FATAL/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.



  • Acceptable Targets: Primarily, women. The game spends paragraph after paragraph drooling with delight over the many, many ways provided for raping women in every possible sense of the word. And then perhaps using such things as the helpfully provided urination rolls to further degrade them. And then it lovingly describes how this will result in the victim herself being cast out by her family and community alike.
  • Audience-Alienating Premise: You think?
  • Author's Saving Throw: After the Sartin/MacLennan review, some of the offensive aspects of the game were changed or trimmed. Others were inexplicably left intact. Others still were worsened (see Game Favored Gender). There's every indication that the creators either didn't understand or were unable to understand exactly why Sartin and MacLennan were offended by most of the things they mentioned, thus the low amount of actual changes.
  • Bile Fascination: The reason this page exists and so many tropers are writing about it. It's probably a safe bet to say that of all the people who've played FATAL, upwards of 90% played for this reason.
    • Someone actually wrote a computer program to generate characters, so that people who didn't want to actually work out the mathematics of rolling their anal circumference could still experience the horror.
  • Fetish Retardant: The manual is filled with images of, as the phrase goes, stock porny dungeon slavegirls. But porn for the sake of porn comes off as rather creepy and disturbing, especially when coupled with loving descriptions of all sorts of misogyny.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • REALISTIC! (the author's repeated claims of historical accuracy)
    • "Roll for anal Circumference!" (one of the rolls that must be done at character creation)
    • "It's cloaca time!" (a possible consequence of rape, if anal circumference is too low)
    • "Randy gay ogres!" (can be summoned in a magic fumble)
    • "Experience an accumulation of gas in their rectum." (another random magic effect)
    • "-4 STR" (actually originates from the D&D world {though not an actual rule there}, but reflects well FATAL's Game Favored Gender issues)
  • So Bad It's Horrible
  • They Just Didn't Care: Many classes that aren't Assassin or Prostitute don't usually get more than a few sentences of description. For example, Spy is just described as a "high-class thief".
  • Unfortunate Implications: The existence of the game has unfortunate implications. Whatever Hall and "Burnout" said in the rebuttal, none of the actual game material implied anything, the glorification of rape and misogyny was pretty blatant in the text.