FATAL Is An Eminently Bad Game

FATAL is already an awful game just based off of the setting, what I would call Genghis Khan simulator (but that would be an insult to Genghis Khan), see Mr. Welch's video for details.  However, I wish to prove, for my own sanity, that the purely mathematical mechanics themselves make the game abysmally bad.

Rant!

ALL games ( that is board games, war-games, ttrpgs...) should be played according to the rules first, and  experimented on later.  Such experiments/modifications/house rules should come after using all the rules and understanding full well what they try to accomplish.

Through this method, much of what I thought to be stupid or useless form AD&D I now understand to be of great import, and I still have a ways to go in that regard.

However, I find there mere idea of attempting the same with fatal to be impossible.  The explanation is simple: If the very first thing a player has to do before the game even starts is ludicrously complex, with no actualized benefit, the rest of the game does not need to be analyzed or even read.

The first thing to be done is to determine ability scores called whateverthe*Idontcare in this game because renaming things is half the fun of making RPGs.  You do this by rolling ONE-HUNDRED AND EIGHTY (180) DICE.  Even if you consider a D100 to be a single roll, this is still NINETY (90) rolls.  FOR ONE CHARACTER.

This could be fine, or at interesting, if the game was a heroic one, where the characters very rarely, if ever, die.  But I assure you it is very much so the contrary: The average health of a character rest somewhere around ~15, this then gets divided between the appendages of the character, LUCKILY ONLY SIX: head, torso, arms and legs.  I believe the head gets 10% of the PC's total health, so on average ONE.  If this is reduced to zero, death.

 I will tell you, the reader, that I have misrepresented the book: The rules say to choose the character's race first, then abilities are rolled.  However, three points: 

  1. The races affect the PC ability scores, so I would argue abilities should be rolled first.
  2. The choice of race in terms of difference to the character makes very little difference because every race is evil (in some way, shape or form)
  3. It is a very short step, the only real complexity coming in later sections, again.

 FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-

WOOPS, another peek reveals that there is ANOTHER chapter before abilities, BODY, where you have to generate SO MUCH meaningless minutiae about your character, and if somebody were to actually use any of it in play I would call them a deviant of the worst kind.  This chapter:

  1. Means nothing, is nothing, should be burned. (my personal bias)
  2. Only furthers my point because you have to either roll on or choose from an onslaught of depraved tables for physical features, only for those features to be meaningless if you take ONE POINT OF DAMAGE.
  3. Highly unscientific, which for game purporting a high amount realism, would be a failure of equally high regard, except that it is dwarfed by greater failures which permeate this game. 

 The point which I wish to end on, before concluding this, is in regards to a line provided by the author (paraphrased): If the [referee] deems it problematic, then he may allow for the player to choose.

More exactly, on page 9, "Therefore, the [referee] must choose whether Race is determined randomly or chosen by the player."

 This loops back to why I started writing this up in the first place, an argument with a random person online. This line, and similar sentiments found throughout the text, indicate a spirit of referee discretion.  Before you even run the game, the writer is admitting that he may have delivered an unfinished product, or at least that is what this sentiment communicates to me.  Yet instead of being a searing condemnation uttered by the author himself, this rather seems to indicate to some that the rules of the game aren't actually bad because you can simply change anything you don't like.

NO SH** SHERLOCK! I CAN DO THAT TO ANY GAME. 

Yet I choose not to because those games are QUALITY, FINISHED PRODUCTS.

THIS is not.

 Not a single one of those edgy "satanic" games made by anybody is half a red (per)cent as demonic as this game.  Aside from the obsession with rape and any and all other sexually deviant behavior, this game is a shining example of the culture of death at work, making dross and wanting so desperately to shove it down your randomly determined circumference of a throat, but unable to do so as the utterly irredeemable nature of this pathetic excuse for a game is so utterly evident that not a single individual, of any mental state even approaching sane, would want to have anything to do with it, let alone buy it.

FATAL is an eminently bad game.  I would say that you can't change my mind on this, but that would be contrary to the nature of the statement, being fact.

Be seeing you.

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