Unpopular opinions go here

[Celebrim]

Your first Advanced Unpopular Opinion hit me right in the gut, well done you’re wrong, of course, but well done, regardless.

There are a number of these that I can total see where the person is coming from, even if for various reasons I still think they are wrong.

I was particularly hit by the claim that a system is best after it is no longer supported, because indeed, ideally you reach a point where no more rules supplements are needed and you have a system that already well covers what is needed for the genre. And indeed, systems like 3e D&D were harmed more by supplements than they were helped as WotC generally focuses not on extending the system, but giving more chargen options, more spell options, and so forth that tends to degrade class balance while not expanding the sort of stories you can tell with the game system.

But then right now I'm GMing a dead system, WEG's D6 Star Wars, and while the fluff of WEG was usually amazingly good and stands up to this day and has become important parts of the canon, there was absolutely no quality control in the crunch of the game. It's like the system never had an editor at all, and everything was sent out to writers without any system guidelines and accepted for publication without any review of the rules that were made up. It's particularly bad with equipment, ships, vehicles, robots, and the like which is rather core to any Sci-Fi game. The prices are all over the place. The quality of the gear has no bearing on price and there is no attempt at balance at all. As just one of many examples, there are like separately three different ideas about how powered armor works and rules developed around those ideas - two of which are game breaking - and this is really weird because there is no evidence in the lore that powered armor works particularly well and is worth investing in.

While I could fix all of this, I just don't really have time to do so. I really would love a revamping of the rules and the crunch, but with the system being dead the best you can manage is fan made projects that themselves don't necessarily have good editing or thoughtfulness.

 

[nevin]

Immediate reaction: Yes, and…? I’m one of those nerds who grew up on the idea of sf as this ongoing conversation and on post-Lovecraftian horror, so for me this is a Tuesday. Commenting on one’s predecessors seems like as good an occasion to say something worthwhile as any.

on a tangent but related one of my favorite stories is when a new york times writer cornered Herman Melville at a party and gave him the whole english teacher deconstruction of his book and asked him how he'd gotten the idea for the allegory of the Whale, and he looked at her and said "Huh funny, I thought I just wrote a book about a whale and a whaler" he on several occasion's popped people analyzing his works that way and apparantly he really thought they were nuts. I wonder how many authors feel the same way about smart people trying to tell them what they were doing.....

 

[CleverNickName]

Next month, someone should write an Uncomfortable Truths Go Here thread.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Like most good deconstructions, they're also good examples of the genre. Watchman is a desconstruction of the superhero genre, but it's still a good superhero story.

I agree, but I think, ideally, you should be able to have good examples of the genre that are just the story themselves, not a meta-discussion on the commentary. We can find those in a lot of genres. Can we find them for westerns, though?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Next month, someone should write an Uncomfortable Truths Go Here thread.

Ideally posted from the doctor's office while waiting to hear test results.

 

[nevin]

There are a number of these that I can total see where the person is coming from, even if for various reasons I still think they are wrong.

I was particularly hit by the claim that a system is best after it is no longer supported, because indeed, ideally you reach a point where no more rules supplements are needed and you have a system that already well covers what is needed for the genre. And indeed, systems like 3e D&D were harmed more by supplements than they were helped as WotC generally focuses not on extending the system, but giving more chargen options, more spell options, and so forth that tends to degrade class balance while not expanding the sort of stories you can tell with the game system.

But then right now I'm GMing a dead system, WEG's D6 Star Wars, and while the fluff of WEG was usually amazingly good and stands up to this day and has become important parts of the canon, there was absolutely no quality control in the crunch of the game. It's like the system never had an editor at all, and everything was sent out to writers without any system guidelines and accepted for publication without any review of the rules that were made up. It's particularly bad with equipment, ships, vehicles, robots, and the like which is rather core to any Sci-Fi game. The prices are all over the place. The quality of the gear has no bearing on price and there is no attempt at balance at all. As just one of many examples, there are like separately three different ideas about how powered armor works and rules developed around those ideas - two of which are game breaking - and this is really weird because there is no evidence in the lore that powered armor works particularly well and is worth investing in.

While I could fix all of this, I just don't really have time to do so. I really would love a revamping of the rules and the crunch, but with the system being dead the best you can manage is fan made projects that themselves don't necessarily have good editing or thoughtfulness.

oh i'd happily just DM 2nd edition if I could convince my friends that newer isn't better. Maybe I'm getting old but there is a comfort in knowing the rules are done and done and you can just play.

 

[Lanefan]

The Next Big Thing on the D&D culture wars front will be the barbarian.

The rest of that post I'll just say nothing about but on this prediction you're probably bang on.

 

[nevin]

In the section you quote, I did not include a "contemporaneous" prior to the "primary." As you can no doubt tell from the emphasis in the second paragraph, I am discussing the salient difference in approaches when someone views contemporaneous primary sources as having more value than later-created primary sources.

It is a truism in historical research that, despite what overgeeked is saying, the general rule with sources (especially primary sources) that the closer in time to an event that the primary source is, the more reliable it is considered to be.

This is truly such a bizarre conversation I have trouble believing that I am part of it. So ... yeah.

find the recent article on the internet of actual shark experts reviewing shark week and how horrified they are at the bad science it puts out. It's like they read this discussion and then decided to check on disney.

 

[innerdude]

Morrus' RPG products are vastly better then WOTC products and most of you would have better games if you used Morrus's stuff instead of Wizard's.

QFT.

 

[Dausuul]

Exactly.

Assuming the researcher is honest, free of bias, and puts in the work to find multiple primary sources. This further assumes those sources exist, are honest, free of bias, and findable.

Well, you can comment. You use interviews with people who were there. You simply note that they are testimonials taken decades after the fact.

This assumes contemporaneous sources are objective. They're not. They're written by the same people who you're worried are biased. That bias doesn't go away simply because of timing or writing it down.

Hindsight is 2020. A lot of things seem amazing at the time only to find out later they're terrible. Pick any one of the thousands (millions?) of ready examples.

That would be bizarre. Good thing that's not what I'm saying. But I'm sure you know that.

As opposed to how they might flatter each other while in a fresh business agreement? That's partially the point. Humans write the primary sources. They're no less biased simply because the information is written down contemporaneously as opposed to spoken, even if years later. Could they could develop a grudge over the intervening years, sure. But they could also have layed it on thick back-in-the-day because they were hopeful of good business dealings.

My point is simply this: information does not become objective simply because it's written down by someone at the time. Read any two history books on the same topic by different authors and you'll quickly discover that there is a lot more...flexibility to how history is presented than most people like to admit. I'm not saying Peterson falsified anything, only that his bias is clear. He favors primary sources to the exclusion of testimonials. You may be fine with that, but it's not a complete history of the topic. As said by dustyboots, you need both primary sources and testimonials to approach something like a complete history of any given topic.

As an aside, I've read history books about the Great War that got the date of Archduke Ferdinand's death wrong. I've read history books about how awesome colonialism is for the colonized. I've read books about the history of Mexico that somehow fail to mention the Mexican-American war. History is only as accurate as the people writing it choose to, or are able to, make it.

Note: We might also be caught up in using "primary sources" in different ways.

Bias is inevitable in both kinds of sources. But bias is not the only source of inaccuracy. Another is that human memory absolutely sucks, and it sucks in direct proportion to the passage of time since the event. Contemporaneous sources are far less affected by that type of inaccuracy, and are thus much more reliable.