Unpopular opinions go here

[payn]

Unpopular opinion threads are best when you dont comment on the opinions.

 

[Reynard]

Unpopular opinion threads are best when you dont comment on the opinions.

Bollocks.
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[Voadam]

5e would have been better if it had ditched target rolling saving throws for 4e style attacker rolling attacks on defenses.

 

[Celebrim]

One of the biggest problems with roleplaying games as a community, or community of communities, is how unable and/or unwilling almost all of us are to imagine any kind of adventurous fun in which combat does not play a large part.

I totally disagree, and by totally disagree I literally mean I believe the opposite is true. For as long as we've had an RPG community, probably THE primary focus of the community has been on trying to figure out how to have a fun non-combat based game. No single one thing has been the focus of more effort by the RPG community than that. Even in D&D itself it has been a significant thrust of design at all levels from rules and supplements to examples of play.

What ought to be really intriguing to someone paying attention to the history of RPG design is just how badly almost all of those attempts have failed given the highly evident desire that the community has had to make non-combat as fun or more fun than combat.

And at this point, the focus of your investigation should not be on why the community doesn't want to have fun outside of combat, but quite the contrary on what is so special about combat that makes it almost impossible to replace as the core focus of the game or the story of the game.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

All D&D novels are terrible.

Yes, even the ones you like.

 

[Reynard]

I totally disagree, and by totally disagree I literally mean I believe the opposite is true. For as long as we've had an RPG community, probably THE primary focus of the community has been on trying to figure out how to have a fun non-combat based game. No single one thing has been the focus of more effort by the RPG community than that. Even in D&D itself it has been a significant thrust of design at all levels from rules and supplements to examples of play.

What ought to be really intriguing to someone paying attention to the history of RPG design is just how badly almost all of those attempts have failed given the highly evident desire that the community has had to make non-combat as fun or more fun than combat.

And at this point, the focus of your investigation should not be on why the community doesn't want to have fun outside of combat, but quite the contrary on what is so special about combat that makes it almost impossible to replace as the core focus of the game or the story of the game.

QFT.

Folks should read The Elusive Shift.

 

[Reynard]

All D&D novels are terrible.

Yes, even the ones you like.

I tried to go back and re-read Dragonlance a year or so ago. Sheesh.

 

[Celebrim]

I tried to go back and re-read Dragonlance a year or so ago. Sheesh.

I wouldn't go as far as "terrible", but it is best read when you are about 12.

 

[MGibster]

Another one: essence/cyberpsychosis/whatever are stupid ideas that don't make sense in Cyberpunk. Not even mentioning problematic implications (I have half of my body surgically constructed, am I less of a human?), it removes a ship of Theseus paradox that is important to cyberpunk as a genre and replaces it with nothing.

The biggest problem with both Cyberpunk 2020 and Red regarding the issue of Humanity is that neither one of them did anything interesting with the idea. Save for lowering an attribute attached to certain skills, there was essentially no difference between a character with a Humanity of 3 and a Humanity of 8. For the most part, Humanity was only affected by cybernetics, so even if you were hovering dangerous close to zero, you were save from cyberpsychosis unless someone happened to give you a drug that temporarily lowered you Humanity. Interface Magazine, the official Cyberpunk 2020 magazine in the 1990s, had an interesting article detailing the personalities of characters based on their Humanity and Cool levels, but from a practical point of view that didn't impact game play in my experience.

I really liked how they handled Humanity and cyberpsychosis in Cyberpunk Edgerunners on Netflix. Characters like Maine and David were addicted to the cyberware. They were both on a treadmill, getting geared up so they could make more money, and then spending that money on new cyberware so they would have an edge and make more money. But in Edgerunners, cyberware wasn't the only way to take a hit on their humanity. One person tried to force David to go off the deep end by forcing him to endure some particularly violent brain dances. But that isn't a mechanism we see in either 2020 or Red. It would have been nice if characters could regain a little Humanity by displaying empathy or even losing it by being callous.

To Red's credit, they did fix the problematic implications of Humanity loss. Even as a teen, I know I wondered "What about a dude who loses his leg in an accident?" Cyberware designed to restore normal function doesn't cost any Humanity in Cyberpunk Red. If you have a bad ticker and get a mechanical heart or lose an arm in an auto accident, a piece of gear that restores function won't cost any Humanity at all.

 

[Autumnal]

QFT.

Folks should read The Elusive Shift.

I have. And knew or was at one remove from a fair number of folks in it.

Honestly I agree strongly with @Celebrim about ghastly failures in portraying non-combat adventure, and about this being a very weird and interesting part of rolegaming history. There are several games that handle this stuff in ways that satisfy me a lot, but none of them are taking the world by storm. (Some of them, like Fate Core, achieved very significant popularity, but not for low/no-combat adventuring.)

I believe that right alongside the lasting popularity of killing things and taking their stuff as a central activity.