Unpopular opinions go here

[Reynard]

- Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars is the best system for running Star Wars.

That's a weird way to spell Savage Worlds.

 

[Jd Smith1]

- On the whole, PbtA / Story Now gaming delivers more overall fun per minute spent in play than "trad" play.

That's just sad.

 

[Pedantic]

Okay, this one should definitely meet the unpopular criteria given the crowd:

Star Wars gets worse the bigger it gets. The worldbuilding isn't particularly deep, and efforts to expand it collapse quickly under their own weight. It worked better as a trilogy than a franchise, something that was already true when we were dealing with expanded universe novels, and isn't getting any better over time as more media grows.

 

[deganawida]

Every change made after Dragons of Spring Dawning sucked and killed Krynn as a campaign setting. Yes, that includes the Legends trilogy. Leaving the world just at the end of Takhisis' defeat gives you an excellent post-apocalyptic world in turmoil, perfect for adventures, and for players to shape the future.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I know a friend in the creative arts teetering on the edge of homelessness now.

A traditional and pervasive part of creative arts career. They could commit at least a semester's worth of such degrees to courses like 'cooking with ramen', 'living with malnutrition', and 'day jobs: important things to know'.

 

[nevin]

The book side of Krynn always sucked as a campaign setting. It sucked before the books made it virtually impossible to change a single thing without a fight. Now Taladas the other side of Krynn.....Happy good fun memories of the almost Roman minotaur empire and the crazy tinker gnomes.

 

[overgeeked]

That's because of a real and sincere difference in methodology.

When you are asking people to recall things (like oral histories), you often get great stories. But you don't always get, or often get, an accurate history. Because memories suck. People are really really really bad at accurately recalling things for a variety of reasons. It's not that people are lying (although a lot of people do lie ...) they just aren't relaying information correctly. Sometimes it's because they have an agenda. Sometimes it's because the story they are telling has become just that- a story- and isn't what actually happened. Sometimes it's because people's memories are terrible and fallible.

Peterson goes for contemporaneous evidence- the primary sources. He doesn't care what person X said about how a business was doing, he wants to see the actual records of the company. He doesn't care what person Y recalls about when a particular game happened, he wants to see a contemporaneous publication stating that the game happened.

I would say that his methodology has led to a number of important corrections in our understanding of the early part of the game, including such basic things as where the idea for Chainmail likely originated.

Sure, but it also leads to glaring omissions and intrinsic bias because, importantly, not everything is written down at the time it happens. It also assumes everything written down is honest and true, when that's not always the case.

 

[nevin]

Thing is and if Ed Greenwood reads this My account was definitely hacked. Forgotten realms was always better in every way that mattered for fun games. Most game worlds are designed for a certain game. Forgotten Realms was designed to have any game.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Okay, this one should definitely meet the unpopular criteria given the crowd:

Star Wars gets worse the bigger it gets. The worldbuilding isn't particularly deep, and efforts to expand it collapse quickly under their own weight. It worked better as a trilogy than a franchise, something that was already true when we were dealing with expanded universe novels, and isn't getting any better over time as more media grows.

That's because Star Wars focuses too much of grand events, whereas most gaming groups operate more along the lines of Firefly.

Middle Earth is likewise hindered.

 

[overgeeked]

Of all the D&D novels I've read, Dragonlance is by far the worst.