Unpopular opinions go here

[Celebrim]

So much of both the tedious bookkeeping and the analysis paralysis of D&D combat centers around tracking how many times you can do cool things and figuring out whether it's worth it to spend those times in any given situation, and the most boring level up features are all about slightly increasing the number of times you can do cool things, and the worst rated classes and subclasses are there primarily because they don't get enough uses of their cool stuff.

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

One person's yuck is another person's yum. One person sees constraints as harming the fun. Another person seeing overcoming constraints as the fun. If I don't have to figure out what to do and weigh benefits versus risks, then what's the point? If cool stuff happens all the time, then it's not even cool. It's cool precisely because it isn't routine, but a deliberate choice to accept the big risks that come with doing something splashy because you've assessed this moment is pivotal and it's worth it to go all in.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Even when a game is set where there are actually interesting choices to make in an everyone-is-running-one-vehicle game, you can run into a problem (which can happen with characters doing their own thing or individual vehicles, but is far more severe and common here): other people don't want them making them. Because often another player deciding to do X will make you having done Y less meaningful (or, if they were really not paying attention or not caring, not meaningful at all). This can produce all kinds of less-than-ideal dynamics.

 

[niklinna]

So much of both the tedious bookkeeping and the analysis paralysis of D&D combat centers around tracking how many times you can do cool things and figuring out whether it's worth it to spend those times in any given situation, and the most boring level up features are all about slightly increasing the number of times you can do cool things, and the worst rated classes and subclasses are there primarily because they don't get enough uses of their cool stuff.

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

Well now, an alternative would be to only allow one use of any cool thing, and some refresh on a short rest, some on a long rest. Then everybody would be incentivized to take short rests, and the classes currently dependent on them and shafted when nobody else wants to take a short rest wouldn't be shafted any more.

And you could make short rests a bit shorter, so you could do them after any encounter. And then you would have cool things you can do all the time, cool things you can do once per encounter, and cool things you can do (effectively) once per day.

 

[Celebrim]

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

Traditional turn-based combat doesn't suit vehicles well at all. You have to break the turn down into segments or phases to capture the effects of movement well. And that in turn gets to be fiddly. Even something "simple" as secret simultaneous declaration turns out to be very fiddly. This fiddliess is doubly a problem with flying vehicles where you also have to track and visualize altitude relative to the xy plane.

Even then, it's really easy for turrets to be game breaking, even in games that are trying. I feel for example that the X-Wing miniatures game vastly under-estimates the value of 360-degree turrets. Indeed, I'd say the 'turret' strategy tends to be one of the most game breaking in table top RPGs period, as even with character scale combat often you can just break the game by having a party of missile weapon users treat every tactical situation as the same problem - movement is for suckers, concentrate fire and get 'arrows' on target every round. (This is the actual problem underlying your dragon example.)

In theory biplanes, mecha, jet fighters, speeder bikes, griffin riders and so forth all ought to be really exciting core gameplay for a tRPG, but in practice that's very hard to accomplish.

And switching into Car Wars or Star Fleet Battles to me just doesn't feel like a solution, as I look now on such games as computer programs that someone was trying to run on wetware.

 

[overgeeked]

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

Some people are. If they’re good storytellers. Others not so much. Most info dump a rambling, incoherent mishmash of events with no through line, theme, or plot to speak of.

 

[Reynard]

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.

The super heroism is much closer to the original meaning of the term.

 

[Reynard]

Some people are. If they’re good storytellers. Others not so much. Most info dump a rambling, incoherent mishmash of events with no through line, theme, or plot to speak of.

That's not really what I meant. Folks think "rpgs tell stories" because they retroactively edit the largely chaotic and/or boring events of play into something approaching a coherent narrative. Like we do with history, and our own lives.

 

[overgeeked]

That's not really what I meant. Folks think "rpgs tell stories" because they retroactively edit the largely chaotic and/or boring events of play into something approaching a coherent narrative. Like we do with history, and our own lives.

100%. I’ve said basically the same a few times around here.

 

[Bedrockgames]

That's not really what I meant. Folks think "rpgs tell stories" because they retroactively edit the largely chaotic and/or boring events of play into something approaching a coherent narrative. Like we do with history, and our own lives.

What I have found, just from doing a ton of session logs, is you can tell a good story from game sessions, just like you can tell a good story using with a historical narrative, but you distort what happened by being selective and prioritizing telling a good story.

 

[Gradine]

"Objective quality" is, 10 times out of 10, the subjective preferences of those with enough social capital to be considered "tastemakers".

Furthermore, whether something is "good" or "bad" is both less important and less interesting than liking/not liking something