a secret rare in America worth close to $100.
  • The New Master Rules was generally regarded as the weakest of the Master Rule sets, thanks to the way Links were handled being a very blatant use of Character Select Forcing on Konami's part.note  When Konami announced the April 1st 2020 Revision to the Master Rules, they were met with near unanimous praise.note 
  • Pendulum Monsters have a particularly annoying stipulation with how they interact with the Graveyard. There is a "hidden" ruling where rather than always going to the Extra Deck when they leave the field, they are essentially treated as always having the text "If this card would be sent from the field to the GY, place it in the Extra Deck face-up". This allows them to get screwed by any card that overrides where cards go when sent to the Graveyard, such as the Spell Card "Dimensional Fissure", heavily crippling Pendulum decks. Compare cards like "Crystal Beasts", whose effects to place themselves in the Spell/Trap Zone trigger on destruction and do not attempt to go to the Graveyard when destroyed.
  • Time rules at a tournament usually dictate that a player with more LP when time is called is the winner. However, this means that you end up with games being decided on incidental burn damage or LP gain to just get the numbers advantage, and some players abuse the rule by stalling to overtime while they're ahead. This also consequentially makes the few decks that rely on paying LP as part of their game plan, such as P.U.N.K., Dinomorphia and Gold Pride, much more difficult to play since the player who's using them has to be extra careful to not lose because of the time rules.

    Other games 
  • Cardfight!! Vanguard:
    • Lock is the signature mechanic of the "Link Joker" clan. You turn an opponent's rear-guard face-down until the end of your opponent's turn, and it can't do anything. And that means anything, including getting rid of it to place a new card down. Lock essentially creates a dead space on your board, and when you consider the fact that multiple or even all of your rear-guards can be locked, and then immediately re-locked after being unlocked in the end phase, you start to see the problem. If you're playing a deck that needs its rear-guards, you're pretty much required to play cards that specifically counter LJ or else you just auto-lose that match-up.
    • Over Triggers were a new type of triggernote introduced in 2021. You're only allowed to play one Over Trigger in the entire deck, and when checked it gives 100 million power to a unit of your choice. This results in many games where the outcome is decided solely by an Overtrigger leaving both sides feeling their victory/loss was unearned. Either you drive check it, and get a power bonus so absurd that only a Perfect Guard (which is a type of card that can No-Sell any attack) could hope to block it. Or you damage check it, and your opponent's turn pretty much ends right there. Neither scenario is something one can realistically account for since you're only allowed to play one. And even if you could account for it, there's not much you can do to play around such an absurd power increase as 100 million.
  • In Chess, Tournament Play, for many years, the fifty move Draw rule counted. The rule was originally 50 moves without a capture or pawn movement and the game is a draw; note that this was not a Scrappy mechanic. Then it was found that certain positions were winnable in more than fifty moves, so the rules were patched. And then patched again. And then patched again. This changed every few years in the 80s, as more and more computer analysis was applied to chess, and more and more positions were thought winnable in more than 50 moves. Eventually, the result was sufficiently baroque that in 2001 it was decided to just leave it at 50 moves.
  • In the fourth edition of Warhammer 40,000, Skimmers received a lot of hate because they were excessively hard to kill. The worst offenders are Eldar skimmers equipped with holo fields and spirit stones. Add in how most if not all Eldar players typically ran three Falcons (or some other skimmer) with this setup, and you have something that made a lot of people angry. Thankfully, they lost a lot of their power in the fifth edition.
    • Continuing with that theme, the Tau have a strategy called "Fish of Fury" which is a complete Game-Breaker under the 4th Edition skimmer rules. This involves taking two infantry squads with an accompanying Hover Tank Awesome Personnel Carriers called a Devilfish. The Devilfish benefits from the difficulty of killing skimmers and the armor of a light tank. By positioning the skimmers in front of the infantry, the skimmers block line-of-sight to the infantry squad, preventing them from being targeted. But in the Tau player's shooting phase, the Tau infantry can fire through the Devilfish, representing the Devilfish crew using its anti-grav engines to thrust upward and open the line of fire, only to drop back down when it comes the enemy's turn to fire. This abuse of a poorly thought out mechanic was widely hated in tournament play.
    • In the fifth edition, the Annihilate mission generated a huge hatedom from Imperial Guard players because the Guard's Troops rules are incompatible with the kill points rule, making this an extreme example of Failure Is the Only Option. For example, one Troops choice for an IG player is worth as many kill points as any other race's entire army in a 500-point game.
    • "Yeah, so one kill point for the Devilfish, and one for the Drones." IG players started preaching to a blue choir on that one. There's also the Tyranid Biovore when the edition first came out. Every time you fire, your enemy gets a kill point. Fortunately, most of the kill point issues with these armies were resolved through updated books and FAQs.
    • The 5th edition wound allocation rules have a large hatedom as well because of the large number of Ork (Nob Bikers) and Eldar (Seer Council on Jet Bikes) players that have highly varied load outs on multiwound units, so you have to pump out large numbers of wounds to kill a single model because wounds can be placed on individuals rather than inflicting full wound casualties. For example, on a 9-model Nob Biker unit, it will take 10 wounds to kill a single one, because the Ork player spreads them out so none of the models get actually killed. Both cases are units that are very hard to kill thanks to special rules and proper equipment. It came to the point where the metagame shifted toward being able kill those units with either a few high-powered shots (which due to a Chunky Salsa Rule could kill regardless of wounds) or just spamming so many shots that they could not save against them all. Armies released later in this addition included options with that metagame in mind, introducing balance problems between those armies who could do this easily and those who could not. The update to 6th Edition changed the ways that wounds are allocated, thus reducing the effectiveness of these kinds of builds.
    • The "pile in" mechanic from 5th edition's assault rules. Previously, there was a considerable amount of finesse in positioning your miniatures right which could allow a weaker squad to defeat a stronger one if you set up the assault right. Not any more...
  • The baby rule in the Pokémon TCG, which forces you to win a coin flip before you can attack a baby Pokemon, generated a lot of flak due to adding yet another variable of luck to an already chance-heavy game. Combine with some of the more powerful cards being baby Pokémon and there's trouble. Eliminated in future sets.
  • d20 Modern has the Wealth system. In theory, this means that instead of nailing down all equipment in terms of absolute cost (which was guaranteed to fall victim of Technology Marches On as the high tech gadgets of 2002 like mobile internet and sub-notebook computers became commonplace by 2009), items have a "Wealth DC," which is the character's Wealth modifier (arrived upon via the player's starting occupation and rank in the Profession skill, then adjusted by some Feats) plus a d20 roll. In theory, this keeps item pricing from ever looking too ridiculous. In practice, it meant that a character's gear is essentially randomized and that characters have to either requisition equipment on the honor system or with the GM present. In the end, most GMs ignored it because telling a player he can't play a sniper because he rolled a 2 on his Wealth check and now can't afford a sniper rifle goes against the spirit of the game.
    • The trouble is compounded in the way Wealth goes up and down. If a product costs less than the player's unmodified check, it can be purchased at essentially no cost. If it's higher than the character's base check modifier, it has to be rolled for—and a success lowers the player's Wealth by 1. Wealth is gained by making Profession checks when leveling up, and can award a 0-4 bonus, depending on how well the roll goes. This means that the system gives a huge advantage to characters created above level one; they can roll to gain wealth during their offscreen levels, then buy equipment after their Wealth check rises to get items essentially for free, instead of losing Wealth to roll for those items at level 1.
    • The Wealth system is also broken wide open by the D20 Future splatbook. Among the things it adds is a futuristic device that, while expensive, grants 1-3 feats of the player's choice to that player. The existence of the "Windfall" feat (+3 to Wealth checks, can be taken any number of times) means that a character can repeatedly buy versions of the device that contain multiple Windfalls until his Wealth modifier is so high he can buy anything.
  • Pathfinder:
    • Its gun rules quickly won no small amount of scrutiny for defying Fantasy Gun Control, so one wonders if they didn't cripple them on purpose. Guns in Pathfinder, under the default "emerging" rules, require a feat or being a gunslinger to use, cost way too much for most characters to get at low levels, possess good base damage per shot but have no ability bonuses to damage and take longer to load than a moving van even with the relevant feat, have a pitifully short range increment that makes them ineffective outside of about twenty feet, and randomly jam or explode. Their only advantages over standard bows is their high crit damage and the fact that they can hit touch AC at short ranges. This would be bad enough, except the rules also feature "advanced" firearms that suffer almost none of these deficiencies, but claim that these firearms are too rare to be bought in the "emerging" rules. Cue thousands of gunslinger players begging DMs to either put revolvers in the next treasure chest or advance the timeframe of the setting just so that they can be competent.
    • The Sacred Geometry feat is generally banned, because it's immensely powerful while being a complete headache to use. Here's how it works: when you take the feat you select two metamagic (which normally enhance spells at the cost of increasing the spell slot used) feats, then if you successfully apply the feat to a spell you cast the spell with that metamagic without increasing the spell slot. To use the feat, roll a number of d6s equal to your ranks in Knowledge: Engineering, then use simple arithmetic to combine those numbers to make one of the three prime numbers associated with the spell level the spell would be if it had those metamagic feats applied to it. E.g. you want to cast a Toppling (+1), Dazing (+3) Magic Missile (1st level) and have 7 ranks in Knowledge: Engineering, so roll 7d6 and get 1,3,2,6,4,5,1. Then you need to make these equal to 43, 47, or 53 (the prime constants for a 5th level spell). So then play screeches to a halt while you calculate that ((5+1)*6)+((4/2)*3)+1=43, then cast a 5th level spell from a 1st level spell slot. Because combat in Pathfinder desperately needed mid-turn math puzzles.
  • Exalted had the Reactor/Perfect Spam/Lethality/Paranoia Combat/Overwhelming issue, which was a whole bunch of these. Elaborated: Reactor meant that with relentless stunting and mote regeneration Charms, it was comparatively easy to come out of any given action with more Willpower and motes of Essence than you started. These were then spent to activate "paranoia combos", which were massive experience sinks containing every single No-Sell power that could be accessed, including perfect defences. If you didn't activate your paranoia combo, you would die because of a preponderance of unpleasant "bad touch" effects, which would kill you, cut off your arms, turn you into a ferret, or otherwise make your life very difficult, not helped by the low health levels of these titan-killing god-kings, which ensured that even if there weren't any bad-touch effects in the oncoming attack, it would still deal quite a lot of harm if it got through your overpriced armour. Overwhelming damage and Essence Ping ensured that armour was largely unhelpful. Notably, the 2.5 errata tried to kill almost all of these: combos became free, mote regeneration was nerfed in the head, stunt regen was dropped to once per action, Essence ping was killed, Overwhelming became far weaker, and armour got cheaper. More abstractly, some players dislike Charms, believing them to be either annoying, too limiting, or overemphasised, and exactly nobody liked attunement motes in the 2.5 errata, but the lethality/paranoia issue was the most widely complained about and the source of many fixes.
    • In the same system, the diverging math between character creation points and experience points is regarded as this. Most traits bought up in character creation are paid for at a flat rate, but increase in cost exponentially afterwards when bought with experience points. Sub-optimal point investment in character creation, consequently, can leave a character behind literally the equivalent of hundreds of experience points (in a game where 4 per session is the baseline rate). This has persisted through the first and second editions of the games, and the developers have stated it would continue through the upcoming third edition, because it would be "fake equivalence" to correct it, and because "[they] never really bean-counted with any of [their] characters". The eventual "fix" was to simply acknowledge this mechanic's existence in the text.
    • Though not quite as widely maligned, due to having some positive upshots, the Resources system is similarly problematic. The Resources trait gives a simple zero-to-five abstract rating of a character's general wealth, meant to avoid having to do painstaking math or accounting. A character can't buy something that costs more than their Resources rating. Purchases below it are "out of pocket" expenses. A purchase equal to the rating is a significant expense, and lowers the rating by 1. However, this means that characters can purchase "insignificant" things in infinite quantities, characters with Resources 1 literally cannot buy anything at all without bankrupting themselves, and merely buying the same items in a certain order completely changes their impact on your wealth. Ex: At resources 3, buying a resources 3 item, then a resources 2 item, then a resources 1 item would drop you to resources 0. If you bought them in reverse order, despite their prices and your wealth being completely unchanged, you would only drop to resources 2.
      • The new edition seems to have addressed this, partially, by not deducting Resources for purchases out of hand. A purchase equal to your Resources merit is now a "significant but not ruinous expense". However, any Resources above the default of 0 reflects above-average wealth (1 for "agrarian landlords" and the like), meaning a purchase of, say, a single mace, whip, or short sword, is a "significant expense" for a successful business owner. However, this no longer means immediate bankruptcy.
  • Car Wars has the "confetti rule": Due to a combination of factors (tournament games at conventions with strict time limits; extremely-low-weight engines; minimally-ablative armor), it became a simple matter to design a duelling car whose armor could not be penetrated easily (if at all) by the weapons of the game, singly or in linked masses. The "solution"? Institute a rule where if a car took damage equal to its mass divided by 50, it was automatically reduced to debris even if its armor was unbreached. Unfortunately, the writer of this rule forgot about Ramming, and specifically the fact that a car which was hit by a Ramplate wound up taking four times as much damage as the rammer (due to a poorly-written Ramplate-damage rule — not only did the target take 2x damage, the rammer took 1/2 damage!). Worse: A ram-car could easily have enough armor and other items to render it impossible to hit, much less damage. End Result: Ram-cars became the vehicle of choice, especially in tournaments; players who brought gun-equipped cars had no chance of winning. Mention of confetti around gamers who remember this period is a bad idea.
  • The least popular mechanics of 13th Age seem to be the "variable class complexity" and "flexible attacks" rules. For the former, classes are arranged from things like the barbarian (whose most difficult decision is "when do I rage") to the wizard (who can pick all kinds of talents that encourage stunting on the fly, coming up with creative ritual uses for combat spells, and so on); while there isn't a great deal of imbalance, at least not in combat, gamers used to 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons often find barbarians and so on to be comparatively dull, leading to a number of homebrew classes aimed at making more complex barbarians and so on. The latter is a mechanic, used mostly by fighters and bards, where the effects you can use depend upon what your hit roll is - some require an even, some an odd, some a high roll, some an even miss - and some people don't like the lack of tactical control this gives you when you're playing those classes, leading to, again, homebrew classes that fill the same battlefield role but with different mechanics.
  • Shadowrun's Priority System for character generation is messy. If you want to adjust your character's stats, you may have to alter priorities, which significantly changes how much of X you get (adjusting Resources changes your nuyen, for example) and you never have enough to make a character that doesn't fit into one of the game's predefined archetypes. Fourth Edition started with a more elegant Build Point system, which gave you a pool of points with which to build your character. Karma Generation is a more refined Build Point system, giving you a pool of Karma to let you buy everything like you would during a campaign. The old guard who developed Fifth Edition brought back Priority as the default character generation system for Fifth Edition.
  • A few traditional card games have an element that is the bane of many players' existence:
    • Hearts has the Queen of Spades, which is worth a whopping 13 points to any unlucky player who takes her in a trick. Some players have devised variants that nerf the Queen of Spades, but they have not gained widespread acceptance.
  • BattleTech has the Force Size Modifier. Designed to prevent people from trying to spam an obscene amount of cheap units at people who wanted to use fewer, more expensive units, it instead had the effect of making it impractical to ever try to use multiple units in a game. The developers admitted it was a mistake after a couple of years and errated it out of the game.
  • Ars Magica 3rd Edition has a Magic Versus Science mechanic that makes Reason a metaphysical domain alongside the Divine, Infernal, Magical, and Fae realms, to the effect that magic can be unraveled by the pure Reason of a well-used laboratory or a sufficiently devoted scientist. Given how illogical this is in a world where magic is proven to exist and is studied through strong scholarly traditions of its own, this was dropped in later editions.
  • The T.I.M.E. Stories series of narrative games gives you a limited number of Time Units. If you run out, you fail the mission and have to start over. This is intended to penalize players for chasing Red Herrings, but the penalties often come off as random, making players feel like the game is punishing them for exploring. Additionally, redoing scenarios in a board game gets old fast because unlike in video games, you have to do all the bookkeeping yourself. Many players feel that this mechanic is just an irritating Fake Longevity element that only serves to artificially add replayability to stories that could theoretically be completed in one run.
  • Mutants & Masterminds had knockback, an effect where failing a Toughness save by 5 or more would cause the character to get flung a distance based on the power of the attack that hit them, possibly colliding with other characters or walls for bonus damage. Unfortunately, this mostly just served to slow the game down as the trajectory and distance were calculated, leading to it being ignored even in games run by the designers and dropped when 3rd Edition was released.
  • Abyss: Several reviews have singled out the Kraken expansion's Sanctuaries as a dubious addition to the game. When you take one of them, you'll draw cards from the loot deck that can give Influence Points and other bonuses. You can stop at any time, and if you get two copies of a card, both are discarded, which loses you their points (but not their other bonuses). The problem is that this is quite swingy — these Locations can provide anywhere from 0 to 20+ points (most Locations give around 7-14) depending on when you stop and on your luck, so a lucky draw can win you the game and an unlucky one might be impossible to recover from. Worse, the Sanctuaries' average performance is good enough that players will often feel like they should go for them, making more games decided by luck. This is generally seen as a worse design than the original Locations, which are more strategic. Thankfully, unless you're playing a Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation, you can just remove the Sanctuaries from the Locations deck and use the rest of the expansion elements normally.
  • Werewolf (1997):
    • Dishonest or irritating mechanics, such as lying to players about their alignment, secret winning conditions and alignment changes, are called "bastard" by Mafiascum members.
    • The Cult is a faction which recruits members and aims to win the game by making up a majority of the players. They usually have a Leader who needs to induct all members personally. Cults are hated nowadays, primarily because they're too unstable: either they recruit members faster than the Town can eliminate them, while depriving the Town of the power-role players, or their Leader dies too early and the Cult members are left in limbo for the rest of the game, if not outright killed off. Recruiting Mafia is also an easy Game-Breaker for Cults, as the former Mafia Goon can simply tell them who the other Mafia are. The Leader could die immediately if they tried to recruit a Mafia member, but that'd be annoying if it happened too early, or the Cult could be the only non-mafia faction, but that makes trying to find pro-Town players pointless as they could all be turned into enemies of the Town. Besides all that, they rely on changing allegiances, which makes former Townsfolk efforts useless and causes players who are outnumbered to try to join the Cult instead of fighting it.
    • The Jester is a role which wins if it's voted out by the Town, which is disliked because it's often too easy (an annoying or inept Jester will be voted out very early on) as well as punishing the Town for acting properly and voting out non-townsfolk, since the Jester is one of a very few roles which don't need to at least pretend to be Town to win.

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