Recent content by Tanin Wulf

The game is about guessing what your opponent will do. The player with the better intuition will have an advantage (yes, "perfect balance" must incorporate player skill into its effects in order to achieve perfect balance and parity between players; it's part of why it doesn't exist). In this...

The reason why it's not a solved game at that point is because D&D has something the other games we're drawing comparisons to does not: the DM is changing the scenario. (Note this is not an appeal to Rule 0, it's an explanation of why it's not a solved game.) Your hyper optimized setup can be...

My point, in making my comment, was actually, "There's no such thing as a perfectly balanced game," not, "the imbalances are what make it interesting." Although... you could make an argument for that in the sense of the closer a game with a finite set of moves or play space gets to being...

(Very, VERY late to the party, so sorry if someone caught this already.) Neither Chess nor Go are perfectly balanced games. First turn still has a hell of an advantage.

The problems with that (which is why it's a debate) are that that ethnicity is a social grouping often based on a nationality, so someone can be ethnically South African and genetically Caucasian. Nationality is just... not useful in the slightest (a disease, like sickle cell anemia, that...

(I'm trying to tease out a bit more detail because in potentially heated conversations, poor communication kills.) I didn't see where the first part came into play, can you elaborate? EDIT: Nevermind. I didn't see how far the thread had moved since then. =)

What irony?

Oh... darn! I was hoping this was a real thing I had missed. Oh well. Thanks. :) (EDIT: Response was to Obryn. Got lost a bit in the thread.)

What book is this in? (I genuinely don't know.) :)

Agree. The differences are definitely much more minor than... whatever we want to call what D&D is calling race. But biological race applied to medicine is very much alive, and not in a eugenics/racial superiority way, but it in a way of understanding how genes tell us the story of where we've...

Hmm. I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as to say "race" is 100% a sociopolitical construct. There do seem to be some DNA-level differences that ignoring racial factors harms our understanding of the disease. For instance: sickle cell anemia. NOTE: This is in no way an endorsement of racial...

Let's be honest... most of the experience game designers in prior editions wrote pretty awful crunch, occasionally sprinkled with delicious crunch. (There's more than once I can think of that I was hired by a company to write a 3.5 version of 3.0 crunch some designer more experienced than I...

That's because we lost our minds with regards to RPG stuff back in the 80s. (But much like being turned into a newt, overall... we got better.) :)

Absolutely agree. I don't think our statements are mutually exclusive. :cool: As I said, in my experience, that's what led to the best/most memorable Paladins I've seen. My experience is hardly enough to make a generalized argument from, and I'd say both GM and Paladin-player have to want to...

High Charisma, Low Int at its finest.