Unpopular D&D Opinions Part 2: Popular To Talk About

[Pex]

Personally, I don't like playable, alien-in-thought races. Because they'll be played by humans, which means played like humans. It also becomes much harder to rationalize why they're working together with people they cannot understand (or with whom the barriers to understanding are high). Because that's what alien-in-thought means--alien enough that mutual understanding is difficult if it's even possible.

Thrikeen were quite the rage back in my 2E days. Even in 5E now you'll find the occasional player who wants to play aaracokra (if just for flying) and especially kenku to have fun with their talking impediment. There are players who just have to play something odd and unique. I won't say outright they want to hog the spotlight. They can play "normally", but being alien is the whole point. They want to roleplay being odd. The trick is not to be That Guy about it.

[dafrca]

Thrikeen were quite the rage back in my 2E days. Even in 5E now you'll find the occasional player who wants to play aaracokra (if just for flying) and especially kenku to have fun with their talking impediment. There are players who just have to play something odd and unique. I won't say outright they want to hog the spotlight. They can play "normally", but being alien is the whole point. They want to roleplay being odd. The trick is not to be That Guy about it.

It is always a very hard thing for even the best of role players to play something really "Alien". I tried to play a Hiver in a Traveller game once. Was honestly one of the hardest RP experiences to really try and not fall into the human in a rubber suit trap.

[Mastikator]

I was once in a one-shot where a player played a Kenku and brought a soundboard app, instead of talking he pulled some classic Samuel L Jackson lines.

Easily the funniest thing ever.

[Ignimortis]

Personally, I don't like playable, alien-in-thought races. Because they'll be played by humans, which means played like humans. It also becomes much harder to rationalize why they're working together with people they cannot understand (or with whom the barriers to understanding are high). Because that's what alien-in-thought means--alien enough that mutual understanding is difficult if it's even possible.

Exactly. This is why I don't mind rubber ear races and frown upon playable races that are supposed to be entirely non-humanoid in mind and body. It's much easier to understand what an elf thinks like if they're just "human except for X".

[NichG]

I don't think it's necessary for players to be perfect in trying to play alien minds. If they can find something interesting to think about in the attempt, that's enough for it to have some value as an option. Maybe they'll effectively be rubber suit humans 98% of the time, but that's okay. That's still 2% of peering into ways of thinking that would otherwise be entirely inaccessible if you just stuck with things that are supposed to be rubber suits.

[Quertus]

Personally, I don't like playable, alien-in-thought races. Because they'll be played by humans, which means played like humans. It also becomes much harder to rationalize why they're working together with people they cannot understand (or with whom the barriers to understanding are high). Because that's what alien-in-thought means--alien enough that mutual understanding is difficult if it's even possible.

So when Humans and Angels / Vorlons / Dragons / Humans with different cultures encounter one another, they should… genocidally exterminate one another? What is your alternative to "working together" here?

[Batcathat]

I think the ideal (for me, at least. It's obviously very subjective) lies somewhere between "completely alien" and "human with funny ears and maybe a gimmick". At any rate, if the designers want people to only (or mainly) play humans, they should make that the rule rather than trying to indirectly curb it with level caps or unmotivated class restrictions.

[Yora]

I'm not a fan of the Gygaxian Monster Zoo. There are a good number of really cool creatures that go all the way back to the AD&D monster manuals and earlier, and the A-list canon we have now has stood the test of time.
But it really should be a catalog to pick from. Taking the whole bunch as it is and dumping it into every camapign setting is too much.

Don't need 10 types of dragon, 6 types of giants, 10 types of barbaric hostile humanoids. Don't need 15 demons plus 15 devils (plus yugoloths plus slaads). Don't need drow, duergar, and derro.

A dozen intelligent monsters and maybe 20 to 30 monsters in total make for much richer fantasy worlds.

[Satinavian]

People who wanted to play humans always could play humans. Trying to bring people who explicitely didn't want to play humans to do so anyway by making all alternatives severely hampered, was always a bad move.

The level caps were just another case of "Designers don't like what players do with their system so they make a heavy handed rules change to force their vision". It is the same with the original reason to introduce alignment, it is similar to their various attempts to get people to retire high level characters and it is in some ways worse than White Wolfs complaining that people played superheroes with fangs instead of following their vision of angst and despair.

For all the "build your own world" and "change the rules to your liking" there was always way too much emphasis in D&D that the default assumption should be a human centric world and all official settings are.


Personally i like playable non-humans that are alien but not that alien. Meaning that there are important differences for very specific aspects of life and society. It's easy to play that out without generally being unable to understand other PCs and NPCs.


Examples from same of the various reptile folk i have played :

- One species had females bury their eggs and then abandon them. The young ones joined the community at a later development state. So no family bounds whatsoever and no understanding of child rearing beyond taking some young apprentice in.

- Another species had sex change at a certain age. Which lead to a culture where all gender stereotypes where mixed and superseded with age stereotypes

- Playing cold blooded individuals could also mean portraying them hyperactive or drowsy depending on ambient temperature.


That is all stuff you can easily portray without being too alien or strange. And it still makes your character palpatibly different.

[Actana]

I guess if I had any unpopular opinion is that if the GM is allowed to fudge dice to "create a better story", then the players should also be allowed to do it. Because nobody around the table is the single authority on what "the best story" means and the GM should not try to impose their idea of what that means over the players'.

Consequently, this leads to "nobody should fudge dice to begin with", but that's not nearly as unpopular of an opinion.

[Yora]

When you start ignoring the dice because the bad outcome would not be fun, then when will you stop doing that and let something bad actually happen? Only when it doesn't really matter?

[Mordante]

I guess if I had any unpopular opinion is that if the GM is allowed to fudge dice to "create a better story", then the players should also be allowed to do it. Because nobody around the table is the single authority on what "the best story" means and the GM should not try to impose their idea of what that means over the players'.

Consequently, this leads to "nobody should fudge dice to begin with", but that's not nearly as unpopular of an opinion.

When I DM I try to avoid unnecessary dice rolls. I die roll needs to add something. Not every skill check or social interaction requires a dice roll IMHO.

[Lucas Yew]

Unpopular opinion: The "Small" sized ancestry/race/species/whatever should not be playable. Initially, it was the "unfortunate implications" with inter-species romance tropes that might happen as of RAW. Then after some other irks that I have trouble remembering clearly, that millionth-repeated scuffle on the 5E forums here about Small PCs and heavy weapon prohibition set up my mind on this.

As such, instead of making them small, their size (both in Lore and Crunch) should be treated as the opposite of 3E/5E Goliaths' Powerful Build. It'd probably work like benefits on the minimum size of space a PC could squeeze and pass through. And the lore-height might be around 70.7% of a human (0.5^0.5, BTW), instead of the proper Small size's 50%.

[Zombimode]

But it really should be a catalog to pick from. Taking the whole bunch as it is and dumping it into every camapign setting is too much.

True. Though it should be mentioned that this is not the fault of the Monster Manuels but of published settings and the wordlbuilding of the GM's.

The monster manuels itself ARE a catalog.

[NichG]

When you start ignoring the dice because the bad outcome would not be fun, then when will you stop doing that and let something bad actually happen? Only when it doesn't really matter?

Good incentive for figuring out how to make the bad outcomes fun though...

[Actana]

When I DM I try to avoid unnecessary dice rolls. I die roll needs to add something. Not every skill check or social interaction requires a dice roll IMHO.

Basically, yes. Only roll when something will happen regardless of what the dice come up as, and also when you're willing to accept any result. If you're not willing to accept a specific result of the dice, you shouldn't roll (though you could also readjust the expectation of consequences of what those results mean as a group, into something more applicable.)

But this thread is about unpopular opinions, not "universally good practices".

[MoiMagnus]

Because nobody around the table is the single authority on what "the best story" means and the GM should not try to impose their idea of what that means over the players'.

I fully agree for campaigns. IME, it's reasonably frequent in one-shots for the Players to agree to give full authority to the GM for determining "what is the best story". There is something about one-shots where you're not really here to play a game, you're signing up for living through the fined-tuned experience that the GM prepared for you. (And it's is almost a prerequisite for games like Paranoia)

Basically, yes. Only roll when something will happen regardless of what the dice come up as, and also when you're willing to accept any result. If you're not willing to accept a specific result of the dice, you shouldn't roll (though you could also readjust the expectation of consequences of what those results mean as a group, into something more applicable.)

But this thread is about unpopular opinions, not "universally good practices".

Interestingly, it's in appearance the opposite of the common GM advice of "when you hesitate between two resolutions, roll a die and ignore it if you don't like the result".

[Quertus]

I guess if I had any unpopular opinion is that if the GM is allowed to fudge dice to "create a better story", then the players should also be allowed to do it. Because nobody around the table is the single authority on what "the best story" means and the GM should not try to impose their idea of what that means over the players'.

Consequently, this leads to "nobody should fudge dice to begin with", but that's not nearly as unpopular of an opinion.

I've stated this unpopular opinion before: I prefer "nobody fudges", but I'm more OK with players fudging dice than GMs doing so.

With the players fudging dice, you might actually get a collaborative story that's fun for everyone; with the GM fudging dice, you get a railroad that would be better suited to single author fiction.

I'm not a fan of the Gygaxian Monster Zoo. There are a good number of really cool creatures that go all the way back to the AD&D monster manuals and earlier, and the A-list canon we have now has stood the test of time.
But it really should be a catalog to pick from. Taking the whole bunch as it is and dumping it into every camapign setting is too much.

Don't need 10 types of dragon, 6 types of giants, 10 types of barbaric hostile humanoids. Don't need 15 demons plus 15 devils (plus yugoloths plus slaads). Don't need drow, duergar, and derro.

A dozen intelligent monsters and maybe 20 to 30 monsters in total make for much richer fantasy worlds.

I, OTOH, find it to be too little.

The story of the golden apple is intended to fill us with the same wonder we once had at encountering an apple.

How many species of animals are there IRL? That is, IMO, a minimal bar on how much wonder there should be in the world.

Also, if you add up the XP for every single monster (no "classes races" or "agree category Dragons to complicate things) in the 2e MM, how many XP is that? What level could you reach by encountering all of them? How many of each would it take to reach 20th level?

It feels unlikely to me that one could run a D&D character from 1-20, with just the full bestiary, let alone limited to 20-30 monsters, and still have that character feel the sense of wonder, that there's still a big, unexplored world out there, filled with "there be monsters". Let alone have the player run a second (or third, or…) character in the same world feel a sense of wonder.

[KorvinStarmast]

Unpopular opinion: The "Small" sized ancestry/race/species/whatever should not be playable.

Agreed. I played a lot of halflings over the years, but I no longer will be doing that.
I have lost my willingness to suspend disbelief in that regard.

(I admit that a ghostwise halfling druid appeals to me, and they are adventuring because they are way too 'different' from everyone else back home - so they left due to being more or less a social pariah - but the number of campaigns I can be in is limited and the number of other class concepts I'd like to try are larger than my desire to do that).

[The Glyphstone]

My favorite character I ever played, sadly in a short lived PvP, was also my most 'alien'. The cliff notes concept was a Far Realms entity summoned and bound into a host body, so while it was physically humanoid more or less, the aberrant psychology inside was an interesting challenge.

Another player commented that I must have taken 'Uncommon' as a native language, so in dialogue at least I pulled it off.

[Morgaln]

I, OTOH, find it to be too little.

The story of the golden apple is intended to fill us with the same wonder we once had at encountering an apple.

How many species of animals are there IRL? That is, IMO, a minimal bar on how much wonder there should be in the world.

Also, if you add up the XP for every single monster (no "classes races" or "agree category Dragons to complicate things) in the 2e MM, how many XP is that? What level could you reach by encountering all of them? How many of each would it take to reach 20th level?

It feels unlikely to me that one could run a D&D character from 1-20, with just the full bestiary, let alone limited to 20-30 monsters, and still have that character feel the sense of wonder, that there's still a big, unexplored world out there, filled with "there be monsters". Let alone have the player run a second (or third, or…) character in the same world feel a sense of wonder.

Estimates on number of animal species range between 10 million and 100 million. Most of these are worms that look pretty much the same to everyone except a single digit number of specialists and/or microscopic in nature. Of the rest, the overwhelming majority are insects. Tiny insects. In fact, the biggest group is probably parasitic insects that prey on other insects.
For animals that are actually fit as combat encounters, you need to look at vertebrates almost exclusively (big exception: giant squids). There are about 75.000 known vertebrate species. About half of these are fish. The overwhelming majority of vertebrates are smaller than a house cat. By a lot. Despite what D&D monster manuals try to tell us, a house cat is not a combat encounter. Even if D&D stats tell us that it is a fearsome predator capable of taking out level 1 wizards without difficulty.

So what is actually left for possible combat encounters? It's a list you can actually put up fairly quickly:

Giant Squids
Sharks
Crocodiles
Bears
Large Cats
Large Canides
Elephants
Rhinos
Hippos
Buffaloes
Pigs
large flightless birds

and to a lesser extent:
Other large ungulates, like bovines, deer and large antelopes
Wolverines and honey badgers
Fur seals
Whales

If you want to stretch it, you could add large kangaroos

That's about twenty groups, although I probably forgot one or two (technically, human belongs on that list). There are multiple species in each of these groups, but they are variations on the same theme. And these span the whole world, as there's just not that much room for many large species of animals in a given area.
So 20-30 monsters would actually be fairly accurate compared to our world.

[georgie_leech]

Another player commented that I must have taken 'Uncommon' as a native language, so in dialogue at least I pulled it off.

scribbles down for later

_______________________________


Add me to the pile of "alien-in-thought humanoids have potential that often isn't realised" GitP'ers. That said, even if it's not done well, I appreciate that they exist as an option. IMO, it's a useful exercise to put yourself in a different mental space; having something really obvious as a difference can make it easier to not just assume they think like you do. I think it's the kind of thing that can help build empathy: if you can put yourself in the headspace of someone/thing that's really different, then another person could be a lot easier to manage.

The trick is not assuming that you necessarily know all the relevant info on how another actual person thinks. That way lies much frustration.

[The Glyphstone]

At least for that character, my take on it was - IIRC - their 'native' form was part of a larger collective-consciousness entity. So it was able to understand large groups like tribes, kingdoms, or organizations fairly easily, while the concept of individual sentience was extremely difficult except if presented as components of that larger group. And then if two individuals supposedly belonging to one group exhibited differences, it was utterly baffled. Speech-wise, it avoided every use of singular nouns and pronouns, everything was expressed in terms of plurals.

The fact that it was a Planescape game is the worst part, because that sort of bizarre PoV was RP gold in the Planes.

[dafrca]

I'm not a fan of the Gygaxian Monster Zoo.

[snip]

A dozen intelligent monsters and maybe 20 to 30 monsters in total make for much richer fantasy worlds.

In a few of my games over time I have begun to do this both with monsters and what playable races will show up. Not because I dislike any single race or monster, but to try and build on a theme of feel.

[MoiMagnus]

Unpopular opinion: The "Small" sized ancestry/race/species/whatever should not be playable.

I mostly agree. More precisely, I don't have problems with them being in supplementary books, together with races that have weird gamechanging abilities like flight. But I think the PHB would be better off without them.
[Admittedly, those "weird races" could also be in the PHB, clearly in an "optional rules" section, and I would be fine with it.]

[Tanarii]

Relevant to races and playing to stereotypes for an alien mind:
https://theangrygm.com/making-race-and-culture-matter/

[Milodiah]

As for player dice fudging, I really like the games that have the pool mechanics for occasionally boosting or rerolling the Big Damn Checks when pretty much everything is riding on the success of this roll. Shadowrun's Edge comes to mind, but there's plenty of other examples, like Deadlands' poker chips, whatever the thing the particular World of Darkness game you're playing calls them (rage, conviction, etc etc), and occasionally optional rulesets pop up in D&D, I seem to recall the most widespread one was Hero Points. Sure, its by definition not fudging because it's part of the system, but it gives people a third option between "Tell the truth and be ****ed" and "Cheat your dice".

It helps the GM too, because if by some decision or series of decisions by your players they've pretty much painted themselves into a corner where a couple die rolls stands between them and a TPK (such as suddenly being accosted by guards right as they're about to go through a big checkpoint, or the driver of the car only having one more chance to regain control before it goes off the winding mountain road), it can save the whole campaign without you having to either ass pull something or let the dice land as they will. And I guarantee if they get a critical success off those dice in this life or death moment, it'll have the whole table actually cheering, which is something any GM should appreciate.

[Xervous]

As for player dice fudging, I really like the games that have the pool mechanics for occasionally boosting or rerolling the Big Damn Checks when pretty much everything is riding on the success of this roll. Shadowrun's Edge comes to mind, but there's plenty of other examples, like Deadlands' poker chips, whatever the thing the particular World of Darkness game you're playing calls them (rage, conviction, etc etc), and occasionally optional rulesets pop up in D&D, I seem to recall the most widespread one was Hero Points. Sure, its by definition not fudging because it's part of the system, but it gives people a third option between "Tell the truth and be ****ed" and "Cheat your dice".

It helps the GM too, because if by some decision or series of decisions by your players they've pretty much painted themselves into a corner where a couple die rolls stands between them and a TPK (such as suddenly being accosted by guards right as they're about to go through a big checkpoint, or the driver of the car only having one more chance to regain control before it goes off the winding mountain road), it can save the whole campaign without you having to either ass pull something or let the dice land as they will. And I guarantee if they get a critical success off those dice in this life or death moment, it'll have the whole table actually cheering, which is something any GM should appreciate.

My players have learned to fear GM luck. “Wait I thought I tied with an 8, why is it 11 now?” Monsters are going to use all their rerolls if you let them, try to make sure they’re defensive rerolls.

I’ve had players throw rerolls at healing pets and hirelings. I’ve had them throw rerolls at cheating in gambling with fae. They’ve averted death and snatched victory a time or three, but the fondest memories seem to be of the random moments they decided should matter.

[Quertus]

Estimates on number of animal species range between 10 million and 100 million. Most of these are worms that look pretty much the same to everyone except a single digit number of specialists and/or microscopic in nature. Of the rest, the overwhelming majority are insects. Tiny insects. In fact, the biggest group is probably parasitic insects that prey on other insects.
For animals that are actually fit as combat encounters, you need to look at vertebrates almost exclusively (big exception: giant squids). There are about 75.000 known vertebrate species. About half of these are fish. The overwhelming majority of vertebrates are smaller than a house cat. By a lot. Despite what D&D monster manuals try to tell us, a house cat is not a combat encounter. Even if D&D stats tell us that it is a fearsome predator capable of taking out level 1 wizards without difficulty.

So what is actually left for possible combat encounters? It's a list you can actually put up fairly quickly:

Giant Squids
Sharks
Crocodiles
Bears
Large Cats
Large Canides
Elephants
Rhinos
Hippos
Buffaloes
Pigs
large flightless birds

and to a lesser extent:
Other large ungulates, like bovines, deer and large antelopes
Wolverines and honey badgers
Fur seals
Whales

If you want to stretch it, you could add large kangaroos

That's about twenty groups, although I probably forgot one or two (technically, human belongs on that list). There are multiple species in each of these groups, but they are variations on the same theme. And these span the whole world, as there's just not that much room for many large species of animals in a given area.
So 20-30 monsters would actually be fairly accurate compared to our world.

Wow. Sweet post.

I wasn't aiming for "combat encounter" with creatures IRL, only "opportunity for wow". That that generally gets translated into combat in D&D confuses the matter slightly.

For versimilitude, for number of things that could threaten a human?

Lemme see… off the top of my head…

Porcupines
Foxes
Skunks
Armadillo (less "combat", more "disease")
Turtles
Alligators
Snakes
"Flighty" birds
Goats
Crabs
Apes (etc)

For insects, I *know* humans have lost combat encounters with…

Bees
Ants

And that's not counting natural disasters that get translated into creatures, like storms, tornados, mudslides,

Or human-derivable creatures, like skeletons, ghosts, and zombies.

Or ancient creatures, like dinosaurs, wooly mammoth, sabertooth tigers, etc.

Or just how many individual creatures some of those groupings represent. Meaning that all the dozens of beholders and Beholder kin count as one entry, same as the dozens of giants or dozens of dragons. And I'd say that, if you've had your teeth kicked in by a horse, seeing a giraffe is more different than two colors of Dragon.

But, again, I was looking at opportunity for "wow", not "threat ecology". And, for wow, 20-30 monsters just doesn't seem to cut it, IMO.

[dafrca]

But, again, I was looking at opportunity for "wow", not "threat ecology". And, for wow, 20-30 monsters just doesn't seem to cut it, IMO.

THis is just me and my thinking, in other words pure opinion:

I think of it this way, it is not that there is only 30-40 monsters in the world, there are only 30-40 monsters in this small part of the world where this campaign is going to play out. I look to build a list that fits into the feel and setting. By setting I do not mean Greyhawk, rather I mean jungle or underdark or desert or snow covered mountains.

I mean think about it with this math in mind: Game Group plays once a week for 3 hours each session, except a couple of holidays. So let's say 45 sessions. How many of those 2000 monsters can fit in those 135 hours? Heck, how many of those 135 hours are monster encounters? I bet not all of them. Do we ever run into the same mook monster more than once, well yes. And the BBG or Sub-boss monsters? By the time you play out the year you maybe could have used more than the 30-40 monsters on the list, but not by a lot.

Just a different way to think of the need for thousands of monsters in my opinion.