FATAL, the worst Tabletop RPG ever. (Links NSFW)

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Ever.

First, the review/MST from two poor saps at RPG.net.

If this is the first time that you've ever heard of FATAL, you're in for a fun ride. Well, let me rephrase: You're in for a "fun ride" if you consider a fun ride to be, say, hitting your nutsack with a tack hammer. For about four hours.

Sartin: The nutsack/tack hammer thing wouldn't be a fun ride, but it is preferable to actually playing FATAL.

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Oh, they want to be all evil and shocking and crap. God, how pathetically they tried. I mean, imagine opening a door to find your mother and sister raping each other with pink strap-ons. And you then realize that you've never seen their bare asses before, because you're pretty sure you would have remembered the swastikas tattooed there. And upon noticing you, they grin wickedly and give you the finger in unison.

It's shocking in a way that instantly blights out all rational thought, but later, you'll have to admit the finger and wicked grinning part was kinda cool. (I...guess.) That's the feeling the FATAL morons so wish they could provoke.

Instead, they're more like opening that door to find your weeks-unwashed Otaku brother in his soiled underwear, masturbating furiously to - of all the goddamn things in the world - an Archie comic. And on his bare ass is a tattoo of, inexplicably, someone else's ass, and he's disgustingly fat enough for it to be a good 14 inches across. And as he goes at it, he's quietly moaning to himself about how worthless women, "fags", and "niggers" are and how they should all be raped or murdered.

I think it says something about how long I've been on the Internet that I didn't even form a mental image at that last bit.

Anyway, the guy in charge of this abomination eventually decided to try and rebut the review, using the same two-man MST format. I say "try", because he failed utterly. Imagine an eight-year old boy in an insult comic battle against, oh, Chris Rock. Rock goes first, and after the boy has had his looks, his skin color, his intelligence, and his mother insulted, all he can come back with is "oh yeah? Well...your face is stupid!"

It's worse than that.

Hall keeps going on about how "emotional" and "unprofessional" the reviewers were, accusing them of personal attacks while frequently directing his own ad hominems at them. In response to their snark about the purported "realism" of the game—the game that depicts a good portion of European history without the Church, for example—Hall keeps babbling about how "difficult" it is. From what's presented, that's strictly correct. It is difficult like an eight-year's time in an insult comic battle against Chris Rock.

What makes FATAL especially fun is the droning, obsessive tone of its rules sections - for example:

Finally, observe that when these sub-abilities and abilities are determined initially for a character, the abilities are determined for young adults. After the sub-abilities are described and the tables presented, aging effects are illustrated which must be referenced throughout the character's life. The last chapter details how two abilities, Physical Fitness and Strength, may be increased through persistent exercise, and also, an alternate rolling method is presented.

And there's that not-English again; where, when you rewrite it for a review, you find yourself restructuring the way that you speak English. Sure, you may have been able to write and/or speak it before; but then you read something like this, and you find yourself taking sentences out into the shed at midnight, butchering them, burying parts of them in the backyard and then redistributing what's left over the original document as a warning to any other proper use of the language in the book.

That was a lengthy way for Darren to say he dislikes my prose (especially since there's little, if anything, grammatically wrong with it, while both Darren and Jason commit split infinitives, dangling prepositions, etc. throughout their review).

Oooh! Split infinitives!

Give it a read, if you like to read horrible, horrible things being made fun of. I haven't even quoted the part about the magic items that turn you into racist caricatures. Incidentally, homosexuals and non-whites don't exist in the FATAL-verse. And fumbles can cause clones to come out of one's penis.

Pleasant dreams!