red-headed android

no, not the worst rpg. how would you even measure that? this post isn’t about FATAL, or any of the other games you might’ve seen talked about as the ‘worst RPG’.

no, this is far closer to my heart. this is about the rpg i think is the worst, because i personally had to deal with it.

it’s called Overlight. even if you’re really into RPGs, you’ve probably never heard of this thing. it was published by Renegade sometime in the 2010s. i think they did Kids on Bikes, which i also don’t like. but Kids on Bikes is not like this one. oh boy. this fucking game.

alright, so the premise of Overlight, which i’ll henceforth call ‘the game’, is that the world is a bunch of floating islands and they’re each about a different kind of human emotional or social tendency. logic, wisdom, strength, whatever. except every single one of these islands has a society that objectively fucking sucks, except the one that’s actively being colonized by the others!

the game tries to make you feel like actually, all of these societies are vibrant, exciting and magical, but it opens with the narrator admitting that his culture–which is the culture of his entire species, because people who look the same all act the same in Overlight–practices religious sacrifice of children. he frames this as fine, not a big deal, because if they don’t do it their gods might get mad. at least he’s against slavery, but what kind of bar is that!? it’s on the floor! this is the only lens through which we learn about the world! the only viewpoint character!

you might be thinking, that’s really cool, this game must be about people who are trying to change these abhorrent practices, right? the PCs are rebels against this?

and the game tries to make you believe that! it really does!

see, a player character in this game is a Skyborn or Lightborn or something–it was so generic i can’t remember the term–and a skyborn’s whole thing is that they have ✨special eye colours✨that mark them as ✨different✨ and everyone hates them for it. also, their magic eyes give them superpowers! more on that later.

the main superpower they get is that… they’re weirdly good at one of the other Broad Human Traits. one that isn’t the one that defines their island.

yeah–what makes player characters special in this world is that they have a singular talent that doesn’t match the dominant worldview of the rest of their entire species–each of which believes that only one human trait is important.

if you’ve noticed that this is the plot of the painfully mid YA series Divergent, which presents a dystopia in which teenagers are only allowed to have one personality trait, like ‘smart’, or ‘daring’, you’re spot on! that’s the level of depth we have here! this world literally works on that internal logic, and only other Skyborn see how stupid this is.

so you’re a Skyborn. what does that mean? absolutely nothing besides the fact you’re a social outcast! the player characters are just… expected to have shared goals, despite being from places that might as well be different planets! there’s no guidance for the players or GM as to what kind of plot hook you should give to a group of these people. there’s some nebulous talk in the lore about skyborn ‘coming together’ to ‘spread light to the world’ but even in-universe, this is explicitly considered a meaningless platitude!

oh, wait, hold on, there’s a spot in here about an organization exclusively composed of Skyborn that dispenses plot hooks for Skyborn! great, let’s see what it says.

i’m gonna be real clear here, this section makes it worse. for one thing, this organization is specifically noted as being extremely corrupt, rife with factional infighting, and unable to agree on any clear goals. there is no guidance whatsoever on tasks they might assign to new members (that is, the PCs) outside of officials in the organization telling them to do unethical shit to their rivals.

for another thing, this organization appears to be more of a nonprofit hostel that provides Skyborn a place to stay (and be exploited for their labour) than an organization actually promoting meaningful change. there’s no indication that they’re working to end any of the massive-scale social issues in this world, namely:

• rampant slavery
• an active war of extermination between a technologically advanced island and another island whose inhabitants don’t even have opposable thumbs sometimes
• rampant wealth inequality
• one of the islands being a mad max dystopia engulfed in constant clan conflicts
• human sacrifice
• discrimination and exile for having the wrong personality trait

so, they’re useless and have no principles. ‘we have to consider both sides. also, have you seen any money i can embezzle from our non-cause?’

the book has the fucking audacity to call this organization ‘our gift to you, the GM’. with the specific justification that they will help provide quest hooks.

provide some quest hooks yourselves, you lazy bastards! i don’t even know what a player character in this world is supposed to care about, let alone do! is this a game about opposing human sacrifice and colonialism!? if so, why are you equivocating on it!? are we rebels against the status quo or desperate homeless drifters just looking for cash!? what does it mean to spread light to the universe!? if you want your PCs to care about something, why are they, by default, recent exiles from the only home they’ve ever known and all of the people they care about, who still live in that home!?

so that’s the book’s lore section. it’s not good. bafflingly, the book describes itself as ‘kaleidoscopic fantasy’ focused on celebrating the diversity of the world it presents, and doesn’t tell the reader almost anything about the world except for a myriad list of reasons why living on every single island–except the one where everyone is soul bonded to a giant monkey, for some reason–would completely suck. it describes a bunch of set pieces, but nothing worth celebrating about any of them besides ‘you can describe some pretty, alien landscapes here!’

and there’s probably nothing you can do about life sucking in this world. remember those superpowers i mentioned? ‘super’ is pretty fucking generous of me. i’ve finished talking about the setting, now get ready for the rules.

i actually kind of like the basic die rolling mechanic. it would be good if it wasn’t bad. you take a base stat, and a skill if you have points in the skill you’re using, and you roll dice for them and pool them together. you have to get a certain number of successes, which is a 6 or better on a given die.

it’s D&D’s skill checks, except it’s a dice pool system with degrees of success. this is better than D&D’s skill checks so far!

let’s see what the degrees of success do.

hmm. it looks like… all you need to do is roll 2 successes to completely succeed at whatever you’re doing. and… there’s no difficulty scaling, at all, except a vague suggestion that ‘especially impressive tasks’ might need 4 successes. what does that mean? how should I, the GM, apply this? the book literally never says anything on it after that.

so, yeah. rolling two successes–which, by the way, is an over 80% chance with even mediocre skill in what you’re doing, and higher if your character is genuinely talented at it–is all you need to do to succeed at anything. according to the rules, it means that your character does exactly what they were trying to do, just ‘unimpressively and without fanfare’.

if i could have those odds in any other game i’d be fucking ecstatic! i don’t need to look good! why is the emphasis on us looking good!? this is a game that explicitly and frequently threatens PCs with death, and it’s a world where slavery and exploitation are rampant and almost everyone is violently corrupt. these odds are superhuman, and you want them to be!

oh, and you can spend a Spirit Point to reroll any skill check. do you want to know what the odds are of getting two successes when you’re allowed to reroll the check? they’re high. they’re very high.

this is a bit of a non sequitur, but remember the soul bonded monkey planet i mentioned? if you want to play someone from there, one of the other PCs has to be your soul monkey. you don’t get a choice, you’re ride or die with this monkey and if you want to be from Space Tibet where everyone’s a monk (riveting worldbuilding there), one of the other players is literally forced by the rules to bite the bullet and be a giant monkey. oh, and if someone wants to play a giant monkey, someone else in the group has to be their monk. there’s no option for one of them to be an NPC. because less than a minute of thought went into this game.

but wait–hold on–what’s a spirit point? you mentioned spirit points. is there an interesting mechanic there? do you have any incentive to spend them on anything else besides rerolling skills?

this is the part where i laugh my ass off before telling you no, there is nothing better you can do with them. because the main other thing you spend them on is the ‘superpowers’.

actually, let me put that in more air quotes. ””superpowers””.

so, for skills, 2 successes on a roll is an unqualified success. you have Done the Thing. for chroma, which is what the game calls superpowers, the maximum capability of your powers depends on your roll. and if you get an average of 2 successes on all of your rolls for this, which is by far the most likely outcome, your powers are across-the-board dogshit.

here’s what i mean by this. 2-success results on your roll for various powers–chosen at random, mind you, not ones i’ve cherry-picked as being especially weak–look something like this:

• you get vague vibes as to what someone thinks of you and your friends
• you can make a simple machine, like a cart, slightly more efficient
• an incoming attack still physically hurts you, but at least you don’t feel any pain
• you can tell if people have been in a place recently. also, if you pass a second fucking skill check you can also tell if there have been some animals. and you know if it’s going to rain today.
• one of your friends magically learns that you’re in trouble. they don’t find out what the trouble is or where you are.
• you can make someone have an anxiety attack. the only mechanical effect is that they’re 17% worse at hitting you with a sword. you can’t do this outside of combat, because fuck you.
• you fix a single disturbed rock or broken tree branch
• you fire a laser beam! that does less damage than a normal attack with any weapon!
• you become 11% more effective at persuading people, for one roll
• you don’t need to eat or sleep and you don’t get tired for the rest of the adventure. but all your friends still do.
• bunny rabbits become scared of you. big scary animals, ones you might want to be scared of you for practical reasons, IMMEDIATELY ATTACK YOU.
• you can stop time. in one area, time passes normally outside it. also, it’s only for you and your friends, and nothing else, because the power needs the consent of people in the area. for ten minutes.
• you physically can’t move until the end of the scene, but people can still hurt you.
• if you roll 2 successes on a particular power, you can force someone to lose all their worldly possessions if they break a promise. if you roll 4 successes on the same power, instead they become cursed to never be able to have sex again. that’s right; if a bad guy doesn’t care about sex, you actually want to roll lower, and rolling a 4 makes the power completely worthless.
• you can make a cubic foot of sand, water or fog.
• you can feel what an animal feels! but you can’t control your own body. or the animal’s.
• you make, like, slightly above average levels of wind
• you can carry your own weight for short distances (i swear to god this is verbatim)
• give yourself a potentially fatal injury to heal a small animal of its own injuries
• you hold onto someone or something really tightly. for LIKE SIX SECONDS.
• you pretend to be a stagehand at a dramatic performance
• street children will back you up in a fight and probably die
• you can tell when one person is lying in one conversation, but not what they’re lying about, and they also don’t have to tell you the truth if they don’t want to
• you can kiss someone and they’ll fall asleep. but oops, if they weren’t already lying down, they’ll wake up, because they just hit the floor! haha, reality ensues! don’t you feel stupid!? this one is just personally insulting.
• instant makeover!
• you can do a little dance that distracts anyone who sees it
• you get a Bic lighter for the next ten minutes

all the rest of them suck exactly this much! even the higher-tier successes are also essentially worthless, on top of being extremely rare (since you need to roll 4 or 6 successes, for which the odds are much, much worse).

and how much do these cost?

here’s the punchline.

they cost 1d4 spirit points. yes, you read that right. for the cost of 2.5 spirit points on average (the output of a d4), you can either:

• reroll 2.5 extremely effective and powerful skill checks, or
• use a superpower, once, with an unknown effect, when you know the most common result of this power is comically worthless

and somehow that’s not even the stupidest part. the stupidest part is that if you run out of spirit points while using these powers, they mutilate your body and eventually kill you or drive you insane!

that’s right–there’s a downside to using your points on anything but boring fucking rerolls! on top of the powers being useless, they also kill you! one of them drives your friends insane and makes them kill themselves! one of them turns you into a statue! it’s all so unforgivably stupid! there’s no reason at all to ever use the superpowers in this game, ever. normal skill checks can do literally everything they can do unless your GM is a sadist who deliberately makes your characters too incompetent to accomplish even basic tasks.

oh, and the game’s sample adventure presents you with a scene of impending child sexual abuse and no reliable way to prevent it besides violence. in a mansion owned by a wealthy oligarch, who you need to reach peacefully in order to progress the plot. in a situation where you are surrounded by literally dozens of enemies who are each individually stronger than any PC at that level.

that’s right. the sample adventure for this game of whimsical, breathtaking ‘kaleidoscopic fantasy’, whatever that’s supposed to mean, presents your characters with attempted sexual assault of a child NPC and ensures you have no reliable recourse to stop it.

i know i buried the lede on this, but that’s because if i led with how heinous the sample adventure is, nobody would have gotten to have a fun time reading about the shitty superpowers. and that’s just not fair. i won’t let Overlight spoil that for us.

i wholeheartedly recommend Overlight if you want to play a game with barebones, mind-numbingly boring rules and no GM guidance for what your characters are even supposed to do. i recommend it even more strongly if you think Divergent’s personality-based class structure is peak worldbuilding, love watching exploitation, colonialism, oligarchic abuse of power, and sexual assault happen with no expectation that you’ll be able to fight it in any way that matters, think that you can map the diversity of human potential onto a standard pack of crayons, believe that every culture having exactly one personality trait is fun and exciting instead of lazy and sad, and think airships are cool, but only when they’re powered by slave labour.

Overlight is the only game brave enough to ask “what if, in our YA fantasy slop, the inexplicably magical outcasts with amazing powers… had powers that were less useful than owning a small set of common household tools? and for some reason, the world still thought they were special and deserved to be punished or praised solely based on their weird eye colour?”

i really hope it stays that way.

this has been therapeutic for me. don’t worry, i’ll talk about good games again soon.