Unpopular opinions go here

[Micah Sweet]

A new version of RM has started to come out! It's pretty crunchy.

There's also HARP. And Against the Darkmaster.

And that's just in the RM-verse.

Torchbearer has a recent 2nd edition, and it's not exactly a low-crunch game!

I love crunch, but to me it's secondary to how much the game mechanizes the creation and maintenance of narrative.

 

[Umbran]

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.

So, really interesting slip there.

You say "dissociated from" is used in other contexts. But, when you try to give an example, you use the other word - disassociated - instead!

I mean, if you want to make my argument for me, that the word they actually want is "disassociated," you can feel free to do that. I won't mind.

I will grant you that "dissociated" is used in chemistry as jargon. But I go take a look, and I find estimates that there's about 84,000 professional chemists in the US. And, in any given year, estimates that about 8 million people in the US suffer from PTSD. Somehow I don't think the use from chemistry is a great counter example showing other common use.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So, really interesting slip there.

You say "dissociated from" is used in other contexts. But, when you try to give an example, you use the other word - disassociated - instead!

I just went and checked to see if I was confused, and the conclusion seems to be that the two words are just equivalents with "dissociate" being the commoner usage. So it may appear I was using a different word, but to the degree the one I used was legitimate, I was not.

 

[Lanefan]

So, really interesting slip there.

You say "dissociated from" is used in other contexts. But, when you try to give an example, you use the other word - disassociated - instead!

I always assumed 'dissociated' was just a short-form spelling of 'disassociated'; i.e. that they were the same word, similar to how 'thru' and 'through' are different spellings of the same word.

 

[Reynard]

One's inability to understand the system/software/etc is NOT a legitimate reason to give it a bad review..

 

[Thomas Shey]

I always assumed 'dissociated' was just a short-form spelling of 'disassociated'; i.e. that they were the same word, similar to how 'thru' and 'through' are different spellings of the same word.

As far as I can tell with (an admittedly cursory) bit of research following Umbran's response, that is what they are, though dissociated is the commoner usage.

 

[pemerton]

5e is less so than 4e. The proverbial lobotomization did return more of what 4e was missing

<snip>

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.

I'm not appealing to the popularity of anything. I don't know what you think 4e was missing, that was returned to 5e, but 4e is manifestly a RPG: it is a game in which the player participants engage the fiction predominantly by the medium of declaring actions for their characters, and the established fiction matters to the resolution of those declared actions.

(This is also why, contra @Tony Vargas, I have no qualms about characterising D&D as a RPG even though it hasn't always said so on the box.)

 

[pemerton]

I love crunch, but to me it's secondary to how much the game mechanizes the creation and maintenance of narrative.

I doubt there's anything in Rolemaster that you would object to.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Theater of the mind is just empowerment for a GM who loves talking.

It is not until you employ high-end VTT that you experience the true form of the TTRPG hobby.

 

[pemerton]

we were specifically told that if the fiction and mechanics are in conflict, the mechanics win.

Here's my unpopular opinion: the fiction and mechanics can't be in conflict. Unless someone is using as their standard some prior conception of what the fiction is. At which point the issue is not a fiction vs mechanics issues, it's a I have two ways of establishing the shared fiction and haven't brought them into correspondence issue.

Many many RPGs, especially from the mid-80s on, manifest this sort of system inconsistency.