Recent content by Dyir

My wife is great. She's been there since those halcyon days in late 2E when I first discovered D&D, through the d20 boom and aftershocks, through the World of Darkness and so much else. I couldn't ask for a better partner in life. Amusingly, although my wife is an avid gamer, she's been mostly...

I haven't gotten to DM or play D&D or any other pen-and-paper RPG in years. I have a close group of friends and we used to get together every weekend and have a great time. But you know the story: marriage, work, extended families, and babies make finding time to schedule a game impossible. So I...

Since the purchasing of the item took place not during character creation, but during play, without the DM's or other player's knowledge (or at least, that's how I read the OP), that's where I cry foul. It would be one thing to not realize the expectations of the setting when a player makes a...

From what I've read online, Alan Moore would agree with you. I've encountered quotes here and there where he regards Killing Joke as one of his worst pieces, and that he'd written it expecting DC to undo his crippling of Barbara almost immediately afterward. Most recently for me was trying to...

Reminding me of One More Day actually does present an angle to this development I hadn't considered. When Ultimate Spider-man was first published, the Peter Parker in normal Marvel was married. But now that Joe Quesada has orchestrated it so that Original Peter is single again, Marvel doesn't...

I will agree with that. However, they've been moving away from "modern retelling of older Marvel stories" and towards new stories with new characters for some time too. The problem is that the more they change, the more the Ultimate Universe resembles DC's Tangent Universe: a completely unique...

They have, here and there. Beast's death was retconned, and they brought Gwen Stacy back too. I'm ambivalent. I would have been more interested if they'd have made Peter Parker non-white, rather than killing him off so they can introduce a "new Spider-man." It unfortunately means that poor...

Heh, so very true! I think that's kind of why questions like "which superhero would win in a fight" is so contentious: almost all of them follow a structure were Hero A wins a round against Hero B, but then Hero B wins a round against Hero A, and by this time they figure out what's really going...

In my campaign, humans are the only "natural" sapient species and all "natural" species behave like they do in the real world. However, all of the "fantasy" species originate from Faerie, where magic and myth and belief are the rule. As a result, pairings between any two "fantasy" species are...

Well, upon consideration, once upon a time Magneto ripped the adamantium off of Wolverine's bones. Now Mags is definitely a top-tier super-villain, but I'm not sure I'd put his ability to produce the force necessary to accomplish that feat beyond what Superman could theoretically produce...

For what it's worth, Ultimate Hulk ripped Ultimate Wolverine in half. And since Hulk and Superman are usually in the same ballpark of super-strength whenever depicted, you could argue that Superman would likewise have the ability to dismember Wolverine. But, then again, in standard superhero...

I will admit to being the youngling of this discussion: my first exposure to D&D was at the end of 2E. At the time, from what I can remember, the gods were almost always presented as "so powerful that you have no hope of even harming them in any way, so stats are meaningless." And then once 3E...

To the latter question, I prefer Upper Krust's definitions of Heroic, Paragon, and Epic to the ones typically described in the core rulebooks. There was a lengthy thread a few months ago about it, but it does somewhat deviate from the way "Epic Tier" has been presented by WOTC. By his...

While this is very true in D&D, this isn't always the case in literature and other mediums. I actually noticed this while playing God of War III the other day: while the gods that are being killed are powerful, many don't scream "epic" to me. And, going back to comic books, while Thor is...

I encountered Planescape not long after being exposed to D&D itself, and it was the first time I encountered anything involving steampunk (even if only in light doses), the idea of a fantasy universe that wasn't obviously LOTR derived, or the idea of demons as having a deeper agenda than Kill...