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.

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.

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 have a morbid fascination with it, and one of the things that keeps dragging me back to it is the very weird ways in which it is, surprisingly, progressive. FATAL makes a distinction between sex and gender (though throws it away), and also recognises asexuality as valid (despite not understanding it).

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.

Rimworld was originally coded so that all women were at least slightly bisexual, if not fully gay, while all men were either gay or straight. According to the creator - who vociferously defended this stance claiming it was based on “research” - bisexual men like me don’t exist.

That’s honestly just the start of the rabbit hole. The game was hardcoded so that men always prefer younger partners and women always prefer older partners. Also women were eight times less likely to be willing to hit on someone. This is, to be clear, supposed to be a scifi game set in the future, but modelling sexual politics apparently taken from 1980’s TV.

There’s an amazing breakdown of the whole thing here; https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rimworld-code-analysis

You can find the creator of Rimworld in the comments defending all of his nonsense and making a total ass of himself in the process. Unfortunately the rest of the comments are a total shit show because the average gamer simply does not have the mental maturity needed to handle critical analysis deeper than “graphics bad”.

I’m told they eventually changed some of this stuff after enough backlash, years later, for whatever that’s worth. Maybe the creator actually did some learning and growing, and if so, good for them.

Based on the fact that all that nonsense was removed even before the release, and that I’ve never heard about him being weird like that, I want to believe he grew as a person since then, and pulled a reverse Notch.

It’s a racist, sexist rape fantasy simulator.

Harping on rimworld, One of the most moddable games ever made, for the creator not understanding the depths of human sexuality is a little obtuse to say the least.

There are a lot of things that people won’t understand and there are so many mods to resolve this it seems silly to expect the creator to “get it”.

I’ve been around gay and trans people my entire life but I still don’t think that I fully understand human sexuality or our cultural relationships with gender norms.

Undoubtedly if I were to architect something like Rimworld I would get it wrong but I hope I would have the foresight to leave an amendment process so that it could be modded into fitting with people’s understanding in the future.