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Which would be fine if all of that difference in costs ended up in the pocket of the author. Right now, it seems that publishers get to have their cake and eat it, too. Paper and shipping make up a pretty large percentage of the purchase price of the book. They get to skip those costs but...

Can he do his most basic job (hit the monster) without the gear? Not without rolling a 20. Whether the gear is "more" important than the character or not is semantic and sort of silly. The gear is necessary within the structure of the game at that level. It is important to the character's...

Eh. Anything made by Hephaestus or his assistants could turn schmuckly-the-guy-with-a-few-stray-drops-of-divine-blood into Kick-arse McKillerson. You could argue that Perseus is an example of magic items that do something interesting, but man was he weighted down with them.

Eh. The upper class seeking out a specific type of death because it's less scary than dying in bed (which was terrifying) is well within the noise here.

Of course there isn't. Race is a largely social construct, and not at all a biological one. The fact that we even had to have that announcement makes me weep for the future. Check out Faces of America.

Death is scary. All of the others I can think of (about half a dozen) will get us into discussions that violate forum rules, because half the room will freak out, insisting that they don't think that way. Which is true, because they don't have to consciously think that way. Their behaviors...

Purely a style thing, IMO. Personally, I like magic items that do cool stuff, but I hate magic items that are +X to whatever. But then, my preference runs toward Conan and Lieber, wherein the skill and badassery is in the hero, and the weapons are just tools. When you lose your +3 sword and...

Looks like Njall beat me to the punch, but I already typed it so.... I was MT for a pretty successful guild for a long time as a paladin. Before paladins could tank, I was a healer. I know the mechanics pretty well. You seem to be conflating threat boosting auras (Righteous Fury for...

While I'm not a simulation nut, I just can't get on board with that given how many "hits" a D&D character takes in combat. It's a bridge too far. Metal armor would be dented in ways that make it impossible to continue fighting. Other types of armor would be in need of repair or landfilling...

"Oldies" radio stations. Rebooting of popular franchises. Re-treads of fads that were asinine the first time. Dozens of others. Point taken. I was speaking in broad generalities. But even in your example, the 18 year old will do each individual calculation faster. The math professor pulls...

I also feel like I'm "smarter" now than I was as a pup. I certainly have a lot more information in my brain. This allows me to detect patterns that young me did not. However, it does take me longer to detect those patterns than it would have if I'd had the same information at 18. If you test...

Sorry, but on several measures, we are all most definitely less intelligent when we get older. I have reams of data showing that your cognitive performance on most tasks begins to decline during your 20s, your memory begins to decline noticeably shortly thereafter, and for the vast majority...

No. We don't. Leastways, not in the narrative of the game. Heck, I'm not really a regular, but just on this site over the years I've seen approximately 70 or 80 threads expressly on the subject of what hit points mean, with everything from polite disagreement to the declaration of holy war...

Actually, they know exactly what they are doing. The single strongest predictor of box office success in the States is how much they advertise the fool thing. And the title guarantees it will get free advertising from every media outlet in the country. Plus, silly people of my generation will...

As a research scientist surrounded by highly intelligent people.... perception in the D&D sense (or the biological sense for that matter), is something entirely separate from either memory (int) or inductive reasoning (fuzzy as heck). In any case, all 3 mental stats are frankly silly as silos...

I was level-drained all the way back to 1. :erm: I've been as high as 7, though the "Occasional" nature of it was driven by lack of available players, not lack of commitment on my part. As such, I've done a fair piece of world and campaign building without ever getting to use it.

Power is only part of the equation. It helps. The Fighter wouldn't be on top if it wasn't powerful. But there's a separate issue of doing something and doing it well. i.e. doing it in a way that makes intuitive sense and is evocative. The Fighter nails that. The Warlord is very solid. The...

Who wouldn't?

It doesn't tell me everything, but it tells me orders of magnitude more than "I played D&D". The definitions are better operationalized. There's a larger social construct supporting pick-up games at the playground than there is around all of D&D. There's a larger social network supporting...

Not at all. That's reductionist and a bit dogmatic. It's not a "flaw" in the game, but nor is it (necessarily) a "flaw" in the gamer. People expect common experience. When you say you've played baseball or Pinochle or Risk, that sets up an expectation in my head. For 99.9% of games out...