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Comparing the role of a referee in a sport - where there are competing factions of players trying to win according to well-defined winning conditions - to an RPG where a group of people with the same goal work together to achieve it, is very silly.

Maybe they just like the experience of hanging out with their friends, and their friends happen to like playing D&D. You can't focus only on the game itself and ignore the social aspect when examining why players do what they do with the game.

Indeed. No one gets flack for not liking a particular game. People get flack for crapping on threads with needless bashing of a game. If people are trying to have a productive discussion about 4E, and someone comes in because it's very important to them that people know they don't like 4E, then...

In another thread, I believe it was either @pemerton or @Hussar who said that in 4E, monsters tell you who they are by how they play, not by their flavour text in the Monster Manual, or words to that effect. I thought that was a great insight.

Many are beyond tired of the "but you can trip an ooze!" argument. And not just because 4E doesn't actually have anything called Trip.

So much this. From day one, attacks in D&D have been abstract. They have never represented a single swing of a sword. The books have always said so. But SO MANY players can't grasp this abstraction. If I'm wielding two weapons, that means I have to be able to attack twice as often, right? In a...

This is mind-bogglingly pedantic, but also just plain wrong in parts. If you pull someone's legs out from under them using say a stick, from behind, they fall forward. People are top-heavy when they lose their footing. Add in the fact that they define what they mean by words in the books, so...

Next time you make Jello, make it a 10-foot cube WITHOUT it collapsing under it's own weight. I'll wait here..... But you won't be able to do it, because the square-cube law is a thing in reality. So physics tells us that realistically.....

You don't say.

I co-DMed a game for a group that included 4 kids age 11 and under, just a couple of weeks ago. Youngest was 6. The rules were VERY helpful in adjudicating what they wanted to do. So yeah, you're wrong about that.

Very true. The designers originally made it to be swords & sorcery, but SO MANY players wanted to use it for high fantasy instead, so they did. D&D has always been whatever you want to make it into. One of its strengths IMO.

Mine is: Having a hill that you would die on with respect to a type of game is very, very silly. That should be reserved for things that really matter in the real world, which would probably be considered politics here so I won't provide any examples.

Yes, that bloody "public." What a bunch of sheep! If only they had the good taste that we do!

This sounds an awful lot like an unfair generalization, the sort of thing that ought to be avoided.

Fear not! Most trashing of Gygax is the result of perfectly-reasoned, well-considered thought.

They have not, of course. Claiming that dragons, lances and war are the only things retained is ridiculous. You should try taking off the jade-coloured glasses.

Flail snail in French would be escargot fléau. Which, pleasingly, also rhymes.

The default you're referring to is Western Europe (including France), not the British Isles. Looking at D&D for e.g., the paladin is (sort of) from French stories. It shouldn't be surprising the cultures are so similar. Both England and France were Celtic territory (Britons and Gauls...

Absolutely. Despite there being no way at all to know why the inclusion was ... included, you will always see claims that's it's been "forced" somehow. As if they can know the creators' intent merely from the result. They don't say the same when a cast is all white, of course. And that's...

Why would they need to present a reason for their fantasy world to reflect something that is extremely common in the real world? In the real world, people have different skin colours and - here's the thing - they often live together in communities with people of other skin colours. The issue...