Unpopular opinions go here

[Willie the Duck]

Do recipes converted from imperial measurements to metric round things off to manageable numbers, or are there calls for like 37.2mls of olive oil?

Even in baking, recipes should follow a strict two-significant-figures rule. Anything beyond that is almost always going to be false precision (your results will be more impacted by how well you scrape out the bowl, how humid the air, how accurate/precise/consistent your stove is, etc.).

While that approach (creating a goal or hook for your character), when people talk about backstories in RPGs they’re generally referring to the “my PC’s so awesome” fanfiction that many players have embraced recently. Things like being 1st-level in a D&D game and already having defeated giants and dragons or having a mountain of lore the player expects the referee to incorporate into the game.

That's 'cause we're getting old (I'm 47, and I think you're a couple of years younger than me; if I'm wrong, my deepest apologies). Never crossed my mind as a kid. Maybe defeat a giant in some Jack and the beanstalk fashion that set my character on a path of adventuring, but that was more luck than skill, and just served as the thing that made them adventurers. It always made sense to me that 1st level was the start of the actual adventuring career.

We're of an age.
Are you suggesting this is a Millenial or GenZ phenomenon? I admit I don't play with many of them outside running games at cons.

I’m about the same age as both of you. I assume the players doing this are significantly younger.

Generational or not, its always possible the people involved on some level are not playing the game they're playing down in their head. What I mean by that is that zero-to-hero is a D&D standard, but it isn't a standard in every fantasy game; in some of them, having done some great things before the start of play not only wouldn't be odd, it'd be expected.

My take is that the player with 8 pages of backstory with 'my character is so awesome' Mary Sue-ness is something of which everyone has seen an example, but in general is overblown in prevalence in games actually played and something of a bugaboo told in tales of worst gamers everyone has had to deal with.

Players with excessive backstory in general is certainly a thing. Some people want game-token characters; some people want characters mostly defined by the emergent events that happen during gameplay; and some people want characters with fleshed out histories, personalities, and motivations right from the start. This is not a new, modern generation thing and many not-new systems like GURPS hinge on characters starting play with connections, personalities, places in society, physical qualities which may require/facilitate backstory explanations, and so on. I think the main issue is people who would like to mess around with these things showing up to game tables (and game systems) not suited to them, and this is in part an artifact of whatever majority percent of gamers it is that are playing D&D or D&D-alikes, despite it not necessarily being the system most suited to their goals.

It's just always been my opinion that World of Darkness, particularly the early '90s incarnation of it, was infuriatingly smug, condescending, and pretentious in tone.

This is going to be a little contradictory, as my first post on this thread included an unpopular opinion bemoaning gamers being over-eager to show just how much more they knew about <nerd-topic> than those around them. However, another (likely-not-so-) unpopular opinion I have is that we gamers are entirely too concerned that that fellow over there might think they're better/smarter than us. Obviously-obviously-obviously we have all experienced someone like that in the past*, but at the same time it seems like a singular obsession amongst the interest group. *with just a casual search of r/rpg on reddit I was able to find someone make an 'I role-play, they roll-play'-type comment.

90s White Wolf had some limitations. The rules for one (discussion below), and yes some of the tone. To me, however, instead of pretentious, it felt more like the young person who took a gap year before college to travel the world and is now super-excited about all the cultures they just experienced and you should be just as excited as they are; and now they just moved into their first low-cost apartment and they are framing it as 'punk' and a rebellion against the Man. With the kid in the analogy, you probably will get a bit of schadenfreude out of some of the reality-kicking-in moments for them and maybe wince a little when some of their adulation of the foreign culture comes off as exoticizing. With the actual books, mostly I just wished more cultural consultants had been, well, consulted and occasionally muttered to the books "we. are. all. the. Man!" They are certainly of their time, but I really think the smugness held within the pages* has been widely overblown. *I recall many tales (of unconfirmed veracity) back in the 90s about WoD players (and White Wolf employees) being that smug guy that thought they were more serious gamers and better than you, but I can't separate that out from the usual rumor mill and the above-mentioned obsession gamers seem to have with the notion of being the target of condescension.

Even if one were to dislike the classic White Wolf stuff (personally I loved it), it had a huge influence both on people who liked what it did and also people who wanted what they thought it should do (but didn't).
White wolf begat Sorcerer which begat the Forge which begat PbtA and a hundred other cool things.

The writing for WW was almost uniformly tremendous. It was IMO the core mechanics of the game that let the writer's down. I learned a lot from WW, but one of the things that it taught me was that the writer's intention for the game had to be matched by the mechanics because the rules were physics and determined how the game would actually play out and not how you wanted it to play out.

This lines up with my experience. 90s White Wolf games were communicated as being about styles of play that the strongly trad system at their core did not support (and sometimes fought against), oftentimes making the in-book fiction something incredibly hard to replicate using the rules included in the same book. The (non-, I think) unpopular opinion I might make for them might be "Unpopular opinion: 90s WW would have been a lot better if the lessons we learned from it (see Sorcerer-->Forge-->Fate/PbtA-->FitD) had been learned sooner and incorporated into the system itself instead of successor games."

 

[nevin]

This is going to be a little contradictory, as my first post on this thread included an unpopular opinion bemoaning gamers being over-eager to show just how much more they knew about <nerd-topic> than those around them. However, another (likely-not-so-) unpopular opinion I have is that we gamers are entirely too concerned that that fellow over there might think they're better/smarter than us. Obviously-obviously-obviously we have all experienced someone like that in the past*, but at the same time it seems like a singular obsession amongst the interest group. *with just a casual search of r/rpg on reddit I was able to find someone make an 'I role-play, they roll-play'-type comment.

I'd add to that some players like to have a concept so incredibly detailed and complex that the DM gets sucked into it and it takes over the game. I've seen a few DM's get sucked into such a cool character that the other players became supporting cast. and with a DM like that it's a very solid strategy for being the center of the game.

 

[Umbran]

Oh, yeah, the hobby would be so much better even whiter, straighter and duder than it already is.

There's "unpopular opinions" and there's "lobbing molotovs" my friend.

Mod Note:
These boards do not operate on the basis of responding in kind to Molotov's - especially after a moderator has already spoken on the subject.

If you feel someone is lighting a fire, adding fuel is likely to burn you, too. So, you know, maybe don't?

 

[Faolyn]

I have never seen this happen, or even heard of it happening to anyone I know IRL. At most, I have had folks be secret heirs or have great destinies.

I did, once. 7 pages of prose so purple it could have been from a White Wolf book. All of which to say, I was a cleric of an evil god until I started to get visions of a non-evil god (can't remember if he was good or neutral) who yoinked me into his service, while also learning that my unborn child had a great destiny, and that I had to flee right after the birth without ever actually being able to hold the child. However, it was a GURPS game, not D&D (although it used D&D gods and the Pathfinder setting).

 

[overgeeked]

Nentir Vale was the best setting created in D&D's history, and perfectly illustrated how one can have a complete campaign in a small region that seems unimportant. (I figure that this is unpopular given how very rarely I see anyone truly discuss it, the one DCC thread that's currently active aside.)

I’m a big fan of Nentir Vale but I wouldn’t say it’s the best. Definitely in my top 5-6 though.

 

[Aldarc]

I’m a big fan of Nentir Vale but I wouldn’t say it’s the best. Definitely in my top 5-6 though.

Top 3 for me. I think that some of the other good quality settings would potentially have been much better played with a game other than D&D.

 

[Gradine]

The first Wonder Woman movie wasn't good either

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Nentir Vale was the best setting created in D&D's history, and perfectly illustrated how one can have a complete campaign in a small region that seems unimportant. (I figure that this is unpopular given how very rarely I see anyone truly discuss it, the one DCC thread that's currently active aside.)

I think it has a lot of popularity. The problem is it's the setting for an unpopular edition, so a lot of people simply don't know about it. I have owned zero books that contained any information about it, for instance.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The first Wonder Woman movie wasn't good either

Hmm. Their use of Ares was terrible but I have a hard time seeing Diana pushing her way through no man's land without getting emotional. And the stuff on Themiscyra works extremely well.

I think there will be better Wonder Woman movies in the future, but I don't think the first one was bad.

 

[Xamnam]

Avatar: The Lion Turtle and what he gives Aang completely neuters the actually interesting conflict that has been brewing the entire series, and robs the ending of that show of most of its potential emotional impact.