Recent content by Umbran

Because character backstory or character development calls for it, darned whatever the mechanics say. A little while ago, I played a wizard character, who had a background as a former bandit, and whose life through his first level really didn't involve a whole lot of magic use. I also had had...

I bow to no gods, be they of RPG playstyle or food fashion.

No, the phrase is much older than the Gulf War. Initially it is a place where you'd park old and severely damaged tanks, like a junkyard for normal cars, where they'd often be used as a source for spare parts over time.

Nonsense. You wouldn't, because it is against the fashion, which says that liking steak rare is more "sophisticated". Admitting liking well-done meats would be a signal that you are boorish or uncultured, which few celebrities are going to do. Calling it a "sin" is a similar signal, marking...

Well, those militaries have had people studying military conflict for decades. And those definitions probably don't actually map to when the last person got shot all the time, do they? You figure Joe, who was a farmer last week and now is fighting off the goblin horde, has that kind of...

Geek cultural icons? Carl Sagan. Weird Al Yankovic. Gene Roddenberry. J.R.R. Tolkien. And, yeah, it kind of bugs me that they're all white dudes.

It isn't a "mechanism". It is advice to the GM for adventure design.

I don't think so. The 6-8 encounter guideline is more about game balance than simulation - if you don't have a stack of encounters, you don't stress resource-use properly across classes, allowing some to "nova" and effectively hog spotlight. Trying to claim this as simulation smacks of the...

I have read some Pratchett, but not that one. Huh. Pretty darned close. I will take that as a win.

You can talk about human psychology without breaking the rules. Some ways of expressing facts of human psychology are true, but expletive-laden, and so inappropriate for this site.

Our ability to fail to see people as people IS the darkest part of the human soul...

Mod Note: If you cannot back that assertion up with some solid data-citation, it looks a whole lot like you trying to pigeonhole people's play preferences to dismiss them. I sure hope you don't need one of us to remind you that's insulting, and that you shouldn't do it. But if you do need that...

Some of my fellow gamers are... terribly disappointing. (not from this site, thank goodness)

I'm not sure it is the same thing. As others have noted - it isn't the game that makes friendships, so much as the social interaction around the game. It then follows that it isn't the game that ends the relationship - it is the fact that the person turned out to be a horrible human being that...

Begin? Tomorrow, I celebrate being married for 21 years to a woman who I met when she showed up to generate characters for a D&D game I was starting up in grad school.