Recent content by Don Durito

What is this? I did NOT "belittle" any one's opinion. Spare me your misplaced moralism. Whatever unstated implications you read into my posts are purely your responsibility. I said that WotC could not tell if people played the class options, not that no one did. If you're going to go aroud...

Yes. And they can't even tell if the people filling in surveys are actually trying out the new rules in play.

We don't need a special annotated rule book. This is just what the regular rule book should do. That was after all the intention wasn't it behind 5e, to put power back in the hands of the GM. So inform them about what the designers were thinking so they can make informed decisions. Explain...

I'm kind of reminded of the way Doctor Who fans insist that everything in the history of Doctor Who is canon for the tv series, even the bits that contradict other bits and the three different versions of Atlantis.

I admit I don't quite get this. So WotC are declaring that things that we all know never happened never happened? What practical effect does this have?

The realms is really beyond fixing at this point in any way beyond an individual table making their own declarations about where history stops.

I think it would probably be have been preferable to have retconned Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance rather than continually blowing them up.

That's circular though. People now want to define racism as a particular modern ideology. If we do that, then of course, by definition it wasn't present in the ancient world. But the average person would almost certainly look at the interaction between Severus and the Ethiopian soldier and...

Well I get that. But she's arguing that 1) we should study ancient attitudes about ethnicity and 2) they were not the same as modern ones. No one has disputed that.

I remember once being sent an email by some genealogical group who wanted me to pay them for family tree services. They said they had good evidence I was descended from a particular roman emperor (I can't remember which one). I wrote back bemused, saying given the sheer length of time, and the...

That link from Professor Kennedy is obvious good sense but I don't see what it has to do with the current discussion.

No the whole trope that's in play here is an ancient one. You have virile male societies that build empires and then you have civilisations that enter states of decadence. In such societies, so the trope goes, men become effeminate, and women become influential and sexually poweful and the men...

In ancient Rome, being African and being black were not the same thing. The majority of Africans were mediterranean. See this interaction between Septimus Severus (African and often said to be Black, but probably not for reasons which should become clear, with an Ethiopian soldier on Hadrian's...

There's a gulf of light years between being against racist tropes being implemented in the depiction of fictional races and the the idea that PC characters should never act in immoral ways or do evil things. Even the idea that these are in some way equivalent displays either serious conceptual...

The Drow play into the (obviously) rather sexist idea that a society where women have a strong influence will become decadent. This has a loooong history.