Unpopular opinions go here

[Reynard]

If you’re going to make an RPG about storytelling, you should read up on actual storytelling and how it works.

RPGs are terrible at creating stories. people, on the other hand, are pretty good at telling stories about what happened in their RPG.

 

[Maxperson]

Nobody wants to sit and play Weird Chess for four hours.

 

[payn]

When a lot of folks say "heroic" they mean being able to bend steal, shoot lasers out of eyes, and fly at will. They dont mean heroic in the sense of an ordinary person risking life and limb for selfless reasons.

 

[CleverNickName]

They should just let everyone do their cool stuff all the time

They already do! There's so much more "cool stuff" in the game than just class features...most stunts and story elements don't require spending resources at all. I know players who can make climbing a wall or intimidating a guard look pretty friggin' cool.

"Cool stuff" doesn't have to mean "go nova."

 

[Willie the Duck]

This has always bothered me a lot. The most challenging design in tabletop gaming is probably making joint operation of a vehicle interesting. I've never seen it done and it makes me wonder if it can be done.

Everyone in their own vehicle should be fairly straightforward, but that rarely comes up and you'd probably have to force it. There the problem is likely ensuring that the skills for controlling a vehicle are also relevant outside of a vehicle.

Even with everyone in their own vehicles or the like, oftentimes it isn't fun or certainly isn't straightforward.

At least unless the vehicle type is relatively analogous to an individual, just on a different scale (one reason why tanks and mecha are common). If you can move, attack, and the primary tactical values are flanking and numbers and such, then a lot of typical gamist abstractions (such as one side acts while the other stays relatively frozen, excepting maybe some prescribed 'reaction' effects) will work.

If the vehicle type is something more like a jet fighter, well then a lot of abstractions don't work or are harder to make work. Think of all the RPGs that have trouble making pure mobility actually combat useful -- such as flying dragon or mounted combat rules where sure you can fly-by/ride-by charge every-other turn or the like and the other melee types might not get good reprisals, but then the archers show up and all that time wheeling and turning is just more rounds you get peppered to death. For that, you kind of need specialized rules best fit to that.

Which is why I've found wargame like car wars or various (usually space) dogfight systems do vehicle combat the best, and most RPGs (where the vehicle combat is usually just slight modification of existing inter-character rules) don't do so well either in making the vehicle combats realistic, or interesting.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, I game with James M of Grognardia, and it is weird how a lot of people have morphed the concept of the OSR to no longer include ANY old-school games (many even claim that classic D&D isn't OSR, it is old school, but playing it is not part of any "revival" or "renaissance")... There's this weird "D&D-compatible" purity test that is the key to the OSR now, and a lot of the original OSR people who were playing classic games have been pushed out the door (James runs our weekly Empire of the Petal Throne campaign).

Well, there's a distinction you can find between OS and OSR in some places, but even the former sometimes seems to be treated like D&D Or Nothing, which makes no sense at all.

 

[Celebrim]

That's one of the biggest problems. The pilot obviously has a lot they can do with choosing where the vehicle goes, how fast it's going, maybe even being able to fire a weapon, etc., etc., but when you're a crewmember or a passenger there's typically not much for you to do. Rogue Trader from Fantasy Flight Games (based on Warhammer 40k) allowed multiple players to participate in ship-to-ship combat, but often there was only one thing for them to do every round. The priest in our group pretty much just rolled the same skill check every single round and was both tedious and repetitive.

I'd say that is the key problem, and this touches a little bit on why tactical skirmish combat is almost always the only effective core RPG play.

The problem is more specifically that though the characters who are not the "Master & Commander" of the vehicle often have a lot to do, the players of those characters do not. Except for whomever is in command, no player has any interesting choices to make. The character may have a lot of interesting choices to make in hectically routing and allocating power to systems, or bolstering and configuring shields, or performing damage control or whatever, but from the player's perspective (as you observed) they are just rolling a dice every round - often the same dice. When you aren't making choices, you don't have any agency and so above the age where the card game "War" is fun, you probably aren't having fun.

Now I've seen this problem solved in elegant ways in video games - most notably in 'Puzzle Pirates' and 'Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime' - where every crew member has their own engaging, hectic, time constrained tasks to perform, but some aesthetics from real time video games are just difficult or impossible to port into a tabletop RPG. Without time constraints and sensation aesthetics, minigames created for specific crew tasks aren't likely to be engaging in the long run. They'll likely just be fiddly math to figure out the 'right' thing to do and a die roll to do it.

Maybe even worse, you run into the problem that cooperative board games often have, where in practice you rarely have real collective decision making and instead one dominant personality makes the decisions and is effectively playing all the characters. Afterall, whomever is making the tactical decisions about where to go probably is basing that decision on the expectation of certain resources being available and deployed in certain ways and certain actions being taken. And so once that decision is made, it's often strongly implied and heavily constrained as to what everyone else is going to do.

It turns out that tactical skirmish combat is "special". It has some properties that turn out to be almost unique and that trying to develop different pillars of gameplay is very hard or maybe impossible (in that nearly 50 years into tRPG game design no one has done it).

The only ways I've ever made vehicles remotely interesting is just make the vehicle effectively the platform on which tactical skirmish combat is conducted. For example, in my Star Wars campaign, the most commonly employed vehicle is a large open topped land speeder. One person drives while everyone else engages in what is effectively ordinary combat - typically against parties in other open land speeders. Only one person is controlling the vehicle, and he has the option to stick a pistol out the window (as it where) and engage in combat as well as control the craft, but everyone else is in a normal fight including the possibility of melee boarding actions. For an example of this being reasonably well done, see Season 2, Episode 7 of The Mandalorian ("The Believer") with the party engaged in combat on a rolling bomb.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This has always bothered me a lot. The most challenging design in tabletop gaming is probably making joint operation of a vehicle interesting. I've never seen it done and it makes me wonder if it can be done.

I've seen a couple cases that didn't seem bad to me; the original Star Trek game was one; Fragged Empire is another. Some people still don't like because its a collective thing, but I think they at least involved everyone in it.

Everyone in their own vehicle should be fairly straightforward, but that rarely comes up and you'd probably have to force it. There the problem is likely ensuring that the skills for controlling a vehicle are also relevant outside of a vehicle.

Mecha RPGs are the commonest where you'll see the individual vehicles, though the old Pacesetter Star Ace also pushed that one.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's another problem. I find vehicle combat in most RPGs to be far too abstract to be any fun. FFG's Star Wars ship-to-ship combat is terribly dull and it shouldn't be! Of course another problem is that most characters can either be good at doing stuff outside the ship, inside the ship, or kind of mediocre in both places. We're often encouraged to hyperspecialize in RPGs.

Fragged Empire addressed this by siloing the resources it gives; you have personal combat, vehicular combat, and non-combat. The impact of some of the last impacted the first two, but at the end of the day, you were going to spend Trait slots on the first two no matter what at some point.

 

[J.Quondam]

Something as integral to the human experience as storytelling is not the sole territory of self-proclaimed "expert" gatekeepers.
No matter what you read in Save the Cat.