Unpopular opinions go here

[Aldarc]

A player playing a human in an RPG is likely to be playing an actual individual. But a player playing an elf is almost certainly playing one of three standard "elf" archetypes.

And a player playing a gnome is almost certainly playing one standard "gnome" archetype!

 

[Jd Smith1]

Modules are the worst thing that ever happened to RPGs.

Many are awful. But they are a welcome aid to GMing, and back in the late 70s, they taught me how to GM.

 

[aramis erak]

See: WHFRP dwarves

Or Dark Sun Halflings and Thri-kreen.

 

[aramis erak]

To be fair, Dracula being royalty-free is why pretty much every RPG had vampires long before the Mythos stuff ever started to spread...

2 years isn't long... Mind Flayers are in Eldritch Wizardy (D&D sup III) of 1976... and HPL's works mostly went out of copyright before D&D was written.

 

[cavalier973]

“Castle Mistamere” is a better introductory adventure than “Keep on the Borderlands”.

 

[cavalier973]

On the other hand, “Keep on the Borderlands” is a better introductory adventure than “Castle Mistamere”.

The advantage of Mistamere is that it starts the party in the dungeon (well, just outside it). The DM doesn’t have to read pages of text about how many pieces of silver the tailor has hidden in a sock under his mattress. He goes straight into, “You see a crumbling castle; there are doors lying on the ground in front of it. A monster attacks!”

The advantage of Keep is that the DM is expected to use his brain, and figure things out. He must pay attention to the map key, and figure out how long it will take the adventuring party to reach the caves of chaos, and whether or not the party will get lost on the way there. It sets up an expectation that the players have options. Maybe they take out the monsters in the valley piecemeal, but maybe they head south into the swamps, instead, or maybe they try to loot the keep, and steal everyone’s socks.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The spellcasting system in Ars Magica/Mage: Word that Starts With the Letter A is vastly superior to what's going on in any D&D-derived fantasy game, but it feels like it would hog the spotlight if it was dropped in alongside the already unhappy martial class players in D&D. It'd be a hell of a lot more interesting, though.

Its absolutely a problem balancing out powerful magic systems and characters who don't do magic. Of course with Ars Magica and things like Mage, they don't really try; everyone is a mage.

There are ways to at least somewhat balance it out, but it requires either weaker magic or a willingness to provide methods for non-mages to exhibit pretty high end abilities, and neither of those seems to be generally okay with fairly big parts of D&D fandom.

 

[deganawida]

White Wolf, and then Onyx Path, actually made phenomenal settings. It was just the rules that didn’t quite gel. Exalted is daunting, for example.

 

[overgeeked]

RPGs are games. It’s okay to let them be games.

 

[Pedantic]

RPGs are games. It’s okay to let them be games.

I'd be a lot more amenable to that position if they were good games. Most of what people point to as examples of game forward mechanics in RPGs are basically roll-to-move equivalents dressed up a little.