The Non-Euclidian Staircase

How about the GW Judge Dredd, where a rookie judge straight out of training could have a less than 30% chance to hit an average target with his pistol. This is the result of 15 years of intensive marksmanship training? Dredd should be arresting all the instructors for gross incompetence.

Or the DC Heroes strip-down Batman game, done in a rush to release with the movies, where the highly-exponential system of the DC Heroes rules (every +1 doubled your effective ability) was forced to try to deal with mostly normal people and absolutely no effort was made to make it fit (i.e., the attribute range was from 1 to 3 on almost everything)? Blech!

The first try at d20 Star Wars where space combat was done with an abstract, mapless system. Is anything other than light sabers more central to Star Wars than cool space dogfights?

The Indiana Jones RPG, with its "Indy cannot be killed" rules. The whole point was seeing Indy escape from death by the skin of his teeth... if we know by game rules he cannot be killed, then it becomes very dull very fast.

LUG's Trek game, where small character-building skills (like Riker's trombone playing) cost exactly as much at character creation as being a point better in your job. So, which would your captain be happier to see you be... well-rounded or capable of the tasks he'll assign to you? And which happens on the Trek shows? See the problem? And this isn't to mention the 50+ different phaser settings or the addition of a money system to the Federation...

Dream Park, a set of books that explicitly describe their characters as having strong classes, levels, and percentile-based attributes/skills, and yet the game system is a die+skill mod vs. die+skill mod house system with only nominal "class" rules patched on (and a role that, in the books, is a mark of seniority and skill made into just another class title in the game)? And where no effort at all is made to detail "real world" abilities and skills from "game" abilities and skills (another central part of the books)? I helped run several huge Dream Park tournaments at GenCon, and nothing was tougher than making this game even try to resemble the books.

And please... a set of books where the characters, their abilities, their backgrounds, even their settings change at the whim of the author based on the jokes he plans to make this time around done in a system with the most detail of any successful RPG? GURPS Discworld? I love both GURPS and Discworld, and Phil Masters did far better than I could have hoped, but this is just not a good mix.

Note the pattern here... licensed games, every one. It's a curse they must live under, that the very thing that drives them into existence (a popular, beloved game world) is their doom, because if they don't do it right, they don't succeed. And "right" is defined differently by the designers (who often have a mechanical bias based on prior work or the way they like games to flow), the original creators (who often don't want their world being played with at all, hence "Indy cannot be killed" rules), and the fans (many of whom want the thrill of proving their character better than, or at least as good as, the character they love from the original). Conflict is all but inevitable.

The biggest issue for me is games that try to just make "doing it the original way" possible... A successful licensed game makes "doing it the original way" into the way that works best (or at least nearly so) in the game mechanics if the original presented it as the best way. Thus, if in the original few characters wear armor, you'd best design rules where armor is only a benefit to a few character types (kudos to d20 Wheel of Time for making the effort there). If, in the original, all characters have significant flaws that trouble them throughout their story, you'd best make that part of the game (the new Marvel Universe system does this, to its credit). Make me want to do it the way the original says it should be done and you've won the biggest battle.

(Yes, there are system/setting mismatches in non-licensed games as well... Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes trying to do gritty modern action adventure using Tunnels and Trolls as the rules base, for example. But licensed games are the big offender on this issue, IMO.)