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It's a postulate that's directly contradicted by what we see in Earth's history (traits that are likely to form the basis of a technologically advanced species - tool use, communication and coordination, problem solving, etc. - are found in all sorts of non-human-like Earth species). So it'd...

Sure, but what I'm saying is the conditions that make those combinations better are largely dependent on what other organisms are capable of. And that part of the conditions will be unique for every world. On a relatively small scale that's true, but on a geologic scale it isn't really. You...

Not really. What we know about biology says that life is opportunistic and adapts to all sorts of different niches; slightly different conditions often result in completely different creatures exploiting those niches. And one of the major conditions is the performance and adaptability of all the...

"Know" is perhaps the wrong word. What is true is that if what we know about the development of life on Earth is accurate, then the odds against finding a critter just like a jellyfish on a world close enough to matter (in a sci-fi RPG sense) are pretty astronomical. Such a find would therefore...

Mongrelmen were originally introduced in a module, I1 if memory serves. One of the abandoned/forgotten/forbidden city modules. Was there an MMIII in 1E? I only remember the MM, FF, and MMII, and I thought they were in the latter.

Laser pistols can be acceptable in hard sci-fi, it's blasters or pulpish ray guns that kind of hit the camp barrier. And laser rifles are kinda silly - what, exactly, is being "rifled"? One of my favourite sources for near future, relatively hard sci-fi ideas is the Atomic Rockets section of...

Maybe, maybe not. Science fiction is entirely about the basic assumptions you make; whether it's hard sci fi or not depends mostly on how consistent you are in the application of those assumptions. Couple things to remember: 1) You can take any current tendencies you like and use them as basic...

I've been reading a fair amount of Greg Bear recently. Eon, Darwin's Radio and The Forge of God are all pretty good. The latter two are near future/present day sci fi, Eon gets more into the far future stuff. Also good are the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. The Culture is kind of a...

Uh, what? The 700 Club is alive and well. Their website, if you care: http://www.cbn.com www.700club.com will also get you there. I snipped the rest of your post in which you go on a high-handed rant about how people don't fact-check before making statements about Chick et al, didn't seem...

My vague recollection from seeing this claim investigated some time in the 90s is that the guy's qualifications were overstated - that he was a freelancer of some kind. But it's been a while. I actually have no trouble believing that some kind of occult research went into D&D, for example the...

Harn, by a pretty wide margin. Maps are both beautiful and relatively plausible - it just looks like a real world, in a way that Greyhawk/FR/Dragonlance/etc. don't. Out of D&D-specific maps, I'd probably give the nod to FR. High production values, even if the geography is (ahem) not quite...

To me, the real difference is whether evil is "single source" or not. In the first case, usually it isn't; in the second, usually it is (at least locally). By that I mean that if a whole nation's evil, there's probably some single reason for it, while if bad guys are more widely distributed...

In my homebrew setting, I only really use kobolds out of the list you give. They and a type of snake-people are the servants and children of one of the "evil" deities in my homebrew setting - I don't actually use alignments, but the deity in question works towards the extinction of humankind...

Sometimes, we play with the normal rules. Other times, we chuck alignments. Two basic ways that have worked well: 1) Use Arcana Unearthed. No alignment-based spells. 2) To use normal D&D spells with as little change as possible, alignment is replaced by religious rivalries. Each entity of...

And I am simply pointing out that by the exact same rules as written, Charm Person is Evil in D&D. Yet Charm Person is not treated as inherently evil in any of the source material that I'm aware of; quite the opposite, the spell is often found in the arsenal of good creatures. I don't know a...

Correct, except that it's your argument that oppression is de facto evil in D&D. All I've done is show how your argument is inadequate to define anything as evil. I hope you're finally getting it. Whether they were oppressed or not does not matter, because as you've agreed simple oppression...

Magic Missile does not have to be used to murder someone (and neither does the weapon). Charm Person has no other use but to suppress a humanoid's free will. If Charm Person is not oppression, then frankly nothing is. Which is just another way of saying that an individual DM gets to decide...

In the past, I've run all-evil campaigns. I haven't done that in a long time, and probably won't again. Usually, what I find is that when players want an evil character, what they mean is they want to play a character who doesn't care about Good and Evil. If I get enough demand for that, I just...

IMHO, that line of argument is kind of silly - Charm Person is at least as oppressive as most historical forms of slavery, and yet it is not an Evil spell. So clearly, the alignment rules do not apply universally even within D&D, let alone to topics not covered in the rulebooks. Saying "X is...

For me personally, when I run a campaign in which alignment is absolute, then Law and Chaos are also absolute. A given society might legalize actions that are absolutely described as Chaotic, and vice versa, so legal status by itself has little or no bearing on whether something is Lawful or...