Unpopular opinions go here

[Micah Sweet]

If you don't mind people discarding characters they don't want, you're one of the very few people who are big fans of random rolls I've seen who are like that; I've seen any number of people who considered it tantamount to cheating.

Give them to me. I've got a new NPC, and you can roll up a new one.

 

[overgeeked]

Games are meant to be played. That’s what they’re for. Not playing a game is like leaving a children’s toy in the box.

 

[Gradine]

Oh man, and don't even get me started on Rumpelstiltskin.

 

[pemerton]

I'd consider updating Geas/Quest to just "you can't benefit from a long rest until you have completed the terms"

..."just"

I just think that fetch quests are the lowest form of RPGing, and Geas/Quest is the lowest form of fetch quest.

 

[pemerton]

There's an active thread right now about what constitutes a narrative rule. I provide my personal definition on page 1. Any game which relies heavily on such rules is what I mean by a narrative game.

And in what manner does Classic Traveller rely on such rules?

 

[Reynard]

It is the players' responsibility to create characters with motivations that lead to adventure.

 

[MGibster]

It is the players' responsibility to create characters with motivations that lead to adventure.

One of my mantras as a GM is that it is the responsibility of the players to make appropriate characters for the campaign.

Years ago I tried running a Blue Planet campaign. BP is science fiction where humans have settled a plant 98% covered in water that you get through by going through a wormhole near Pluto. Anyway, I assigned monthly incomes to each crew member based on their occupation with the PCs playing the doctor and engineer being paid the most. It's not like I just pulled this out of my blowhole, there was a chart showing the average income for various occupations.

One player decided to make a private detecting sort, which I could work with because the expedition would have someone to handle security. The player saw that a private detective could so many credits per day and used that to calculate how much he thought his PC should get per month. I disagreed, arguing that while the daily rate a private dick charges is high, he's unlikely to have steady work and may go a whole week without a paying client. But the player just kept pestering me and I refused to budge. Finally he said, "I don't know why my character would ever leave Earth." And that's when I told him: "It's your responsibilty to make a character that fits into the campaign."

 

[Lanefan]

That's a different story; the specifics I was referring to were "You've failed to learn anything but marginally useful spells up through fifth level, but people are still expected to take you with them on adventures."

I get this, but the solutions are twofold: get the wizard some better spells (there's so many good ones, he can't possibly fail them all!), or run him out and hire another one.

Like post-Greyhawk characters who's attribute dice betrayed them and made them just substandard across the board, that's the sort of thing that just leads people to swordbushing (and GMs getting soggy about it).

Swordbushing? New term for the day, for me anyway.

 

[Lanefan]

If you don't mind people discarding characters they don't want, you're one of the very few people who are big fans of random rolls I've seen who are like that; I've seen any number of people who considered it tantamount to cheating.

I'm the same as Micah - if a character isn't working out you're always free to retire it and roll up something new (at slightly lower level, just like any other replacement character). I've done this with various characters that, on running them for a while, just didn't work out in play the way I thought they would.

The retired character does remain part of the setting, however, and always belongs to you in case for whatever reason you want to bring it back in later.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, I don't like that. It doesn't feel like making a tough choice to me. It feels like being arbitrarily limited for no reason. Nothing in any AD&D or D&D lore that I can think of explains why such a thing would happen. It's not like in, say, the Cypher system where you're limited to carrying three Cyphers because they're filled with strange energies that react badly to each other or that are dangerous to you if you carry more than that number. It's not like in the Discworld novels, where large concentrations of magic can cause the books to come alive and potentially eat you. Instead, the limit is purely for meta-reasons, because otherwise the wizard would be stronger than the fighter.

The brain-bucket, as quantified by one's Int score, is only so big and can only hold so much.