Recent content by Benjamin Olson

That's simplifying for combat, but it's just making the prep point decision-making much, much harder. But whatever. I despise the "you should only be able to do like five things and magically forget how to use all the other abilities you've learned for the day" school of ttrpg design, and view...

You can make a D&D clone without those abilties or any abilities and it can be fine and dandy. But if it's going to be called "Dungeons and Dragons" it should have the core elements of Dungeons and Dragons, which to my mind are the six ability scores, classes (including at least some that align...

I agree that 5e has a fundamental rules bloat problem, but people choose Wizard because they want to mess around with a large number of spells, and because the idea of playing a massive spell nerd appeals to them. Trying to streamline spells for a high level wizard actually just kills the class...

I think Solo is actually my favorite Disney era Star Wars movie. Was it "necessary"? Not remotely. And yeah, I get that people found the need to explain every distinctive thing about the character with events that seemingly happened in the course of a few days obnoxious. But it was just easy...

I didn't care for those comic books not just because I didn't like the Emperor coming right back as a weird green clone, but also because (at least as I remember) they involved Luke falling to the Dark Side at the drop of a hat, and generally a giant plotline that didn't really tie in to the...

The shame of it is that Palpatine cheating death could have been a great payoff for the never really resolved Darth Plagueis's powers over life and death plotline from Revenge of the Sith. Yeah, trotting out the same old villain when he should be very dead is lame, but not having the overarching...

If creating April Fools episodes for online content, be aware that most the people who ultimately interact with it will not do so on the first of April. The "ha, ha, you should have known it's April Fools Day" twist hits differently when it's not and the audience had no particular reason to know...

My guess would be that it's a post-apocalyptic themed Survivor clone, where they do challenges to simulate surviving in the wasteland. A vault-based reality series is also possible, but that seems more expensive and harder to have much variety that's on theme for Fallout, as the Vaults tend to...

The "Padme" ploy worked fine though, because she was seemingly known to everyone else as just "Queen Amidala". Where the logic sort of breaks down for me has always been when they reveal in episode 2 that she was elected to a term as teenage queen of her planet. Which by the way, what sort of...

They already have a DC, and the d20 result is already a matter of luck rather than character skill. I narrate based on how widely they beat or miss the DC. As a bonus there are substantial stretches of results where they can just sort of have a normal, unremarkable success or failure.

To the best of my knowledge I've never played with anyone on here, but who knows who might be hiding about.

The ending was realistic enough. The actual government would have to either release a bunch of civilians or give them a trial, which would risk a lot of paranormal secrets and the nature of their actual activities in Hawkins coming to light. They probably also wouldn't want to draw attention to...

Well if it's love is like a tidal wave, spinning over your head, drownin' you in its promises better left unsaid, then, my friend, you've got a heartbreaker.

I mean it is a 45 hour narrative. Then again I also felt Return of the King had an appropriate amount of endings for the scale of the narrative (and size of ensemble). Personally I was totally there for all the endings, but I just wish I had known beforehand, because, seeing another hour of...

I've got a movie pass last June so I've seen a lot of new releases since then. By contrast I was in rural Alaska until May and saw absolutely no new releases. So this last 6 months and a bit: Best Movie: Hard to say. I saw both One Battle After Another and Bugonia and they're both masterfully...