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It's been a while since I played Star Wars d20, so hopefully I'm remembering correctly, but from what I recall, while WP/VP certainly worked better then they do in DnD, they still led to a lot of weird results that were difficult to describe. As an example, lots of big creatures had heaps of...

In theory, I love the idea of WP/VP. Hit points and their inconsistency bug the he'll out of me. In practice, though, I think they're actually even worse for verisimilitude then HP are. HP are essentially fictionless. Their saving grace is that they don't actually mean any particular thing...

I rather like the idea that elves are incredibly conservative, but not in a way humans would recognize. The world they long for is so old, it goes right through human ideas of conservatism and back out the other side. The Elder Kingdoms didn't have judicial systems, or monetary systems, or even...

Absolutely--that's pretty much what I was describing. If you destroyed Asmodeus, you might usher in a golden age of liberty. Maybe it would last for a hundred years, but it wouldn't last forever. The concept of tyranny can never be truly destroyed. It would still matter a lot to all the people...

I'll add a fourth option, which I use in my campaigns: all beings from the outer planes both create and are created by humanoid moral choices. A fiend isn't just a being that happens to be evil. It's the concepts of hatred, tyranny, selfishness, and malevolence themselves, made flesh. That's why...

That is a major area where we differ. I wouldn't go so far as to say that intent doesn't matter, but it's not the primary criteria I'd use for whether or not something is, for want of a better term (and I really do hate this one), "problematic." It's easy enough to say things you didn't intend...

It's partly a question of character design: This guy just screams "Jewish banker" to me, in a way that the description in the books does not necessarily evoke. It is not any one specific trait, which might well be unrelated or just generally come from goblinesque depictions. It's an emergent...

Is this an objective critique, though? Absent empirical data being used to test some kind of falsifiable hypothesis, I don't think it is purely objective. I disagree with @Maxperson, but he's lived as a Jew and experienced Anti-Semitism, so I'm inclined to give his view some credence. Maybe you...

To a lot of people, capitalism is synonymous with Jews. (And to an entirely different group of people, socialism is synonymous with Jews. Anti-Semitism is weird.) I disagree about Harry Potter and the Ferangi. The Ferangi as originally introduced could have been taken straight from early 20th...

To return to the tiger analogy brought up earlier in the thread, I'm not sure there's that much difference between tigers and mind flayers in terms of their ability to make moral judgements. We tend to assume that creatures with higher intelligence should be able to make moral judgements...

I certainly remember those stories, well enough to recognize how little DnD resembles them, whatever Gygax and Arneson might have intended. Part of the problem with the Paladin class in earlier editions is that it attempted to graft the tropes of chivalric romance onto a game that was never...

That many cultures are expansionistic--maybe most of them--does not mean that they all approach expansion identically. I have never claimed that expansionism was unique to American culture, but that Dnd's conception of leveling by going out and conquering stuff most evokes American ideas about...

Precisely. Knights were made. They didn't make themselves. Arthur is "the once and future king," and was since he was born. The sword just reveals that he's the rightful king. And while there are some self-made heroics in The Silmarillion, there's an awful lot more lineage and pseudo-divine...

It seems to me that the question of whether or not Dnd was inspired by westerns is irrelevant. The question is whether it reflects particularly American ideals of heroism, which also happen to be exemplified by westerns. I'd say that it does. "The hero goes out into the untamed frontier and...

So, my personal experience of representation isn't about ethnicity. I'm an Ashkenazic Jew, and I'd be perfectly happy if I never saw anyone with my particular ethnic background in fiction ever again (not that this is likely). But I have experienced its importance in other ways. I have Crohn's...

I don't see those two things as mutually exclusive. Femat's last theorem is basically lost lore from an ancient master, and it took hundreds of years for the solution to be rediscovered. I can find the shortest path between two orientations using a Quaternion slerp, but I can't visualize how the...

I've always liked the idea that wizards are perfectly sane and rational (or at least, no more or less likely to be sane then anyone else) but seem completely bonkers to the outside world, particularly when describing anything magical. A modern, educated person with a decent knowledge of physics...

I've always been tremendously frustrated by how difficult it is to make a coherent fiction out of hit points...but I also think they're inevitable. I've tried a lot of alternate systems and found most of them to be wanting in one way or another. WP/VP, for instance, strikes me as just being hit...