Unpopular opinions go here

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That’s not necessarily a good thing for the hobby or industry. The OGL ensured that D&D would maintain its strangle hold on both. Not that they would continue to exist. RPGs won’t suddenly die if D&D dies. Even before the OGL.

That’s giving wildly too much credit to Dancey. RPGs would continue to exist with or without his efforts. He made sure D&D would continue regardless of whether the company owning it continued to exist. RPGs as a hobby and industry would keep going regardless.

Dancey also made sure that a zillion people became game designers and helped create the modern D&D boom that brought a lot more gamers in the door. Inevitably, many of them went on to do other things, but there's just more people in the space, both as players and designers, than before.

Without Dancey, we would have a much smaller game industry, with fewer games, and they'd probably be much more insular than they are.

 

[CleverNickName]

1) Having both ability scores and modifiers is redundant. Pick one or the other.

2) Hit points are just pointless extra maths to determine how many times you can get hit before falling unconscious...so just skip the maths and list the number of hits you can take.

3) Most monster design is backasswards. Filling hundreds of books with hundreds of pages of stat blocks is an absolute waste of time and money. Designing monsters as relative to the PCs' power or a simple chart for basic stats would save a lot of space and is infinitely more flexible.

4) A superhero fantasy game is a wonderful idea. D&D's game system is absolutely terrible at delivering that kind of play.

5) 4E is the best designed edition of D&D WotC ever produced. It has the best lore, the best monster design, the best DM advice, the best class balance, the best use of non-combat magic, the best system for non-combat encounters, on and on and on. It's only flaws are that combat takes too long and that skill challenges needed a few more revisions before publication.

6) B/X is the best designed edition of D&D TSR ever produced.

7) D&D's almost always reliable magic is boring. Games with rolling for magic are much more exciting. Games like DCC and WFRP do magic better.

8) The response "you have infinite dragons" is just a useless thing to say. You might as well say "you have infinite rocks." To say either entirely misses the point.

9) RPGs are not story-generating games. Most are incredibly bad at creating stories. Even the dedicated storygames are generally bad at generating story.

10) Railroading is literally the worst thing you can do as a referee. Railroading is the negation of player agency.

Counterpoint, overgeeked Edition
1, 4, 8) That is an excellent point.
2) I can see your point, but I don't want to play a game with a "number of hits you can take" system.
3) Agree. I'd rather have a toolkit and a handful of examples.
5) I agree with the "lore" part of your statement, and strongly disagree with everything else.
6) As much as I love BECM, I agree with this statement. The two aren't terribly different, though.
7) I thought I was the only one who felt this way!
9) Strong disagree.
10) I'll respond with an even less popular opinion: Player agency isn't as important as some people think. In fact, most of the time it's entirely an illusion. It's purely theater.

 

[CleverNickName]

1) Alignments are actually a cool idea but people have bad experiences from bad mechanics or their misuse(or have heard horror stories) and don't want to bother trying again, honestly there just needs a clear definitive explaination for what defines each one and people need to stop applying their own definitions or assuming they already know what they mean by what they're called.
ps: evil player characters aren't the problem you think they are, problem players can be awful in any alignment but they just abuse evil's sterotypes to be more blatant about their awfulness, it's not evil's fault.

2) Species based ASI actually make sense and should be included in their default stats, and they're not actually inherently racist because species aren't actually races, people just make them racist by making comparisons to real world peoples.

3) The standard adventuring day is functionally 24 hours for most groups and fullcasters' slots need to be reballanced around their use over that duration, i say just wholesale cut them directly in half.

4) Wizards ought to have 90% of their levelled offensive magic removed and be turned into the magic toolbox utility caster.

Edit: i don't know any of the lore, the most i know is that the outer planes all exist on a ring or something, and i don't really care about learning any of it either.

Counterpoint, CreamCloud0 Edition
1) This is probably the truth.
1a) This is also probably the truth.
2) I understand the theory, but I entirely disagree. I actually have to avoid this topic in the EN World forums now, because it's bad for my blood pressure.
3) Sounds good to me.
4) I'd go a step further and just replace all "full caster" classes with a single class called Mage.

 

[Fifinjir]

Star Wars is an incomprehensible mess of mutually contradictory ideas smooshed together in a way that only highlights their incompatibility. I still love it for some reason, but let’s call a spade a spade.

Also, we need to break free of the Galactic Empire era. Currently I haven’t seen anything from the High Republic that has grabbed my attention, but I still want to give the project a wad of cash just to say “do more of this”.

 

[overgeeked]

Dancey also made sure that a zillion people became game designers and helped create the modern D&D boom that brought a lot more gamers in the door. Inevitably, many of them went on to do other things, but there's just more people in the space, both as players and designers, than before.

Without Dancey, we would have a much smaller game industry, with fewer games, and they'd probably be much more insular than they are.

Again, giving one person way too much credit. Creative people will create regardless of the circumstances. If they didn't have access to the d20 rules they'd have made their own games. Whether that's better or worse is a matter of preference.

 

[CleverNickName]

Me reading this thread:

 

[Celebrim]

Fine, here's some more:

17) RPG campaigns are stories and stories need to have themes. If I'm taking the trouble of playing a character in a story I want it be about something

I agree with that one, but agree it will provoke some people.

18) Say what you will about Rise of Skywalker, but the whole astral-projection lightsaber duel in the... I guess the first third act? or second second act?... anyway, is one of the coolest damn things I've ever seen in a Star War.

So about that. This actually pertains really well to my previous claim that story focused RPGs make bad stories but good scenes. I explicitly compared using a story focused RPG to try to create a story to making a JJ Abrams movie. Like everyone using the techniques popularized by "Bad Robot", JJ Abrams makes great scenes, but those scenes seldom add up to a good story. And really the whole sequels are filled with that. My favorite moment in the sequels (admittedly not Abrams, but the technique is similar) is the temptation to the dark side scene in TLJ where Kylo Ren is like, "you're nothing, but not to me". That's a really well-done scene that in different context would be powerful, but if you pull back just even the slightest bit, you start thinking, "Like literally just a few hours ago she watched you murder your own father that she had in like 30 minutes basically adopted as her own father, and then you tried to kill her. This seduction scene however well done it is, doesn't make sense in the context of the story being told." Stories require scenes to hang together and follow logically from what has gone before. Story games too often prioritize the needs of the scene and take advantage of the slow pacing and long form storytelling inherent to RPGs to kind of sweep under the rug that none of it makes sense. You end up with that fast pacing of a JJ Abrams movie where big dramatic things are always happening but none of it makes sense in context or really gives time for themes to develop.

19) Character death almost always kills more dramatic tension than it causes. True in fiction and in TTRPGs.

I really hate when players screw up because it kills so many aesthetics. But the only thing worse than a character death that kills the story is the protagonist repeatedly doing dumbs things that should get them killed and there never being any real tension with whether they will survive it. Why can't players really be big darn heroes?

 

[Reynard]

Again, giving one person way too much credit. Creative people will create regardless of the circumstances. If they didn't have access to the d20 rules they'd have made their own games. Whether that's better or worse is a matter of preference.

And as Shannon Applecline's "Designers and Dragons: The 00s" shows, many designs saw the light of day as a response to d20 or because of the bust. d20 did not kill RPG design innovation, it enabled it.

 

[J.Quondam]

Oh, man, the chess weirdos are going to be coming for you now.

"No, not speed chess," they said, correcting me. "Speedo chess."

 

[CleverNickName]

Last one, and then I've gotta get back to work.

Fine.

1) Gygax gets too much credit for the early success and growth of D&D. It was a team effort and other people deserve more acknowledgement, with Weis/Hickman right at the top of the list.

2) WotCs reluctance to include narrative control mechanics beyond the very anaemic Inspiration system in D&D is a decrepit relic of last-century game design and should be forcibly turfed.

3) There is no faster way to get me to ignore your new RPG and/or D&D setting than by touting it as 'dark fantasy', unless you also go with 'Norse-inspired'. The Vikings horse is dead, stop beating it.

4) A lot of the material for old classic TSR settings is utter pants and WotC is entirely correct in believing that it needs major retcons. TSR had a massive volume of output, which led to them producing a lot of gold in those years. But by law of averages they also produced a lot of dross which people forget about when looking back at Dark Sun or Ravenloft or Planescape or whatever through nostalgia goggles.

5) D&D giants are boring, and their elemental affinities are forced and unimaginative. They should have been retconned wholesale in one of the recent-edition lore rewrites.

6) The Next Big Thing on the D&D culture wars front will be the barbarian.

Counterpoint, humble minion Edition
1-4) Hard agree.
5) Agree with the "retconned wholesale" part, but disagree with everything else.
6) I don't see myself having a strong opinion one way or another about the Barbarian class. I think that Barbarian should be a subclass of Fighter, but that's as far as I can follow.