Unpopular opinions go here

[Theory of Games]

I don't think alignment arguments will do it, but straight-out edition warring will get the moderators in here, throwing red text around and potentially shutting the thread down.

The moderators agree with me! Who wouldn't? WoTC is a trash company that threw real D&D in the trash like Lori threw Gary's stuff in the trash.

 

[MGibster]

That's because Star Wars focuses too much of grand events, whereas most gaming groups operate more along the lines of Firefly.

When it came to Star Wars adventures, West End Games suggested the DM go big or go home. You're not rescuing a rebel agent from a prison island, you're rescuing him prison moon or something.

 

[Umbran]

WoTC is a trash company that threw real D&D in the trash like Lori threw Gary's stuff in the trash.

Mod Note:
I think you will find none of the moderating staff will agree with inflammatory rhetoric. While you can feel how you want about the company, expressing it by leaving a steaming pile in the middle of the boards isn't acceptable.

Dial it back, please.

 

[Celebrim]

When it came to Star Wars adventures, West End Games suggested the DM go big or go home. You're not rescuing a rebel agent from a prison island, you're rescuing him prison moon or something.

If the map for the moon and the island are the same size, they are the same thing.

Star Wars has a bad problem of treating entire planets as one building. When you run Star Wars you have to work to achieve a sense of scale.

"He's somewhere on this moon." is much harder for the PC's to deal with than "He's somewhere on this island." Maybe the island is on a Imperial prison planet that happens to be on the frozen moon of a gas giant, but you still need a way for the players to dial down the scale to something manageable.

 

[MGibster]

You can verify various primary sources against each other. Obviously, a drawback of this style is that it is much more demanding of the researcher, and that there will be times when the record is unclear and you can't comment- and, again, I think Peterson does a great job of saying when the record is incomplete or contradictory.

To me, this is infinitely preferable to relying on people recounting stories after more than forty years. Is it possible that the contemporaneous sources aren't correct? Sure. But the contemporaneous sources have the major advantage of being ... contemporaneous. Unaffected by the passage of time. Of accurately recounting events of that time- as opposed to what people say decades later.

A primary source is a first hand account from someone ( or something) who had a direct connection to the subject. If I interviewed my grandfather in 2012 about his experiences in World War II, even though it had been almost 70 years since the war ended, he would still be considered a primary source. Newspaper articles that include quotes for direct witnesses or photographs, personal letters, diaries, census data, etc., etc. are all primary sources. If I write an email today in 2023 (hello future readers) where I talk about how Americans reacted to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it would still be a primary source because I was a direct witness.

 

[overgeeked]

The real answer is that both techniques should be used together, rather than favoring one over the other.

Exactly.

You can verify various primary sources against each other.

Assuming the researcher is honest, free of bias, and puts in the work to find multiple primary sources. This further assumes those sources exist, are honest, free of bias, and findable.

Obviously, a drawback of this style is that it is much more demanding of the researcher, and that there will be times when the record is unclear and you can't comment- and, again, I think Peterson does a great job of saying when the record is incomplete or contradictory.

Well, you can comment. You use interviews with people who were there. You simply note that they are testimonials taken decades after the fact.

To me, this is infinitely preferable to relying on people recounting stories after more than forty years. Is it possible that the contemporaneous sources aren't correct? Sure. But the contemporaneous sources have the major advantage of being ... contemporaneous. Unaffected by the passage of time. Of accurately recounting events of that time- as opposed to what people say decades later.

This assumes contemporaneous sources are objective. They're not. They're written by the same people who you're worried are biased. That bias doesn't go away simply because of timing or writing it down.

Hindsight is 2020. A lot of things seem amazing at the time only to find out later they're terrible. Pick any one of the thousands (millions?) of ready examples.

Simply put, it is beyond bizarre for someone to say that there is more intrinsic bias in using contemporaneous primary sources than there is in asking people to recount their personal experiences from decades ago.

That would be bizarre. Good thing that's not what I'm saying. But I'm sure you know that.

But again, you can see the advantages of this when you're looking at, inter alia, Game Wizards. It is much more instructive to see how Gygax and Arnerson wrote about each other at that time than it would have been to get an oral history from them 40 years later, when both would have been motivated (to the extent that the accurately recalled all the events) to shade the history in ways that flatter each of them in the present.

As opposed to how they might flatter each other while in a fresh business agreement? That's partially the point. Humans write the primary sources. They're no less biased simply because the information is written down contemporaneously as opposed to spoken, even if years later. Could they could develop a grudge over the intervening years, sure. But they could also have layed it on thick back-in-the-day because they were hopeful of good business dealings.

My point is simply this: information does not become objective simply because it's written down by someone at the time. Read any two history books on the same topic by different authors and you'll quickly discover that there is a lot more...flexibility to how history is presented than most people like to admit. I'm not saying Peterson falsified anything, only that his bias is clear. He favors primary sources to the exclusion of testimonials. You may be fine with that, but it's not a complete history of the topic. As said by dustyboots, you need both primary sources and testimonials to approach something like a complete history of any given topic.

As an aside, I've read history books about the Great War that got the date of Archduke Ferdinand's death wrong. I've read history books about how awesome colonialism is for the colonized. I've read books about the history of Mexico that somehow fail to mention the Mexican-American war. History is only as accurate as the people writing it choose to, or are able to, make it.

Note: We might also be caught up in using "primary sources" in different ways.

 

[overgeeked]

A primary source is a first hand account from someone ( or something) who had a direct connection to the subject. If I interviewed my grandfather in 2012 about his experiences in World War II, even though it had been almost 70 years since the war ended, he would still be considered a primary source. Newspaper articles that include quotes for direct witnesses or photographs, personal letters, diaries, census data, etc., etc. are all primary sources. If I write an email today in 2023 (hello future readers) where I talk about how Americans reacted to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it would still be a primary source because I was a direct witness.

Exactly.

Fun story. I was in German class when the Wall was coming down. The teacher wheeled in a TV and we watched the news live as it was happening.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

A primary source is a first hand account from someone ( or something) who had a direct connection to the subject. If I interviewed my grandfather in 2012 about his experiences in World War II, even though it had been almost 70 years since the war ended, he would still be considered a primary source. Newspaper articles that include quotes for direct witnesses or photographs, personal letters, diaries, census data, etc., etc. are all primary sources. If I write an email today in 2023 (hello future readers) where I talk about how Americans reacted to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it would still be a primary source because I was a direct witness.

In the section you quote, I did not include a "contemporaneous" prior to the "primary." As you can no doubt tell from the emphasis in the second paragraph, I am discussing the salient difference in approaches when someone views contemporaneous primary sources as having more value than later-created primary sources.

It is a truism in historical research that, despite what overgeeked is saying, the general rule with sources (especially primary sources) that the closer in time to an event that the primary source is, the more reliable it is considered to be.

This is truly such a bizarre conversation I have trouble believing that I am part of it. So ... yeah.

 

[Gradine]

Okay, this one should definitely meet the unpopular criteria given the crowd:

Star Wars gets worse the bigger it gets. The worldbuilding isn't particularly deep, and efforts to expand it collapse quickly under their own weight. It worked better as a trilogy than a franchise, something that was already true when we were dealing with expanded universe novels, and isn't getting any better over time as more media grows.

Exactly the opposite; Star Wars gets worse when it stays too small. Some of the best Star Wars things have vanishingly little to nothing to do with anyone named "Skywalker"... Andor, KotOR 1+2, Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor, Rebels, the parts of Mando that don't have Luke in them, X-Wing/TIE Fighter/Rogue Squadron, etc...

 

[Eyes of Nine]

In the spirit of the OP,

and in the spirit of my usual thing when coming to a thread and ignoring all but the first page of posts - so apologies if this is a repeat

Original Unpopular Opinion
Westerns pretty much suck out of the box, and even modern attempts can't redeem the genre

Basic Unpopular Opinion
Forgotten Realms was the right choice to focus the first 10 years of setting on for this version of D&D

Advanced Unpopular Opinion
Conan and swords & sandals as a genre is boring

Advanced Unpopular Opinion 2e
WotC is doing a pretty ok job of keeping D&D alive and thriving, actually

Unpopular Opinion Third Edition
Steampunk is hard to make a fun game around

Unpopular Opinion D20 (3.5)
Victorian settings without steam-tech nor magic are even harder to make fun

Unpopular Opinion 4th Ed
D&D 4e was a great system

Unpopular Opinion 5e
OSR games continue to grow in popularity not in spite of 5e, but because of 5e

One-Unpopular Opinion (ie, Onepopular Opinion)
What makes D&D great isn't the rules, but the settings and the player community (ok, this one's probalby not actually unpopular...)