I guess of the infamously awful RPGs, it has the most fascinating mechanical mess.
Something like RaHoWa would be pointless and just gross, Wraeththu is just homoerotic world building, HYBRID could be interesting but the mental illness angle is a little intimidating.
In addition, the professions. Things like bread making or soap making are prioritized in development. Trying to figure out how to implement each individual leveling system. I use integers, but some gain decimal points for certain actions. I created a looping system for tenth points, but then another class gained twentieth points. There was surely a better way to do this, but I am happy to let the code reflect its contents.
There are so many small things in FATAL that mean no human could reasonably follow the rules with any form of fidelity.
I think the fact that it took that much time and effort just to complete character generation.
Rolling a character by hand is an ordeal (which I have never even bothered with myself, just watched on YouTube). You can accidentally generate a character who is dead.
You lack so much agency in character creation that it’s something that should be entirely done by a computer. You roll for your marriage status and number of siblings.
I also plan this more as a way to develop my skills for the true project, which would be The Campaign. I need to experiment with ncurses UI design, because that would be a project worth honoring with aesthetic effort.
It is definitely a problem as difficult as the coding aspects. I am using the revised version, which they released after the criticism and has some more offensive elements toned down.
In character creation, one can be “neuter” (to clarify, this is an innovation on my end, which I do attempt to minimize) which will remove any related mechanics entirely. No sexist modifiers. Other offensively named modifiers are simply implemented without name.
However:
There are things like needing spell components to be from women of various sexual experience, and many of the spells involve inducing some nauseating effects. Considering the way spell component and access to magic works though, magic can end up entirely unusable, requiring hyper specific components or having side effects (for example, accidentally casting the titular FATAL, which kills everyone and ends the game). This is why the corpse looting system is necessary for magic, and also a pain in the ass with arrays and such. The idea is that if one does go through all of that effort to cast the spell that facilitates necrophilia with another unpleasant name, the taciturn “You did the thing.” will be enough of a not reward.
Combat is another area where it is unavoidable. The wrestling table has a dice roll that leads to a situation where a male character “may” assault a female character by succeeding on another role. The authorial intent would be likely for the majority of male NPCs to attempt this.
The solution really is that my interest and thus game is focused on the strange professions and skills and errata. The disgusting will have to be offered as a possibility, but I think in a way where it could be excised entirely with an option in a settings menu.
It’s not like it can even be a “fun” game. You can lose arbitrarily at any point due to no fault of your own.
It’s an interesting challenge. I debate on whether I want to ever release it or not - I don’t want to draw attention to the grosser aspects, just the mechanical ones. This is mostly to answer the question “is it possible to complete a campaign of FATAL?” in perhaps the only ethical way.
character.h alone is roughly 14,000 lines of code. This is just character generation and access to the rolls. The code itself is poorly optimized and might prove a similar object of “Bile Fascination” if released.
I have an urge to do something similar for “The Campaign for North Africa,” but this would be worth developing a better thing in ncurses for.
The original (eg, DOS era) Wasteland was a heavy inspiration for the Fallout series. New Vegas harkens back to it; the NCR Rangers are inspired by the Desert Rangers.