Guild of San Marcos Forum

Some time ago I joined a facebook group for gamers who like to talk about games. As is usual, about once a month or so, someone will ask for folks most/least favorite game. Some (ok most) devolve into snarkfest, but occasionally people will talk earnestly about what they like/dislike in a game.

(Full disclosure here, I intensely dislike CthulhuTech and Savage Worlds. The former because it's mechanics make it more likely to end in catastrophe the more skilled you are at something, and the latter because they stripped everything that made Deadlands cool out of the rules set and gave us a (IMNTHO) far-too-vanilla game to replace it with).

As usual I see a lot of complaining about Savage Worlds (and plenty who come to it's defense) along with the usual gamut of "I hate (insert 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th (especially this one), 5th) Edition" because... Every once in a while I will see someone point out CthulhuTech's little "quirk," and the various iterations of Champions get a lot of hate. The safe-betters always point out FATAL or World of Synnabar, and that's usually where it ends.

BUT this week I saw someone say that they "HATE" 7th Sea. I figured it must be someone who has problems with 2nd ed, but NO! They said that both editions were equally awful and that they go out of their way to warn people away from playing.

Of course I said nothing (because, really, who needs that kind of negativity in their life) but I was just so amazed that there was someone who hated it. I have heard folks say they aren't interested, or didn't get the hype, but this is definitely a first for me.

...who do I have to hunt down and shank?

Lot's of people hate it.

The combat system is not historically accurate to real fighting.

It rewards creativity over mechanics.

It is too abstract in pace of combat time.

You are expected to describe your attacks.

It has a statistical cap at rank 5 for most things.

It rewards innate talent over skill (keeping trait instead of knack) rendering their master swordsman less effective than a really agile guy.

Too many knacks.

Too few knacks.

Weapons are grouped into essentially 2 descriptions with no variations between an axe, hammer or broadsword.

Everything does the same damage.

Reload times are too long to be effective.

Reload times are too short to be historically accurate.

They mishmashed too much history.

The translations are not accurate.

Not enough monsters to fight.

Too many monsters for a historic game.

It's not a historic game.

Magic doesn't let me just dominate stuff like D&D.

The dice system scales poorly with the TNs.


I can go on. I had plenty of these conversations back in the day.

It's funny, I've been reading your list for the past two days and I am hard pressed to find any of the complaints I disagree with. The combat system IS wonky, it DOES reward creativity over mechanics, combat time is abstract, we DO want you to describe your attack, etc., etc., etc. And always at the end of the complaints I feel compelled to say, and that's just one of the reasons I love it.

Well, you are a ROLE player.

Some folks are ROLL players.

And some folks like the SCA for their incredibly picky rules about how wide your belt and headband are allowed to be.

Some folks don't see that stuff as a benefit.