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I'd suggest prisons became a thing when the combination of corporeal punishment and exile became considered either undesirable or impractical, because the truth is, you weren't going to kill people for every ruddy thing.

Because you still need to do other things with that hand, like it or not.

Then you shouldn't have said "just about every fantasy game". There are plenty of non-class-based fantasy games, some of them (RuneQuest for example) not exactly unknown.

There are certainly characters who have skills and sometimes powers (Obfuscate for example) that lean into that.

Yup. That's the point. Outside of Superworld powers and a few things like mutations in some games, BRP hasn't tended to have a framework for that sort of thing, because its sun-source (RuneQuest) predated that conceptually and there's a certain--hostility?--in the fandom to that sort of thing...

I'd say it tends to be the case in D&D settings that there's more tolerance for situational violence than their is in our world--and less assumed governmental monopoly on violence. Which, as you say, was true of a lot of our own world throughout a lot of history once you got away from very...

A good part of my wife's job is logistics. She then comes home and plays computer games, many of which are focused on--logistics.

I dunno, man. Some people find ways to turn their hobbies into jobs, and some of them even avoid losing the joy while doing that (largely because they like so much of the hobby having to do it consistently enough is not painful). I'm not going to say most people can pull this off, but its not...

Yeah, that's why I never entirely answered.

Depends on what translates into "creating a conflict over it." If someone talks about things in fashion that indicates they're talking from very limited knowledge, I'm not going to hesitate to call them on it. I'll try not to be too aggressive in the way I do it, but I don't have to act like...

You've probably expressed why its a movie I respect but don't consider a favorite better than I can. I wonder if it'd even be a classic were it not for the combination of Gort still being a really striking piece of older SFX work even now, and Michael Rennie's peculiar charisma carrying the...

On the other hand, when you have things like people that talk about the hobby like a class-and-level approach is the only one that exists, I can't say I find that either an appeal to authority or gatekeeping; its more a suggestion someone is talking beyond their scope of knowledg.extent. If...

Well, other than librarians being generically hostile to destroying libraries, part of the issue there is we're pretty sure there's knowledge lost there we never did, and probably never can, reclaim.

I haven't seen an edition of CoC in many years, but it probably is suffering here from the fact BRP predates the idea of talents and the like, so it tends to want to force anything that isn't an attribute into a skill. It occurs in other areas in the BRP family. Try to build someone in a...

This seems a pretty big overstatement in the tabletop field, given I can name a fair number where the lines between those are thoroughly blurred.

Well, not counting the perverse incentives the progressive cost on things bought in play and the linear cost of them bought at character gen produces.

Well, honestly, you can do all of it with skills if you want to. Or at least skills and separately acquired talents and the like. Sometimes I think people coming from the D&D sphere are overly focused on handling everything with classes.

Well, you can have games that don't need anything thief-like, but barring the aforementioned games where its moot (if you've got a build system with skills, "thief" is a description, not a mechanical hook) you have to have fairly narrow focus in the game for that to make sense.

Though I have to say "or technology" in that sentence comes across as a bit odd, as in a modern game the distinction between that and trade skills can be pretty hard to tease out (vehicles too, far as that goes).

I have to note that most games that don't have them, do so because they're already subsumed in either the general system, or other character structures.