Unpopular opinions go here

[Scribe]

'Strong" isn't a personality.

No, but being strong, to the point of it being ones primary stat, would likely impact how one approaches various problems or scenarios no?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Totally disagree! I was out hunting in the woods a few weeks back and shot an Oxford comma. Mounted that sucker over the mantle.

Well, I hope you weren't hunting in Maine.

As much as people joke about the Oxford comma, the failure to punctuate correctly has repeatedly cost companies millions of dollars.

If you're writing on the internet, feel free to emoji away. If you're writing for something that matters ... you might want to use proper punctuation- especially given the increasingly textualist approach that we have been seeing in 'Murikah.

 

[Reynard]

No, but being strong, to the point of it being ones primary stat, would likely impact how one approaches various problems or scenarios no?

Maybe, but people are complex and if we let "strong" be a personality trait, we end up in cardboard cutout character territory pretty quickly. I prefer RPG characters to be as real and three dimensional and human (not necessarily in the species sense) as possible.

 

[Jd Smith1]

A character's attributes should have a lot of influence in how you roleplay them.

Should, but rarely does. Ditto for race in fantasy games. IME, most players use the same personality in every game.

 

[Aldarc]

The secret menu? Yeah, totally. The bog-standard burger & fries? Sublime

Either way, I wasn't that impressed to be honest. It's good. I like it. But I've definitely had better at other burger joints.

A character's attributes should have a lot of influence in how you roleplay them.

I think that attributes should give insight into how a player actively interacts with the world. This is where I think that attributes like "Constitution" fall short. They tend to be more passive in that regard.

 

[MGibster]

Sure. if the game has Kindness as an attribute, it's going to impact the character's personality in one way or another (though not necessarily in an obvious way). But most game use some sort of quantifiable quality like Agility or IQ or whatever, and those don't say much about personality.

Some games have statistics like Willpower, Cool, and Wisdom. And I said the stats should have a lot of inflence in how you roleplay your character not that it was the only determination. A character with a high intelligence and wisdom is probably going to have a different personality from one with a low inteligence and wisdom score.

 

[MGibster]

Either way, I wasn't that impressed to be honest. It's good. I like it. But I've definitely had better at other burger joints.

For a fast food joint, they make a pretty good burger. I think a lot of people have their preferences based on where they grew up. I really like Whataburger, but that's because I spent a lot of time in Texas.

 

[Reynard]

Some games have statistics like Willpower, Cool, and Wisdom. And I said the stats should have a lot of inflence in how you roleplay your character not that it was the only determination. A character with a high intelligence and wisdom is probably going to have a different personality from one with a low inteligence and wisdom score.

Probably, but not necessarily in a predictable way. I guess I am saying that I agree with the idea that your natural traits will inform your behavior to some degree, but how and to what degree are so uncertain as to make it essentially unimportant. Of course, in most games, attributes (especially the mental ones) are so fuzzy as to be nearly useless in trying to assess much. Wisdom in D&D, for example, doesn't seem to have much to do with what we might call wisdom today, which is based primarily upon applying experience.

Insert tomato gif here.

 

[Aldarc]

For a fast food joint, they make a pretty good burger. I think a lot of people have their preferences based on where they grew up. I really like Whataburger, but that's because I spent a lot of time in Texas.

Sure, but I think that's the underlying point into why I think that places like In-and-Out tend to be overrated. California has a lot of cultural clout and a big population to hype it up. However, it's mostly an above average burger and fries for me.

 

[overgeeked]

The vast majority of RPG characters are not even well-rounded enough to become two-dimensional, to say nothing of three-dimensional.

A quote from Pulp Hero on the topic that perfectly encapsulates my nearly 40 years of experience gaming.

“Hand-in-hand with the “action” convention is the fact that Pulp characters are shallow, clichéd, and poorly developed. In an action-oriented story, there’s little (if any) time for the hero to ruminate about how he feels, or what the events in the tale mean to him; he’s got things to do! Even the best-known Pulp heroes — characters like the Shadow and Doc Savage about whom hundreds of stories were written — aren’t much more than collections of easily-identifiable personality traits, quirks, mannerisms, and habits, possibly coupled with one or more distinctive elements of appearance that makes them easy to write and read about.

This is the other thing that makes Pulp so wonderfully gameable. The description of Pulp characters given above could apply word-for-word to the vast majority of gaming characters. Most roleplaying games, including the HERO System, require you to create characters through various attributes and traits defined by the rules. It’s a more elaborate, and sometimes “scientific,” process, than how a writer for the pulps worked, but the end result is the same: a character who’s really not a character so much as he is a characterization — a collection of traits that identify him and let him take action, and not much more. In short: RPGs are ideally suited for creating Pulp-style characters.” (Pulp Hero, p10)