Except the real Zimmerman wasn't a cop, and there was no doubt that the real victim was unarmed. It's a rare case where real life is less ambiguous than the fictional version.

I hope they get the character to the point where she figures out she doesn't actually want or need that house. First of all, that apartment she has is kind of awesome, and secondly, fuck her kids. They want their mom to drop $2 million on a house for sentimental reasons just as they're about to leave for college?…

I disagree - I think it'll definitely come up again, but just not as a primary storyline. Maybe it'll be a B-plot next week or something.

Other DMs do do it differently! That's one thing I thought was good about Todd's convention experience - he got to see what lots of different play styles, GM styles, and play cultures looked like.

I'm an evangelist for Lacuna (Lacuna Part I: The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl From Blue City). It's a great combination of John LeCarre, The Matrix, Inception, and The Cell. You can create a character and learn to play in 5 minutes.

1st edition Spycraft was nicely streamlined. I own Spycraft 2.0 and really would love to play it, but never have - partially because handing someone that rulebook feels like a crime. It's way too simulationist for most people. I think there's even a table to model the spread of a disease somewhere in there.

I have a very tech-savvy friend who plays at a table with non-teched-out players. He's got his character on his Galaxy phone, rolls dice with an app, etc. I've seen other people who use flatscreens at the table to show constantly updating maps, complete with fog-of-war. There's a lot of crossover between the…

@avclub-0aa1883c6411f7873cb83dacb17b0afc:disqus D&D has a weird problem with alignments, where they are universal principles. Not only is there a Chaotic Evil alignment, there are planes of Chaos and Evil, and a detect evil spell, and a protection from evil spell. I don't remember exactly how 4th edition handled the…

I think editions are too different now. For example, using a 3rd edition adventure for a 4th edition campaign would be nigh-impossible, you'd have to restat everything.

Totally agree, Pathfinder is a lot of what's good about 3/3.5 with a lot less of the bad.

I started playing RPGs in the Boy Scouts, and I've heard from enough other people to think it's a common enough experience.

This is weird, it is like the real life version of the Chick tract. Maybe I'm underestimating the social subtleties here, but why couldn't your friend just say, "I don't want to play anymore"? Even little kids know how to do that.

As far as I know this was the start of the hysteria:

I remember him only as Horsecock the Gaul.

Egyptianator stabs, Oenomaus blocks with his palm, dagger goes through his palm, Egyptianator forces the point into Oenomaus's eye with Oenomaus's hand still speared on the dagger, is basically how I remember it.

I'm no expert, but it would probably not be very historically plausible. The Third Servile War (Spartacus's rebellion) was ~75 BC, while the Battle of Carrhae was in 53 BC, and I think that's about the time when the Republic started to bump up against eastern cultures that used the composite bow. So there's really no…

I think there's a continuing tension between "what's legal" and "what you can get away with" in this show.

Well, if we're getting nitpicky, isn't this era a bit early for lorica segmentata, which I think I've seen many of the Roman troops wearing?

Yeah, in retrospect all the show's problems were there in the first season. By the first season finale I should have realized what was going on, but I guess I was still hoping it would level out.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I think I get it now, but for me she's still one of the least awful characters on the show. I think if I had to rate them, it'd be Glen, Maggie, and Daryl at the top, Andrea, Herschel, and Mr. Theodore Douglas in the middle (don't hate them, don't love them), and then everyone…