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The reason your sarcasm is ridiculous is because a player doesn't have to select spells from the entire spell list at once. And magic items are usually distributed in limited quantities by the GM. But the choice of weapon/power would be virtually unrestricted. What's being proposed here, as I...

I know what a post-scarcity world is. I've seen Star Trek. I read sci-fi. I'm just not sure what the question is. At any rate, I never found Star Trek's vision of a post-scarcity future convincing. Clearly there is scarcity in Star Trek - everyone doesn't have their own planet. Everyone doesn't...

IOW, "weapon powers might have worked, but not in D&D." Sure, weapon types might be very cool in a game that doesn't have the same assumptions D&D does, but that's neither here nor their, is it? D&D does have a huge weapon list and it most likely always will. A long list of weapons with fiddly...

I'm not really sure what you're asking here. Or even what is so significant about the article.

Highly apropos - just read an excellent New York Times article about why no one seems to be able to say anything for sure about nutrition. Here are a few choice morsels: Read the whole thing here.

I think the focus that gov'ts are putting on junk food and soda is missing the point. I think they are targets because of the stereotype of the fat teenager who lives on nothing but MacDonalds. But most of us who struggle with our weight know enough not to be dining on happy meals all the time...

Well, first of all, don't over-think it. Often if you simply describe the problem to the player they will come up with an imaginative (and sometimes over-complicated) solution. All you have to do then is nod sagely, as if this is what you had envisioned all along, and tell them a DC to roll...

LOL. I think they'd notice when they suddenly couldn't flank or charge. But it IS tempting! [/LIST] I haven't tried this yet, but this reminds me of one other thing I want to steal from 13th Age... the death save systems. I think the harder saves combined with a free recovery on a natural 20 is...

Hmm, it hadn't occurred to me that there might be things that have skills as prerequisites. Surely there can't be too many of them though? Any examples? Another possible issue is that 4e assumes that your skills increase with level, while 13A does not. Would probably need to add 1/2 level to...

Well, I just finished running a short, two-session game of 13th Age for my group. They liked it, but felt the combat was just too lightweight compared to 4e. "The roleplaying is better in 13A, but the combat is better in 4e." *sobs* Well, it looks like we'll be going back to 4e but we have all...

I thought I would update this thread to say that I think I have figured out how to run a satisfying 'morally gray game', at least for our group. The solution is very simple: make the good guys... not very good. And make the bad guys somewhat sympathetic. In other words, the Mighty Empire...

Chapter 3, Page 300. Today I learned - Wargamers were arguing the merits of simulationism vs. gamism long before the internet. The debates were raging in wargamer newsletters back in the 1950's. And the debate really goes back to the earliest Kriegspiel, as different game creators pushed...

Normal d20 combat has very few 'dimensions': HP, defenses, attack bonuses. If you want to model something specific like the parries and thrusts of a sword fight then you need a new dimension. Maybe more than one. Position is the most obvious one to add. Here's a real simple system to model a...

What we need to do is separate the fences out by tier. There should be, at minimum, Adventure-tier fences (backyard, white picket), Hero-tier fences (chain-link, barbed wire, wrought iron) and Epic tier fences (electric fence, invisible fence, living fence, wall). Once we know what tier a fence...

You know, I think someone should do this just so we could see the look on a customer's faces when they opened up their new Complete Book Of Fencing and realized what it was all about.

That's a pretty great deal, although I've played all of those except the Ace Patrol games I believe. Also, why anyone would want to play Civ 3 when they have Civ 4 is beyond me. Civ 3 is probably my least favorite installment of the series, while I consider 4 to be the best.

I'm in the same boat as you, man. Have you ever read anything by Paul Davies? He's a physicist who write books that make arcane concepts fantastically accessible to laymen. I never really understood what relativity was about until I stumbled across his book "Other Worlds" a few years ago. Since...

This question is even harder to answer than you think, because light is both (either?) a wave or a particle. In other words there is a quantum state such that a photon cannot be treated as a discrete particle. TomBitoni's link above is very good. I also found this clip from a BBC documentary...

The funny thing is, I don't remember 'damage on a miss' being a part of the edition wars during the transition from 3x -> 4e. People got upset over lots of things that, in retrospect, seem quite silly (and occasionally things that were legitimate). So you'd think someone would have honed in on...