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Yeah, you can't really fake the attachment that comes from leveling a character up over time, earning things through danger and excitement. It's like It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. It's all about sincerity.

One of the great things about the rise of nerdom in pop culture is that barriers between fiction and genre fiction are dissolving to a certain extent. People are writing dissertations about Robert E. Howard! Dude got out there at age 16 in a pre-internet age. That's no small achievement.

I recently re-read DL1 and was surprised at the sandbox elements (paired with a handful of timed events). Would that the rest of the series had continued that approach.

I'm a voracious reader. I've read tons of classics. I am secure in whatever literary knowledge pretensions I have. I can let myself kick back and enjoy something "lowbrow." I'm happy talking about Crime and Punishment or The Eye of Argon.

The internal chapter start art for the Dragonlance books deserves more credit than it gets. I mean, look at this one: Considering how bad the character work on the new trilogy's cover art is, that's a real shame.

I finished reading First, You Fight By the pseudonym D.B. Drumm. Prime 80s nuclear post-apocalyptic schlock. It's got just about every trope you'd expect, good and bad. Not a great book, but at least an enjoyable one. And for all the Rambo-like qualities of the main character, it doesn't ever...

Indeed. There was absolutely no need for him to try to pull that one off. Cheating at playing pretend is generally a low deal. I've long been a bit of a softie as a DM. But back then, when a player cheesed me off enough, I could be vicious. Kobold with a Nine Lives Stealer. Level-draining...

Another wonderful Dean Morrissey cover!

Extraplanar sourcebooks have always hit that sense of wonder for me since the original Manual of the Planes. There's something about the strange and alien worlds coming to life that makes me want to go there. In general, a really good setting book does it for me. When I feel like I can step...

Outside of organized play, no. I remember when I was a young teenager and I invited a new player to our group. He asked if he could bring the character he'd been playing in. He showed up with a high-level paladin with a holy avenger and 18s in every stat. Now, as an adult, I can see that the...

"Stop if you've heard this one before. A priest of Lathander, a priest of Sharess, and a priest of Helm walk into a bar..."

Elden Ring has this wonderful mythic quality to the world. It stands in contrast to Dark Souls, which I always liken to a very old-school grim and gritty Greyhawk-y dungeon crawl.

AI is great for searching and organizing large amounts of information. It is not great at creativity. I've no doubt that AI could run an acceptable one-shot, but over the course of a campaign, I think it's limitations would become evident, and a degree of sameness would creep in. Things would...

True. What there was a consensus on was their least favorite choice. No one wanted to play a campaign of OD&D.

Bloodborne is a wonderful game, though that initial stretch before you can start leveling up can be brutal. The soundtrack is one of my favorites. If the Cleric Beast theme doesn't get you hyped to hunt some monsters, nothing will:

The last time one of my groups needed to decide on our next game, I made a Qualtrics form with five choices and asked them each to rank them. The interesting thing was that there was no clear consensus on people's top choices - it wasn't until the second pick that we had a clear winner.

I watched the Peripheral TV series, so I really should get to the books. One of the things I love about Moorcock is that as many times as he has revisited Elric of Melnibone, he has never given into the temptation to alter the finite, fixed endpoint of the character's story.

As much as I love the Gnomes book, having been a fan since I was pretty much gnome-sized myself, I think making them tiny in D&D causes too much trouble downstream.