Search results

I've just started Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. I normally love his books, but the premise of this one just didn't grab me, and it's a bit of a beast. However, I've read everything else he's published and this was on for like 3 bucks or something on Kindle, so I figured I should check it off the...

My top 5: 1. Alien 2. Bladerunner 3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 4. Children of Men 5. The Iron Giant

Agreed. Star Wars (Andor possibly excepted) is far more fantasy in terms of both content and, especially, themes and narrative structure, than it is sci-fi. Probably more Western, as well. I would call it a Fantasy Western with a sci-fi aesthetic.

Of course it's imprecise. That's a feature, not a flaw: it's a broad term within which various sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories, etc. are subsumed. That's just...how language works. We understand, for example, that the word "sports" denotes certain very general features, while "baseball"...

I run my campaign worlds like I see the real world: people are complicated, so are their social systems, and sometimes they do bad things. If history has shown us anything, it's that people can do terrible things even with supposedly good intentions. Often because of supposedly good intentions...

Drinking rum. Edit: my campaign kicked off one game where the party had to rescue the captain's rum from some harpies.

Agreed - superheroes are typically extreme deontologists, concerned with the moral principle, not loosey-goosey consequentialists who focus on the greater good. Refusing to sacrifice any baby, not just their own, is extremely on brand for the FF.

You mean they're checking their DMs when they shoud be paying attention to the game, so I kill their character with a lightning bolt?

I saw it at a drive-in in Langley.

I find those AI responses interesting, because LLMs are essentially aggregators of the most typical responses, which makes them kind of useless for generating anything original, but potentially useful if you want a kind of "wisdom of crowds" response...which is arguably particularly relevant for...

Just watching this over on the Dungeon Dudes, and it is just delightful! I really enjoy Deborah Ann Woll's DM style - she keeps things fun and fast-paced, and Ginny Di and Anjali Bhimani are similarly joyful players, so the tone is light. Although it's called Session 0, it's really more of a...

I just wrapped a 4 month long pirate arc in my home campaign, and here's how I handled it: 1. The PCs were crew but it was obvious pretty quickly that they had special skills, so the captain basically used them as a kind of strike team, which dovetailed nicely with the PC's own motivations for...

It pretty typical for the even numbered levels to feel less impactful for full casters, though level 2 does offer more than a single spell slot. For example, if you're a wizard you also learn a new spell and get to choose expertise in a skill. Given that level 2 is only a few levels, I don't...

Mastery alone makes them more powerful than their 2014 incarnations. Mastery is a LOT stronger than a lot of folks realize, when you math out the various effects. Martial classes in general got the most buffs; paladins remain a top tier class. Maybe not THE top class, as many felt previously...

Well, every 2024 class is OP against 2014 classes. Maybe not moon Druids. But everyone else. However, monk from being a consensus bottom tier class to a consensus top tier class. For those arguing 2014 monk is fine, most players did not agree, and evidently, neither did WotC, since they...

I don't enforce that rule - if players wanna multiclass, they can.

Yeah, but now I have to reassess my choices. Again. How could I have left off Stan Lee?

Dammit.

...are awesome, but geek culture? They're too cool. Like, above, someone cited Bowie. He would be top of my list of personal icons, cultural icons, and music icons, Mt. Rushmore for all three, but geek Rushmore?

Hmmm...nerds, only, huh? Tolkien Gibson Lucas Shelley Edit: I really want to put Miyamoto on there but can't decide who to bump! Might have to be Gibson, but...I can't! Edit 2: How can Gygax not be up there? This is too hard! Edit 3: Okay, restricted myself to one per media: Tolkien Gygax...