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That's a really cherry picked comparison. Have you seen the blue hairs at a casino shoveling quarters into a slot machine or at a bingo parlor playing over and over? They're the right comparison set to a hardcore "all I do is play CoD" type. Different game but the same basic addiction. I see...

Space rock wasn't all that far from metal back in the day. The great British metal band UFO started out as a space rock band and the great German metal band Scorpions were inclined in that way early on, too. Black Sabbath started as a psychedelic blues band that just got heavier and heavier. You...

Perfect example! I mean, blood sports used to be considered "adult entertainment." In Call of Duty, it's all fake.

:eggplant emoji: is a way of saying Maher's a... well you can click on the Know Your Meme link if you care. He's a professional jerk who makes a living mocking other people.

That may be but I don't really think D&D is unique in this regard compared to, say, people who are into gambling, sports fandom, or a lot of other things. I also think that what's happened now is that parents back in those days mostly didn't take their kids to more adult movies. There have...

I think that's a common reaction, certainly. Perhaps, though I dispute that someone prepping a D&D game isn't "doing something". I'm a statistician by trade and you'd be surprised how many people my rough age group (fortysomething...) first got interested in the subject because of the...

I get that you're playing devil's advocate and I appreciate the role, but Boomers themselves are far from immune. In many respects, they're the worst offenders. Think about the "oldies' station" which plays music from the youth of Boomers. Ditto the bands that were fresh and interesting (or not...

Yep, he is that kind of :eggplant emoji:.

We just did that in a more or less ad hoc way because we had a small group of players who were pretty much all on the same page about what to do. I'm fairly certain that scaling it up would require some kind of formalization, even if the players were pretty solid with each other.

All dark all the time is probably too much for many players. I agree, playing a ruthlessly self-interested party or even an evil one can be really good RP, but I also very much agree that it's crucial for things to be tailored to the group.

I've played in a few over the years, although they were generally custom ones devised or adapted by the GM. The posted idea is pretty cool. Obviously, games like Vampire: the Masquerade could be argued to be "evil" campaigns all the way through. They're hard to sustain, though, especially given...

I've never read Blades in the Dark so i can't comment on it, but I've played in an "ensemble cast" type game where the PCs were a group of somewhat loosely connected adventurers. We also had henchmen of various sorts that sometimes got "promoted" to being a PC, or would sometimes leave the game...

It looks like they're available in Kindle format for a reasonable price. I didn't see PoD but that might be around somewhere. They're good reads. She started a series with the book The Swordswoman, which was an Eastern-influenced planetary romance, but unfortunately it was never finished.

Great choice. There's a really neat trilogy of books by Jessica Amanda Salmonson on a slightly fantasy version of Tomoe Gozen (The Disfavored Hero, The Golden Naginata, Thousand Shrine Warrior). Also, C. J. Cherryh wrote a book, The Paladin, that's very loosely based on her. They are all...

They also tend to have a large dose of "realism" patched in. (Air quotes intentional.)

They were playing with the ideas at the tail end of 1E in books like the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.

OK, I think we part company there. IMO good rules often don't actually read all that well in terms of sparking the imagination but they play well. This is where good art and a few good fictional examples of play can really help, though. Also, lots of times, the part that's the most fun and...

I get where you're coming from. The more transparent and simple the mechanics are, all other things being equal, the more they can get out of the way. This can be an issue with both games you cite and I do think there's a real tradeoff between clarity of rules and fun to read. Still...

Grappling is something that just really doesn't fit with the overall structure of how D&D combat works. It's never been great.

I'd certainly agree with this---a board game is a finite (though sometimes extremely large) decision space. One way of thinking about this is to consider a game like chess and go as taking only a bit to learn the basics but for which there is an extraordinary amount of depth. While chess is...