Unpopular opinions go here

[deganawida]

There's no surfeit of good settings.

Well, then, I suppose that I have finally fulfilled the purpose of this thread, which is to share one of my unpopular opinions

 

[CleverNickName]

Vanilla ice cream is the best flavor of ice cream.
It's so good they put it in everything. In fact, most other ice cream flavors wouldn't even taste right without at least some vanilla in the mix.


So if campaign settings are like ice cream...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yards work pretty close to "strides", so TotM you can think of yards as how many steps (at a reasonable speed) it takes to get places.

I'm not sure that changes it much. If you want to do a zone based area/movement system, you need to define things in zones. (Or forget the whole thing the way, say, 13th Age or Atomic Highway does).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I can't offer any useful conjectures about the alternative history.

But when I look at the AD&D PHB, here is what the cleric and paladin have in common: heavily armed and armoured, miracle workers, heal with a touch, drive off the undead and other evil spirits, all in the name of the divinity.

How do they differ? Purely in mechanical detail, and the paladin's alignment strictures are even more tightly specified than the clerics. And the rules have room for anti-clerics (who can use poison, create and command the undead, and rot flesh with a touch), but anti-paladins can (and have been) built around the same principles.

My note about the specificity was about the OD&D version (as I was gone by the AD&D period), and the extremely specific things present regarding the non-spell Detect Evil, the mount, the holy sword and a couple of other things. These so clearly matched up with a rather specific fictional character (though some overlapping with others) it does not strike me as at all a coincidence.

 

[overgeeked]

A character without a goal is a waste of paper.

 

[MGibster]

The very curated world we create is for us as DMs not the players.

This is definitely true. Which is why I don't put a lot of effort into anything that doesn't have much of an impact on the game. I was running a post apocalyptic game set in Little Rock, and one of my players started asking me all sorts of questions about demographics. What was the population? How many men, women, and children? How do they feed themselves? And as I kept answer her questions she finally asked, "You're just making all of this up as I ask, aren't you?" And the answer was yes.

 

[Autumnal]

Why not?

No very deep reason. Prior to this, I’ve only heard from people using it for hardcore dungeoneering, and they made it sound like it was laser-like focused on that. I know someone willing to let me look at their copies of Torchbearer and Burning Wheel, and I’ll take them up on it.

I blame you.

I used to believe that. Now I believe that the perfect game is one I have modified myself.

Now this is a thing that makes me happily agree.

 

[MGibster]

Bards should have been placed in an appendix, and then we should have performed an appendectomy.

Who was the Bard that hurt you to make you hate them so?

 

[Jd Smith1]

A character without a goal is a waste of paper.

Not if the player is enjoying himself. Sometimes hookers and beer is all the motivation a PC needs.

 

[MGibster]

For a game like D&D, "all" you'd need to do is remake the classes. People expect combat when half the classes are designed around combat and the other half have access to combat abilities. Just come up with new class ideas where combat is a distant third.

All the classes are designed around combat. Some of them might be useful outside of combat, but each and every one of them is designed for a fight.

No, there’s just a surfeit of material. I’m not saying remove it, just stop producing so much. It’s fantasy. Make new worlds! New peoples! That’s all I’m saying. As with all my other posts in this thread, this is my opinion only.

I believe D&D is so popular in part because the majority of the player base has cultural touchstones with Europe in a way that they don't with Asia, South America, or Africa. While we've seen several Kickstarters like Coyote & Crow and, shoot, names are escaping me at the moment, that have been successful, even winning awards, I don't know how many people are actually playing them.