Unpopular opinions go here

[Jd Smith1]

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

So true.

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

Yep.

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

Cautiously agree. A lot of GMs are simply not equipped to handle it.

Character sheets are woefully underused in most game designs.

Or badly designed.

 

[CleverNickName]

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

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

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

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

5) Character sheets are woefully underused in most game designs.

Counterpoint, soviet (the username, not the national council) Edition
1) Since most games only ever have one edition, I guess this was bound to be true. If only statistically speaking.
2) Untrue and off-putting. Nobody should get to decide what gets to exist or what people should want.
3) Agreed. Remember my motto: "Why OSR, when you can just OS?"
4) Whether or not this is to be embraced or avoided will mostly depend on the players at the table. If you've got players who don't mind sitting around fiddling with their phones for 10-120 minutes while they wait for the scene to return to them, splitting the party can be very enjoyable. In my experience, players will wander away (or start playing something on their phones).
5) I'm not sure I understand. Most games don't have character sheets at all, and those that do usually have a reason for them. In what ways are they being under-used?

 

[MGibster]

The Searchers is most famous (other than for its shot of going from a dark house into the brightly lit outdoors) for explicitly discussing how westerns deal with Native Americans, for instance.

Eh, by 1956 there were already westerns that had depicted Native Americans with some degree of respect and sympathy. i.e. It wasn't anything novel like it was in 1948 with Forth Apache. At any rate, The Searchers might have examined racism, but it didn't deconstruct the western genre as a whole like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance did. Nor was High Noon a desconstruction of the western, it was a take on McCarthyism using the old west as a backdrop.

But I'm not going to quibble too much about what does and doesn't count as a deconstruction. If the only good westerns are ones that deconstruct the genre, I don't know what do say. SOme people just don't like westerns and that's okay.

 

[CleverNickName]

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

1) --- 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.

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

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

4) --- 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.

5) --- 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.

6) --- 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.

7) --- 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.

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

Counterpoint, Lanefan Edition
1) Ah, sweet memories of The Isle of Dread and The Keep on the Borderlands
2) My players tend to land less on the "interesting and entertaining" side and more on the "creepy and ethically-questionable" side.
3) This is the essence of role-playing. I'd also add "if it's not worth doing, your character probably knows it."
4-6) Absolutely.
7) Hard disagree.
8) I didn't mind the last ten seconds either.

 

[DammitVictor]

So, let's just get our pizza order out of the way first: anchovies, extra pineapple, onion, and roasted red peppers.

Everything, every single thing, about D&D's alignment system is the worst thing about D&D's alignment system. It is fractally awful and there is neither any redeeming quality or any redeemable element to be salvaged from it.

Matter of fact, the list of the worst parts of D&D history and the list of differences between Old/Classic D&D and AD&D are practically identical.

Racial ASIs, even including mental abilities, make logical sense... but they're not beneficial for gameplay. Every reason to have them is better served by giving all the nonhuman fantasy races their own classes.

Extensive character histories aren't good roleplaying and they aren't conducive to good roleplaying. Play out one good session with a group of other roleplayers and your character will have one session of actual backstory.

 

[nevin]

Tolkien had a good deal to say on that subject.

The funny thing is that the Lord of the Rings really does have a lot going on under the surface, deliberately put there and carefully thought out by the author (who was after all an academic himself). But none of it lends itself to hot takes on trendy issues.

Its really easy to take a dead persons work and tell the world what they were saying.

 

[Reynard]

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.

Maybe. But a good GM doesn't need the setting detail to creqte compelling play in the first place. Setting detail is mostly about failed novelism.

 

[Reynard]

Its really easy to take a dead persons work and tell the world what they were saying.

Tolkien has hundreds of thousands of words of notes, development and letters. You don't have to guess. You just have to read.

 

[Dausuul]

Its really easy to take a dead persons work and tell the world what they were saying.

I gather there were quite a few people who did that while Tolkien was still alive. In the revised edition, he devoted a chunk of the foreword to knocking down claims that it was an allegory for World War 2, with the Ring symbolizing nuclear weapons. And I'm sure that was just the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Umbran]

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

I mean, if we are going for unpopular opinions...

"You are wrong to assert what entertainments are good/right for others."

While it applies to the statement I quote above, it also applies... all over the place. And nobody ever likes hearing it about themselves, so it is pretty darned unpopular.