I was tragically born without any common fucking decency (or maybe this is from being an unsupervised child on the early internet) but I’ve also heard the game is just horribly bad and unfun from a game design perspective.

I absolutely love the world(books) from RIFTS. The system itself is… Painful.

Though playing Palladium RPG did help me to understand how it was supposed to be functional, in some ways anyway.

I guess it could be sped up with a computer just generating the random character

At this point I feel the rpg culture should be firmly separated again from the mainstream only to have the mainstream stand between itself and this kind of awfulness.

I didn’t even get into how the underlying system is abysmally bad even when you try to strip away all the gross shit.

Like, stats are generated by rolling 10d100/10-1. Yes, you read that correctly. Then there are five derived attributes generated as an average of four base stats, so if something modifies a base stat you have to recalculate the derived stat, but then those derived stats also set things like your carry weight, so you have to recalculate that and… It’s exhausting.

Combat is atrocious. There are criticals, but they have no relation to each other, so you can cleave through someone’s appendix and their belly button but leave everything in between untouched. Magic requires you to roll to see if you say the words correctly. The whole thing is an ungodly nightmare.

Magic requires you to roll to see if you say the words correctly.

I hate this kind of realism for the sake of realism

FATAL is, somehow, simultaneously a masterclass in realism for the sake of realism, and also the most unrealistic game ever made. There is a specific stat for how many words per minute you can speak, a stat for the longest word you know, and a stat for how far back your earliest memory is. But also, the system uses the concept of “humors” as something that actually has real-world effects, has the aforementioned critical system where you can crit individual organs but leave the surrounding organs unscathed, the ability to roll up a 4 year old with B-cups, and all kinds of other absolutely deranged nonsense that has no business whatsoever calling itself realistic.

Oh, and if your character’s intelligence is low enough, you get to roll to see if they have “R****d Strength”. So that’s great.

Zigmenthotep on YouTube covered F.A.T.A.L as part of their “Let’s make us a character” series. It took four episodes, in a format that is usually one-and-done.

However bad you’ve heard the game is, I assure you it’s worse.

Magic requires you to roll to see if you say the words correctly.

I hate this kind of realism for the sake of realism

Palladium was foundational to everything in RIFTS and it was clear the overlap was just supposed to be implied knowledge, especially from the later rulebooks.

It was a bit need you had to pick and choose what to do with.

Your cyber knight with AR and SDC hitpoints is dead the second a child brings out a Wilks laser pea shooter with a full eclip

But in an SDC environment that same cyber knight is an absolute terror.

The world building through Erin Tarn is what makes the books entertaining even when you don’t even play it IMHO

There are people here who’ve probably never seen the greatest review of the worst RPG of all time.

There is no God, and the proof of this can be found in a .pdf file from Fatal Games.

And for those who don’t have time, the only thing you need to know about FATAL is this; it’s an RPG made by the kind of people who stormed the capitol on Jan 6. Horrifically racist, sexist and queerphobic, and designed by people so fundamentally stupid and lacking in curiosity that they can’t get even the most basic of design concepts right, but so utterly obsessed with the idea of their own intellectual superiority that they keep trying to reinvent every single wheel.

Some friends and I once got drunk and made FATAL characters. After 4 hours we gave up. We still weren’t done. There’s no decisions to make, character gen is 100% random roll. It’s just so badly designed that even rolling your base attributes takes forever.

By the point where we stopped the dice had informed me that I was playing an 8 year old lesbian prostitute, and understanding how that’s even possible reveals the depths of the awfulness at work here.

My character was 8 because you have to roll for age, and these morons decided it was a good idea for people to be able to random roll adventurers who are literal babies. Yes, 0 years old is an option. Newborn barbarian warrior, off to save the world.

My character was a lesbian because the dice said she was a girl, and the system said I had to roll for sexual characteristics, like breast size. Gross. Of course, the system also applied a massive downward adjustment to her breast size for being, y’know, an actual child. So she was an A cup. For those of you wondering how an 8 year was an A cup, it’s because these geniuses remembered to include an age adjustment but didn’t remember to actually include an option on the table for “I haven’t fucking hit puberty yet you disgusting perverts.”

Anyway, the reason we’re talking about this hypothetical child’s hypothetical breast size (thanks FATAL, God you suck so much) is because you then have to roll for sexuality, and for women this is modified by breast size! I am not shitting you, this is how unbelievably fucking awful this game is. Every big titted lesbian you’ve ever met doesn’t actually exist according to FATAL. I swear to God even the Rimworld guy had more brains than this.

And she was a prostitute because you roll for your career, but the careers all have stat minimums. Don’t meet the minimum, roll again. And being 8 gave her huge penalties to her stats, so the only career in the entire book she actually qualified for was prostitution.

If you feel like throwing up right now I completely understand.

There are people here who’ve probably never seen the greatest review of the worst RPG of all time.

There is no God, and the proof of this can be found in a .pdf file from Fatal Games.

And for those who don’t have time, the only thing you need to know about FATAL is this; it’s an RPG made by the kind of people who stormed the capitol on Jan 6. Horrifically racist, sexist and queerphobic, and designed by people so fundamentally stupid and lacking in curiosity that they can’t get even the most basic of design concepts right, but so utterly obsessed with the idea of their own intellectual superiority that they keep trying to reinvent every single wheel.

Some friends and I once got drunk and made FATAL characters. After 4 hours we gave up. We still weren’t done. There’s no decisions to make, character gen is 100% random roll. It’s just so badly designed that even rolling your base attributes takes forever.

By the point where we stopped the dice had informed me that I was playing an 8 year old lesbian prostitute, and understanding how that’s even possible reveals the depths of the awfulness at work here.

My character was 8 because you have to roll for age, and these morons decided it was a good idea for people to be able to random roll adventurers who are literal babies. Yes, 0 years old is an option. Newborn barbarian warrior, off to save the world.

My character was a lesbian because the dice said she was a girl, and the system said I had to roll for sexual characteristics, like breast size. Gross. Of course, the system also applied a massive downward adjustment to her breast size for being, y’know, an actual child. So she was an A cup. For those of you wondering how an 8 year was an A cup, it’s because these geniuses remembered to include an age adjustment but didn’t remember to actually include an option on the table for “I haven’t fucking hit puberty yet you disgusting perverts.”

Anyway, the reason we’re talking about this hypothetical child’s hypothetical breast size (thanks FATAL, God you suck so much) is because you then have to roll for sexuality, and for women this is modified by breast size! I am not shitting you, this is how unbelievably fucking awful this game is. Every big titted lesbian you’ve ever met doesn’t actually exist according to FATAL. I swear to God even the Rimworld guy had more brains than this.

And she was a prostitute because you roll for your career, but the careers all have stat minimums. Don’t meet the minimum, roll again. And being 8 gave her huge penalties to her stats, so the only career in the entire book she actually qualified for was prostitution.

If you feel like throwing up right now I completely understand.

I was tragically born without any common fucking decency (or maybe this is from being an unsupervised child on the early internet) but I’ve also heard the game is just horribly bad and unfun from a game design perspective.

There are people here who’ve probably never seen the greatest review of the worst RPG of all time.

There is no God, and the proof of this can be found in a .pdf file from Fatal Games.

And for those who don’t have time, the only thing you need to know about FATAL is this; it’s an RPG made by the kind of people who stormed the capitol on Jan 6. Horrifically racist, sexist and queerphobic, and designed by people so fundamentally stupid and lacking in curiosity that they can’t get even the most basic of design concepts right, but so utterly obsessed with the idea of their own intellectual superiority that they keep trying to reinvent every single wheel.

Some friends and I once got drunk and made FATAL characters. After 4 hours we gave up. We still weren’t done. There’s no decisions to make, character gen is 100% random roll. It’s just so badly designed that even rolling your base attributes takes forever.

By the point where we stopped the dice had informed me that I was playing an 8 year old lesbian prostitute, and understanding how that’s even possible reveals the depths of the awfulness at work here.

My character was 8 because you have to roll for age, and these morons decided it was a good idea for people to be able to random roll adventurers who are literal babies. Yes, 0 years old is an option. Newborn barbarian warrior, off to save the world.

My character was a lesbian because the dice said she was a girl, and the system said I had to roll for sexual characteristics, like breast size. Gross. Of course, the system also applied a massive downward adjustment to her breast size for being, y’know, an actual child. So she was an A cup. For those of you wondering how an 8 year was an A cup, it’s because these geniuses remembered to include an age adjustment but didn’t remember to actually include an option on the table for “I haven’t fucking hit puberty yet you disgusting perverts.”

Anyway, the reason we’re talking about this hypothetical child’s hypothetical breast size (thanks FATAL, God you suck so much) is because you then have to roll for sexuality, and for women this is modified by breast size! I am not shitting you, this is how unbelievably fucking awful this game is. Every big titted lesbian you’ve ever met doesn’t actually exist according to FATAL. I swear to God even the Rimworld guy had more brains than this.

And she was a prostitute because you roll for your career, but the careers all have stat minimums. Don’t meet the minimum, roll again. And being 8 gave her huge penalties to her stats, so the only career in the entire book she actually qualified for was prostitution.

If you feel like throwing up right now I completely understand.

Just know that character creation is reminiscent of the oldest D&D types, where you’d roll randomly. It is possible (I read a review of the game, not the system itself, thank god) to have a negative circumference of the anus.

Honestly FATAL isnt even fun to read its just mad cringe. Like the most in depth look into the mind of an incel.

Just know that character creation is reminiscent of the oldest D&D types, where you’d roll randomly. It is possible (I read a review of the game, not the system itself, thank god) to have a negative circumference of the anus.