Unpopular opinions go here

[aramis erak]

BOOOOOO!!! HISSSSSSSS!!!

«Howard Cosell voice» And we see here Dannyaalcatraz's attempts to speak bug!

 

[innerdude]

And unlike the great dearth of indie clones of all kinds of systems, that suffer the exact same problem, DND has a great dearth of people who are compelled to play it for reasons beyond its actual worthiness, and so it has a considerable dearth of disgruntled people in its audience that get sent a gruntling to other games that, surely, coincidentally were developed as responses to DND.

Dearth:
1: scarcity that makes dear
specifically : FAMINE

2: an inadequate supply : LACK

For clarity, did you mean to use "dearth" in the quoted sentences above?

Did you rather intend to convey one of its opposites, e.g., "abundance," "variety," "smorgasbord," "assortment," "multiplicity," "many," etc.?

For indeed, why would it be problematic for DND to have a "great [LACK or INADEQUATE SUPPLY] of people who are compelled to play it for reasons beyond its actual worthiness"? That would seem to be a good thing. It would seem to be much more problematic for DND to have "a great ABUNDANCE of people who are compelled to play it for reasons beyond its actual worthiness".

 

[Emberashh]

Dearth:
1: scarcity that makes dear
specifically : FAMINE

2: an inadequate supply : LACK

For clarity, did you mean to use "dearth" in the quoted sentences above?

Did you rather intend to convey one of its opposites, e.g., "abundance," "variety," "smorgasbord," "assortment," "multiplicity," "many," etc.?

For indeed, why would it be problematic for DND to have a "great [LACK or INADEQUATE SUPPLY] of people who are compelled to play it for reasons beyond its actual worthiness"? That would seem to be a good thing. It would seem to be much more problematic for DND to have "a great ABUNDANCE of people who are compelled to play it for reasons beyond its actual worthiness".

Huh, go figure. Apparently everytime Ive heard the word it was being used wrong. Or perhaps I completely misread the context. Either way, learned something new.

 

[Autumnal]

Mentioning your bachelor’s degree as part of any appeal to authority is 9 out of 10 times next to worthless.

I’m now reminded of my all-time favorite example of this, on Usenet in the 1990s. A guy was holding forth in one of the sf newsgroups on how women just can’t write decently hard sf, with a strong implication that they were biologically disadvantaged more than subject to strong cultural pressures. Unfortunately for him, one of his examples was Cat Asaro and her Skolian Empire series of space opera romances. He cited some particular bit of obviously bad science, just the kind of thing a woman wouldn’t think to check….

He didn’t realize she’d been a regular in the sf groups for a long time. Or that he was discussing the work of Dr. Catherine Asaro. Or that she’s got her doctorate in chemical physics. Or that the bit he was snickering at was a direct outgrowth of her dissertation research, which she’d been wanting to extrapolate on for a story.

And that was about the end of that thread.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

GURPS is best played when all the optional rules are enabled. Even the ones that contradict one another.

We found Steve Jackson, everybody!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's been ongoing in the community for like 30 years.

You need to keep company with less-crappy gamers, then. You don't need that kind of hostility in your life.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You need to keep company with less-crappy gamers, then. You don't need that kind of hostility in your life.

that was comment, on an on-line forum, about the on-line community

(OK, and a reference to the September that Never Ended)

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would say how you cast a spell is core rules. But if you have a simple mechanism for casting a spell, and then a list of spells put elsewhere in the book, I treat that differently because you don't have to read and memorize every spell to play the game. You do have to read and memorize rules like how to cast a spell. I will say, how involved individual spells are, matters a lot. One reason I like white box's approach for D&D, and would consider it on the lighter end, is, vague though it is, the spells are generally very easy to deploy as you look them up on the fly (contrast that with 2e or 3e where the spells take a lot more time to read and use in the middle of a game).

Sure. As I commented before, you can have very simple spells that have a very limited cognitive load. If there wasn't some idiosyncratic use of range and duration, most people using RuneQuest battle magic could probably look at a spell they'd learned once and never again, and you weren't going to have that many typically unless you were a heavy specialist in it.

But that makes it a light magic system, not a magic system that isn't part of the core rules. The only things you can argue are not core rules are things that are effectively optional rules or subsystems and set out as such.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sure. As I commented before, you can have very simple spells that have a very limited cognitive load. If there wasn't some idiosyncratic use of range and duration, most people using RuneQuest battle magic could probably look at a spell they'd learned once and never again, and you weren't going to have that many typically unless you were a heavy specialist in it.

But that makes it a light magic system, not a magic system that isn't part of the core rules. The only things you can argue are not core rules are things that are effectively optional rules or subsystems and set out as such.

I get that but what I mean is I am not counting each individual spell in that case as something that weighs down the system more. If each spell is relatively simple to read and deploy, what matters to me in terms of system weight is how complex the actual casting system is

 

[MichaelSomething]

I get that but what I mean is I am not counting each individual spell in that case as something that weighs down the system more. If each spell is relatively simple to read and deploy, what matters to me in terms of system weight is how complex the actual casting system is

I would like to note that many arguments for spells not making a game rule heavy can also apply to 4E powers.