Bad RPG Ideas

[Atton Rand]

I've had some... interesting experiences participating in RPGs over the years, and I have attempted to run a few myself. So far the only one that was really successful was my first RPG, The Golden Age of Piracy. It wasn't something likely to win any awards and it certainly deviated a bit from my original concept (I originally wanted it to draw more on actual history, but in the end most players instead fell back on the swashbuckler image that has been perpetuated by Hollywood, and those were the ones that didn't abruptly start trying to shove in supernatural elements)  but for its purposes it worked as a fun adventure that lasted a few months. I've had plenty of ideas since then (even before that, technically) and some of them were really bad, like horrendous. These are concepts that would never work and yet I still considered them.

 

I'm sure I can't be the only one who's had some bad ideas, so I thought it might be amusing to start a thread in which we could all share the worst ideas we've had for RPGs. Since I'm starting this I guess I should go first. Here are a few of my worst ideas, and I'm probably forgetting a few.

 

• Monty Python's Flying Circus: Yes, I actually thought about starting an RPG based on the classic British comedy show. In fact i was one of the first ideas I had for an RPG. Basically, the way it would have worked was that you would create a character (on what would be a pretty standard signup form except for the fact you'd have to specify which of the five Pythons is playing your character) and then you'd basically just go do whatever you wanted with the encouragement of making your posts as bizarre as possible. I think I might have considered including some game mechanics incorporating gags from the show as well like having players be able to bring in The Colonel if things got too silly. This one didn't even get a draft, and I'm sure any player with experience in an RPG can come up with a long list of reasons this would fail.
• The Elizabethan Era: This was a project I'd intended as sort of a spiritual successor to The Golden Age of Piracy. The concept was pretty much a sandbox RPG in which players would create characters and interact with Elizabethan Era-England. That was pretty much it. There would have been options as well to interact with major historical figures but most people agreed that idea would be boring. That's not even getting into the fact that I actually wanted to allow players to perform with Shakespeare, but as it turns out roleplaying theater basically amounts to copying passages from the plays and including them in IC posts. I probably would have also include an option to join Francis Drake against the Spanish Armada, which is probably where everyone would have been more interested in going and even then defeating them over and over again would have gotten boring after a while.
• Thomas the Tank Engine: This one's pretty self-explanatory. You're an engine on the Island of Sodor and you have to go around doing various jobs for the Fat Controller. Of course, being a train, that would have the slight problem that you can't really do a whole lot since you're stuck on the tracks and unable to move anywhere but where they lead, and that's only assuming you people to drive you. This would probably get infuriating very quickly.
• Game of Thrones: The basic dynamic would be pretty straight forward: players would create a character belonging to a specific house (probably beginning with Stark, Lannister, Baratheon, and Targaryen with the possibility of more being added as the game went on). The obvious problem is that there is a lot of material to keep track of (we probably would have had to go on a separate timeline from the show). This would make for a challenging game to run, since it would require not only moderating every player vs. player confrontation to ensure fights are handled fairly and to determine when it is okay to kill another player's character but also there would have to be some sort of record kept of everyone who has died so far so people can keep track and don't accidentally reintroduce someone in page 144 who they forgot was killed on page 42. The other problem, as it turned out, was that Game of Thrones also contains some major adult content that would be hard to adapt into a family-friendly medium. It's one thing for players to be roleplaying as characters locked in a violent conflict with each other but some details aren't exactly appropriate for explicit description on this board. The... um... shenanigans of one Ramsay Snow quickly spring to mind as a very good example, and considering his role in the overall narrative it would be hard to cut out that part of his character. Some of the things Joffrey does would also be harder to translate into a family-friendly RPG come to think of it.

 

So there are some of my worst ideas. Hopefully I've amused you with some of these concepts. If I think of any more I'll post them but in the meantime why don't you share some of your worst ideas for RPGs.

[Petewa]

I had a pretty successful idea for a transformers RP once, in fact, that RP is still running with two of the three original players of the RP, sadly, it isn't this RP itself I would like to speak about, but instead, its countless offshoots, one of which involved one of the crazier characters creating a device which genderbent nearly the entirety of everyone within the beloved, fan created universe. In another offshoot, the characters had to face their shattered glass counterparts, and in yet another, the characters somehow wound up in jail, breaking out easily, but somehow still managing to get imprisoned once more.

 

Oh, and other people began making offshoots of the RP as well, such as one in which all the characters wound up as humans through reasons not fully explained.

[Nik the Three]

I have once tried to write a tabletop RPG rulebook. Idea was to make it sci-fi game about having ship. When I think about it, it was similar to FTL (awesome game btw). I was a lot inspired by Czech tabletop RPG "Dračí doupě" (something like Czech D&D). But inspiration changed too being a DrD in space. Rules were nearly same...

Note: I was 12 I think