Unpopular opinions go here

[Lanefan]

A few opinions of mine that might not gain me many fans...

--- D&D works best when approached player-side largely as a rogue-like: you roll up your character, put it in play, and see how long it lasts. Repeat as and when required.

--- Evil characters are not only playable, they're often more interesting and entertaining than the goody-goods.

--- If it's what the character would do, do it.

--- The story of the adventuring party (or parties, in a bigger campaign) is always more important in the long run than the story of any individual character.

--- PCs are not special snowflakes but are (and should be) representative of the setting in which they live. Corollary to this is that to reflect the randomness and variability among people, character stats should be rolled rather than point-bought or arrayed.

--- The seven playable species in 1e (Human, Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Hobbit, Part-Elf, Part-Orc) is enough, or even one or two too many. Dragonborn, Tieflings, Goliaths - they're all monsters than real PCs beat up on for a living.

--- Species-based stat penalties are not only OK, they're essential in order to avoid Humans becoming the least optimal species in the game. General species-wide alignment trends are also OK.

--- Other than about ten seconds at the very end, Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie hands down. It's not even close.

 

[Lanefan]

Speaking as a software developer who has to do date/timestamp work All The Time, this solution sucks because it prevents you doing a pure string comparison to sort dates in chronological order. You end up having to do all sorts of parsing and deserialisation to translate, which is a pain.

Speaking as a reader who can't tell the difference between 03-05-2023 and 05-03-2023 I say it's way simpler to put MR 05 2023 and have done with it.

For software applications, for the month field just use numeric months in the background for calculating/sorting/etc. purposes but do a mass substitute for letters before printing or posting anything public-facing.

 

[Parmandur]

it's been my go to rules system for horror games of all sorts for decades, now, and i haven't used anything from the 'mythos' in most of that time (and we just switch 'sanity' for whatever is most setting appropriate.)

I was pretty surprised when o got the Call of Crhulu anniversary box set just how much OG CoC was more Universal Horror than Lovecraft.

 

[Autumnal]

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.

I’m willing to believe it, but I need stuff that’s simpler than baseline D&D, and it’s my impression Morrus doesn’t do that. Do I err?

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.

This has been in my mind a lot in recent years as we work through old paperwork of Mom’s. She has dementia and there’s a lot the rest of us now need to understand, and mixed in with the business is a lot of personal family stuff. It’s startling just how much past records can contradict present memories - report cards, school photos, vacation pictures, postcards, and the like lay out stories that (without our ever intending it) have sometimes drifted a lot over the decades.

I know that many people have better memories than me. But the processes of distortion, remixing, etc, are at work in all human minds. So I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith, laziness, or anything of the sort when I say that it’s important to check later recollections where possible.

 

[overgeeked]

Bias is inevitable in both kinds of sources. But bias is not the only source of inaccuracy.

Yes.

Another is that human memory absolutely sucks, and it sucks in direct proportion to the passage of time since the event.

It depends entirely on the event. Most people can't remember what they had for breakfast yesterday but can tell you exactly where they were when some historically significant event occurred. For example, I was in class watching the Berlin Wall come down on 9 November 1989. Likewise, when the Challenger exploded on 18 January 1986, I was watching live, like most US schoolchildren at the time. On 9/11 I was taking mass transit to work and had no idea what was going on until I got to work and heard people talking. I got to the break room just in time to watch the second plane fly into the tower. It also depends entirely on what bits of information are being recalled and how relevant they are in context.

Contemporaneous sources are far less affected by that type of inaccuracy, and are thus much more reliable.

But they are affected by literally all other types of bias and inaccuracy. Snarf seems to be suggesting that they are free of bias and inaccuracy by the mere fact of being written down close to the event. That's absolutely not how anything works. Take just about any two newspapers from the same day reporting on the same event and you can read wildly different stories. Doubly so with any kind of political event and political papers.

 

[Celebrim]

--- Other than about ten seconds at the very end, Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie hands down. It's not even close.

I would say that it is close, but the 30 seconds or so that make that claim hard to sustain aren't at the end, but have to do with awkward plotting in the middle. In particular, the whole thing about Cassian's boss ordering him to continue the assassination mission even after it is clear that the Death Star is already operational is just totally illogical and is stupid hoop jumping in order to hit the needed plot points. There are also a few parts of the opening act which lag a bit while not adding a whole lot to the story, such as the deal with Bodi and the Bor Gullet. But overall, yeah, it's the best thing in Star Wars since the original trilogy.

 

[soviet]

First editions of games are nearly always superior to subsequent editions.

Most licensed games should not exist and people are wrong to want them.

Out of print and no longer supported games are fun and easy to play, even with people who are new to them.

Splitting the party is something to be embraced rather than avoided.

Character sheets are woefully underused in most game designs.

 

[Jd Smith1]

When it came to Star Wars adventures, West End Games suggested the DM go big or go home. You're not rescuing a rebel agent from a prison island, you're rescuing him prison moon or something.

Yeah, but that advice doesn't work. The PCs are still going to be a half-dozen guys (or less) crawling through some poorly-guarded high-tech steam tunnel or trying to bluff their way through the gates, or some other scheme.

Star Wars lovingly depicts Star Destroyers, when PCs are going to be running from Customs cutters.

This is not a uncommon problem; too many settings pump detail into the ruler of the land and Grand Councils, when PCs will be dealing with the City Watch of the 3rd largest city, road patrols, and the annoying bastard who gathers tolls on the fourth-largest bridge on the second most important highway.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Setting -- as in detailed worldbuilding -- is completely irrelevant and can even be detrimental to fun.

Only in the hands of a bad GM.

A good GM can use details as seeds for scenarios, and not having to generate everything in a scenario, get more bang out of his preparation hours.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Yeah, unpopular. The Searchers, High Noon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Fort Apache, Tombstone, and many more are fantastic movies.

Bone Tomahawk; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Hell on Wheels series (am using that in a campaign soon); Deadwood series, Lonesome Dove mini-series.

Steampunk is the triumph of aesthetics over substance. It's why I hate it.

Steampunk makes a better LARP than a RPG.