The Gaming Den

What caused the dark ages in Europe last time? You'd think if that were the case, people would remember stuff like aqueducts and medicine and things wouldn't have been so crappy for a thousand years. Roman engineering lasted well after the Roman empire fell. Roman medicine wasn't all that spectacul...

Lago, what the hell are you talking about? We could literally decimate (in the modern sense, as opposed to the Roman definition which was to reduce the population by 10%) the entire human population on the planet and we would still be the “dominant intelligent life form” on the planet. Life in the y...

the rise of the oppressive police state Tell me about who passed the patriot act? You Stupid Fuck. A Neo-Con (or as Mike Church would say a DecptiCON) named G.W. Bush. (Remember his father once called Reagan Economics "VooDoo" economics.) He was also the one who had to "destroy capit...

TOZ wrote:Can we say for certain AIDS didn't exist back in the day?

Wikipedia wrote:AIDS is caused by the Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which originated in non-human primates in Sub-Saharan Africa and was transferred to humans during the late 19th or early 20th century.

Only in the apes.

Your days were full of polio and segregation; your days fucking sucked. And your days are filled with AIDS, beast / prostrate cancer, and the rise of the oppressive police state (that literally steals a turkey sandwich from 4th graders and forces them to eat chicken nuggets). So your days suck too....

I'm not Kaelik, but: we have observed that life on earth was created by normal mechanical processes involving common materials that appear throughout the universe in fair abundance. It's ludicrously improbable for life not to form on anything like an early earth. But that's the key. How common are ...

Well, the UK is having such a shitty economy that there are literally riots in the streets and Scotland is threatening to leave the Union . Scotland has always been threatening to leave the Union. It's the general nature of the Scot. And riots in the streets (of England) have been happening for a w...

John Paulson Says Greece May Soon Default And The Shock Might Be Worse Than The Lehman Bankruptcy via @clusterstock Hedge fund titan John Paulson is predicting that Greece may default by the end of next month causing the euro to break up, according to Bloomberg News. The billionaire hedge fund mana...

I especially love how the same people who talk about how Civil Law needs to reflect God's Law will completely FREAK OUT if you mention Sharia Law. Even though that's fucking what Civil Law reflecting God's Law actually is. Actually it's not. Parts of the Sharia is and parts are not. Legal scholar L...

What's the problem? No one is being forced to use those services. It's an individual choice. The catholic position is to force their position on other people, regardless of their religion. Obama isn't making catholics be not catholic. The problem is in paying for these services. In paying for these...

Tzor, what is your position on mandatory blood donation? Has that actually come up? You're starting to get me thinking I'm in the NationStates forum again. So in a nutshell, my position is "No, No, No, No and No, and in any case there better damn well be a religious exception clause for people...

Obama had a great compromise where instead the insurance organization must legally provide them free of charge, and cannot charge the Catholic Hospital. It's Catholic Institution, but whatever. I really would like to know how that even makes fucking sense. How can a cost not be passed on to the con...

As opposed to the POTUS who has been fucking off playing golf and forcing Churches to supply abritifacients to nuns.

Glancing only briefly at various sites devoted to this rather strange notion, it appears that most of the people who claim to push “Intelligent Design” are not per se trying to push for the “divine watchmaker” or even creationism (although by default most are not opposed to either) but instead are p...

When you say easily, you mean by today's medical standards, and not by, say, what people have been living with for tens of thousands of years? Granted, they didn't have processed sugar back then, but tooth decay could still happen. They pulled teeth in the medieval period as that was the only treat...

First and foremost, I don’t think anyone would ever argue that “Intelligent Design” would demand that everything in the human body is brilliant, but then again I do like teeth. I mean, where would you want the nerve to be? On the outside? Considering that teeth form a part of your skeletal structure...

Here is the problem for me, and why I generally prefer minis (or as we used to call them “figs”) in role-playing. I am a left-brain / right-brain kind of role-player. This is especially true for combat. It’s not enough to “describe” the scene, I need a visual representation of the scene even if it i...

Currently, yes. Haven't spent any time gaming lately and I've haven't spent enough time with a friend who is in the K of C honor guard to get into his games.

Just a point about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser: If the world of Leiber had been a D&D campaign, Leiber would have been the most revilled DM of all of history. (He would have made Gygax seem a nice DM.) High level NPC dominated the plot. Magic items were handed and taken away by the whims of hte h...

It's really not my fault that DC writers blatantly ignore the capabilities of the Green Lantern so that they can make him the protagonist of mid-level plots all the time. It's more complicated than that. Non linear advancement cannot be contained in a linear mindset. DC has always had a problem wit...

What the hell is a pre-D&D fantasy story? There are fundamental tropes that wound up in many fantasy writers as a direct result of Gygax's interpertation of Tolkein's world and the general impact of non-linear level advanceent in a campaign world, but I don't thnk that is what is being talked a...

On a side note, I sometimes play with a woman who randomly rolls stuff all the time without being asked. There was a time when I used to do stuff like that, not rolling saves that weren't needed, but sometimes when faced with a decision "should my character do this or should my charcter do tha...

Oh please. The idea that the PCs should drink from every fountain they come across in case it happens to give them 18/00 Strength is a stupid idea that should have died with AD&D. The RAW fountains were nothing compared to what my DM's had. My dwarf (with an int of 8) once drank from one of his...

In a 1e/2e paradigm where that stuff is all arbitrary anyways that doesn't matter and the fact that you are adding cool stuff to your game is all upside, because there wasn't even a pretend agreement as to what level really meant and you were totally expected to fight werewolves before you had a si...

Yes, it was a brilliant move. Especially because it wasn't Karen Handel who made the policy. The person who made the policy to drop groups under investigation was a former aide of ... wait for it ... Nancy Pelosi. According to people close to the Komen Foundation I’ve spoken to, it was not Fleischer...