Unpopular opinions go here

[MGibster]

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

Boo!

 

[Jd Smith1]

4E is the best designed edition of D&D WotC ever produced. It has the best lore, the best monster design, the best DM advice, the best class balance, the best use of non-combat magic, the best system for non-combat encounters, on and on and on. It's only flaws are that combat takes too long and that skill challenges needed a few more revisions before publication.

D&D's almost always reliable magic is boring. Games with rolling for magic are much more exciting. Games like DCC and WFRP do magic better.

Railroading is literally the worst thing you can do as a referee. Railroading is the negation of player agency.

It depends on the group. I have had groups who are perfectly content to follow a clear progression of tasks (or to be commanded by an NPC, individual or agency), without any illusion of player agency at the strategic or even operational level.

But in general, I would say that railroading without creating at least the illusion of free will is poor GMing.

 

[nevin]

Fine.



There is no faster way to get me to ignore your new RPG and/or D&D setting than by touting it as 'dark fantasy', unless you also go with 'Norse-inspired'. The Vikings horse is dead, stop beating it.

lol... or movie, or book. here you go.... Game of Thrones is nothing but a 1 dimensional world where bad alway wins because there really isn't anything but shades of bad....Can't even call it evil when there's no good.

 

[nevin]

Level and classes? Lol, D&D was videogame-y before videogames even were.

orrrrrr Video games are just bad D&D games that cant adapt to players.

 

[nevin]

Note that it super strongly implies that it can be used for almost any adventurous settting in the AD&D DMG, and again in the AD&D2 DMG, and the d20 open licenses were specifically to make it ... not quite GURPS-like universal, but more like 80's Hero & BRP lines, and almost all Palladium games: adapted cores using a common ruleset.

Real Controversial: Palladium has much better worldbuilding efforts for each major setting than any official D&D setting.

Palladium has some really good stuff. I liked the basic fantasy palladium.

 

[overgeeked]

Counterpoint to that though - I hate DMing magic- and supernatural-free games because your logic and plotting has to be just SO much more rigorous. Magic (or mysterious/secret hypertech, or superpowers, etc, whatever you want to label it) gives you much more freedom as a DM to handwave stuff in order to set up the plot you want to run.

Counterpoint. You can sidestep that problem quite easily. Don’t prep a plot.

 

[nevin]

Forty years later, and D&D, BRP, WEG D6, and Traveller 2d6 are still the best and most relevant game systems ever made. Every rules system since then either doesn't work, works only for short term play, or is a derivative or mix and match of those systems.

Dark, gritty, and violent is merely the first sort of creativity a typical bright 13-year-old boy discovers, and if you are still thinking that crap is cool then you probably aren't brighter or more mature than that 13-year-old boy.

Sturgeon's Law is a vast understatement when it comes to RPG supplements. For every 1 usable page of RPG supplements, there are like 999 pages of crud.

I bow in agreement......Though to be fair 1 in 999 movies, and all other creative content are the same. We only see what makes it to our streaming service and think it's different somehow.

 

[overgeeked]

That's definitely an unpopular definition of "agency."

Mostly because it’s dead wrong.

 

[nevin]

Alignments are actually a cool idea but people have bad experiences from bad mechanics or their misuse(or have heard horror stories) and don't want to bother trying again, honestly there just needs a clear definitive explaination for what defines each one and people need to stop applying their own definitions or assuming they already know what they mean by what they're called.
ps: evil player characters aren't the problem you think they are, problem players can be awful in any alignment but they just abuse evil's sterotypes to be more blatant about their awfulness, it's not evil's fault.

Alignments are a cool idea that requires a philosophy class to explain, and a non emotional person to understand. Since 80 percent of the world according to psychologist's process emotionally, trying to explain to someone that they way they feel about something has nothing to do with it's goodness or evilness was always, guaranteed to be a failure.

 

[nevin]

Wizards ought to have 90% of their levelled offensive magic removed and be turned into the magic toolbox utility caster.

so pathfinder 2e with minor tweaks.....