this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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There are people here who've probably never seen the greatest review of the worst RPG of all time.
And for those who don't have time, the only thing you need to know about FATAL is this; it's an RPG made by the kind of people who stormed the capitol on Jan 6. Horrifically racist, sexist and queerphobic, and designed by people so fundamentally stupid and lacking in curiosity that they can't get even the most basic of design concepts right, but so utterly obsessed with the idea of their own intellectual superiority that they keep trying to reinvent every single wheel.
Some friends and I once got drunk and made FATAL characters. After 4 hours we gave up. We still weren't done. There's no decisions to make, character gen is 100% random roll. It's just so badly designed that even rolling your base attributes takes forever.
By the point where we stopped the dice had informed me that I was playing an 8 year old lesbian prostitute, and understanding how that's even possible reveals the depths of the awfulness at work here.
My character was 8 because you have to roll for age, and these morons decided it was a good idea for people to be able to random roll adventurers who are literal babies. Yes, 0 years old is an option. Newborn barbarian warrior, off to save the world.
My character was a lesbian because the dice said she was a girl, and the system said I had to roll for sexual characteristics, like breast size. Gross. Of course, the system also applied a massive downward adjustment to her breast size for being, y'know, an actual child. So she was an A cup. For those of you wondering how an 8 year was an A cup, it's because these geniuses remembered to include an age adjustment but didn't remember to actually include an option on the table for "I haven't fucking hit puberty yet you disgusting perverts."
Anyway, the reason we're talking about this hypothetical child's hypothetical breast size (thanks FATAL, God you suck so much) is because you then have to roll for sexuality, and for women this is modified by breast size! I am not shitting you, this is how unbelievably fucking awful this game is. Every big titted lesbian you've ever met doesn't actually exist according to FATAL. I swear to God even the Rimworld guy had more brains than this.
And she was a prostitute because you roll for your career, but the careers all have stat minimums. Don't meet the minimum, roll again. And being 8 gave her huge penalties to her stats, so the only career in the entire book she actually qualified for was prostitution.
If you feel like throwing up right now I completely understand.
Is that the one where you roll for anal circumference?
It is, and that's somehow one of the least offensively bad things about it.
That's pretty funny
My favorite thing about fatal is that you can read several reviews of it, all will be summed up vety similarly, but it induces a verbose disgust that leads to every review being a distinct archive of points where each reviewer got sufficiently pissed off at the creator of the game for publishing it.
For all I hear of the misogyny, of which I trust the reviewers is abundant, every review leaves me thinking that this man believes things about men that should offend the entire human species.
Thank you for throwing yourself on that grenade for us.
What a terrible day to be literate
Thank you Mr Abyss, for staring back at me.
I miss the person I was prior to having read this.
I had to force myself to keep reading this.
I read this in the voice of Mr. Cody. That was the only way I could get through it.
I guess it could be sped up with a computer just generating the random character
I don't want to sacrifice coders to insanity, like some sort of slaneshi torture program
Yes, but then you'd have to actually play FATAL, and you really don't want that.
Thanks for the write up, it sounds like it’s maximum value is as kindling…
But what’s wrong with the RimWorld dev, am I ootl here?
Rimworld was originally coded so that all women were at least slightly bisexual, if not fully gay, while all men were either gay or straight. According to the creator - who vociferously defended this stance claiming it was based on "research" - bisexual men like me don't exist.
That's honestly just the start of the rabbit hole. The game was hardcoded so that men always prefer younger partners and women always prefer older partners. Also women were eight times less likely to be willing to hit on someone. This is, to be clear, supposed to be a scifi game set in the future, but modelling sexual politics apparently taken from 1980's TV.
There's an amazing breakdown of the whole thing here; https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rimworld-code-analysis
You can find the creator of Rimworld in the comments defending all of his nonsense and making a total ass of himself in the process. Unfortunately the rest of the comments are a total shit show because the average gamer simply does not have the mental maturity needed to handle critical analysis deeper than "graphics bad".
I'm told they eventually changed some of this stuff after enough backlash, years later, for whatever that's worth. Maybe the creator actually did some learning and growing, and if so, good for them.
That weird comment, my sides.
I don't know why I haven't heard about it, but it's very fascinating to see dev's biases leaking into their product just like that.
Based on the fact that all that nonsense was removed even before the release, and that I've never heard about him being weird like that, I want to believe he grew as a person since then, and pulled a reverse Notch.
And if you can show me even one time that he actually apologized and admitted he was wrong on this, I'll happily agree.
I want to see people be better. But I'm smart enough not to assume it without evidence.
I'm not in on the drama, I don't know if he apologised or not.
But at this point I would take quitely sweeping bullshit under the rug over going all in on being an asshole.
voroxpete@sh.itjust.works said in Just don't: > According to the creator - who vociferously defended this stance claiming it was based on “research” - bisexual men like me don’t exist.
I, too, spent much time 15 year ago sitting at the back of the bus reading Savage Love on my way to work. Research scientists, unite!
Dan Savage at least has repeatedly apologized and cut that shit out a long time ago.
Harping on rimworld, One of the most moddable games ever made, for the creator not understanding the depths of human sexuality is a little obtuse to say the least.
There are a lot of things that people won't understand and there are so many mods to resolve this it seems silly to expect the creator to "get it".
I've been around gay and trans people my entire life but I still don't think that I fully understand human sexuality or our cultural relationships with gender norms.
Undoubtedly if I were to architect something like Rimworld I would get it wrong but I hope I would have the foresight to leave an amendment process so that it could be modded into fitting with people's understanding in the future.
My issue isn't with the mechanics; yes, I'm sure that stuff can be modded.
My issue is with the idea that I should give my money to someone who will actively defend the claim that I do not exist.
Put it this way; if there were no non-white people in Rimworld, and the reason why was because the creator firmly believed that by the time humanity gets to space white people would have "won the race war and exterminated all the scum" would you still feel comfortable giving that person your money just because "I can mod that out"?
I actually feel better about having pirated the game instead of paying for it. It also explains why the base game and all the DLC are around the same price and it never fucking goes on sale.
Either you straight up did not understand the comment you responded to or you're trying to move the goalposts.
Either way, poor form
The creator said they had done research into this. Not only that, if you don't know the rate of bisexual man, just leave it the same as woman of something. And even if it's wrong it doesn't change anything (until Biotech)
Jesus. I thought Lamentations of the Flame Princess was bad...
I didn't even get into how the underlying system is abysmally bad even when you try to strip away all the gross shit.
Like, stats are generated by rolling 10d100/10-1. Yes, you read that correctly. Then there are five derived attributes generated as an average of four base stats, so if something modifies a base stat you have to recalculate the derived stat, but then those derived stats also set things like your carry weight, so you have to recalculate that and... It's exhausting.
Combat is atrocious. There are criticals, but they have no relation to each other, so you can cleave through someone's appendix and their belly button but leave everything in between untouched. Magic requires you to roll to see if you say the words correctly. The whole thing is an ungodly nightmare.
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 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.