YMMV / The Witcher: Game of Imagination

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Bears. A bear can kill a character wearing heavy armour and having maxed-out Vitality. In a single round. With lowest possible damage rolls. All while being able to ignore absurd amount of damage.
  • In similar fashion to bears, a pack of wolves is extremely dangerous. While a single wolf is hardly a threat^note it still has 40 Vitality, though, entire pack of them can take full advantage of their numbers. Being attacked by three or more enemies at the same time adds a considerable debuff to defences. Adult wolf weights enough to throw a character to the ground, which virtually renders such person defensless and pinned down, with vicious predator chewing on their neck. If the party lacks magic user with some area of effect spells, it's a perfect time to start running.
  • Pretty much anything and anyone that can perform ranged attacks. Defense against melee attacks scales with Agility and related skills. Magic can be neutered, while defenses scale with Will and related skills, also supplemented with amulets and later even perks. Defense against projectile scales only with Agility, giving grand total of 3 with Legendary Agility. Most of creatures in the game have 1, including average PC. This means just about any archer, thrower or monster attacking at range can auto-hit if they have just 1 in related skills. And for obvious reasons, they usually have more than that. Any experienced player will say that shields are pretty much a must, since they are the only way to increase defense against projectiles - and only up to +3. For comparison, starting melee fighter will have around 4 or 5 in defense against Armed attacks and that will only bloat from there.
  • Dryads are notoriously lethal as an enemy, since they combine superior shooting skills with pretty potent bows and, worst of them all, ambushes. During ambush, no matter what, all defenses are reduced to 1, but it only lasts until being detected, which usually means first round. Dryads are perfectly capable of maintaining their stealth and thus keep their ambush bonus for entire fight. Thankfully, dryads only live in their native Brokilon and unless the party is suicidal, nobody even thinks about pissing them off - they won't attack unprovoked. Then again, going into Brokilon is considered as provocation, so...
• Fair for Its Day: Design-wise, while a huge leap forward when it was made, in retrospect the game suffers from variety of issues tabletop RPGs were plagued with through the second half of the 90s: overlapping stats, pointless skills (with countless of them overlapping), balancing and granularity issues (characters either are pathetic wimps or superhumans, with no middle ground), indecisive tone and extreme emphasis on combat. On top of this all, it also obviously never was play-tested, like every single Polish TTRPG from the 90s. So when it was made, Game of Imagination was lightyears ahead of other games accessible on the Polish market, both foreign and local. By modern standards, it's a clunky mess that requires a heavy trimming to work with and about third of the rules are best to be ignored in actual play, as they contradict each other or break the game entirely.
• Game-Breaker: There are a few that can turn fighting into little more than declaring who got killed during your round. To be fair, every type of character can get their own game-breaker, and the game-breakers by themselves are nothing more than a way of showing how badass your character is at the point when they can actually be pulled. Each of them heavily relies on how bonus damage and/or defense ratings are calculated, so they're not as obvious as they might seen on the list. In the case of a Critical Hit, every one of them turns into an overkill. For details, check tabletop RPG section of game-breakers.
• Goddamned Bats: Fighting against average human enemies, like random thugs or poorly-trained town guards, if players insist on rolling for this, rather than roleplaying can get simply tiresome. They stand absolutely no chance in combat against anything or anyone even remotely combat-oriented, but for obvious reasons they will show in numbers.
• Popular Game Variant: Movement is a Dump Stat. Its only two purposes are to determine how far you can travel in battle (where you'll be at melee range soon enough anyway, while the difference between 1 and 4 Movement is to merely double your range - while you can always run in a pinch, which triples whatever range you have) and in the field (where you're usually riding a mount or using some sort of vehicle, using their Movement). Consequently, players often derive these from another stat to save the invaluable stat points. Notably, the planned, but never ultimately produced 2nd edition accepted that Movement is useless as a separate stat and the two substats it generates were supposed to be derived based on one of the most popular variants players came up with: (Constitution+Agility)/2, rounded down.
• Scrappy Weapon: Large chunks of combat mechanics were directly ported from previous game made by Sapkowski and published by MAG, The Eye of Yrrhedes. EoY was a game based exclusively on 2d6, with random character generation and combat scaled for 24 HP as maximum (with PCs usually having 18-20). In such configuration things like armour scaling only to 6, certain weapons dealing fixed 1 point of damage or modifiers being limited to +6 made perfect sense and were more than viable. It became less so when The Witcher is scaled for 35 HP maximum (with 23 being minimum), introduced variety of damage multipliers and being a Point Build System in general. Suddenly armour ending at 6 meant it is completely insufficient to stop monsters that can deal damage in range of 15-60 (and half of it as a fixed value). Knives dealing 1 damage? Even the weakest character is going to punch for 2. At least in case of the regular, d6 weapons it was alleviated by adding further damage modifiers, but light weapons absolutely suck even with those modifers and the only way to make range combat worth it is to actively abuse bunch of loopholes, which weren't needed in EoY due to different scaling.
• That One Disadvantage:
  • Most of the disadvantages you can pick during character creations are not worth the Stat Points they give. To name a few: obesity makes you slower and less dexterous, leaving you an easy target for enemies; curse is picked by the story-teller, so you can end up with a Fate Worse than Death; and stutter... well, makes you stutter.
  • Absolutely nothing beats Uneducated trait. It halves the amount of starting abilities, which breaks any possible character. Just to balance out the loss caused by taking it, the disadvantage would have to add 5 points, spent exclusively on Intellect. It gives 2.
• Ugly Cute: Doppelgangers in their true form.

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