and yet I've had an English professor explain the entire litany of reasons that the lord of the rings was a Satire of wwII. I did drive a truck through his opinion by the time the semester was done.
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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
Unpopular opinions go here
- Thread starter Whizbang Dustyboots
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Unpopular opinion: experts can be wrong.
now your being nice and setting me up for something............
Unpopular opinion- while experts can be wrong, you are not an expert just because you have access to the internet and the ability to google things.
Everyone overestimates their own abilities, so while experts can be wrong, it is almost always the case that you will be wronger.
Celebrim
Legend
Thank you for your service.
Willie the Duck
Hero
That's actually my 'yeah... wait, no, not-yeah' moment for Metric vs. Imperial discussions.
1) Not having to figure out how many tablespoons are in a cup (because instead you are using metric where volumes are just multiples of ten): point for metric. 2) Putting trim around your room and having one side be three feet, four and seven eights inches long, the other four feet, five and three-quarters inches long, and having to figure out how long to cut an third piece to finish off your eleven foot, three and seven sixteenths inch long room (because instead you are using metric and you just add all the two base-ten numbers together and subtract from the third to get the remaining necessary length): points for metric. 3) Water (pure, at sea-level) transitioning from solid to liquid at 0 and liquid to gas at 100: no score drawn. It doesn't actually benefit anything (except making two very specific maybe-important -in-everyday-life physical qualities be readily memorable). You don't multiply temperatures. The one example I can think of where you multiply by a temperature (as opposed to a delta of temperature), the ideal gas law (pV=nRT), requires you to use absolute temperature. Both Celsius and Fahrenheit use base-ten partial-state nomenclature, sure adding and subtracting temperatures works the same for both. The 0 and 100 stop being relevant* the instant you are boiling water in Denver or the sea-level water is sea water or you care about whether your kid with the flu is running a fever instead of literally boiling or freezing. Of all the distinctions between Metric and Imperial, this one come closest to being arbitrary and of no objective benefit over an alternative.
*not that there was a lot of mathematical benefit to these being 0 and 100, it just helps in remembering them
I remember the Challenger explosion. I was home sick from middle school that day, and watching on a B&W TV in my bedroom. It was frustrating because I saw it happen, kind of understood what was happening, but had no one to turn to ask about, help process it, or really understand all the ramifications (or be distracted, or whatever the teachers did for the rest of the US schoolchildren). It was horrifying. It also isn't what happened. I was in school that day, and like 38.7 of the 41.2 million children in grade-through-high school children in 1986, wasn't watching it (it was only ~2.5 million of US schoolchildren who were watching at the time). That memory of watching it while home sick -- that happened to my friend Mike. I heard it, internalized it, and now thoroughly have it lodged in my brain as something that happened to me. This frighteningly common experience is why people question later accounts of events, as Snarf is discussing.
This, however, is also true. Something being contemporaneous does not prevent something from being biased.
There's also the issue that not everything is written down. Not everything is communicated in the first place, either. A primary documentation only standard is going to have more gaps in the evidentiary trail of things. Sometimes the things that show up in the primary documentation are going to be biased not because of innate quality of the observer (like the political bias example), but merely based on what was recorded (financial records might tell what transactions took place, but the causes or motivations might have been conveyed verbally or not at all).
History is messy, and you have to take all look at all contributing evidence and recognize not just how it might be biased, but why what it is and isn't/could or could not show/etc.
Experts can be wrong. People who think they are experts can be wrong. People who think the other person in a discussion must merely have access to the internet as their supposed expertise regarding a situation can be wrong (about that, or the topic being discussed). People can take knowledge from experts and interpret it (either the expertise in total or the individual knowledge communicated) and apply it to situations it doesn't actually apply. This is why, in general, I look for people providing both the (checkable) references in question, as well as the actual functional argument for what said evidence is, how it applies, and what they believe it implies about the topic being discussed. There's no shortcut to bringing one's receipts.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
Racial ASIs make about as much logical sense as racial languages and racial tool proficencies. Identical twins who are separated at birth and grow up in different circumstances (wealthy/poor, rural/city, coastal/desert, etc.) are going to have completely different physiques and mindsets. Such ASIs and features should be determined by your character's Background, not Ancestry.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
And the best ones can admit it.
Moonmover
Adventurer
Unpopular opinion I: Nitpicky details such as encumbrance, travel times, and ammo-counting is great, actually.
Rules-lite systems are fine for quick, casual one-shots. For a serious campaign, though, high-crunch systems are superior. The rules people often complain about as being boring or busywork - things like encumbrance limits, the need for food and water, taxation, downtime expenditures, training costs, and so on - act as a continuous series of prompts for ongoing stories. Each is an obstacle that the PC's must overcome, and overcoming them becomes a story. Modern tradgames (like Pathfinder and the last few editions of D&D) strip the mechanics down to just combat, which gets boring after a while. Storygames strip away even that and are barely games at all. What I want in an RPG ruleset is detailed simulation.
Unpopular opinion II: You should have your next D&D character be a teenager.
Part of the point of D&D, to me, is emulating fantasy fiction. In this genre, young and inexperienced protagonists are the rule, not the exception. Conan the Cimmerian; Eragon; Harry Potter; Lessa from Dragonriders of Pern; the Pevensie children from The Chronicle of Narnia; and Arya Stark, Danerys Targaryen, and Jon Snow from A Song of Ice and Fire are just the first few examples off the top of my head of fantasy heroes who begin their first adventures before age 18.
What's more, I would think that younger people are more likely to go out adventuring than older ones, realistically. Teenagers aren't yet tied down to careers, spouses, and children of their own. They have the freedom to leave home and throw themselves into danger- and lack the wisdom to know that they probably shouldn't!
I also feel that D&D (and its near derivatives) is uniquely suited to playing out coming-of-age stories. Even when PC's aren't literal teenagers, they often feel like they are. I've never seen a PC begin a campaign with a spouse or kids; oftentimes they don't have a job yet, until they begin the first adventure. If your character is level 1, that implies they lack experience (they literally have 0 experience! The game measures that!). As you play, the character learns about the world they inhabit, meets and forms relationships with new people, earns a reputation, and begins to advance their skills and abilities (by leveling up.) That's what being a teen and growing up is all about!
Unpopular opinion III: AD&D, 1st Edition, is not a swords and sorcery game.
It's a chivalric romance game. The alignment system encourages stark conflicts between good and evil. The most powerful prestigious class is the paladin, a righteous knight following a strict moral code. Forests are full of fairies. Clerics are modeled after Christian clergy rather than on R.E. Howard's sinister cultists. Name-level PC's are expected to establish feudal estates or churches. Unearthed Arcana adds a barbarian class, which is good for modeling Conan and his imitators. But, it also adds the cavalier, a second class of heroic knight which is way more powerful (and which players are therefore more incentived to choose).
The only thing S&S about AD&D 1e is the magic system.
1e had three published settings - Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms. All three of them lean into these tropes and away from pulp fiction.
Rules-lite systems are fine for quick, casual one-shots. For a serious campaign, though, high-crunch systems are superior. The rules people often complain about as being boring or busywork - things like encumbrance limits, the need for food and water, taxation, downtime expenditures, training costs, and so on - act as a continuous series of prompts for ongoing stories. Each is an obstacle that the PC's must overcome, and overcoming them becomes a story. Modern tradgames (like Pathfinder and the last few editions of D&D) strip the mechanics down to just combat, which gets boring after a while. Storygames strip away even that and are barely games at all. What I want in an RPG ruleset is detailed simulation.
Unpopular opinion II: You should have your next D&D character be a teenager.
Part of the point of D&D, to me, is emulating fantasy fiction. In this genre, young and inexperienced protagonists are the rule, not the exception. Conan the Cimmerian; Eragon; Harry Potter; Lessa from Dragonriders of Pern; the Pevensie children from The Chronicle of Narnia; and Arya Stark, Danerys Targaryen, and Jon Snow from A Song of Ice and Fire are just the first few examples off the top of my head of fantasy heroes who begin their first adventures before age 18.
What's more, I would think that younger people are more likely to go out adventuring than older ones, realistically. Teenagers aren't yet tied down to careers, spouses, and children of their own. They have the freedom to leave home and throw themselves into danger- and lack the wisdom to know that they probably shouldn't!
I also feel that D&D (and its near derivatives) is uniquely suited to playing out coming-of-age stories. Even when PC's aren't literal teenagers, they often feel like they are. I've never seen a PC begin a campaign with a spouse or kids; oftentimes they don't have a job yet, until they begin the first adventure. If your character is level 1, that implies they lack experience (they literally have 0 experience! The game measures that!). As you play, the character learns about the world they inhabit, meets and forms relationships with new people, earns a reputation, and begins to advance their skills and abilities (by leveling up.) That's what being a teen and growing up is all about!
Unpopular opinion III: AD&D, 1st Edition, is not a swords and sorcery game.
It's a chivalric romance game. The alignment system encourages stark conflicts between good and evil. The most powerful prestigious class is the paladin, a righteous knight following a strict moral code. Forests are full of fairies. Clerics are modeled after Christian clergy rather than on R.E. Howard's sinister cultists. Name-level PC's are expected to establish feudal estates or churches. Unearthed Arcana adds a barbarian class, which is good for modeling Conan and his imitators. But, it also adds the cavalier, a second class of heroic knight which is way more powerful (and which players are therefore more incentived to choose).
The only thing S&S about AD&D 1e is the magic system.
1e had three published settings - Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms. All three of them lean into these tropes and away from pulp fiction.
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