Unpopular opinions go here

[Dannyalcatraz]

Ska happened because a dark cabal of unemployed horn players in Venice Beach came together to hatch a nefarious plan to infiltrate pop music so they could have jobs for once, and the struggle to counter their dark magicks cost us many lives.

Side note: I only found out that ska predated reggae about 10 years ago when I got a music question wrong in a music trivia contest. Surprised the heck out of me.

 

[Cadence]

I honestly couldn't remember if I had ever played a Fighter before. Checking, I had played a 1e multi-class Fighter-Thief a few years ago. Does a B/X Dwarf count?

 

[pemerton]

I honestly couldn't remember if I had ever played a Fighter before. Checking, I had played a 1e multi-class Fighter-Thief a few years ago. Does a B/X Dwarf count?

How is not playing a fighter an unpopular opinion?

 

[Emberashh]

Part of the problem is this sentence is, shall we say, not universally held. There were absolutely people back in the RGFA days who felt the farther the mechanics resolution mapped from a direct correspondence to the action, the less immersive it was, and the more stylized the genre was, the less immersive it was. I've hit some folks around here who feel the same

That doesn't disagree with what I said. "Gamey" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

So you also think that 5e is only vestigial in its RPG-ness?

5e is less so than 4e. The proverbial lobotomization did return more of what 4e was missing, but it was done poorly and was not (and won't be even with 1DND) taken to its logical conclusion.

And before we start trying to appeal to its popularity as an RPG, lets remember that that kind of rhetoric is a fallacy for a reason.

As someone who's not exactly crunch-light in preference, there's actually no lack of fairly crunchy games out there. A lot of them just try to at least minimize the amount of exception-based design, and they often aren't exactly well known.

What I suspect is coming is going to be a resurgence in crunch as being a more favorable way to design, not just the proliferation of crunchy games.

Even back in the day, there was games for all crunch levels. Moldvay's Challenges was 10 pages long and that was back in 1986 (if not earlier).

So its not so much that theres a lack of crunchy games but a lack of emphasis and innovation in regards to crunch.

 

[Cadence]

How is not playing a fighter an unpopular opinion?

A failure in both the unpopularity and the opinion part. At the time this had seemed the best place to say it. :-/. Apparently my cold has me more muddled than I thought.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Part of the problem is this sentence is, shall we say, not universally held. There were absolutely people back in the RGFA days who felt the farther the mechanics resolution mapped from a direct correspondence to the action, the less immersive it was, and the more stylized the genre was, the less immersive it was. I've hit some folks around here who feel much the same.

I mostly feel that way, for example. Freely admitted.

 

[Thomas Shey]

No. It isn't the "combined term" that is the problem, at least for me.

It is that in modern use, disassociation and dissociation are two different words with rather different applications.

In modern use, "dissociated mechanics" is effectively referring to a psychological process that is (among other things) one characteristic response to trauma. As in, dissociation is one common response when a person's clinical PTSD is triggered.

I'm afraid that's simply not true, Umbran. Psychiatry may be the place where you're most familiar with it, but "dissociated from" is used in other contexts (as an example, "the sound was disassociated from any apparent source") and that's not even counting its use in chemistry. I think you're projecting your own, well, association too much here.

 

[Xamnam]

Im not sure I follow how grunge ushered in these trends, but third wave ska should be considered torture by the Geneva Conventions...., or any convention really.

Couldn't be worse than grunge itself, which was the most melodramatic, self pitying nonsense that a genre based on positive energy was fundamentally forced to exist by Newton's third law.

 

[Micah Sweet]

4e has lots of grids for resolving combat. So does the AD&D DMG. Given that 5e uses 5' increments for resolution, it could too.

I don't really see how these issues of presentation bears upon whether or not it's a RPG.

The core of a RPG, it seems to me, is that (i) the fiction matters to the resolution, and (ii) the non-GM participants (ie "players) engage the fiction predominantly from the first-person perspective of characters in the fiction.

(i) is what differentiates a RPG from a boardgame. (ii) is what differentiates a RPG from a free kriegspiel-eseque wargame.

No doubt there are marginal cases that are RPGs but don't quite fit (i) or (ii), or that fit (i) and (ii) but aren't quite RPGs. Still, I think (i) and (ii) get most of it.

Most of the debate about whether or not 4e is a RPG turn on whether or not it satisfies (i) - although that is not always clearly expressed. To me it's obvious that it does - see, for instance, this part of the rules for damaging objects from the DMG (p 66):

Some unusual materials might be particularly resistant to some or all kinds of damage. In addition, you might rule that some kinds of damage are particularly effective against certain objects and grant the object vulnerability to that damage type. For example, a gauzy curtain or a pile of dry papers might have vulnerability 5 to fire because any spark is likely to destroy it.​

The fiction - ie here is a pile of dry papers affects the resolution - additional fire damage is applied to the objects in question.

Similarly, the DMG and DMG2 discussions of skill challenges talk about the role of the GM in framing each check, adjudicating, adjusting the fiction appropriately, and then re-framing for the next check.

My (purely anecdotal) observation is that many if not most of those who complained about 4e not being a RPG also ignored these parts of the rules about making fiction matter to resolution.

Because it was not encouraged (rather discouraged) by the format, imo, and we were specifically told that if the fiction and mechanics are in conflict, the mechanics win. That was a deal breaker for me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

[Never mind, answering snark with snark is rarely useful.]