Unpopular opinions go here

[Celebrim]

The metric system is infinitely superior to the imperial system.

That's not a hot or unobvious take though.

The hot take is that the Imperial system is an infinitely more clever and functional system than the metric system.

And the hotter take is that both statements are equally true.

 

[overgeeked]

Counterpoint, overgeeked Edition
1, 4, 8) That is an excellent point.
2) I can see your point, but I don't want to play a game with a "number of hits you can take" system.

If you play any game with hit points (or any variation thereof), you already do. It's just plastered over with inflated numbers and a little randomness thrown in to obfuscate what's going on. Even things like stress and conditions are basically "how many hits" with a bit of fluff added to them.

3) Agree. I'd rather have a toolkit and a handful of examples.
5) I agree with the "lore" art of your statement, and strongly disagree with everything else.
6) As much as I love BECM, I agree with this statement. The two aren't terribly different, though.
7) I thought I was the only one who felt this way!
9) Strong disagree.
10) I'll respond with an even less popular opinion: Player agency isn't as important as some people think. In fact, most of the time it's entirely an illusion. It's purely theater.

These last two are likely related. You think players have as much agency as characters in novels, re: none, therefore RPGs can effectively produce stories. Hard disagree. I have seen the "players only have as much agency as the referee gives them" argument, but it's not convincing. It's backwards. The players have full agency, the referee for some reason decides to restrict their agency, then points to the players' restricted agency and says "see, they only have as much agency as the referee allows." It's honestly a weird argument. Stop restricting the players' agency and you'll see that they actually have quite a bit.

 

[overgeeked]

And as Shannon Applecline's "Designers and Dragons: The 00s" shows, many designs saw the light of day as a response to d20 or because of the bust. d20 did not kill RPG design innovation, it enabled it.

It certainly drastically restricted innovation and funneled most design into d20 games, which was a large part of the point of the OGL as Dancey admits. Get the wider industry to stop doing their own thing and start producing content for D&D...aka d20 games. Most of the d20 glut was not standalone games, they were supplements and splat books for D&D. To me, it's the opposite of innovation to laser focus the majority of the hobby and industry into producing 99% compatible content for one system. Innovation is branching out, novel design, and novel systems. Literally the opposite of what we saw because of the OGL.

 

[Celebrim]

I have seen the "players only have as much agency as the referee gives them" argument, but it's not convincing. It's backwards. The players have full agency, the referee for some reason decides to restrict their agency, then points to the players' restricted agency and says "see, they only have as much agency as the referee allows." It's honestly a weird argument. Stop restricting the players' agency and you'll see that they actually have quite a bit.

I think you are misunderstanding the construction. The player's agency is generally limited to what the GM can paint. Sometimes in a shared universe the players have a lot of understanding of the setting (like, maybe it is the real world) and so their imagination lets them reach easily into places and concepts that the GM hasn't painted for them, but in a typical setting the players can only imagine to do what the GM has put into the sandbox for them to play with. And, unless the GM is able to paint on the fly, even players that can imagine something that isn't in the sandbox to play with will not be able to actually act on their ideas.

Returning to my idea of a rowboat world where the players are put in a rowboat in the middle of a featureless ocean, the players in that situation have both complete agency and zero agency depending on how you look at agency. Sure, they can do whatever they want and row in any direction they like, but unless you drop islands in the ocean in their path they can't really do anything. To have agency the players need a destination and a way to reach it, and it's very easy in a setting with very little content for players to have no destination and no way to reach it even if they did. Ironically, if you give the players in the rowboat a map with two options on it, in going from infinite options to two options, they get more agency. Indeed, it's possible that even if the map has a single option on it, they still have more agency than they did before.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Wait, this is an unpopular opinion?

I think this is close to the consensus in 2023.

Unpopular opinion: The vast majority of opinions expressed on unpopular opinion threads are relatively popular (maybe not the majority position, but usually within the top 2 or 3; or in case of an either-or position it rarely being 3-to-1 against or the like).

D&D cannot be all things to all gamers. It's not designed to be a generic game like GURPS where you build the world exactly the way you want.

Unpopular opinion: most generic games like GURPS (Hero, Savage World, and so on) also aren't really all things to all gamers or able to (readily) build exactly what you want. Most have significant places where they do well, and places where they struggle.

Having both ability scores and modifiers is redundant. Pick one or the other.

Skills and ability scores are redundant.

D&D would be much better if ability scores were abolished wholesale. Fold everything into a single proficiency bonus where you either have it on a given roll, or don't. Skills, saves, attack rolls; any time you pick up a d20, all you need to know is whether you're proficient and whether you have advantage or disadvantage.

My take: For games like D&D (where class and level is the primary method of saying how good character X is at role Y), ability scores made sense when they 1) gate-kept certain other options like minimums for certain classes, etc. (whether this is a good idea in a given system is another question), or 2) the primary way that you distinguish otherwise like individuals. The instant you have other ways of distinguishing Fighter Joe from Fighter Jim (feats, sub-class choices, skills, for non-D&D-alikes things like advantages and disadvantages), attributes become the least interesting quality a character has. If D&D continues to want to have Attributes (and I get the reason why, if only because people expect them out of D&D), then they should go back to the drawing board and come up with something interesting to do with them (suggestion: reduce their importance to base functionality like warrior to-hit/damage and caster spell DCs and relegate them to skills and such, so that people will actually play low-int wizards or low-str fighters or otherwise allow some real variability).

Folks should read The Elusive Shift.

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

Trying/hoping not to single either of you out here but rather just springboard from it (because every time someone suggests that people should read Peterson, it's in threads where 90% of the participants have) -- unpopular opinion: Folks on gaming forums should assume they are not unique in a discussion as to their nerd-cred expertise. Maybe not everyone here has read Jon Peterson, but most have. Maybe an individual in the thread hasn't had firsthand encounters with some/all of the founding historic individuals in TTRPG gaming's birth, but one is unlikely to be the only thread participant who has. In discussions about realistic premodern combat (honestly at the office and on another forum more than here), I can't count the number of time where it is something like person A with 8-12 years of traditional martial arts experience and 6-8 in HEMA is trying to tell person B with 10-12 in fencing and 6-10 in MMA and person C with 3 tours of duty and 20 years of SCA 'how combat really works.'

Vancian magic really isn't that bad.

More generally: many of the trappings of older systems or older versions of systems were really useful and really successful at cultivating very specific game experiences and generally seem outmoded only when many people are not attempting to capture the same game experience. That's true for Vancian magic, treasure=xp, alignment, or any number of other systems and mechanics.

 

[MGibster]

Dead games are better: you don't have to worry about "keeping up" with the line, and you don't have to worry about new player options or other disruptive material injecting itself into your campaign.

I would certainly agree it's a point in their favor. Finding players for dead games, particularly games that have been dead for a long, long time, can be rather difficult. But it's a lot easier to get your hands on older material today than it was even a few years after something stopped publication.

By the by, the best Star Wars storytelling right now (I mean, outside of Andor, obvs) is happening in the Jedi games. I am hyped for Ahsoka though.

Having recently finished Jedi Outcast and Jedi Survivor, I think you have a point here.

 

[MGibster]

Unpopular opinion: most generic games like GURPS (Hero, Savage World, and so on) also aren't really all things to all gamers or able to (readily) build exactly what you want. Most have significant places where they do well, and places where they struggle.

This opinion is popular in my heart. I agree with you.

 

[Reynard]

It certainly drastically restricted innovation and funneled most design into d20 games, which was a large part of the point of the OGL as Dancey admits. Get the wider industry to stop doing their own thing and start producing content for D&D...aka d20 games. Most of the d20 glut was not standalone games, they were supplements and splat books for D&D. To me, it's the opposite of innovation to laser focus the majority of the hobby and industry into producing 99% compatible content for one system. Innovation is branching out, novel design, and novel systems. Literally the opposite of what we saw because of the OGL.

Have you read DnD: 00s? Because it literally says the opposite of what you are claiming.

Remember that most of what was produced for d20 did not take away from other designs. it was stuff that would never have existed by people that would never have published in the first place. The appearance of the market created the majority of the product. And for those that would have created anyway, many of them got their start with d20 or as a rejection of it.

 

[Fifinjir]

Many, if not most, alignment arguments are caused by people refusing to acknowledge that the character they’re playing or their favorite character from another property is some flavor of neutral.

Ravenloft domains where the Darklord is the direct cause of everything bad are boring, and Van Richten’s Guide leaned far to much into that despite the rest of the book being good.

I like the countries, religions, and history of Eberron, but can take a hard pass at “pulp adventure” or “noir intrigue”.

In fact, whenever I hear about “political intrigue”, I’m overwhelmed with a feeeling of rather just playing/reading/watching something about tax policies.

There needs to be a word that encompasses “read, watch, or play”.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Quietly Googles "Jon Peterson."