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If "The Hobbit" had been one movie, it would have been fine. Most of the problems with that trilogy stem from the decision to make it a trilogy, which necessitated adding an enormous amount of material to the original. It's a damn shame, because there were some really amazing performances...

This is my feeling as well. I would love a cut that trimmed out a few of the over-the-top bits -- the tipping stairway in Moria and the "shield-surfing" come to mind -- and polished up some of the CGI, toned down the effects on Galadriel's temptation scene, etc. But those are minor complaints...

Very little of this is applicable to Great Old One warlocks, though. GOOs are not devils offering written pacts signed in blood. They are Lovecraftian monstrosities with (per the PHB) "incomprehensible motives", who may be "unaware of the existence" of their warlocks or "entirely indifferent"...

The current ruling on AI-generated works is that they are non-copyrightable. Whether that holds up on appeal, we'll have to see -- and of course there will be a question about how much AI involvement is too much -- but I hope it does hold up.

Providing goods and services. That is the reason we have laws providing for their existence (for example, by granting limited liability, so creditors cannot go after the personal assets of the owners if the company goes bust). Profit is merely one of the incentives we offer people to form, run...

Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further...

In "The Fellowship of the Ring," when explaining the story of the Ring to Frodo, Gandalf says, "I wondered often how Gollum came by a Great Ring, as plainly it was -- that at least was clear from the first." Gandalf doesn't explain his reasoning, but he is definitely claiming to have known...

Scattered across multiple planes, always in watery areas. There are fragments on the Elemental Plane of Water; the first layer of Mount Celestia (I think that's the layer with the holy ocean, not positive); Dagon's realm in the Abyss; under the Styx in Hades; etc. The highest mountain in...

I'm not a fan of big umbrella corps like Hasbro, period. They're a recipe for dysfunction. Companies generally run a lot better when the executives have a deep understanding of the company's operations. When the company's operations are oriented to a single product or line, it's possible to...

Er... no. Not at all, actually. "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" is another story of epic struggle against a Big Bad ending in bittersweet triumph. Yes, you've got a self-destructive and generally unpleasant* protagonist, but otherwise it's very much in the LotR mold. The closest thing I can...

Tolkien himself tried and couldn't do it. He started a manuscript titled "The New Shadow," set 100 years after Aragorn's death in the reign of his son: "Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the...

The NuTSR saga has been quiet lately. Gotta get my "obnoxious fool in self-inflicted legal train wreck" fix somewhere...

...And now you're a lawyer*. :) *At least, that's the impression I got from your postings during the OGL fiasco -- please correct me if I'm wrong.

Say we assume an average annual cost to Hasbro of $100,000 per employee. (That's not just salary; it also includes benefits, the employer's share of payroll taxes, 401(k) matching, HR and admin, et cetera -- the full cost of keeping someone on the payroll.) Then $9.4 million would cover six...

Iron Dragon 15 (+1) Tungsten Dragon DEAD (-2)

Falling damage is certainly one of the places that really highlights the problem, but I think the main issue is simply with the choice of names. All of the terminology in the game pushes the Arnesonian meat interpretation of hit points, really really hard. When an attack is rolled, it either...

"A group of seven men approaches. They are following the road east, and are making good time, neither tarrying nor running. Their faces are expressionless. One is dressed as a cleric of some sort, and another is dressed as a traveling drummer. The others could be peasants or serfs going from one...

The "ferrous dragons" should consist of iron, steel, pyrite, magnetite, and blood, led by a Ferrotitanium Dragon as the equivalent of Bahamut/Tiamat. (The loyalty of the blood dragons to the Ferrotitanium Dragon would be notoriously unreliable, since hemoglobin switches from ferrous to ferric...

Cobalt Dragon 4 Iron Dragon 16 (+) Tungsten Dragon 4 (-)

Cobalt Dragon 8 Iron Dragon 14 Tungsten Dragon 10 I might have considered one of the others if the title hadn't been "Ferrous Dragons," but since that's the category, I'm voting for the only dragon that actually meets the qualification.