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The desire to look more hardcore than you are is the one constant in the universe, especially among young whelps.

Hussar, I think that most of that female MMO audience is responding to things that really don't generalize to D&D. There are social aspects to MMOs that do not map to D&D at all. It's like a social networking website with a game attached, and all the attendant social games come with it...

That's probably because I didn't re-read it before responding. I read it several months ago, iirc, and frankly didn't feel compelled to work at retaining the specifics.

We shall have to agree to disagree on at least two points, then.

I'm equally capable of writing longhand in the notepad I carry at all times for that purpose. Most of it is still crap, even if not typed. If editing wasn't part of the writing process, we'd never end up with anything readable by an audience besides the author. Or do your first drafts come...

Nonsense. Writing is easy. Self-editing is hard. I can type all day and generate pages upon pages of material. The first problem is that most of it is trash. The second problem is that I'm too close to it to have a consistently good idea of which parts are trash and which aren't. When you...

Now I'm getting curious, because I had considered in the past running a D&D lite for the nephews at some point, but I'm likely to have nothing buy d6s available if I do. High defenses are clearly an issue, but I might be lowballing those for the tots anyway. Powers that alter to hit by more...

Or at least one with a very, very low chance to hit. Aye. I can see that. OK, so there are probably more things to adjust than top end defenses. :)

Oh, I don't have a wellspring of bitterness left for this. I ran out of actual bitterness for this kind of thing on book 7 of Wheel of Time. Now I'm just bemusedly rueful with a chance of snarky comments when it comes up on a messageboard. I only work up a head of steam when someone...

That drastically changes my reading of your post. I need to stop replying to these heady topics between steps of histology protocols in the lab.

Meh. I'm not sitting up nights thinking about it, but you are frequently memorable in any thread where they come up, even tangentially, so there have been reminder trials. I guess I'm fine with their immaturity because it's part of the act. I've seen them be incredibly mature in contexts...

That's a gorgeous model. Naturally the first comment I see on it from the geek public is an indictment of her choice to not base it strictly on the book. As a subculture, we don't deserve to procreate. :erm: Also.... in before "Her comeliness score is pretty high for someone who was into...

Of course he wasn't. I'm guessing he knew he wasn't, but at least he did it anyway. That's really all I ask. I'd rather have an imperfect ending and some closure than sit around for decades unresolved. If you don't have a roadmap for an epic story, don't start publishing it. I don't expect...

Total aside @ Felon: Agreed about the Dark Tower to some extent. Although my problem wasn't with the ending, which was irksome but appropriate, but with the whole "meeting the author" bit, which Vonnegut did very well and King did in a way that felt like pure self-aggrandizement and nonsense.

Of course he's not. That said, delivering Book 1, Book 2, etc creates a social contract with your readers that you're actually going to finish the damn thing at some point. If you can't handle expectation, don't write open ended series. If you don't know where the hell you're going when you...

While I'm not certain I can agree to most of what you said, this last has some merit. I'm not enough of a 4e wonk to know how many monsters are going to create some problems here. But the math itself suggests that the average user is only going to notice those issues at the top end of their...

Perhaps the best way to cap my thoughts here is to say that Tycho is smarter than all of us. :) He saw that there isn't an argument worth having so he didn't bother. This will play out as it has before without any input from a pop artist like Tycho. As I've said, we're all playing out our...

Pics or it didn't happen. I'll believe he's actually writing when the next book is on shelves. Man is pulling a farking Dark Tower here. While that is less irritating than pulling a Wheel of Time, it's still irksome.

Right, but that's irrelevant to actual play except in specific cases. Sure, you can pull out corner cases, but the distribution of results over time is what really matters, and a 3d6 is a normal distribution. Maybe this is the biologist in me talking, but a normal distribution is great. It's...

That's a little misleading. Admittedly, I'm close to reductio ad absurdum here, but if you are inflating specific points on the curve to make your point, I can just as easily say "If I needed a 17 and I roll a 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, or 18 that +1 is meaningless."...