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I agree, mostly because I think Tolkien will be a victim of IP laws if they continue in the direction they're currently headed. We could potentially stay interested in Tolkien's stories for as long as we have them, but I don't think we'll stay interested in the stories as he wrote them. Kyd is...

An Amazon.com poll picked Tolkien as the greatest author of the millennium and ranked Harry Potter in the top 10 as well, which shows you just how ignorant most people, especially English-speaking people, are of literature in general. Why do you suppose they settled on LotR and Harry Potter...

The Black Cat Pirates? So close.

He's saying that your example was wildly hyperbolic because it exaggerated the facts toward some rhetorical end. How did it exaggerate the facts? By being wildly hyperbolic, of course. In other words he's begging the question. My rule of thumb is to ignore posts using the phrase "straw man,"...

Seconded. It has some cool special effects too.

Actually they sold the deck and the SAGA rules separately for around $10. It came with an adventure and some other stuff too.

Rocks! A 60 INT character can decipher Druidic just by hearing someone else speak it for a few minutes.

Asura is a Sanskrit word, so you can find it in the texts of all the religions that have roots in Sanskrit and related Indo-Aryan languages, where it can designate a number of different beings. In fact the positions of Devas and Asuras are reversed between later Hiduism and Zoroastrianism. You...

Political and religious leaders: the Pharaohs, the Caesars etc. (and since this is fantasy, powerful creatures like dragons are even more poised to cultivate worshippers and assume godhood).

Wow, The Da Vinci Code cleaned up overseas in a big way. I wonder why it played in almost 3x as many countries as Pirates is?

Nah, I actually played a hybrid with blood-fueled defiler magic and dragon king scions :p.

I guess I have to go with "unique" too, although the two D&D settings I like are Dark Sun and Birthright, aka fantasy Dune and fantasy Highlander.

Superman Returns is about level with Batman Begins so far, and X1 did slightly better than either (Pirates: Black Pearl had a first weekend on par with Batman, but I think word of mouth gave it a lot more longevity; it ended up pulling in as much as X1 and Batman combined). Spider-man, of...

I definitely rank Underworld and Slevin above Superman and X3. My #1 for the year so far is Brick. But with a general increase in population, disposable income and theaters and seats, as well as changes in moviegoing culture, tickets would be an equally poor measure of anything other than...

First, I'm not looking for Superman to fail. Neither it nor X3 were the movies they should have been, and I expected their second weekends and general earnings to be much closer, with Superman probably in the lead. Second, the comparison between the two is completely natural since Singer was...

Looks like X3 left Superman Returns in the dust. I expected them to be closer in terms of second weekend domestic gross, but X3 came out 12 million ahead even after its insane opening weekend (despite Superman showing in 300+ more theaters). Even Batman Begins had a better second weekend than...

I really don't see anybody claiming that the simplest rule is the most elegant one. (Edit: Oh, Gotcha. I just reread Hussar's post.) Instead a few people have said an elegant rule is as simple as you can make it, or, alternatively, an elegant rule is only as complicated as it needs to be. Also...

Which is why I said "I wouldn't say they're elegant," instead of "they aren't elegant." :) At the end of the day, elegance in the context of this conversation is all about functionality, and functionality in an RPG is all about what works for you. If hit points work for you, then great. I...

In point of fact, elegant does mean simple. It can also mean ornate, delicate, graceful, refined, luxurious, polished and any number of other things, some of which are completely different, even opposed to one another. That's language for you. In the case of a wristwatch, you might be using one...

In my case, the abstraction is precisely what turns me off of hit points. Ditto saving throws, stat adjustments where the bonus is a different number than the stat, etc. This stuff just makes no sense to me. I think elegance and realism are probably incompatible. It's hard to deal with the fact...