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.

Either you straight up did not understand the comment you responded to or you're trying to move the goalposts. Either way, poor form

Could you clarify your instructions? I'm smashing two small loafs of bread together but nothing's happening.

That's pretty funny

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

You nees to roll the rolls.

Thank you Mr Abyss, for staring back at me.

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.

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.

I don't want to sacrifice coders to insanity, like some sort of slaneshi torture program

For as long as the hobby's existed, "RPG" has been quietly misread as "roll-playing" and "games" like this shite are examples of that confident ignorance given form. ‍️🤪

>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.

It's like one dark corner had a walkabout to poll all the other dark corners for ideas, Jesus Christ on a cracker

The only game I've ever played with a more complicated character creation was the 5th edition of Hero System. There were a couple of steps that resemble calculus, but once you're done you know exactly how your character will fair in a lot of situations. If character creation was a little easier it would be my favorite superhero RPG.

The one thing FATAL has going for it is how terrible it is. Any improvement would make it not so perfectly horrible, and thus not as good.

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

I would just casually read the rule books for fun. I had binders of Palladium NPCs with mapped towns and cities. No campaign ever got off the ground, but it did develop my love of worldbuilding.

What a terrible day to be literate

I had to force myself to keep reading this.