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Beating the enemy adventuring party in the early game got so much easier when I realized there was a way to engage them next to a couple of oil barrels. These days, any time I see a barrel of any substance, it goes straight to camp.

"The DM's dictatorship?" I missed the part where @Doc_Klueless was rounding up their friends at gunpoint and forcing them to play. Shall I now accuse you of wanting the DM to be the players' slave?

Yeah, there are quite a few cases where there really isn't a compromise position. If what you want is to play a character who looks like an anthropomorphic turtle, and I do not want to have creatures that look like anthropomorphic turtles in the campaign, we are at an impasse where the only...

I'm not talking about Disney trying to shoehorn a copyright claim into a trademark suit through legal shenanigans -- I'm talking about Disney claiming straight-up, bog-standard trademark infringement. They could argue something like this: 1. This promo image has a big ol' Mickey Mouse face. 2...

Yes, Steamboat Willie is out of copyright. But Mickey Mouse remains a Disney trademark in very active use -- quite possibly the most well-known trademark they have. I am not a lawyer, still less an IP lawyer, but making a movie where one of the major characters is the trademark of a giant...

Yup, absolutely true. A DM of my acquaintance once gave the party a cursed ring that enabled the BBEG to track the wearer. Immediate response on discovering the curse: "Cut off the finger."

This looks to me like a deliberate choice. Unskilled laborers in a "standard" setting do indeed live hand to mouth, in squalid conditions, with little in the way of savings or a cushion for hard times. That said, a typical peasant (90% of the population, unless magic is used to drastically...

Fleshing out my previous example, consider the protagonist of BG3 if you There's not a bargain per se, just an alien being encouraging you to trade your humanity for power one piece at a time. Eventually you will have to make a saving throw to resist crossing a major threshold, and the deeper...

4E was very tightly engineered. Crafting set-piece battles was a dream. Combat in general was dynamic and exciting, due to a number of innovations like minions and solo monsters. The rigorous mathematical foundation served it very well. It did suffer from excessive "crunchiness," however; it...

I'm so very sorry. No parent should ever have to go through this.

Building a VTT is more than enough work to keep multiple people busy for an extended period. If WotC thought they could have one guy build the whole thing, that was their problem right there.

Sure. As I said, there's a ramp-up time. But if the coworker had decided never to come back from vacation, your friend could have continued to make progress. The project would not have been doomed to failure by the loss of that person. Now, if the coworker had taken their company laptop on...

If you're referring to the murder-suicide, that happened shortly after the Gleemax project had been canceled. But even if that were not the case, there is absolutely a lesson to take away from that: "If suddenly losing one person will cause your big expensive project to fail, you have a serious...

If "The Hobbit" had been one movie, it would have been fine. Most of the problems with that trilogy stem from the decision to make it a trilogy, which necessitated adding an enormous amount of material to the original. It's a damn shame, because there were some really amazing performances...

This is my feeling as well. I would love a cut that trimmed out a few of the over-the-top bits -- the tipping stairway in Moria and the "shield-surfing" come to mind -- and polished up some of the CGI, toned down the effects on Galadriel's temptation scene, etc. But those are minor complaints...

Very little of this is applicable to Great Old One warlocks, though. GOOs are not devils offering written pacts signed in blood. They are Lovecraftian monstrosities with (per the PHB) "incomprehensible motives", who may be "unaware of the existence" of their warlocks or "entirely indifferent"...

The current ruling on AI-generated works is that they are non-copyrightable. Whether that holds up on appeal, we'll have to see -- and of course there will be a question about how much AI involvement is too much -- but I hope it does hold up.

Providing goods and services. That is the reason we have laws providing for their existence (for example, by granting limited liability, so creditors cannot go after the personal assets of the owners if the company goes bust). Profit is merely one of the incentives we offer people to form, run...

Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further...

In "The Fellowship of the Ring," when explaining the story of the Ring to Frodo, Gandalf says, "I wondered often how Gollum came by a Great Ring, as plainly it was -- that at least was clear from the first." Gandalf doesn't explain his reasoning, but he is definitely claiming to have known...