But for some reason are popular.   

About a month ago I asked about which mechanics folks here think should be more popular so, with the new month, I figured I'd ask the followup opposite question... what game mechanic that is currently in vogue do you think should be LESS popular?

I'll go with skipping the to hit roll as popularized most recently by MCDM's Draw Steel.   I like rolling to hit and having the potential to whiff as long as the system is streamlined enough that I'm not waiting 20-30 minutes for my next turn to come back around  and as long as when you do hit then it's meaningful each time.   When I saw one of their earlier gameplay demos, it look like you could still whiff completely but they just transferred the possibility over to the damage die roll (making it less likely) and they turned even low level goblins into hit point sponges to make up for the "everyone is doing damage every turn" ethos similar to the HP bloat of their 4e inspiration.   If a game is specifically not combat oriented (whether some sort of horror game where you're supposed to run intead) or a minimalist system that is extremely light on every part of the rules though then I'm fine with skipping the to hit roll though.  YMMV.

I know it isn't a popular opinion, yet the Advantage/Disadvantage thing seems weird to me. Way back when the DM/GM/etcetera would consider the roll and just say, 'Roll again.' It comes out in 5e and people fall all over it like it is the 8th wonder of the world.

Advantage is just basically a better version of a + bonus to rolls, that stacks on top of one.

Quote from: bat on May 02, 2025, 06:20:01 PMI know it isn't a popular opinion, yet the Advantage/Disadvantage thing seems weird to me. Way back when the DM/GM/etcetera would consider the roll and just say, 'Roll again.' It comes out in 5e and people fall all over it like it is the 8th wonder of the world.

Like a lot of things that will probably end up in this topic before it is done, Advantage/Disadvantage is a moderately good idea pushed way too far.  I use a form of it in my own system, but it is relatively rare, situational, and certainly not something players can chase all the time.  It is true that D&D 3E has too many fiddly modifiers that stack in odd ways.  It is true that using advantage for some of them helps.  In the chase to "fix fiddly" they threw the baby out with the bath water.  I don't know where modern designers get this idea that if ramping something back a bit is a good idea then ramping it back all the way is even better.  The thought process seems to be, "I need to lose some weight.  I ate less and lost a little.  So I'll just stop eating altogether and that will be even better!"  Though given how little perspective so many of them have on the rest of life, I don't know why I should think design would be any different.

The other category that gets used way too much is mechanic for the sake of the mechanic, not for what it is doing in the particular game.  I've got no beef with dice pools, used properly.  So many games decide that the dice pool is the be all and end all, even when another mechanic would work better in parts of it.  You get a similar thing with streamlining mechanics getting a bad name because someone has to push "unified" to the Nth degree.  Or likewise, "balancing" going nuts.

Finally, my pet annoyance is "skills" listed with no real thought to what the game is really about--mixing heavily used ones with throw-aways for flavor with massive abstraction imbalance for no apparent reason.  Sure, if you want Skill X to be prominent while Skill Y is more subdued in the setting, by all means make Y harder to get or less valuable for the cost or whatever.  Just do that as a conscious choice.  I'm absolutely sure that some games have skill lists that the designers just slapped down in an afternoon because of some vague ideas that they considered while drinking.

Any mechanics that allow players to directly dictate the final outcome. "Player agency" stuff like those found in Dungeon World, 2D20/Modiphius does this with "doom" or whatever it's called. Any time the player can override the DM/GM, I think it's trash, and yet these things keep cropping up.

Quote from: Brad on May 02, 2025, 07:15:52 PMAny mechanics that allow players to directly dictate the final outcome. "Player agency" stuff like those found in Dungeon World, 2D20/Modiphius does this with "doom" or whatever it's called. Any time the player can override the DM/GM, I think it's trash, and yet these things keep cropping up.

Are you referring to narrative style dictations with GM-style duties on players, metacurrency that lets you change the outcome if spent, or situationally dependent dice roll mechanic dictating mechanics?   For example, does taking 10 or 20 in 3.x D&D override the GM since he or she asked for a roll and the player is effectively ignoring it?   

Quote from: bat on May 02, 2025, 06:20:01 PMI know it isn't a popular opinion, yet the Advantage/Disadvantage thing seems weird to me. Way back when the DM/GM/etcetera would consider the roll and just say, 'Roll again.' It comes out in 5e and people fall all over it like it is the 8th wonder of the world.

I agree it's a bit overdone but I do like it personally.. just not with the d20 where because of 5e it's most prevalent.   The d20 feels too swingy for that to be the baseline catchall mechanic.

There are few mechanics I view as objectively bad design, everything is generally contextual to the game and surrounding mechanics, so I'm going avoid naming mechanics I simply dislike because of the games I encountered them in or how they were done in those games.

The mechanics I harbor issues with tend to be on a much more philosophical levels, mechanics that actively harm the social contract or reason one plays an RPG to begin with.

Meta-Currencies: to define a meta-currency real quick: any spendable resource or token which is untethered from the in-universe fiction in any meaningful sense but which has a notable gameplay affect. for example things like story points, that let a player rewrite a scene or add an element. or let the player say "Nu uh!" to the GM.

Meta-Currencies are not things like Spell slots, Psi-points, sanity, Will-Power, strain, etc, because while they are abstract and while the player characters may not talk about things in terms of those, you can directly correlate them to a phenomenon in the fiction and genre of the game/setting.

Let's Go back / Flashback mechanics: Things that let you retcon something or add a scene or detail that was otherwise not there suddenly, yeah don't care for those, on the same principle it overrides the GMs authority, I find this type of unpalatable and lazy more often than not in constructed fiction, translating a sloppy narrative device into an even more imprecise medium like a TTRPG doesn't bode well to me.

Life Path character gen where you can die at character gen: Yeah this is just the game designer trolling their player base, looking at you Mongoose Traveller... like if it takes an average of 30-45 minutes and I might not even get a character alive out of that process, yeah no you're just wasting my time in the name of "realism" or something.

Basically this goes for any character gen system that has a decent chance of producing a non-viable character and is lengthy, that shit is a literal time sink in a hobby where time is a precious commodity, any designer that does this should get bent.

Quote from: RNGm on May 02, 2025, 07:48:50 PM

Quote from: bat on May 02, 2025, 06:20:01 PMI know it isn't a popular opinion, yet the Advantage/Disadvantage thing seems weird to me. Way back when the DM/GM/etcetera would consider the roll and just say, 'Roll again.' It comes out in 5e and people fall all over it like it is the 8th wonder of the world.

I agree it's a bit overdone but I do like it personally.. just not with the d20 where because of 5e it's most prevalent.  The d20 feels too swingy for that to be the baseline catchall mechanic.

My observation on advantage is that I actually ran a serious playtest comparing various static bonuses to advantage as part of designing my own system.

I came into the test with a definite preference. I wanted to prove static bonuses were better and that players wouldn't have a clear preference for advantage over static bonuses.

I was wrong.

The absolute bar none best element of advantage as proven in the tests is what I call its "save vs. failure" aspect.

People remember exceptions. They don't remember all the times Advantage made no difference whatsoever (a lot of them).

What they all remember and talked about for weeks after was when the party was in dire straits and one of them rolled a 3 on the attack. They needed a 10 on the die to succeed so even the mammoth +5 static modifer I had offered in another test would not have saved them. It wasn't even an interesting fail like you could narrate with a natural 1.

But they'd forgotten they had advantage, and when they rolled again? Natural Twenty! The crit took out the monster and saved the party.

There is no size of static bonus that can compete with the endorphin hit of a failure turned into a critical success. It was an absolute exception. By averaged results the +5 definitely outperformed Advantage.

But it didn't create the memorable experiences that Advantage is. It didn't have players yakking it up about the player had made their "saving throw vs. failure" (which is why I still refer to the effect as that).

Which is why my system uses Advantage.

Random character creation.
Random character advancement.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 02, 2025, 08:33:19 PMBut it didn't create the memorable experiences that Advantage is. It didn't have players yakking it up about the player had made their "saving throw vs. failure" (which is why I still refer to the effect as that).

Which is why my system uses Advantage.

Players definitely remember swings like that moreso than the roll they just squeaked by and made because they got a +1 bonus even if the two results were similarly significant and memorable (the results...not the roll necessarily).  It's definitely memorable!   I'm not against it per se but just feel like it's a bit overused and too swingy and should be left for situations where it's more meaningful.   For example, leaving adv/disadv for magic spells where your character is twisting and tugging on the skeins of fate to effect the result... as opposed to having an assistant helping you.

Quote from: RNGm on May 02, 2025, 09:26:37 PMPlayers definitely remember swings like that moreso than the roll they just squeaked by and made because they got a +1 bonus even if the two results were similarly significant and memorable (the results...not the roll necessarily).  It's definitely memorable!   I'm not against it per se but just feel like it's a bit overused and too swingy and should be left for situations where it's more meaningful.   For example, leaving adv/disadv for magic spells where your character is twisting and tugging on the skeins of fate to effect the result... as opposed to having an assistant helping you.

Well, you don't have to go that far the other way to make it memorable. For me, a good example is the difference between flanking versus a "backstab" situation where you completely have the drop on a guy. I like the mechanic for the latter but not the former, not least because a character has to engage with the world and work a little to get it.  Or attacking while invisible versus having some concealment.  Or for that matter, getting the disadvantage side when attacking an invisible guy versus something like blur.  Sure, invisibility is a spell, but you have to get pretty high up before it doesn't go away with attacks.  So we are back to situational.

Thus my short cut above:  If the player can directly chase it as a mechanical edge, it becomes a button pushing game at worst, a cut and dried game tactic at best.  If it is situational, it's back in the GMs control in the consistent world, however with the players having a good idea of when it will get invoked.  No matter how well or poorly a mechanic works, I'll always default to pushing things into that realm.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 02, 2025, 07:00:18 PMFinally, my pet annoyance is "skills" listed with no real thought to what the game is really about--mixing heavily used ones with throw-aways for flavor with massive abstraction imbalance for no apparent reason.  Sure, if you want Skill X to be prominent while Skill Y is more subdued in the setting, by all means make Y harder to get or less valuable for the cost or whatever. 

I'm a believer that skills which are core to the main activities of a game should be purchased separately from rarely used or "just for flavor" skills. Just remove the choice a player has to make between making an effective character and an interesting one.

Probably gonna be some unpopular opinions but...

1. Dice pool systems where you count successes.
2. Dice pool systems where you keep the highest.
3. Yes, and; no, but resolution systems -> and this extends to all the partial success/success with a cost crap.
4. New trend where everything is "fail forward".
5. Exploding dice.
6. Wild dice.

I think 5e's advantage/disadvantage mechanic is fine. But, I really don't get the hype around it. It's not THAT great. I see people act like it's some kind of mind blowing game changer. It's not.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 02, 2025, 08:33:19 PM

Quote from: RNGm on May 02, 2025, 07:48:50 PM

Quote from: bat on May 02, 2025, 06:20:01 PMI know it isn't a popular opinion, yet the Advantage/Disadvantage thing seems weird to me. Way back when the DM/GM/etcetera would consider the roll and just say, 'Roll again.' It comes out in 5e and people fall all over it like it is the 8th wonder of the world.

I agree it's a bit overdone but I do like it personally.. just not with the d20 where because of 5e it's most prevalent.  The d20 feels too swingy for that to be the baseline catchall mechanic.

My observation on advantage is that I actually ran a serious playtest comparing various static bonuses to advantage as part of designing my own system.

I came into the test with a definite preference. I wanted to prove static bonuses were better and that players wouldn't have a clear preference for advantage over static bonuses.

I was wrong.

The absolute bar none best element of advantage as proven in the tests is what I call its "save vs. failure" aspect.

People remember exceptions. They don't remember all the times Advantage made no difference whatsoever (a lot of them).

What they all remember and talked about for weeks after was when the party was in dire straits and one of them rolled a 3 on the attack. They needed a 10 on the die to succeed so even the mammoth +5 static modifer I had offered in another test would not have saved them. It wasn't even an interesting fail like you could narrate with a natural 1.

But they'd forgotten they had advantage, and when they rolled again? Natural Twenty! The crit took out the monster and saved the party.

There is no size of static bonus that can compete with the endorphin hit of a failure turned into a critical success. It was an absolute exception. By averaged results the +5 definitely outperformed Advantage.

But it didn't create the memorable experiences that Advantage is. It didn't have players yakking it up about the player had made their "saving throw vs. failure" (which is why I still refer to the effect as that).

Which is why my system uses Advantage.

From that anecdote what makes is seem memorable is that they forgot to roll twice. They they done so and rolled d20s at the same time, still getting the result, it doesn't seem like it would have been the same impact.

But personally, I don't like it because it makes the odds trickier. A modifier, you know how much the odds are going to change. It's trickier with 2 dice instead.