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To the first part. I do agree negative thoughts particularly recurrent ones can be harmful (i am involved in neurochemisty and psychiatry so I know this is true) but actually they can also be good (stress can have good effects as well as deleterious ones) and recurrent positive thoughts can also...

There are kind of two ideas that were looked at in the thread (this is getting way too Augustinian. If evil is a state adjective or property that is an 'essence' vs a description (in D&D it seems to be) Evil either is the presence of something or Evil is the absence of something (non-good)...

It is not circular as it was not an argument. The first is just proscribing what I identify as evil. limiting evil to a certain parameters (behavior, manmade definitions, social unnaceptability). The second part was thrown in as this conversation has a habit of jumping back and forth between...

This is where there is disagreement. Several people (myself included) do not considere sadistic desires as evil but acting on them is the evil part. I do not think greed is evil, though not controlling it may cause someone to do evil actions. Same with jealousy and pride or even arrogance...

He is the ex-nephew of one of my colleagues. She just went to have coffee with him a couple weeks ago during his book tour when he was in Chicago. She was not terribly surprised that I was a gaming geek B-)

Somehow my post got lost in the ether...arrrghhh I tried to obtain this article but it looks like it is in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and the epub is not yet available. Unfortunately the current trend is to release the results to the news media before the...

i always thought it was weird that creatures that produce/are fire are not more resistant to cold damage than normal critters.....

I will preface this with i am a neurochemist in drug development and while i am very wrong on many things, i do know this subject matter pretty well. Honestly the 10% is a myth. Though it is a myth that did originate from some unusual phenomena that we have observed (certain developmental...

I think you summed up your point very well. I am in much agreement with everything you wrote.

Your point is a good one. Which dungeon they go in is probably not a meaningful choice in many circumstances unless it is as you picking which dungeon to go in really impacts the overall plot. This of course begs the question as to why are they going in the dungeon (if it is to kill things and...

This is an advantage to stake setting mechanics. Additional conflicts tied to the conflict will arise whether the interrogation is a failure or successful as they are written into the conflict itself. Obviously a potential disadvantage for some is that the game is less simulationist when such...

This is agree with. If the gameworld reacts very differently to the last-ditch vs triumphant battle choices, then i think the choices/results that the players accomplished earlier is meaningful. I guess an easy way would have been... 1. In the case of last-ditch: The town survives relatively...

I DM I try to practice what i talk about My players seem happy and state that they are happier playing now than many years ago before I thought about these issues. They say the games are more fulfilling now than they were then. Of course that is hard to judge. Like many things it could be...

If the DM could manage to show that them tracking me was difficult and that is expressed in game..then that is good. It is why i like games that give out such gems like bonus dice. This allows these a good way (though not the only way) to reward (or penalty dice to penalize) choices to make...

Agreed some games (Dogs in the Vinyard) are good examples of games that are neither sandbox or railroading, but are also not illusionism, the players are fully aware that 'x' type of conflict will occur and are given tools to also make sure that they do. My point was not about whether the DM...

Is it near the occult book store and what used to be B&G video?

I agree i dont think its a trichotomous choice. I think most games provide a bit of illusionism, railroading and sandbox with varying thresholds of success vs impairment. there are also other options (player defined narrative in setting, scenes and goals). A lot of what is talked about is...

The person i mentioned was particularly bad at it. And frankly we had fun in the game but that was mostly because of the other players. I am sure a good GM could do it, but in the end if i did find out I would never trust that the specific GM is not doing it in the future and this would be an...

Well like i think anything if you don't know then you will enjoy it as if you had real power. I think players generally figure it out though. Going one step further, i wonder what people would think if the same thought pattern held to not only encountering the challenges but to the challenge...

Well in the article on Fantasy Heartbreakers one of the criteria is that the designer did have a couple of really cool ideas that got buried in a D&D knock-off. The guy who wrote it really liked many of the these cool ideas that were designed but that they were lost in the D&D cloning. VS...