Unpopular D&D Opinions

[Lord Raziere]

but then, instead of having to learn and master one single complicated game, you'd have to learn dozens of simpler games. how is that any better?

Well for one, you already have to do that for anything outside of the DnD fantasy sphere. if your definition of roleplaying ends at people going around dungeons in vaguely medieval worlds killing things then sure its all you need.

But no matter how much you rework and master it, its still DnD. your still fixing all your problems with a hammer.

the way it is right now, you have to learn one complicated system that everyone assumes is one game when its not and a bunch of smaller system to cover everything it isn't. now you can adapt your DnD for other things, but your never going to have a good social influence system for example unless you make it yourself and if you have no experience with other rpgs that have already done that your either reinventing the wheel or making a bad system for it because you don't have any examples of good ones to work from. a common criticism of many DnD heartbreakers is that they break off try to make their own rpg....and just end up making DnD with one or two changes then get forgotten.

your never going to have a good non-combative game from DnD either, because you need more than just "roll for investigation" for an investigation focused game for example. in both of these cases you basically have to hope that the DM knows what they are doing when you roll in social or investigative encounters and if they don't, well your screwed and the system can't help you unless you use vancian magic, where not all settings will allow you to use magic.

furthermore....DnD needs competition. I look at all the opinions about it and honestly its being pulled in a million different directions- that can't last forever. this DnD balloon may be large, but sooner or later its gonna pop, and your going to end up with a bunch of smaller games anyways catering to more focused things that individually does a part of DnD better without having to deal with people thinking they're playing another part getting in the way. sure you can talk all you want about session zeros, but thats all a patch job. eventually it won't be enough, because people will be tired of the session zeroes that consist of "we're not doing what you want to do, deal with it".

[RandomPeasant]

Its the point at which "Baron von NaughtyPants with skeleton armies who is 1500 miles away" goes from being an epic trek and infiltration mission to "we'll pants him tomorrow morning and come home in time for supper". At that point the game is mechanically saying (without of course telling a new dm or anything) that he and his army are an easy encounter of which you can handle more than one each day.

It's worth noting that (in 3e) teleport also comes on line at roughly the point where "an army of regular dudes" is supposed to stop being a significant challenge. The back half of the game is really supposed to be a very different beast from the front, and for good reason. If 20th level and 1st level are basically the same, the function of those levels is just to force you to spend time playing without most of your character's toolkit.

The fact that lots of people don't get the message is a failure of the books to accurately tell you what the game expects you to do.

Also the failure of the assumption that defeating adventures should automatically cause you to advance to higher level adventures. That's not the wrong way to play, but all the demands to be allowed to play a totally mundane warrior guy at 20th level demonstrate that there's a chunk of people who want advancement to be more like Spiderman or Conan: maybe you get a prize from winning the adventure, but your character remains a similar level of overall capability throughout his career.

[Kymme]

A very unpopular opinion that may get me flamed, but which I hold dearly:
In 2021, there is no reason to play 3.5 instead of Pathfinder 1, other than for empty nostalgia.

*ducks*

Pathfinder 1e doesn't have the Teramach, so it remains the inferior choice.

[Fel Temp]

• In 5e, the sorcerer and wizard function so similarly that it feels pointless to make them two classes. I'd drop wizard entirely and make artificer the way to engage with magic through intelligence. That would mean that learning magic on your own, getting magic naturally, and making a contract with a powerful being for magic all are mechanically distinct. I'd probably revise bard to make it more distinct from sorcerer as well, though not sure exactly how off the top of my head.
  
• Ability scores more often act as a minigame to show how much you understand the system mechanics than something that makes your character unique. The game would be more friendly to new players if they were dropped entirely, and it wouldn't meaningfully change the in game experience.
  
• D&D is most interesting when you let it get weird, particularly in character creation. Like if I were designing a new edition, core race selection would be something like bugbear, pixie, displacer beast, hengeyokai, shardmind, and horse. Core classes might be swordmage, warlord (with a note specifying that they can indeed literally reattach someone's hand with a good pep talk), artificer, runepriest, and psion. If you want to be a human fighter, wait for a couple expansions.
  
• While I feel like 4e solved the "boring fighter" problem, there's another tactic 5e could have taken: make the default "non-magical guy with swords and armor" class the warlord. Heck, they could still call it a "fighter," and I feel like most tables wouldn't notice anything wrong if this class just happened to be able to give buffs and order others to attack.
  
• Tying healing to a floor of 1/4 of a character's HP was one of the smartest things 4e did. It insured that healing someone who's still standing is almost always useful. In 5e, it often feels like it's more useful to just let someone drop, then cast a healing word to bring them back up than to keep them standing. Otherwise you risk the chance of say bringing someone from 1 to 15 HP when they're fighting a monster that can easily do 20 damage to them per turn.

[Lemmy]

There's nothing wrong with racial attributes and penalties. And nothing wrong with racial alignment either. Neither is necessary, but both are perfectly fine tools for character creation.

It's perfectly fine for the minds of non-human species to work differently from the minds of humans. specially in a world with magic, divine intervention and all sorts of unnatural phenomena.

[Anonymouswizard]

D&D is not a game. D&D is a workshop to custom-create your own game.
The only real issue is that it's not marketed as such.

[Giant laughing emoji]

As somebody who owns and heavily enjoys Fate, D&D is not a toolbox. It gives you a lot of implied fluff just from your mechanical options, and is limited to a very small number of settings.

You want a toolkit, you pick up Fudge. Witch I've been wanting to do in print for ages, but have never got around to. If you want a less flexible tomorrow you pick up GURPS or Fate

[NichG]

[Giant laughing emoji]

As somebody who owns and heavily enjoys Fate, D&D is not a toolbox. It gives you a lot of implied fluff just from your mechanical options, and is limited to a very small number of settings.

You want a toolkit, you pick up Fudge. Witch I've been wanting to do in print for ages, but have never got around to. If you want a less flexible tomorrow you pick up GURPS or Fate

There's a difference between a toolbox and a framework though. One of the things that universal systems have trouble with is having a lot of detailed structure on which to hang various things such that those things will seem instantly meaningful to the player in diverse ways. Stuff like AC, concealment and miss chance, saves, skills, attributes, attack sequences, DR, size categories, energy types and resistances, movement modalities, etc establish a bunch of hooks that customized mechanics can modify - adding damage versus adding extra attacks versus modifying an ability score vs ... all have distinctions in their consequences, so you can throw stuff into that and it becomes kind of non-trivial how it's all going to interact and combine and apply to each player's character, but in a way people can figure out as they play.

With Fudge and Fate, there's basically a single default bottleneck through which all effects flow - the dice roll. So while that's easy to understand, it also means you have to do a lot of hard work if you want to create mechanically diverse choices. Basically, you need to write subsystems.

It's actually quite hard to write something with as much combo potential as D&D comes with. I've tried. The instinct is to separate things cleanly and make them modular, which reduces the degree of interactions. But five+ editions of history means that a bunch of people stuck things on in random places and produced a lot of different grips and handles whose interactions are messy and uncontrolled.

[Anonymouswizard]

If you're going to insist on one tool to fix the job then you might as well pick a versatile one.

Plus it isn't like D&D doesn't boil everything it can down to d20+modifiers.

[Lord Raziere]

If you're going to insist on one tool to fix the job then you might as well pick a versatile one.

Plus it isn't like D&D doesn't boil everything it can down to d20+modifiers.

and vancian magic is just having 4-36 fate points with a lot of restrictions on what you can spend points on.

[NichG]

If you're going to insist on one tool to fix the job then you might as well pick a versatile one.

Plus it isn't like D&D doesn't boil everything it can down to d20+modifiers.

Positioning, ranges, immunities, areas and relationships between areas (including threatened areas, cover, line of effect, emanations vs spreads), things which outright modify game state without a roll (wall spells, polymorph any object, make whole, minor creation, teleport, divinations...), status conditions and their transitions (e.g. prone to standing provokes an AoO, various kinds of ability damage and drain and stuff like petrification)...

It's the sort of thing where if I were doing sci-fi I could say e.g. 'Robotic Spinal Mount: lets you make an attack with a one-handed ranged weapon as a Swift action' and it'd interact in interesting ways with a drug that let's you borrow next round's swift action, or a weapon augment that miniaturizes it, reducing the size category by 1, or... I can have things like 'the maximum number of implants a character can have is equal to their Con mod' and the like, because there are enough various things going on already that one can usually find something to pin things on.

[Silly Name]

Alignment is part of D&D's identity. It's ok for it to not be the fundamental aspect of a character, but the struggle of Law and Chaos, Good and Evil is a fundamental building block of the game's lore, and it's the only system under which some creatures make sense (why do Demons and Devils hate each other? Why do Angels tolerate the existence of Devils? etc)

Paladins should be Good. Not necessarily Lawful Good, but the Neutral or Evil paladin doesn't make a lick of sense. We already have "evil Paladins", they're called Blackguards. Likewise, a Chaotic Evil cleric of a Lawful Good deity is just a counter-intuitive idea, and most everyone who plays a cleric will conformo to their deity's alignment anyways because it makes sense.

The Sorcerer class was a bad idea, and being designed as "Wizards for noobs" didn't help.

I like kenders.

[Bacon Elemental]

Alignment is part of D&D's identity. It's ok for it to not be the fundamental aspect of a character, but the struggle of Law and Chaos, Good and Evil is a fundamental building block of the game's lore, and it's the only system under which some creatures make sense (why do Demons and Devils hate each other? Why do Angels tolerate the existence of Devils? etc)

Paladins should be Good. Not necessarily Lawful Good, but the Neutral or Evil paladin doesn't make a lick of sense. We already have "evil Paladins", they're called Blackguards. Likewise, a Chaotic Evil cleric of a Lawful Good deity is just a counter-intuitive idea, and most everyone who plays a cleric will conformo to their deity's alignment anyways because it makes sense.

The Sorcerer class was a bad idea, and being designed as "Wizards for noobs" didn't help.

I like kenders.

Personally I think the Lawful Neutral paladin works fine, but the Chaotic Good one does not.

[Millstone85]

Paladins should be Good. Not necessarily Lawful Good, but the Neutral or Evil paladin doesn't make a lick of sense. We already have "evil Paladins", they're called Blackguards.

That's the problem. Whether they are called blackguards, antipaladins, oathbreakers, hellknights, or whatever, they can hardly be described as anything but evil paladins.

[RandomPeasant]

and it's the only system under which some creatures make sense (why do Demons and Devils hate each other? Why do Angels tolerate the existence of Devils? etc)

Why do the Fused hate the humans of Roshar? It's not because the Fused have an Odium alignment and the humans have an Honor alignment. It's because there is a legitimate grievance between the two sides. The fact that having a Team Red and a Team Blue lets you preserve a status quo that is based entirely on there being a Team Red and a Team Blue is not an argument for having those teams, it is an argument for reworking the setting so that conflicts have a coherent basis instead of stemming from what sort of hat the sides wear.

The Sorcerer class was a bad idea, and being designed as "Wizards for noobs" didn't help.

The Sorcerer class was a bad idea because the correct implementation of that idea is the Beguiler, Dread Necromancer, and Warmage.

Personally I think the Lawful Neutral paladin works fine, but the Chaotic Good one does not.

The Knights Radiant are all Paladins, and I think you would be hard-pressed to come up with an alignment that suits the Willshapers better than Chaotic Good (though, of course, the best alignment for Willshapers to have is "Willshaper").

That's the problem. Whether they are called blackguards, antipaladins, oathbreakers, hellknights, or whatever, they can hardly be described as anything but evil paladins.

Exactly. "Guy who wears heavy armor and has defensive abilities" is a concept that can show up on any alignment. Demanding that we write separate classes for Good Paladins and Neutral Knights and Evil Blackguards is just wasting pages. If you want to call them something different, you can just do that.

[Batcathat]

Alignment is part of D&D's identity. It's ok for it to not be the fundamental aspect of a character, but the struggle of Law and Chaos, Good and Evil is a fundamental building block of the game's lore, and it's the only system under which some creatures make sense (why do Demons and Devils hate each other? Why do Angels tolerate the existence of Devils? etc)

Are you saying that groups with (violently) philosophical disagreements and the idea of "the enemy of my enemy is my ally" can only exist if alignments does? Because there are plentiful examples of both in both fiction and reality.

[Anonymouswizard]

Why do the Fused hate the humans of Roshar? It's not because the Fused have an Odium alignment and the humans have an Honor alignment. It's because there is a legitimate grievance between the two sides. The fact that having a Team Red and a Team Blue lets you preserve a status quo that is based entirely on there being a Team Red and a Team Blue is not an argument for having those teams, it is an argument for reworking the setting so that conflicts have a coherent basis instead of stemming from what sort of hat the sides wear.

Yeah, while I've not read the third book yet I've heard about the apparent beginning of the conflict, and it makes complete sense. Far more than most of D&D's conflicts.

The Knights Radiant are all Paladins, and I think you would be hard-pressed to come up with an alignment that suits the Willshapers better than Chaotic Good (though, of course, the best alignment for Willshapers to have is "Willshaper").

To be fair can you fit any of the characters nearly into an assignment.

The alternative of course it's too rename the Chad the Champion or something.

Exactly. "Guy who wears heavy armor and has defensive abilities" is a concept that can show up on any alignment. Demanding that we write separate classes for Good Paladins and Neutral Knights and Evil Blackguards is just wasting pages. If you want to call them something different, you can just do that.

Hey, look, I remember BD&D, Knights got a completely separate set of benefits to Paladins and Crusaders. Although to be fair they were all just Fighter options you could pick at 9th level.

Honestly, in the current edition I'd just make them subclasses of Fighter. We already have a knight themed subclass (and a Samurai), a couple of divine champions with some shared and some differing abilities shouldn't be too problematic.

[Draconi Redfir]

I really only play Pathfinder, so a majority of these options will only be relevant to such


Sorcerer bloodlines should be available for all classes through some method at level 1. Maybe Sorcerers are the only ones who get the benefit of the bonus spells and bonus feats, and / or get something else extra. But i feel like there should be some method of other classes gaining an entire Bloodline without needing to blow half their feats on eldritch heritage, which doesn't even provide the benefit of the bloodline arcana.

Power attack should be just a universal ability rather then a feat.

Finesse weapon should be a weapon option, not a feat.

A viable Bard / Sorcerer hybrid class needs to exist.

[Cluedrew]

To Faily: I read your response, I think regular travel is still kind of ranger thing but other than that I think I would have to go full subtopic to explain things.

and vancian magic is just having 4-36 fate points with a lot of restrictions on what you can spend points on.

That refresh differently, are stored different, are counted separately instead of being in one giant pool... OK, other than "a resource in a game that is spent to make something happen" what do vancian magic and Fate points have in common? I would describe it more like stunts actually. Which is probably a point for Fate's flexibility if it can (roughly) mimic D&D's mechanics. I don't think the opposite is true.

Exactly. "Guy who wears heavy armor and has defensive abilities" is a concept that can show up on any alignment. Demanding that we write separate classes for Good Paladins and Neutral Knights and Evil Blackguards is just wasting pages. If you want to call them something different, you can just do that.

Another popular opinion: D&D's class system is badly designed and is inconsistent about what each class represents and how it represents it. The Paladin is very focused on a single heroic archetype while the wizard seems to be a combination of every magic user that ever lived (except those that cast healing spells) and then some. I suppose it is not inherently a problem but I don't think it has been handled well. Although I think sub-classes might be a step towards fixing that.

[Tanarii]

As somebody who owns and heavily enjoys Fate,

That's an unpopular opinion right there!

[Quertus]

The real problem with your definition is that it uses a subjective quality judgement as its core.

Ah, so that's where the disconnect is.

No, it's not subjective. So I need to reword… strike that. I could try, but still fail, because, while I know what the disconnect is, I don't know where the disconnect is.

So, instead, I'll ask you: what part of my definition sounds subjective to you? Be as exact and specific as possible.

Who knows, maybe I'm just being dumb, and there is an angle at which my definition fails objectivity. But… from my (singular, biased) position, I don't see it. So my bet's on "miscommunication".

So if you want to argue that D&D 4e is not a role-playing game, your definition should refer to something fundamental about the game. Not your experience with it. Because if your experience with D&D 4e is enough to disqualify it from being a role-playing game, than my experience with D&D 3.5e and D&D 5e should be enough to disqualify them as role-playing games.

Hmmm… this part is also backwards. So maybe this is where the issue lies? Probably at least part of the issue, so I'll put up a little plaster, and see if anything takes shape (bad metaphor is bad).

(Note: what I'm about to describe is really easy / simple. If you don't look at it, realize it's obvious truth, and facepalm at how bad my description is, assume I've failed to communicate the concept.)

If someone says, "all pencils are yellow", it only takes one person showing a counterexample, "no, this pencil is blue" to disprove that statement.

If someone says, "no pencils are yellow", it only takes one person showing a counterexample, "no, this pencil is yellow" to disprove that statement.

But not all arguments are in that form.

And which direction the singular example proof / falsify goes can vary.

"Some pencils can be yellow." "Really?" "Yes, this pencil is yellow."

Make sense?

So, as to "is RPG Y/N?"…

It's not that "an experience disqualifies it".

If anything (meaning, weasel words, I haven't thought this through, and reserve the right to retract and disavow any connection to this concept), it's a "single instance qualifies" scenario.

More likely, though, it's a "licensed practitioner" scenario.

That is, Other editions of D&D have been vetted by the board as role-playing games, and have received their certification. 4e had not yet passed its certification.

So, if that's the correct parallel, when I say "4e is not an RPG", I mean that it hasn't passed its certification (and, implied, I suspect it never will).

"Is a licensed doctor" is not a subjective measure, now is it?

It's actually quite hard to write something with as much combo potential as D&D comes with. I've tried. The instinct is to separate things cleanly and make them modular, which reduces the degree of interactions. But five+ editions of history means that a bunch of people stuck things on in random places and produced a lot of different grips and handles whose interactions are messy and uncontrolled.

I don't know whether to respond with "agreed" "disagree" or "challenge accepted".

Can you give me a simple "sniff test", a "chicken / not chicken" for "combo potential" vs "modular / reduced interaction", that I can use on some of games my friends have designed?

and vancian magic is just having 4-36 fate points with a lot of restrictions on what you can spend points on.

It's hilarious (and occasionally enlightening) when you look at the world through such perspectives, isn't it?

[zzzzzzzz414]

It's perfectly fine for the minds of non-human species to work differently from the minds of humans. specially in a world with magic, divine intervention and all sorts of unnatural phenomena.

...the issue is that they really don't work differently, though. Something like the WH40K Orks can at least try to lay claim to the "totally alien mindset" thing, what with them being actual weird fungus aliens with totally different physiologies. I've never seen any DnD setting, official or otherwise, where the orcs were anything but green humans, doing things that humans have done in real life for thousands of years (just arbitrarily projected onto one species, which for whatever reason is called a "race"). Because, ultimately, humans don't really have a frame of reference beyond "other humans" when designing supposedly alien intelligences.

If it walks like a human, talks like a human, acts like a human, and builds civilizational and social structures nigh-identical to humans', it's going to be a bit of a broken suspension of disbelief moment when you tell me these people are all biologically predisposed to one of the arbitrary and limiting Alignment moralities, and have accordingly sorted themselves into homogenous Kingdoms of Hats regardless of wildly varying material circumstances and history. The idea of uniform "Dwarf Culture" or "Orc Culture" does not make any more sense to me than describing a uniform "Human Culture" irl would.

[OldTrees1]

More likely, though, it's a "licensed practitioner" scenario.

That is, Other editions of D&D have been vetted by the board as role-playing games, and have received their certification. 4e had not yet passed its certification.

So, if that's the correct parallel, when I say "4e is not an RPG", I mean that it hasn't passed its certification (and, implied, I suspect it never will).

"Is a licensed doctor" is not a subjective measure, now is it?

1)
"Is a licensed doctor" is an objective measurement of a specific subjective measurement. We are measuring the subjective judgement of a licensing board that was granted authority by a subjective judgement of a governing body.

I like pasta is a subjective judgement?
If you say Oldtrees likes pasta, is that a subjective measure?

2)
Where does the authority for the judgement come from?

A Medical license was an invention of a law. So the governing body that controls that law is the source of authority for that licensing. However why would I care? Why would I grant that license merit? I grant it merit based on a subjective judgement that the licensing standards map close enough to my expectation of what my judgement would be IF I were informed enough to make one based on how they map when I am not informed enough to make a judgement but still do so anyways.

So we have 2 sources of authority. We have an arbitrary governing authority and we have everyone's individual subjective judgement contributing to the authority granted to the license.

3)
How does your conclusion about 4E RE RPG map to a licensing process? Is it a licensing process others would trust or reject?

PS:
I am not mentioning my opinion RE that topic because whether or not I evaluate 4E as an RPG feels off topic at the moment.

[Anonymouswizard]

That's an unpopular opinion right there!

Hey! Only in the portion of the RPG fanbase that exclusively plays D&D.

So 98% of the RPG fanbase.

[georgie_leech]

The alternative of course it's too rename the Chad the Champion or something.

That is, in fact, exactly what Pathfinder 2e did. Paladin's are the Lawful Good subset, but there are unique codes for each of the Good/Evil alignments: Redeemers, Liberators, Tyrants, Desecrators, Antipaladins. For whatever reason, pure Law and Chaos apparently don't have Champions yet. Maybe they're hard to write

[Tanarii]

I've never seen any DnD setting, official or otherwise, where the orcs were anything but green humans, doing things that humans have done in real life for thousands of years (just arbitrarily projected onto one species, which for whatever reason is called a "race").

Humans don't have the malign influence of an evil deity working on their personality from birth.

Edit: by default lore that is. Certainly campaign specific lore may differ, for both humans and Orcs.

Hey! Only in the portion of the RPG fanbase that exclusively plays D&D.

So 98% of the RPG fanbase.

Yup. Being unpopular opinion doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means it's not commonly agreed with.

[Quertus]

@OldTrees1,

Touché, and (senility willing) I'll have to think about that.

(And I knew I shouldn't have tried to address the question until I knew what the question was.)

I think we're at risk of getting lost in the weeds of the… line… "parallel", the example, the metaphor.

I detailed the process by which one could evaluate - at least at "sniff test" level, and arguably completely - how well something matches my terms. Senility willing (senility willing, I'll edit this post, and paste that into this reply). Seems to me that picking that apart would be more valuable than evaluating my metaphor?

Granted, demonstrating the weakness of my metaphor does… Hmmm… help demonstrate the likely vectors in which the actual "product" might fail. So… sure, it's valuable as *one* source of test cases (but we should not limit ourselves to *just* seeing if it falls apart in the same way).

Do I sound completely insane, or did any of that make sense? (My mind isn't working well today, so I'm honestly not sure how much sense I'm making)

[Lemmy]

...the issue is that they really don't work differently, though. Something like the WH40K Orks can at least try to lay claim to the "totally alien mindset" thing, what with them being actual weird fungus aliens with totally different physiologies. I've never seen any DnD setting, official or otherwise, where the orcs were anything but green humans, doing things that humans have done in real life for thousands of years (just arbitrarily projected onto one species, which for whatever reason is called a "race"). Because, ultimately, humans don't really have a frame of reference beyond "other humans" when designing supposedly alien intelligences.

If it walks like a human, talks like a human, acts like a human, and builds civilizational and social structures nigh-identical to humans', it's going to be a bit of a broken suspension of disbelief moment when you tell me these people are all biologically predisposed to one of the arbitrary and limiting Alignment moralities, and have accordingly sorted themselves into homogenous Kingdoms of Hats regardless of wildly varying material circumstances and history. The idea of uniform "Dwarf Culture" or "Orc Culture" does not make any more sense to me than describing a uniform "Human Culture" irl would.

It doesn't have to be "totally alien" to be different from humans.

In the same way that IRL there are animal species with similar levels of intelligence, but quite different behavioral patterns and dispositions, it makes perfect sense for the same thing to happen to different humanoid species.

I agree that having an homogeneous culture or language for a whole race is usually dumb, (unless the near entirety of said race is located in a very small region). But certain races being much more prone to certain psychological traits, and having said traits influence their culture makes perfect sense and is completely fine.

Now, sure. Having human-like intellect helps in identifying and if necessary, toning down certain behaviors. But at the end of the day, It's absurd (and kinda boring, from a world-building and story-telling perspective) to say that every race is equally capable at everything and/or have the same ease (or difficulty) adopting or discarding certain behaviors.

e.g.: Sure, orcs can be as civilized as any humans, but on average, they'll still have a harder time controlling their aggressiveness. An elf, OTOH, might struggle to adapt to the fast-paced rhythm of human society, and so on.

And in extreme cases, adaptation might be downright impossible except in rare anomalies or under the influence of major external forces. e.g.: A race that is corrupted by demon blood or something, could be basically unable to be legitimately "Good".

Does that mean this should always be the case or even be present in every setting? No. Of course not. But it's a completely valid and perfectly fine concept to incorporate into fiction of any kind. Specially fantasy.

[Batcathat]

Do I sound completely insane, or did any of that make sense? (My mind isn't working well today, so I'm honestly not sure how much sense I'm making)

I think the main issue is that whether or not your qualifiers are objective, your definition of an RPG is still subjective in that it doesn't match how other people define the term. Which is fine, of course, but it does make it harder to communicate effectively.

[Telok]

...the issue is that they really don't work differently, though. Something like the WH40K Orks can at least try to lay claim to the "totally alien mindset" thing, what with them being actual weird fungus aliens with totally different physiologies. I've never seen any DnD setting, official or otherwise, where the orcs were anything but green humans, doing things that humans have done in real life for thousands of years ....

If it walks like a human, talks like a human, acts like a human, and builds civilizational and social structures nigh-identical to humans...

So the original Traveller system had an interesting solution to this (not completely implemented across all playable species of course, darn '80s). Humans had a 'social rank' stat, but the Vargyr (pack oriented not-dog people) had a different stat with different rules. AFB so spelling and details are from memory.

It meant that (assuming the player followed rules and wanted to play a non-human species instead of a human in makeup) the character would at times act in ways that wouldn't make any sense to someone who only knew the human social stat rules. It was mostly limited to a 'who is the team leader' subset of social interactions, but it could set up interactions where a mixed party got the "thats not a human style decision" reaction. Th DM could also use it to determine how the leader of a vagyr group could react to PCs in ways that a human wouldn't.

But no, D&D can't manage that. Its too married to the "human with funny ears/forehead" model of things.

[NichG]

I don't know whether to respond with "agreed" "disagree" or "challenge accepted".

Can you give me a simple "sniff test", a "chicken / not chicken" for "combo potential" vs "modular / reduced interaction", that I can use on some of games my friends have designed?

I don't think it's simple though. I could say 'give the rules to an online community, and see if they're still discovering new interactions after 10 years?' but...

How much does the effect of one mechanical choice hinge critically on other mechanical choices, and how many such hinges are there? How easy would it be to overturn the meta of the game by adding a new thing and how small could that thing be on it's own?

If you had to design a bunch of new unique (purely mechanical) item enchantments, how many different ones could you make which would all be a hard choice to pick between for the same character?