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So if I say that a foot of standing water is not sufficient to constitute "difficult terrain", and you say that a foot of standing water is sufficient to constitute "difficult terrain", then we cannot agree on what "difficult terrain" means, it's a bad descriptor, and should be removed from the...

What the mechanic does? It's a flag for certain game effects, like rakshasa vulnerability and the requirements to wear the robes of the archmagi. That's pretty straightforward.

Well, what you're describing certainly sounds like indecision to me. Okay. Cool. You don't have to like it. Does that mean nobody else should? That's where the blinders come in: not in deciding you don't like something, but in arguing, over the course of a sixty-page thread without any success...

I haven't read Gygax's letters, or Three Hearts and Three Lions, or Moorcock. I figured out an interpretation of those few lines that works for me and my group. Players who approach that system with an open mind can do this. And players who can't or don't want to can run their games without...

I thought I was pretty explicit in what my point was with that example. I even began not one but two sentences with the three words "The point is..." But if you want to throw out "counterexamples" which completely fail to address that point, I guess I can't stop you. Go nuts. Maybe you're even...

In the ideal Land of the Logicians, we define all our terms precisely and unambiguously and only after we have done so proceed to make cold, hard deductions. In the real world, we often learn natural-language terms by example: our parents and peers tell us "That's a dog" and "That's not a dog"...

Really? You need a pretty significant resource investment in building a drop tower, but the actual technology isn't too sophisticated, is it? You just melt metal and drop it.

No. That's a strawman argument; it's hostile and it's completely unnecessary. Let's try looking at this question charitably instead. What differentiates nomadic societies from settled societies? Well, they move around. They are changing their environs, and changing their lifestyle to react to...

Well, I could note that there's nothing particularly modern about apartments above bakeries, but in general I think cosmopolitanism has a pretty natural association with the more modern eras of real-world history that feature intercontinental travel and rapidly growing cities. It's not...

Eh. Some campaign settings are more cosmopolitan than others. Sometimes the elves live in the hidden city of Gondolin, sometimes the elves live in the apartments above the bakery next door.

Not that poly-racial cultures are a bad thing, but poly-cultural races seem to me like they'd do more on the avoiding-monolithic-stereotypes front. "The dwarves of Tharagund are isolationist but true allies to those in need; the dwarves of Mizinthur bully their neighbors and extort them for...

Did I say both claims are equally valid? I said that your claim "leads to a contradiction, but standard interpretive principles tell us to minimize contradictions where possible, so that's exactly the reason we shouldn't adopt it." That's not saying your claim is equally valid -- quite the...

I want you to recognize that you are also adding details to the system in order to defeat it, and that this method of argument is only self-defeating. Every time you point out such a statement in another person's argument, whether rightly or wrongly, you affirm the statement's negation (and...

If you refuse to look at where you want the discussion to go, you shouldn't be surprised when it doesn't go anywhere. And that is an interesting question which I could discuss at some length under different circumstances. But like I said, it had become clear to me by that point that answering...

You skipped the part asking why you're driving this conversation in circles and whether that's getting you anywhere in order to double down on driving this conversation around in circles. Why did you do that? Is that getting you anywhere? Anyway, there's only one new point I'd like to address...

Eh. This issue long predates that one.

I guess. Notwithstanding all the confusion that it apparently causes on the internet, none of us find "good" or "evil" or "law" or "chaos" particularly difficult to parse in the context of a fantasy roleplaying game. Should it become an issue, we are friends who are capable of having a friendly...

This would be much more of a problem in a game with multiple DMs.

Okay, that's pretty vague. What specifically is your endgame? Do you want to see people who are currently happy with the system become unhappy? What's it to you whether we're happy or unhappy? And, perhaps a more salient question, is what you're doing working to bring your endgame about? You've...

Well, for starters, you're talking to people whom alignment does help as DMs and players. Are you trying to persuade us that this thing we're using, which seems not to be broken, is? Why? Okay. Imagine you're, I dunno, a Jacobite. And one day you happen across me, staunch anti-Jacobite that I...