Unpopular opinions go here

[Reynard]

Only 5e ones. Many osr or free league adventures take little prep

Any time I have to adjust a module to fit my group it is more work than if I just ran it on the fly.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Rotflmao.

I’m sorry but no version of DnD had ever made the slightest sense when it comes to economy.

So what? Does that invalidate the concern?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then you dont want to play dnd

Not WotC D&D, certainly. But players do ask these kinds of questions, and that means I want a answer for them that makes sense. My preferred OSR game, ACKS, is based on that idea, and there's no reason other games in the D&D family couldn't do the same. Regardless of the game, the answer is prep.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Many sci-fi settings use some flavor of universal translator system to make their multitude of discrete languages irrelevant 90% of the time.

Name a setting other than Star Trek that uses a universal translator (and HGttG doesn't count, as they point out for ridiculously convenient the Babel Fish is).

 

[payn]

Unpopular Opinion AND a hill I will die on: running a pre-written adventure, especially an adventure path or campaign length adventure, is significantly more work that homebrewing. Adventures don't save time or work and a 10 page campaign overview would be of more use than a 200 page adventure.

Related: "prep" is far less important than familiarity with the system for the GM to run an enjoyable game.

Unpopular opinion to unpopular opinion; I like doing that extra work. I think part of making a module and/or AP great is on the GM and not the material alone. Also, the shared experience allows hundreds and thousands of GMs to share ideas to make even badly written adventures great ones.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Colour me unpopular. I've long been in the (seemingly small) camp of let the modifiers override the dice roll. As I played a lot of GURPS and HERO, with their skill checks made on 3d6, I got very used to most rolls falling into a small range that was easily overshadowed by modifiers.

In a similar vein, I immediately loved the Take10 and Take 20 rules from 3e DnD. Dice rolls are for schmucks.

I don't mind them weighing in heavily, but I don't think they should make the roll moot. And I'm an old Hero (and to a lesser degree) GURPS hand, too. But I'll admit I'd rather the roll mean too little than too much (one of the reasons I'm not entirely fond of D20 or D100 resolution any more).

 

[Thomas Shey]

For the next five sessions, unrelenting? Because that's the scenario @Hussar seemed to think was reasonable. Also, if you're going somewhere where you can't speak to the locals, how about a little prep?

When you head out to an area that doesn't share languages with where you come from, you're not exactly likely to turn around and go back immediately, so, yes, that doesn't seem a particularly far-out scenario.

A lot of it depends on how stingy you are with languages in the first place, and how fussy you are about which ones people take. If most people are going to only have 1 or 2 local languages, I don't find it an unlikely situation at all, unless they rarely travel out of the local area--and if that's the case the languages are unlikely to matter in the first place.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Heck, it wasn't that long ago that even a fairly geographically small area like England would have several different languages spoken, none of which can communicate with each other. French, English, Celtic, Latin and I'm sure there were more. Documents would be in French, Latin or English and, again, probably more. "Speak to the locals"? Locals means "someone who lives within about a hundred mile diameter circle". Anyone outside of that circle? New language time.

And we won't even mention Welsh and Gaelic (of which there were two somewhat different versions).

(Of course having languages be entirely sharp-line divisions isn't particularly realistic anyway (ask Spanish and Italian speakers), but if I recall your profession I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.)

 

[Reynard]

Unpopular opinion to unpopular opinion; I like doing that extra work. I think part of making a module and/or AP great is on the GM and not the material alone. Also, the shared experience allows hundreds and thousands of GMs to share ideas to make even badly written adventures great ones.

Example: Dragon heist. Terrible adventure. Great toolkit.

 

[MGibster]

Unlike a procedural TV show, games have the unique capacity to make language barriers repetitively interesting by way of gamification.

I think you could write a pretty decent set of stories about first contact that included trying to figure out how to effectively communicate with one another. I'm sure you could make a decent game about it too. But I'm not sure it's a game I'd be interested in playing very often.

I still think my previous post on this is a way forward on a nice middleground that properly gamifies language without making it a chore or an overdeveloped part of the game.

I am not a badwrongfun kind of a guy, if that's your bag then I wish you all the best.

I always put that down to each show being only an hour long; they had to skip all that stuff but the assumption was it still happened, as even with a universal translator there's going to be misunderstandings before communication becomes smooth.

Eh, that's not how it works in the fiction though. It would be trivially easy to include at least one scene showing that's how the translator works but it isn't. The only time language barriers come up in Star Trek is when the writers specifically want it to. Like that inexplicably popular TNG episdoe "Darmok" or in Strange New Worlds where the translator was imprecise.