Unpopular opinions go here

[Reynard]

Are one man shows theater?

A one man show still has an audience, and it is the interaction with an audience that makes it theater.

 

[Reynard]

Agency in the moment is more important than agency in the larger plot.

 

[MGibster]

Even as a dumb preteen in the early 1980s, I pretty quickly realized that the class and level system is a not an effective way to emulate characters in the stories I read.

Vancian magic alone means you can't emulate a lot of other fantasy settings.

Some of the reasons I enjoy playing D&D are the Sacred Cows so many want to grind into hamburgers.

I'm with you on this one. When I want to play D&D, nothing scratches that itch except for D&D. But the times they are a changing.

 

[Aldarc]

Your character being emotionally or psychologically affected through game mechanics as part of playing the game is not a loss of agency nor does it in any way mean that you "are rollplaying and not roleplaying" or want to play a roleplaying game as if it were a boardgame. Certainly no more than being hit by a physical attack represents a loss of player character agency. It simply means that you want to play to find out what happens and roleplay when your character is emotionally and psychologically affected in unexpected ways.

 

[Celebrim]

Some of the reasons I enjoy playing D&D are the Sacred Cows so many want to grind into hamburgers.

If I want roleplaying experiences without them, I play different games.

In the late 80's and early 90's, I too believed that a game would be better if it was more realistic, combat was not abstract, hit points were stupid, classes and levels were bad design, linear probability was inferior to normal distributions and all the rest of the things that all the cool people believed.

Then I started playing the systems that had implemented those ideas and discovered that there were big tradeoffs in practice, and that the solutions to my gaming problems so many people were adamantly insisting on didn't in fact do what they were supposed to do. Intuitive combat mechanics like active defenses, armor as damage reduction, and so forth ultimately didn't make combat more realistic or rewarding they just slowed the game down and made it fiddlier and fiddlier. Removing hit points only made combat swingier and more predictable and not more dramatic, and also made combats harder to balance. Removing classes and levels didn't make player characters more diverse, it actually did the opposite, while producing tons of chargen traps and balance issues because "solutions" like point buy were invariably unbalanced. Dice pools to create normal distributions of probabilities didn't create a superior play experience, they just made the game harder to GM by hiding actual chance of success from all parties in the play while making the game harder to design and balance because even the designer seemed to not understand how things like linear modifiers or altering the difficulty actually effected the chances of success.

In short, I went to those systems that had slaughtered D&D's 'Sacred Cows' and discovered that they weren't as smart as the designers believed they were and that in adopting those systems I went from one set of problems to another.

I also noticed in this period that if these alternative systems were so great, you'd think that they come to dominate the design of cRPGs as well. But cRPG designers largely stuck to what worked precisely because it worked.

So I went back to D&D when 3.5 came out and I stopped thinking that because I could see problems that meant I was a better designer than my elders or that the designers trumpeting how great their designs were really were much anything other than arrogant.

The more systems I get exposed to, the more impressed I am by D&D, BRP/Pendragon, Classic Traveller, and WEG D6. And if I were to throw another system in the mix as really seeming innovative to me, it would be the cRPG Fallout (especially Fallout 1 and Fallout 2).

 

[Celebrim]

3.0 was, IMO, better than 3.5. Maybe not design-wise, but it captured the D&D feel better than 3.5, and had less power creep. Also, the Psychic Warrior was awesome.

Again, my opinion only.

It's really not even an opinion. That one shouldn't even be controversial. 3.5e was a huge step in the wrong direction with a massive number of untested merely theory crafted changes that made the game actually worse. It was like someone's untested poorly thought out house rules suddenly became canon. While a few changes were probably necessary, on the whole the rules became less balanced and less well thought out. But even more problematic was the design/marketing direction that 3.5e was taken in, of the large splatbooks produced regularly with minimal or no playtesting where every splatbook was supposed to contain a little something for everyone - player and GM alike. That very quickly ruined the game. Much of the hatred toward 3.5 was self-inflicted harm by participants in the game who took every published thing as the system.

 

[Reynard]

3.0 was, IMO, better than 3.5. Maybe not design-wise, but it captured the D&D feel better than 3.5, and had less power creep. Also, the Psychic Warrior was awesome.

Again, my opinion only.

I wholeheartedly agree. 3E felt like a continuation of AD&D, perhaps even a little retro with its "return to the dungeon" mindset. There are a lot of things I like about 3.5 (Eberron being chief among them) but 3.0 FELT like D&D.

 

[Celebrim]

Vancian magic alone means you can't emulate a lot of other fantasy settings.

The biggest problem with D&D magic generally is not that it is Vancian, but rather that it is not grounded in traditional folk magic. There are far too many things it allows spellcasters to do which are traditionally considered very hard and epic magic, as opposed to things like divination and subtle blessings and curses that are considered easy magic.

In actuality, Vancian magic can emulate just about any fantasy setting and its magical rules (especially soft magic settings) if you consider the limitations on the magic use implied by Vancian to be narrative restrictions rather than physical limitations. Or to put it another way, in most stories it isn't well explained why magic users don't use magic all the time, or else the explanations given are somewhat weak and abstract (one shouldn't rely on magic because it's dangerous to overuse it for unexplored reasons). The result is that spellcasters with supposedly vast power seldom actually display this vast power (Gandalf for example isn't supposed to show his power as part of his mission to aid humanity to overcome evil on their own, rather than opposing evil by force).

Well, you absolutely can do that with Vancian magic because Vancian magic imposes pacing on the production of magic in the narrative of play. It forces the caster to not do the same thing over and over, and to not use magic all the time, and to only use powerful magic in the big moments - just like you see in most fantasy narratives. All you have to do is consider Vancian magic an abstraction (just like hit points) and well, it emulates things just fine.

 

[deganawida]

It's really not even an opinion. That one shouldn't even be controversial. 3.5e was a huge step in the wrong direction with a massive number of untested merely theory crafted changes that made the game actually worse. It was like someone's untested poorly thought out house rules suddenly became canon. While a few changes were probably necessary, on the whole the rules became less balanced and less well thought out. But even more problematic was the design/marketing direction that 3.5e was taken in, of the large splatbooks produced regularly with minimal or no playtesting where every splatbook was supposed to contain a little something for everyone - player and GM alike. That very quickly ruined the game. Much of the hatred toward 3.5 was self-inflicted harm by participants in the game who took every published thing as the system.

Yeah, huge power creep which moved the baseline up for power level for all classes, abilities almost every level, books released 3 years before overwritten, the quantity of splats put 2e to shame, the start of "everything is core," which meant that it was much more difficult to have a setting designed with a feel and added a whole "gotta catch 'em all" mentality to the spats, and more.

I played a ton of 3.0. Despite the fact that I liked a lot of changes to 3.5 at first, I only ever played one face-to-face game with the rules. It just felt like too much. Didn't help that there was a push to make miniatures the default (moreso even than 3.0 and 2.5), and I gravitate towards TotM play.

 

[Rushbolt]

D&D needs to adopt a spell point system for level 1-5 spells and make level 6-9 spells class abilities that only gives access to one spell slot of each level. A caster should get one level 6 spell slot at level 12, one level 7 at level 14, one level 8 at level 16, and one level 9 at level 18.