Unpopular opinions go here

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The thing is, if you were playing at the time, it was obvious that Gygax's opinions changed with the wind, often due to whatever was happening on the business end with TSR and were essentially the same kind of things you'd hear from the crank down at your local game/comic shop and should be respected or ignored in the same way you'd handle those opinions.

I don't know when people stuck him up on a pedestal, but it's definitely weird to see. He was just another gamer, and depending on how you view the history of RPGs, not even the first roleplayer.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I really, really have never liked a single official D&D character sheet that I have ever seen.

Is that the kind of thing that this thread is for?

 

[mamba]

Likewise, the base 10 sucks as a mathematical function; we'd be far better off for mental math with base 12.

I'd like to see the case for that

 

[MGibster]

Likewise, the base 10 sucks as a mathematical function; we'd be far better off for mental math with base 12.

We're resistant to metric here in the United States, good luck trying to get us to adopt the duodecimal system.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I have mixed feelings about this. But first, I really need to state that you have good reasons for this opinion. When I look back at the metaplots from the 1990s, for all games not just D&D, I don't look back at many of them with any particular fondness. Ravenloft is my favorite setting, but I don't really care about the Grand Conjunction. But a big reason why I don't remember many of the metaplots with fondness is because of how companies handled them. They would dole the plot points out in little tidbits forcing you to buy multiple products if you wanted to keep up. And then some adventures just ended up with the PCs watching the main characters of the metaplot do all the cool stuff. And then there are times when the metaplot comes along and just changes the setting in a way you don't care for. L5R I'm looking at you.

I agree with all of this. What do you have mixed feelings about?

In recent years I've come to the same conclusion. Mainly it was his name I always saw so he was the one who got credit. But in the last few years I've come to learn about and appreciate the efforts of others, especially some others I can't recall ever hearing of, who influenced D&D and other games in ways I hadn't realized.

Yeah, as someone that is newer to D&D than a lot of you (quite a few of you have been playing the game decades longer than I've been alive) it's been interesting to learn about the history of D&D and the people that contributed to its creation/evolution. However, it has also been very strange to see how much people venerate Gary Gygax, treating him like the "Founding Father of D&D", and saying that the game has only gotten worse since he left TSR (or since TSR went bankrupt).

 

[ichabod]

We're resistant to metric here in the United States, good luck trying to get us to adopt the duodecimal system.

Yeah, geez, we'd have to have 12 inches in a foot or something silly like that.

 

[Celebrim]

If you start with a story then condense it, sure. But you have to start with a story first. Which you don't when translating an RPG live play into an actual story format like novel, cartoon, comic book, etc.

Now you are reduced to making axiomatic assertions. RPG live play produces a story. It has the elements of a story - characters, events, plots, setting. It has the structure of a story. That structure isn't always classical and sometimes meanders, but many modern stories (and even some fairy tales) do the same. So, yeah, I feel yours is the extraordinary claim.

Yes, it does. Because real life isn't a story. It's a long sequence of events, some boring and utterly mundane, others minorly interesting and engaging, others wildly dramatic, and some better off forgotten.

So? It's still a story if it has a sequence of events. The fact that some are boring and utterly mundane doesn't make it less of a story. It might not be what you claim is a good story, but then that returns me to my point - you seem to be defining certain qualities of story-telling into your definition of story and if the story doesn't have those qualities you prefer (every moment meaningful and non-mundane?) then you claim it is not a story. When really, all you are saying is that the story isn't to your taste in stories.

To get to a story we take the real life condense it, edit it, alter it, etc in order to accentuate the drama and conflict and remove all the boring and tedious bits.

But it's a story before you do all of that.

If our real lives were as jam-packed with action, adventure, death-defying feats, etc as what's in most stories, we'd have literally no need for stories.

A story isn't defined by its action, adventure, and death-defying feats! That's just one type of story. I asked my daughter what happened at work today and no action, adventure, or death-defying feats were involved but it was still a story!

 

[Milieu]

Second, the USA is almost using the metric system. There's only a few holdouts like distance.

"Almost" is doing a lot of work there. Of the 7 SI base units, we use normally use 3, arguably 4. Of those 3, the second long predates SI and doesn't use base 10 or follow the usual SI rules. (How often have you heard someone unironically measure time in "kiloseconds"?), amperes have never really had an alternative traditional unit, and candelas aren't used that often outside of technical contexts (except that when you buy a lightbulb, the derived unit of lumens is on the box). The mole is a weird case in that it's almost never used outside of technical contexts in any event, but even then US engineers sometimes use the pound-mole. The other 3 (length, mass, and temperature) are the most commonly used units in everyday life (besides seconds).

There are a few specific cases where metric units of length and volume are used outside of technical contexts, but I can't think of any for mass and temperature (and even all-metric countries don't use Kelvin directly).

Alternatively, since US customary measurements have technically been redefined in reference to SI units (e.g., 1 inch is defined as exactly 2.54 mm), we are secretly already fully metric!

Centigrade is no benefit over Kelvin, and Kelvin is what's used in physics. One could do the same transform to Fahrenheit that Kelvin did to Celsius... and have a 460-560 range for human comfortable hab, and 445 to 575 for overall range.

That's called the Rankine scale.

 

[Autumnal]

That may be true. But I think you will find that defining an RPG is difficult. And defining a story game is just about impossible.

I’ve got the oracular head of Ludwig Wittgenstein right here….

 

[Reynard]

Arneson did not actually do much from a design or production standpoint and it is pretty clear that without Gygax there would have been no product called D&D.