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This is actually a major subtheme of Tolkien's work, showing up in both the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It's most humorous (and tragic) when Sam does this trope, advancing to stand between Faramir and Frodo and saying, "I'm not one to put myself forward, but...". Tolkien very much...

Both my description and Umbran's counter take are true and I think Tolkien would agree with both. Tolkien addresses this tension in the intellectual climax of the story when Sam and Frodo discuss the meaning of stories generally (and this story that they are in particularly), while resting on...

"Empathy" is a very slippery term because it's a feeling and not an action. Altruism is generally a better measure because you can actually measure it somewhat objectively. "Empathy" or "Pro-Social" studies are all over the map in their conclusions with respect to how income and status effects...

Maybe because you offered no definition then of what the common theme in all SF actually was. "Questions the norms" is for example not the same as " exploration of free will in the face of prescience".

That's a rather particular definition of SF and not one I've encountered before in any discussion of what it means to be SF including discussions that define SF by theme. And I'm not sure you can convince me of it, because I'm not sure you can convince me the theme of "The Alien Way" is that we...

All three of those things are false. You are just showing you stopped reading fantasy mostly with Tolkien and his imitators. Fantasy isn't inherently set in the past - Star Wars, Dune, and Tales of the Ketty Jay for example. It's not inherently nostalgic - read Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence...

So while I agree that Tolkien is very much the trope setter (or at least trope spreader) for all of fantasy, not all of fantasy has those tropes. Terry Pratchett tends to have fantasy where things are slowly getting better. Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" actually gives voice to your...

There is only so much I can say.

Tolkien however viewed it even more starkly. While evil's victory could be postponed, even the world that followed the defeat of Sauron was only given a reprieve, like cancer that has gone into remission. Some blush of health might return, but the body would still be weakened compared to...

Tolkien believed in both. My main point was that a world where even the noblest intentions cannot save it might not look like what you imagine.

What's really ironic about this paragraph is Middle Earth is a setting of despair, where things are not fundamentally good, and in fact it is a world of darkness and hopelessness and greed and evil is the prevalent state of the world. Tolkien describes his world as "fighting the long defeat"...

Too many feels. No like button option is quite appropriate for that post.

I kind of like this idea but it needs some refinement to make it work. I don't usually run explicit "scenes" and for your suggestion to work the expenditure of the Force Point would need to be tied to something in the meta. But exactly how you define that in a way that just isn't moving the...

Like you I conceptually understand that critical hits are bad for the game, as they always favor the monsters over the PCs. But, while I can understand nerfing them, my solution leans in the other way. 1) Critical hits are one of the ways I can keep martials competitive with non-martials as...

In my ongoing campaign, the PC's "hero ship" is based off a homebrew Suwantek Systems TL-2200 Medium Freighter itself based of the canon TL-1200 Medium Transport. And it has been heavily upgraded and indeed started the campaign pretty heavily upgraded because I didn't want to go through a...

Only if your ship is the Millenium Falcon or the Enterprise. You don't become emotionally invested in a garbage scow or a rotten tub. The ship has to be something you have depended on successfully and is well, better than other ships. The Millenium Falcon was legitimately the fastest ship of...

I've already mentioned this, but technology doesn't change the dynamics and in fact just makes it worse. A pinnace could have crew of 25. Balinger's were crewed by 40. Longships could have crews over 100, and even typical ones a crew of 70. The same pressures apply. Bigger ships have more...

I had a goblin campaign that I kept trying to run in college where everyone was a goblin (or kobold). It never got past a couple of sessions, but it did cause me to do a lot of brainstorming about goblins which was very influential in my later play.

I think that's definitely one of the two ways to start the campaign. The other, is that you start for whatever reason as part of the crew of the larger vessel, though that way requires the group to be OK with the game being on rails for a while. But at 1st level, just a small 30 or 40 foot...

That would probably be my 4th through 6th, so let's end up on the same island.