The Gaming Den

Whoever put that sign up at the co-op is an overbearing fuckwad, who may have some kind of trauma, or have just had a really fucking bad day, that explains why they put up that note. Ah, the self-serving bias. Poor behavior by the other is attributed to innate characteristics; poor behavior by the ...

Alas, one cannot determine what a law was meant to do by reading it. Because lawmakers tend to suck at writing laws.

I commend to you Wikipedia's article on the topic, which covers different ways the concept is considered in various countries.

It's not actually that difficult to imagine a Mundane that doesn't generate Paradox for a certain style of magic - technically that describes everyone living 'normal' lives on Earth according to the generally-accepted principles of normality. All it takes is for the person to have an intuitive and p...

If I recall correctly, the purpose of Affirmative Action was to provide a temporary boost, in order to counter the lingering disadvantages of legal racial discrimination. The metaphor memorably tossed around was that you wouldn't take leg irons off a child and then expect them to be able to complete...

No, because I find the term SJW to be a way to shut down discussion. That term only gets used when the discussion has already been shut down by the people the term is applied to, the ones who not only don't want to hear anything they don't like, want to ensure that no one can even say any such thin...

Affirmative action 'works' in what way, exactly?

Might and Magic is a computer game series, but sort of D&Desque... and if memory serves, M&M 6 involves a struggle against aliens and a crashed spaceship.

That. Is. AWESOME.

Somebody give Ancient History an Internet.

Now all we need is a way to harmlessly encode data into human tissue at will. Although a Godellian statement for one computer program won't work on others, so there's no way to render DNA truly unreadable.

As I understand it, Joker Immunity exists so that future stories involving the Joker are possible, and writers who might want to use a very popular villain in a future work can do so. This is perfectly reasonable for people writing comic books. You don't want to eliminate a perfectly good source of ...

A wizard makes a perpetual motion machine that runs on magic, and drains all the magic from the world. Civilization collapses. Hundreds of years later, magic is slowly regenerating - meaning that depowered artifacts are once again becoming dangerous, and ancient magical techniques that had been aban...

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - the BBC America show - is fantastic.

Great moments? All of them. ALL.

Teleportation changes very little, if it's sufficiently useless - that is, if the costs and disadvantages grossly outweigh the benefits. Flexible, cheap, and easy teleportation would utterly change any setting. For example, take a good look at the society Alfred Bester postulates in The Stars My Des...

you can remove almost anything, but you can't remove everything at the same time. You can remove vancian casting, you can use 3d6 instead of 1d20, you can replace fireball with elemental ball, you can remove the classes, but maybe you shouldn't do all those thing at the same time. That's the guy wh...

Since when does being True Neutral mean you believe "all beliefs are equally valid"? That's both stupid and absurd. True Neutrality means you don't have strong inclinations along either of the alignment axes.

I thought the character of Vulture in the recent Spiderman film was a great example of a True Neutral with Neutral Evil tendencies character.

Maybe it's a thematic 'sequel' rather than an actual follow-up.

The end-of-credits scene in Spiderman Homecoming had the entire theater laughing.

It has just occurred to me that petitioning the Dead Master Thieves to permit the humble mortals to 'borrow' some of their accumulated wealth, in exchange for promising to repay it on demand, could lead to a supernatural banking system.

What's wealth, compared to wealth with interest?

It's not really a surprise that WW products don't have a lot of concern with making sense.

If you want to be especially protean, you could go with the basic limbic drives: Hunger, Lust, Fear, and Rage. Disgust is actually a very complex reaction that many animals don't possess.

I'd assume Luke got pathing instructions from the Rebel Base and passed them to R2D2.

I vaguely remember people talking about that when nMage came out, and the developers said something about how it was the most problematic part of oMage, so they got rid of it. Sadly, it was the reason for playing the game for some people... including me. What we got was a lot closer to specific clas...

It's rather like asking "what value does a car have" and then comparing something you'd pick up at a used lot with something used for racing. They're both highly engineered precision devices, in a sense, but there are significant practical differences. A vintage VW Bug even has some advant...

Stupid question: are there any remnants of Paradigm in nMage? (I grant you that most people didn't actually bother with it in oMage, but technically it was supposed to be there.)