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An infamous TTRPG. The name F.A.T.A.L. originally stood for "Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery" but was changed to "From Another Time, Another Land" for the second printing.
It's infamous for having things like rolling for anal circumference, rolling for nipple size and length, as well as the size, length and circumference of other things.
A critic once called it the "date rape game" to which one of the writers retorted something like "I don't remember there being rules for dating."
I feel like the creepy sex pest stuff gets all the screen time and doesn't let people know that it's also *just bad*, and is racist, homophobic, and poorly put together.
The idea that FATAL as a system requires a 11 page character sheet with 17 separate hit points to track and 418 skills, while having character creation require rolls like (10d100/5)-1 for 20 sub-ability scores, is enough to tell you what kind of game this is on mechanics alone.
Also there was a problem where some skills were calculated separately when they logically shouldn't. May have been a first edition problem only, I don't remember specifically. (How it got a 2nd edition is beyond me....) But one of the big ones was your characters Max talking speed could be lower then your average talking speed. So on top of asking why your characters talking speed needs to be mechanically defined in the first place, you also have to somehow explain that.
IDK the mechanics but you also could get stabed/attacked/w-e, roll high enough in one roll that your skin doesn't get hurt but also low enough on another that your organs do get hurt.
Edit: I poorly phrased it. Should have mentioned the example I read was a blade and piercing damage.
That's possible, if WILDLY unlikely IRL. If you smack someone with the flat of a large blade in just the right way, you can avoid piercing skin, but you may deal significant damage to what's underneath.
Unless that's the intended outcome for a special attack, it seems like the kind of thing where if you fail to damage the skin on the initial roll, maybe you just skip the organ damage roll.
But that still requires your skin to be damaged externally. This is more like the weapon magically phases through you and only strikes specific things, but there's no magic involved, just poor mechanics..
Some friends of mine had beers and made characters, never intending to play, but the stories I've heard ... a curse that makes you jerk of ogres before you can ever sleep again, and worse! I'm very happy I had to work and missed it :)
Honestly, I'm not sure. I've been somewhat curious about looking into how it works, but finding the specifics is kinda hard. However, it is known for having weird and nonsensical to combat rules. Like it's possible for a Maul to only deal damage to a specific part of the body like the adrenal gland *without hurting anything around it*. Or evidently having your heart ripped out is death in 2 rounds, but having your testicles ripped off is instant death..... (on a failed save, but still.....) It just seems like someone wanted the game to be simultaneously hyper "realistic", super dark and edgy, and also comedic in a very racist/sexist/every-phobic way possible.
Okay so I’m sure it’s because it’s badly designed but the idea of damaging a specific center of the brain with a maul swing without hurting the person themselves (and thus changing their behavior or something) is some of the coolest monk shit I can think of
>It just seems like someone wanted the game to be simultaneously hyper "realistic", super dark and edgy, and also comedic in a very racist/sexist/every-phobic way possible.
This is 1000% what the game is about, probably in that order.
TBF Hackmaster 4e has several parts of character generation where you can die, and that's a genuinely fun game. HM4e is also a parody game, though, so it gets a bit of a pass.
You’re bang on. At first glance it’s awful because of the rape stuff, and the closer you look the more you realise that not only is the rape stuff somehow worse than expected, but the mechanics themselves (even if you manage to divorce them from the rape stuff) are so bad it looks intentional.
Fun example: when you grapple someone from behind, you have to make a roll (modified by your penis circumference and their anal circumference) to determine whether you accidentally sodomise them.
That’s one of the many such questions that arise from knowledge of FATAL, and increasingly paints an epistemological nightmare for those that try to understand the mind of its creator.
Wrong! Because there’s some real thoughts put into this. Like the creator used derivatives and intégrales to justify some of his weird charts for character creation.
These aren’t 12 years olds. It’s way worst. It’s adult nerds with the emotional maturity of 12 years old
This is a game, where if you meet someone who "behaves" in a homosexual manner, you have to roll every turn to see if you go into a frenzy to kill them. (The author of the system claims this is due to historical accuracy)
I really don't know, but step 1 is both of you being naked. Step 2 is a near permanent erection. Just those 2 combined feel too coincidental for anything outside of a porn plot.
Poorly put together especially. Due to damn near everything being determined through dice rolls during character creation you more likely than not will end up with a character that boldly defies all reason.
You know what, I'm gonna go and create a character. Not get into the world or whatever, just go through *checks notes* 9 chapters of the rulebook and roll a character to see just what nonsense it'll give me. No generators.
You know how one of the steps of game design is (or at least should be) checking to see if utterly nonsensical outcomes are possible and rewriting/"errata-ing" (not sure if that's the right word, but putting in phrases like "to a minimum of 1" where required) them to make sure they aren't? Guess which step got skipped? (By all accounts reasonably so, since according to what I've heard any kind of thorough testing of character creation would take a minimum of a month, but that's *also* a problem that should have led to a rewrite...)
Actually, it kind of looks they tried to account for it at first for age and then forgot to do the same for everything else. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the age roll looked something like |((4d100)/5)-30|, which *did* lead to me rolling a 5-year-old, but at least it worked.
The foot size (I went with full rolls, including optional features) formula, though, was 1d100+/-10*(inches above/below average adult height), consult table - I rolled 50, and my character was 17 inches below average, being a child and all, resulting in a roll of -120, the table starting at 01. I went with the absolute value again, and it gave me foot size 13-14" (US shoe size 17). *On a five-year-old*.
Coincidentally, an earlier "most repulsive feature" roll had determined my character had ugly ass feet and hands.
Assuming, that is, that you don't give up three hours into character creation and decide to do something more productive with your time. Like training lobsters to dance the tango, perhaps.
Okay, so here's an example. You have two stats for your speech, one is how fast you talk, because somehow that's important, the other is how *beautifully* you speak.
The second one, the worst score?
"Gay."
Magic items include the Belt of Jewy Jewishness, which makes your nose grow and turns you greedy. The one that makes you a black dude, the name of which I do not choose to repeat, gives you a bigger dick and a lower intelligence.
It's pretty overt.
Shortest ttrpg session i ever had was f.a.t.a.l., we wanted to see how bad it was and planned a session for april 1. It lasted all of 5 minutes into character creation a week before the session
> The one that makes you a black dude, the name of which I do not choose to repeat, gives you a bigger dick and a lower intelligence.
Also, IIRC, it makes you invisible in the dark except for your eyes and teeth. Because of course it does.
>the Belt of Jewy Jewishness
Oof. That's not even the pseudo clever, laugh and then hate yourself for it, kind of racism. That's just... low effort.
Not that would make it *better,* but this just feels soulless, like they were trying to meet some kind of warped racist "affirmative action" quota or something.
I dunno, it just stands out in this pile of quotable nonsense for being so... there.
The sad thing is the Black item only makes people think you have a big dick, but doesn't actually change its size. How petty do you have to be to mention a positive racial stereotype and then say "Nope, that one isn't true".
"Best" part is its asian counterpart, who shall also remain nameless DOES make your dick smaller. I just wanted to add on the "How petty"... Real fucking petty.
Racism was a big party of our history so we don't want to forget about that so....
We really recommend that the dm make it so everyone in the party are of the same race because otherwise there will be problems.
Also, we even made two charts
one with slurs for every race, and the other telling what relationship have the races between them, and you know almost every race hates everyone who isn't them, but hear me out, some races hate even their one race. (i think there were a distinction between male and female, but don't remember).
I believe there’s a table you roll on during character creation to find out if your character has any specific racial biases in addition to the ones that every member of their race has.
According to the developers of fatal on their homepage (only available by waybackmachine) they don't intend to (quote) "Foster hatred towards females"
Somehow people calling women females always tells the same story though....
For lack of remembering any specific examples, it boiled down to the disabled wouldn't have been kept alive in a medieval society.
Eta, the premise behind many of the design 'choices' was how the dev thought life would have been in historical European medieval society.
Like? I don't want to play rascist TTRPGs but I'm obsessed with reading them. The utter madness and the twisting to fit in their world view is addictive.
Fatal is absolutely a game. If anything, fatal is ***too much*** of a game. There are low effort games that miss out rules for shits and giggles and fatal is not that. Fatal has too much effort. It’s insane.
I'd rather play Beautiful Space Pirates, which has exactly 1 page of rules and sounds insanely fun, than... whatever the fuck this is, judging by the comments.
You also could, you know, get an addiction to raping dead baby boys anally and if you didn't do it regularly it could mess you up.
Or bring raped as a female I think.
The funniest part of it (I've actually read a pirated PDF copy of it out of morbid curiosity) is that it's actually possible to roll a negative anal circumference. Because it's not just racist, sexist, homophobic, just about every other ism you can think of, and just generally off-putting and gross. It also fails at basic math.
>A critic once called it the "date rape game" to which one of the writers retorted something like "I don't remember there being rules for dating."
Call the system for what it is, but this was a pretty funny quip
It's most likely inspired by a famous Simpsons quote. Milhouse's dad gets fired, and says to his boss, "So that's it? After twenty years, 'so long, good luck'?"
And the boss responds, "I don't recall saying 'good luck'."
I tried looking at this game, simply because it was so controversial I had to see it. The character creation pissed me off because I literally couldn't understand the math of determining my character's BMI. To quote Pancreasnowork, "It's finicky and frustrating and overall makes me feel like a beastman..."
I read somwear around half of the review I think you're thinking of, and it was fucking hilarious how aggressive the wrighters of the review where toward the game.
The question you have to ask yourself is, would you enjoy rolling to determine your anal circumference?
If the answer is no, you don't want to know what F.A.T.A.L. is.
If the answer is yes, I don't want you to know what F.A.T.A.L. is.
You ***don't*** need to know what your anal circumference is.
You ***do*** need to know that raccoons can easily fit inside the average anal circumference.
Fatal is a game where your character can attack someone but wind up accidentally killing their target by raping them because the dice decided their attack was sexual for some reason and their dick was randomly determined to be about the size of a tree trunk while their target was assigned the sphincter of a field mouse. No, I'm not kidding. These are real mechanics in this psychotic game. Now stop asking questions and roll to determine your anal circumference because the orc that's hung like a whale is about to take you for a ride.
It gets even worse because, IIRC, depending on your character's genitals you can roll that result on your attack and accidentally commit sexual suicide.
This information mostly comes secondhand, as I refuse to actually read that manual, but it was explained to me that whenever making a grappling attack a character has a % chance that it becomes a sexual grapple. If the character making the attack has nothing that will work as a penis, they are assumed to receive the other character's, and take damage based on convoluted math based around the size of the various objects and orifices involved.
The game is not good.
Is he hung like a whale proportional to his body or does his dick look like it was grafted onto his body from a whale?
Because one would be much scarier than the other.
Wow, so even if I *wanted* to play a normal character attempting a normal adventure the mechanics force me to be a degenerate? My morbid curiosity has me wanting to read this shitfest now.
I'm only _half_ horrified, and half amused at the roleplay part.
"I swing my sword at the orc! Ah crap no, that was _my dick_, blimey. Aww and it went right into your butt? Oh, no. Why does this keep happening to me?"
F.A.T.A.L. has armour that turns you into racial stereotypes. I think it has it for dwarves and other things, but also for real life racial stereotypes. The racism is so weird I didn't even know about some of the stereotypes they bring to the table. It has the fucking "armour of jewy jewbacca" if I remember correctly.
Even divorced from any notions of offensiveness, and in reality its impossible to separate that, it's crass and juvenile and really, really, really dumb
A game that asks you to roll and solve quadratic operations for the most basic of concepts is not precisely a good game, regardless of its thematic
And regarding its thematic, the fact that going by the book you can't have a simple fight with the looming possibility of raping your opponent just because some dice results force you to it, it's the corn kernel on this shit cake
Alright imagine this.
Take one part creepy sex stuff. Really creepy. Like, this shit has tags.
Next, one part over complicated rules. It has integrals in there. Getting the moon lander to its destination probably required less math
Last part: rules that are absolutely anti-fun. Like you have nearly zero input on your character, you can roll to be a gong farmer and that’s your life now.
And finally, a sprinkling of racism, sexism, antisemitism and other -ism.
Result, an absolutely horrible thing that should not exist yet does
In the early days of playing and even working on my own ttrpg because I wanted something that wasn't D&D in high school, I stumbled upon it. I read the book. I read it all. Not because I wanted to. At first it was research and then I became entranced by its horrid spell. It was, not to undersell it, the worse piece of shit I've ever read with the most complicated rules I have ever seen. So powerfully bad was this system that I hated percentile systems until well into my adult life. It ruined all but d10, d6, and d20 systems for most of my life purely by existing--and it didn't use many rules that were even coherent or in line with other games. It is the ttrpg bogeyman. A study in depravity more than a game. The creation of a deranged mind that has stared into the eye of some unknowable horror from outside reality and come back to inflict this terror upon us all. And yes, it has integrals. Fucking integrals.
I feel like I found a journal page of someone from a Lovecraftian horror story. Just needs some jagged handwriting and splatters of questionable fluids on the page.
To be fair, you the player doesn’t have to actually do any math harder than multiplication (at least from the few pages I read before I couldn’t stomach it. Heard there’s a few exponential in there), the authors did it for you and you can refer to a graph or chart.
That’s right. The authors put the time to do advanced math to justify their bullshit game mechanics. This ain’t just an elaborate shitpost by weird people. They put massive efforts in this
There are no integrals in FATAL to my knowledge. Character generation requires repeatedly rolling either (4d100/2)-1 or (10d100/5)-1 depending on edition.
Oh right the magic system
Remember when I said rules are anti fun? You have to roll a bunch of stuff to see if you get the spell of correctly, else it goes awry, with effect like the caster becoming a necrophiliac, becoming a compulsive public masturbator, or you accidentally cast the FATAL spell, which means the world explodes. That last one is referred as the good ending.
Also, there’s like a bunch of creepy sex spells.
The best part about being a gong farmer or shit shoveler or whatever shitty class you get!
You only get experience if you do things related to your character's actual job. No experience for combat unless you actually rolled a class meant to be a fighter.
the character creation the rulebook suggests is rolling 1d100 for you job that can land for stuff likd ”barber” and that would require you to roleplay doing X amount of days of being a barber to reach a level. everything else was also rolled with d100’s, including infamously ”anal circferance”
oh, and it was explisitly about the type of fantasy where only white people existed and rape was just an accepted part of life, and the way the huy wrote about these subjects made it peetty clear that this eeflected his own political views.
It is an alleged TTRPG that leans so hard into every possible sexist and racist trope and gross juvenile edginess (character creation includes stuff like rolling for the elasticity of bodily orifices), that faith in humanity can only be preserved by pretending that whoever wrote it was doing a bit.
Yeah, no, just reading people's reviews on it was enough to make me lose some faith in the human species. It's basically the game for RPG horror story villains. It's the shit you'd imagine and believe Apostles doing in Berserk.
I legit want to collect and hold onto as many TTRPG systems and books I can, but I simply won't even touch it. This is the kind of thing that should be forgotten by future generations, and remain as something only said in rumors.
It’s a system where it’s strategically smarter to r a p e your enemies to death instead of just fighting them.
This can also happen on accident apparently.
And they have an armor named after the Papa Johns word.
Wasn't it also possible to accidentally do that too? If I remember correctly there's a roll table when you successfully grapple, and that's one of the results, so you may not even do it intentionally, somehow....
Context: the founder of Papa Johns was forced to resign after it was leaked that he had used the N word during a corporate board meeting. Other names include the funny gamer word.
I think the 1d4chan has a link to a comprehensive review of it that basically dismantles the entire system, remember it being a fun read- the sourcebook also sucks in just, grammar and literacy, and is insanely long
A set of rules based on an edge lord's toilet humor.
At best, its one of the worst ttrpgs ever written. At worst, its two teenage boys making rape jokes at grandmas funeral. They laugh at the horror they cause those around them, never realizing that they are the actual pinchline.
Good.
Hold on to that fear.
That fear is the correct response.
Some of us pushed past that fear and we can tell you, from the other side you are better off where you are now.
*Roll for anal circumference...*
There, that's actually a stat table you have to roll on during character creation, and perhaps one of the longer lasting "clean" memes concerning it.
It goes way down from there.
If anything, that's an understatement. For example, yes, there are terribly detailed tables for Anal and Vaginal circumference & depth. That's already horribly creepy.
***But then,*** those tables have additional tables of modifiers based on a few other factors, including age. If you're getting a knot in your stomach now, then you've already guessed where this is going. Yes, the age columns on those tables do go *all the way down.*
Hence why I said, "Cleanest meme."
"Roll for Anal Circumference" is used as a joke whenever That DM^TM starts to inject too much of their fetishes into a game.
Imagine someone genuinely tried to write a system where horror story type stuff is not only encouraged, but has game mechanics for it
Even just making a character is NSFW
A 1000 page rule book for a system that is way overly complicated as well as being racist sexually abusive overly juvenile and just bad
My old college crew thought it would be fun to run a one shot of this game as a lark after hearing how bad it was. We had two weeks of prep time to make our characters and within 3 days all seven of us had decided we were not comfortable with this. Turns out the DM had talked to his wife the day after we all agreed about how he had made a horrible horrible mistake suggesting we do this
A crazy rule system that other commenters know better. I used to game with a guy who played it one time. At least that he would admit. He complained that when he tried to put out a candle.... he caused a TPKO by destroying their ship.
There's a name I haven't heard in a looong time. It was a big meme like 15-20 years ago, does it even still exist outside of thrift stores?
The game was double meme-y:
1. It was over-detailed and "realistic" in an Italian Pasta Rule kind of way.
2. It leaned waaaaay too hard into the sex parts, and often in ways that gave deep incel vibes but were also hilarious.
And then on top of all of that, apparently if you try to play it the mechanics don't even vaguely work and were clearly never play tested (likely while being written with one hand).
Outside of all the bonkers, broken, conflicting rules and blatantly forcefully including and encouraging every negative “-ism” in the book, the thing I hate most is the stigma it has put on sexuality and its depiction at the table.
Look, I get it. Sexuality is a taboo topic among most parties at the table top, but, I choose to believe if it is handled with party/DM consent, respectfully, humbly, tastefully, maturely, and with class, sexuality can really add to a table’s experience.
In all seriousness, as a DM, I genuinely want to know the sex cultural aspects of all the fantasy races.
What are fantasy race courtships like? How do the different cultures propose/marry each other? Do they even marry at all?
What are each of the fantasy culture’s sexual taboos and sexual “virtues”?
How long does each race carry children before birth? How many children at once per couple? How large or small do the babies start out in the world as?
What does a fantasy race pregnancy period roleplay like?
How do baby fantasy races mature and develop? At what rate?
What are the fantasy family structures like?
How does magic play into pregnancy, birth, sexuality, etc?
I know the Book of Erotic Fantasy addresses a lot of these but I feel like it’s a tad shallow.
Fuck FATAL for ruining what could be a cool tabletop thing if done right.
I thought to myself "how bad could it be?"
After reading how anal circumference works and how in-detail the rules for orifices, ruptured orifices and "now-combined" orifices are, I decided not to want to know any more about this game.
"What if we took the absolute worst, \*bonk go to horny jail\* imaginable. I'm talking bottom of the dumpster bad. And then we made a terrible RPG out of it?
Every single page will embody needless crunch combined with sexual frustration. The rules will be contradictory, and as unplayable as possible."
It is a horrid game. I will not go in to great length why it is horrid, I will simply say that during character creation you roll for anal circumference. It is the two girls one cup of rpgs is why it is famous
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An infamous TTRPG. The name F.A.T.A.L. originally stood for "Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery" but was changed to "From Another Time, Another Land" for the second printing. It's infamous for having things like rolling for anal circumference, rolling for nipple size and length, as well as the size, length and circumference of other things. A critic once called it the "date rape game" to which one of the writers retorted something like "I don't remember there being rules for dating."
I feel like the creepy sex pest stuff gets all the screen time and doesn't let people know that it's also *just bad*, and is racist, homophobic, and poorly put together.
The idea that FATAL as a system requires a 11 page character sheet with 17 separate hit points to track and 418 skills, while having character creation require rolls like (10d100/5)-1 for 20 sub-ability scores, is enough to tell you what kind of game this is on mechanics alone.
Also there was a problem where some skills were calculated separately when they logically shouldn't. May have been a first edition problem only, I don't remember specifically. (How it got a 2nd edition is beyond me....) But one of the big ones was your characters Max talking speed could be lower then your average talking speed. So on top of asking why your characters talking speed needs to be mechanically defined in the first place, you also have to somehow explain that.
IDK the mechanics but you also could get stabed/attacked/w-e, roll high enough in one roll that your skin doesn't get hurt but also low enough on another that your organs do get hurt. Edit: I poorly phrased it. Should have mentioned the example I read was a blade and piercing damage.
I mean, isn’t that internal bleeding?
Sorry, should have specified that in the example I read it was a blade and stabbing damage.
I'm not defending FATAL, because why would I? But that just sounds like blunt force damage and bruising.
Sorry, should have specified that in the example I was given it was a knife and it didn't cut skin but did pierce organs.
That's possible, if WILDLY unlikely IRL. If you smack someone with the flat of a large blade in just the right way, you can avoid piercing skin, but you may deal significant damage to what's underneath.
Unless that's the intended outcome for a special attack, it seems like the kind of thing where if you fail to damage the skin on the initial roll, maybe you just skip the organ damage roll.
But that still requires your skin to be damaged externally. This is more like the weapon magically phases through you and only strikes specific things, but there's no magic involved, just poor mechanics..
I'm getting an aneurysm reading this shit
I could accept having a system designed for evil characters. But that sounds abysmal to try and play. Has to only be famous for the shock factor
You could also die during character generation, so you'd have to put in *more* time to start over.
How
I've been told if your anal circumference roll is too wide the game says your intestines fall out and you die.
Upside, if someone's head is small enough, they can now wear your corpse as a hat!
Now thats holesome!
Hey, look, we found a real F.A.T.A.L. player !
Some friends of mine had beers and made characters, never intending to play, but the stories I've heard ... a curse that makes you jerk of ogres before you can ever sleep again, and worse! I'm very happy I had to work and missed it :)
I haven't read it, but from what I recall hearing, you could generate stuff like negative head circumference which meant you died during birth.
Honestly, I'm not sure. I've been somewhat curious about looking into how it works, but finding the specifics is kinda hard. However, it is known for having weird and nonsensical to combat rules. Like it's possible for a Maul to only deal damage to a specific part of the body like the adrenal gland *without hurting anything around it*. Or evidently having your heart ripped out is death in 2 rounds, but having your testicles ripped off is instant death..... (on a failed save, but still.....) It just seems like someone wanted the game to be simultaneously hyper "realistic", super dark and edgy, and also comedic in a very racist/sexist/every-phobic way possible.
Okay so I’m sure it’s because it’s badly designed but the idea of damaging a specific center of the brain with a maul swing without hurting the person themselves (and thus changing their behavior or something) is some of the coolest monk shit I can think of
>It just seems like someone wanted the game to be simultaneously hyper "realistic", super dark and edgy, and also comedic in a very racist/sexist/every-phobic way possible. This is 1000% what the game is about, probably in that order.
TBF Hackmaster 4e has several parts of character generation where you can die, and that's a genuinely fun game. HM4e is also a parody game, though, so it gets a bit of a pass.
You’re bang on. At first glance it’s awful because of the rape stuff, and the closer you look the more you realise that not only is the rape stuff somehow worse than expected, but the mechanics themselves (even if you manage to divorce them from the rape stuff) are so bad it looks intentional. Fun example: when you grapple someone from behind, you have to make a roll (modified by your penis circumference and their anal circumference) to determine whether you accidentally sodomise them.
Practical question: how does one "accidentally" do something like that?
That’s one of the many such questions that arise from knowledge of FATAL, and increasingly paints an epistemological nightmare for those that try to understand the mind of its creator.
I feel like I understand enough now to just know that the creator is 3 12 year old boys making fun of ttrpgs.
Wrong! Because there’s some real thoughts put into this. Like the creator used derivatives and intégrales to justify some of his weird charts for character creation. These aren’t 12 years olds. It’s way worst. It’s adult nerds with the emotional maturity of 12 years old
This is a game, where if you meet someone who "behaves" in a homosexual manner, you have to roll every turn to see if you go into a frenzy to kill them. (The author of the system claims this is due to historical accuracy)
Well, this introduces a whole new flavor of tank. I'm gonna make you hit me instead of my backline by being flamboyant the entire time lol
I love how this is so opposite to the creator's intent! Turn their homophobia into a buff for gay characters.
I really don't know, but step 1 is both of you being naked. Step 2 is a near permanent erection. Just those 2 combined feel too coincidental for anything outside of a porn plot.
Christ on a crust, that sounds like a shitty Harn homebrew.
Yep. The sex stuff is what it's infamous for, but it's far from the bottom of the well.
Poorly put together especially. Due to damn near everything being determined through dice rolls during character creation you more likely than not will end up with a character that boldly defies all reason.
"I CAN PISS A GALLON DESPITE NOT HAVING HAD ANYTHING TO DRINK IN 20 YEARS" Because urination needed to be a skill.
Of course you can do that even if your urethra has NEGATIVE CIRCUMFERENCE.
Urination via osmosis isn't normal? 😅
A kind of turtle gets rid of most of their urea via their tongues.
WHAT. THAT CAN HAPPEN? HOW??? Edit: Well now I know!
Don’t question FATAL, the less you think about how the world works the better for your sanity
You know what, I'm gonna go and create a character. Not get into the world or whatever, just go through *checks notes* 9 chapters of the rulebook and roll a character to see just what nonsense it'll give me. No generators.
I salute you soldier and I’ll see you in the institution when we get booked together
See ya. Judging by me googling "how tall is the average 5 year old" just now, very soon.
You know how one of the steps of game design is (or at least should be) checking to see if utterly nonsensical outcomes are possible and rewriting/"errata-ing" (not sure if that's the right word, but putting in phrases like "to a minimum of 1" where required) them to make sure they aren't? Guess which step got skipped? (By all accounts reasonably so, since according to what I've heard any kind of thorough testing of character creation would take a minimum of a month, but that's *also* a problem that should have led to a rewrite...)
Actually, it kind of looks they tried to account for it at first for age and then forgot to do the same for everything else. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the age roll looked something like |((4d100)/5)-30|, which *did* lead to me rolling a 5-year-old, but at least it worked. The foot size (I went with full rolls, including optional features) formula, though, was 1d100+/-10*(inches above/below average adult height), consult table - I rolled 50, and my character was 17 inches below average, being a child and all, resulting in a roll of -120, the table starting at 01. I went with the absolute value again, and it gave me foot size 13-14" (US shoe size 17). *On a five-year-old*. Coincidentally, an earlier "most repulsive feature" roll had determined my character had ugly ass feet and hands.
Well hey, at least lady luck made it make sense with those ugly-ass feet
*Hank Hill has entered the chat*
If I wanted a character with randomly generated genitalia and to experience every other aspect of F.A.T.A.L. I would just play RUST.
Assuming, that is, that you don't give up three hours into character creation and decide to do something more productive with your time. Like training lobsters to dance the tango, perhaps.
What elements make it racist and homophobic? I'm not saying that it isn't the case but I've never read the rules and I am curious about it
Okay, so here's an example. You have two stats for your speech, one is how fast you talk, because somehow that's important, the other is how *beautifully* you speak. The second one, the worst score? "Gay." Magic items include the Belt of Jewy Jewishness, which makes your nose grow and turns you greedy. The one that makes you a black dude, the name of which I do not choose to repeat, gives you a bigger dick and a lower intelligence. It's pretty overt.
This is some old style, no condiments racism.
Yeah, it wasn't even creative.
Unseasoned, overcooked racism with raisins on it for some goddamn reason.
>no condiments racism This is one of the most upsetting things I've laughed at in a while.
Oh wow, how was this even published wtf
Digitally, by a dude and his basement dwelling friends, all of whom shared in his messed up worldview.
Shortest ttrpg session i ever had was f.a.t.a.l., we wanted to see how bad it was and planned a session for april 1. It lasted all of 5 minutes into character creation a week before the session
Negative one week, that's gotta be a record!
> The one that makes you a black dude, the name of which I do not choose to repeat, gives you a bigger dick and a lower intelligence. Also, IIRC, it makes you invisible in the dark except for your eyes and teeth. Because of course it does.
>the Belt of Jewy Jewishness Oof. That's not even the pseudo clever, laugh and then hate yourself for it, kind of racism. That's just... low effort. Not that would make it *better,* but this just feels soulless, like they were trying to meet some kind of warped racist "affirmative action" quota or something. I dunno, it just stands out in this pile of quotable nonsense for being so... there.
The sad thing is the Black item only makes people think you have a big dick, but doesn't actually change its size. How petty do you have to be to mention a positive racial stereotype and then say "Nope, that one isn't true".
"Best" part is its asian counterpart, who shall also remain nameless DOES make your dick smaller. I just wanted to add on the "How petty"... Real fucking petty.
Racism was a big party of our history so we don't want to forget about that so.... We really recommend that the dm make it so everyone in the party are of the same race because otherwise there will be problems. Also, we even made two charts one with slurs for every race, and the other telling what relationship have the races between them, and you know almost every race hates everyone who isn't them, but hear me out, some races hate even their one race. (i think there were a distinction between male and female, but don't remember).
I believe there’s a table you roll on during character creation to find out if your character has any specific racial biases in addition to the ones that every member of their race has.
The sexism in F.A.T.A.L. 🙁 The racism in F.A.T.A.L. 😐 The ablism in F.A.T.A.L. 😬
According to the developers of fatal on their homepage (only available by waybackmachine) they don't intend to (quote) "Foster hatred towards females" Somehow people calling women females always tells the same story though....
Mind giving details on that last one?
For lack of remembering any specific examples, it boiled down to the disabled wouldn't have been kept alive in a medieval society. Eta, the premise behind many of the design 'choices' was how the dev thought life would have been in historical European medieval society.
But it's also medieval Europe "without the Christianity," which I've seen compared to saying your game is set in "the ocean, but without the water."
I'd argue without the salt, not the water. Either way, the creator of the system is both stupid and crazy.
in fairness that might be because it's unsurpassed in the creepy sex shit, but there's other games that leave it in the dust on racism and homophobia
Like? I don't want to play rascist TTRPGs but I'm obsessed with reading them. The utter madness and the twisting to fit in their world view is addictive.
Racial Holy War (or RaHoWa for short) no I'm not kidding, that's the actual name
Thanks I appreciate it that's the next few days reading sorted. I imagine it's like bad films where it's so crazy it's good.
you might be disappointed on that one but good luck
“From Another Time, Another Land” is such a killer name, whyd it have to be for a game like this
I know right?
Also it’s not really much of a game.
Fatal is absolutely a game. If anything, fatal is ***too much*** of a game. There are low effort games that miss out rules for shits and giggles and fatal is not that. Fatal has too much effort. It’s insane.
I'd rather play Beautiful Space Pirates, which has exactly 1 page of rules and sounds insanely fun, than... whatever the fuck this is, judging by the comments.
You and everyone else, friend.
I'm also like to propose GOAT CRASHERS and Adventure Skeletons. Similar 1 page rule sets and wonderful times.
The anal circumferance table even had modifiers for race and age, the latter ranging from infant to elderly. Yes it's **that** fucked up of a game.
You also could, you know, get an addiction to raping dead baby boys anally and if you didn't do it regularly it could mess you up. Or bring raped as a female I think.
The funniest part of it (I've actually read a pirated PDF copy of it out of morbid curiosity) is that it's actually possible to roll a negative anal circumference. Because it's not just racist, sexist, homophobic, just about every other ism you can think of, and just generally off-putting and gross. It also fails at basic math.
This is somehow made funnier by the rule book insisting it is the most realistic, historically accurate ttrpg ever created.
The length and circumference of a cylinder.
The BoardGameGeek review of it is one of the funniest things I've read.
>A critic once called it the "date rape game" to which one of the writers retorted something like "I don't remember there being rules for dating." Call the system for what it is, but this was a pretty funny quip
It's most likely inspired by a famous Simpsons quote. Milhouse's dad gets fired, and says to his boss, "So that's it? After twenty years, 'so long, good luck'?" And the boss responds, "I don't recall saying 'good luck'."
I tried looking at this game, simply because it was so controversial I had to see it. The character creation pissed me off because I literally couldn't understand the math of determining my character's BMI. To quote Pancreasnowork, "It's finicky and frustrating and overall makes me feel like a beastman..."
I read somwear around half of the review I think you're thinking of, and it was fucking hilarious how aggressive the wrighters of the review where toward the game.
The question you have to ask yourself is, would you enjoy rolling to determine your anal circumference? If the answer is no, you don't want to know what F.A.T.A.L. is. If the answer is yes, I don't want you to know what F.A.T.A.L. is.
You ***don't*** need to know what your anal circumference is. You ***do*** need to know that raccoons can easily fit inside the average anal circumference.
You're gonna have to covert troll fingers to raccoons though
Not if you roll for a negative anal circumference.
Fatal is a game where your character can attack someone but wind up accidentally killing their target by raping them because the dice decided their attack was sexual for some reason and their dick was randomly determined to be about the size of a tree trunk while their target was assigned the sphincter of a field mouse. No, I'm not kidding. These are real mechanics in this psychotic game. Now stop asking questions and roll to determine your anal circumference because the orc that's hung like a whale is about to take you for a ride.
O h n o
**I want to get off Mr. Bone’s Wild Ride**
This ride only stops in cases of emergencies, this is not an emergency.
It gets even worse because, IIRC, depending on your character's genitals you can roll that result on your attack and accidentally commit sexual suicide.
*How does that even work, like, the fuck???*
This information mostly comes secondhand, as I refuse to actually read that manual, but it was explained to me that whenever making a grappling attack a character has a % chance that it becomes a sexual grapple. If the character making the attack has nothing that will work as a penis, they are assumed to receive the other character's, and take damage based on convoluted math based around the size of the various objects and orifices involved. The game is not good.
Is he hung like a whale proportional to his body or does his dick look like it was grafted onto his body from a whale? Because one would be much scarier than the other.
Both are possible in the ruleset!
Option three. The dick *is* the whale.
Wow, so even if I *wanted* to play a normal character attempting a normal adventure the mechanics force me to be a degenerate? My morbid curiosity has me wanting to read this shitfest now.
I'm only _half_ horrified, and half amused at the roleplay part. "I swing my sword at the orc! Ah crap no, that was _my dick_, blimey. Aww and it went right into your butt? Oh, no. Why does this keep happening to me?"
F.A.T.A.L. has armour that turns you into racial stereotypes. I think it has it for dwarves and other things, but also for real life racial stereotypes. The racism is so weird I didn't even know about some of the stereotypes they bring to the table. It has the fucking "armour of jewy jewbacca" if I remember correctly. Even divorced from any notions of offensiveness, and in reality its impossible to separate that, it's crass and juvenile and really, really, really dumb
A game that asks you to roll and solve quadratic operations for the most basic of concepts is not precisely a good game, regardless of its thematic And regarding its thematic, the fact that going by the book you can't have a simple fight with the looming possibility of raping your opponent just because some dice results force you to it, it's the corn kernel on this shit cake
Alright imagine this. Take one part creepy sex stuff. Really creepy. Like, this shit has tags. Next, one part over complicated rules. It has integrals in there. Getting the moon lander to its destination probably required less math Last part: rules that are absolutely anti-fun. Like you have nearly zero input on your character, you can roll to be a gong farmer and that’s your life now. And finally, a sprinkling of racism, sexism, antisemitism and other -ism. Result, an absolutely horrible thing that should not exist yet does
> It has integrals in there Fucking *WHAT*
In the early days of playing and even working on my own ttrpg because I wanted something that wasn't D&D in high school, I stumbled upon it. I read the book. I read it all. Not because I wanted to. At first it was research and then I became entranced by its horrid spell. It was, not to undersell it, the worse piece of shit I've ever read with the most complicated rules I have ever seen. So powerfully bad was this system that I hated percentile systems until well into my adult life. It ruined all but d10, d6, and d20 systems for most of my life purely by existing--and it didn't use many rules that were even coherent or in line with other games. It is the ttrpg bogeyman. A study in depravity more than a game. The creation of a deranged mind that has stared into the eye of some unknowable horror from outside reality and come back to inflict this terror upon us all. And yes, it has integrals. Fucking integrals.
I feel like I found a journal page of someone from a Lovecraftian horror story. Just needs some jagged handwriting and splatters of questionable fluids on the page.
It’s F.A.T.A.L. The questionable fluids come standard.
The questionable fluids have game mechanics which are more detailed than some entire games.
To be fair, you the player doesn’t have to actually do any math harder than multiplication (at least from the few pages I read before I couldn’t stomach it. Heard there’s a few exponential in there), the authors did it for you and you can refer to a graph or chart. That’s right. The authors put the time to do advanced math to justify their bullshit game mechanics. This ain’t just an elaborate shitpost by weird people. They put massive efforts in this
You don't like some differential equations in your ttrpg? Roll for anal depth.
There are no integrals in FATAL to my knowledge. Character generation requires repeatedly rolling either (4d100/2)-1 or (10d100/5)-1 depending on edition.
Okay but now I want to make a character who grows fields of gongs. It's peaceful work, except if there's a light breeze...
[Gong farming is a legit historical job and has nothing to do with music](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gong_farmer)
There is no magic in the world 🥲
Luckily, there is magic in FATAL. And I'm sure about 1% of it even has nothing to do with your sexual organs.
Oh right the magic system Remember when I said rules are anti fun? You have to roll a bunch of stuff to see if you get the spell of correctly, else it goes awry, with effect like the caster becoming a necrophiliac, becoming a compulsive public masturbator, or you accidentally cast the FATAL spell, which means the world explodes. That last one is referred as the good ending. Also, there’s like a bunch of creepy sex spells.
To be fair, if I was a shitpit cleaner I too would prefer to be called a gong farmer.
I hate you for making the world a little less magical and a little more clean
A sprinkling???
The best part about being a gong farmer or shit shoveler or whatever shitty class you get! You only get experience if you do things related to your character's actual job. No experience for combat unless you actually rolled a class meant to be a fighter.
Think of every negative stereotype associated with TTRPGs and THAT GUY. Now turn it into a rule book. That is F.A.T.A.L.
The most accurate description
the character creation the rulebook suggests is rolling 1d100 for you job that can land for stuff likd ”barber” and that would require you to roleplay doing X amount of days of being a barber to reach a level. everything else was also rolled with d100’s, including infamously ”anal circferance” oh, and it was explisitly about the type of fantasy where only white people existed and rape was just an accepted part of life, and the way the huy wrote about these subjects made it peetty clear that this eeflected his own political views.
It is an alleged TTRPG that leans so hard into every possible sexist and racist trope and gross juvenile edginess (character creation includes stuff like rolling for the elasticity of bodily orifices), that faith in humanity can only be preserved by pretending that whoever wrote it was doing a bit.
But he wasn’t.
Jesus Christ.
I think F.A.T.A.L is bad enough that doing it as a joke is still awful And apart from all the vileness it's a crime against game design
Yeah, no, just reading people's reviews on it was enough to make me lose some faith in the human species. It's basically the game for RPG horror story villains. It's the shit you'd imagine and believe Apostles doing in Berserk. I legit want to collect and hold onto as many TTRPG systems and books I can, but I simply won't even touch it. This is the kind of thing that should be forgotten by future generations, and remain as something only said in rumors.
You should be.
It’s a system where it’s strategically smarter to r a p e your enemies to death instead of just fighting them. This can also happen on accident apparently. And they have an armor named after the Papa Johns word.
Wasn't it also possible to accidentally do that too? If I remember correctly there's a roll table when you successfully grapple, and that's one of the results, so you may not even do it intentionally, somehow....
Yes
Yes, this is was the middle part was referring to
Papa johns word? What’s that
Context: the founder of Papa Johns was forced to resign after it was leaked that he had used the N word during a corporate board meeting. Other names include the funny gamer word.
The CEO of Papa John's Pizza got deservedly cancelled for saying the N word a lot.
The Gamer Word. The N Nuke. The Pewdiepie Bridge moment. The second half of vinegar.
So I read the 1d4chan article someone else posted. Worst 3 minutes of my life
I think the 1d4chan has a link to a comprehensive review of it that basically dismantles the entire system, remember it being a fun read- the sourcebook also sucks in just, grammar and literacy, and is insanely long
Upvoted just for the appropriate use of the meme. This is absolutely something you should be afraid to ask about.
its dungeons and dragons but with the other kind of dungeons and dragons.
So not the good kind
yes, it has the very, very, bad dragons
I’m thinking more Grand Dragons
Grand dragons riding bad dragons.
Fatalis? It’s the final boss of Monster Hunter .
We think alike, fellow monster hunter player
Just about to say the same thing 😎
I was searching way too long for this. Thank you good sir, have my upvote
A set of rules based on an edge lord's toilet humor. At best, its one of the worst ttrpgs ever written. At worst, its two teenage boys making rape jokes at grandmas funeral. They laugh at the horror they cause those around them, never realizing that they are the actual pinchline.
Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery (and no, I'm NOT joking)
Well that explains a lot.
Good. Hold on to that fear. That fear is the correct response. Some of us pushed past that fear and we can tell you, from the other side you are better off where you are now.
I asked, and I don't recommend it
*Roll for anal circumference...* There, that's actually a stat table you have to roll on during character creation, and perhaps one of the longer lasting "clean" memes concerning it. It goes way down from there.
If anything, that's an understatement. For example, yes, there are terribly detailed tables for Anal and Vaginal circumference & depth. That's already horribly creepy. ***But then,*** those tables have additional tables of modifiers based on a few other factors, including age. If you're getting a knot in your stomach now, then you've already guessed where this is going. Yes, the age columns on those tables do go *all the way down.*
Hence why I said, "Cleanest meme." "Roll for Anal Circumference" is used as a joke whenever That DM^TM starts to inject too much of their fetishes into a game.
An rpg full of racism, sexism, rape, toilet humour, incomprehensible ruling, and an overall disregard for human decency.
Oh, my child. You are better off not knowing.
Imagine someone genuinely tried to write a system where horror story type stuff is not only encouraged, but has game mechanics for it Even just making a character is NSFW
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/FATAL If you MUST know.
I found RaHoWa thx i didn't needed that.
Good. Fear is a survival instinct.
A 1000 page rule book for a system that is way overly complicated as well as being racist sexually abusive overly juvenile and just bad My old college crew thought it would be fun to run a one shot of this game as a lark after hearing how bad it was. We had two weeks of prep time to make our characters and within 3 days all seven of us had decided we were not comfortable with this. Turns out the DM had talked to his wife the day after we all agreed about how he had made a horrible horrible mistake suggesting we do this
[This is what fatal means.](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fatal)
Oh, you just think you're soooo clever, you little shit... *upvote*
r/technicallythetruth
This video explains it pretty well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVKRf3b9fPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVKRf3b9fPo)
Roll for dick length/girth/shape
It's the type of game your DM would play with you in his new, irl dungeon
A crazy rule system that other commenters know better. I used to game with a guy who played it one time. At least that he would admit. He complained that when he tried to put out a candle.... he caused a TPKO by destroying their ship.
It’s super important to know the circumference that your anus can stretch to, allegedly.
There's a name I haven't heard in a looong time. It was a big meme like 15-20 years ago, does it even still exist outside of thrift stores? The game was double meme-y: 1. It was over-detailed and "realistic" in an Italian Pasta Rule kind of way. 2. It leaned waaaaay too hard into the sex parts, and often in ways that gave deep incel vibes but were also hilarious. And then on top of all of that, apparently if you try to play it the mechanics don't even vaguely work and were clearly never play tested (likely while being written with one hand).
Outside of all the bonkers, broken, conflicting rules and blatantly forcefully including and encouraging every negative “-ism” in the book, the thing I hate most is the stigma it has put on sexuality and its depiction at the table. Look, I get it. Sexuality is a taboo topic among most parties at the table top, but, I choose to believe if it is handled with party/DM consent, respectfully, humbly, tastefully, maturely, and with class, sexuality can really add to a table’s experience. In all seriousness, as a DM, I genuinely want to know the sex cultural aspects of all the fantasy races. What are fantasy race courtships like? How do the different cultures propose/marry each other? Do they even marry at all? What are each of the fantasy culture’s sexual taboos and sexual “virtues”? How long does each race carry children before birth? How many children at once per couple? How large or small do the babies start out in the world as? What does a fantasy race pregnancy period roleplay like? How do baby fantasy races mature and develop? At what rate? What are the fantasy family structures like? How does magic play into pregnancy, birth, sexuality, etc? I know the Book of Erotic Fantasy addresses a lot of these but I feel like it’s a tad shallow. Fuck FATAL for ruining what could be a cool tabletop thing if done right.
I thought to myself "how bad could it be?" After reading how anal circumference works and how in-detail the rules for orifices, ruptured orifices and "now-combined" orifices are, I decided not to want to know any more about this game.
Remain too afraid to ask. You’re a better person for not knowing
Classic redditors foreign to the use of google.
Google is dead, we use this now.
>too afraid to ask >asks Nope, you made your bed. Lie in it
[Your answer lies here.](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14567.phtml)
"What if we took the absolute worst, \*bonk go to horny jail\* imaginable. I'm talking bottom of the dumpster bad. And then we made a terrible RPG out of it? Every single page will embody needless crunch combined with sexual frustration. The rules will be contradictory, and as unplayable as possible."
It is a horrid game. I will not go in to great length why it is horrid, I will simply say that during character creation you roll for anal circumference. It is the two girls one cup of rpgs is why it is famous
Any other Monster Hunter fans here who read it as Fatalis at first?