Search results

Well, that's what it means when you're reading certain Greek philosophers (not the essence of the idea, but the essence of the thing--its thingness, the ideal--and of course it has been appropriated in a variety of ways as jargon by a number of disciplines). I don't know about extending it to...

Of course nobody missed the tag! Some folks are just thread tag snobs. They have no use for existing tags and don't understand those who do. The idea of tagging a thread with something that some other poster (or worse, posters!) is using/has used makes them itch uncontrollably. To them the Humor...

Beat me to it. It's certainly true that Shakespeare played to all the seats, and that he and the rest of the Elizabethans were very interested in spectacle: they were taking their cues from Seneca, but they didn't know that Seneca wrote closet dramas which were meant to be read and not...

Lucky for you your players aren't asking that same or a similar question when you run games. Everybody draws on existing material, very few people rely on any published material completely, all creative work in RPG's is cooperative, and you're fooling yourself if you say otherwise.

I think Potter is a little more mature than some of these things, but what I actually want to respond to is grouping it with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Alice books are completely scalable, so sure, kids can read them, but they don't stop paying off for adults either. Dodgson was in...

Because her prose is horrid! Really she doesn't need to be innovative or even a decent craftswoman of the language, as long as people enjoy the stories, and they do. Somebody's got to point out the democratic fallacy though, since chances are we'll end up with yet another Amazon.com poll...

The point of the thread is roughly the same as the point of your post: people like to talk about their likes and dislikes. Generally it's helpful if they include a 'why,' but those are in short supply in this particular thread. I'll contribute to this lack by stating that Buffy is one of the...

Well whether they're entertaining or not depends on who you ask. Ultimately there are a lot more people in the world who will never read the Potter books than people who will. Personally I couldn't get through the first book, but that's not the fault of the story, just the writer (the writing...

Oh, me too. In fact whenever anyone becomes too emotionally invested in a conversation about RPG's, of all things, I tend to approach their posts as humorous asides.

I don't like J. K. Rowling either. She'd better watch herself. I've got the death sentence in 12 systems. Seriously, she's kidding herself if she thinks she's subverting anything. Potter is the same old cliches distilled to a pallatable consistency. Nothing wrong with liking it, but it's far...

I've seen quite a few posts hostile to you as well, and then those users suddenly no longer reply to your posts; in fact I wouldn't be surprised if you were the most blocked person on ENWorld. Obviously your OD&D proselytizing doesn't bother me enough to block you though :) .

Yes! A faithful Iliad simply would not work as a movie. Troy does not fall. Achilleus does not die (the heel story wasn't even invented until later). Troy did as good a job of turning the Iliad into an action movie, while retaining some of the thoughtfulness, as I could have hoped for. Can I...

Not everyody is devoted to gaming in this sense though. I play RPG's occasionally, when I'm not doing any number of other things. I can't say I'm really committed to them to the extent that the thought of talking about my games specifically or RPG's in general to random people excites me. Even...

So what you're really saying here is that socially skilled gamers gravitate toward rules lite systems? ;)

I secretly suspect the two different entries are a clever lexicographer's joke.

Funny, but actually incorrect. The OED amusingly has nitpick as a noun, nit-pick as a verb. The reason I know this is a long and sad story I won't bother telling, heh.

I wouldn't waste my time hating D&D, but I don't play it anymore and have no interest in doing so. d20 and various d20-based systems, on the other hand, are fine.

The idea of atemporal divinity is certainly not an invention of Augustine's. One (much older) expression can be found in Vedic literature, for example (you may have noticed that the writers of DS9 even made "Vedic" a spiritual office for Bajorans, so the connection is fairly straightforward)...

This is how I run games, for the same reasons you list. Give it a shot in a one-off, if nothing else, maybe with a system your players don't know very well, or with some changes to the 3.x stock numbers. Getting rid of the PC-side number crunching is nice in itself, but if they still have the MM...

I think Bale was in the better movie, made a better Bruce Wayne and made a very good Batman, I just don't think that disqualifies Keaton in any way (and most people apparently agree, if you go by the "Your favorite live-action Batman movie" poll in this forum, where it has the second most votes...