Exactly! Even if you allow that the ship has lots of survival mechanisms and guidebooks full of Lost Knowledge, it's not like colonizing from scratch is *easy*. The pilgrims in the Mayflower were tougher and culturally much closer to the mindset of colonization, and they only survived because the locals both took…

I actually thought of him in Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie for this article. Not sure what that says about me.

I'm surprised not to see Oh Brother Where Art Thou's laconic lawman, but I'm more surprised that of the SNL Satans you went with, you took Lovitz over Will Ferrell's devil-can't-write-no-love-song with Garth Brooks: http://www.nbc.com/saturday…

Not to derail further, but that part of the movie is exactly what didn't work for me. I don't care what the end credits show us, those people on that planet = dead people. They didn't stand a chance.

Heh, back when I pen-and-paper RPG'd regularly, we'd mix our more serious (i.e. talkier) games with the occasional cyberpunk one-off. We'd all play mad slashers and every mission was a suicide mission for everyone, everywhere. Total gleeful munchkin powergaming, it was great.

B2: I felt a whole lot more like a Big Daddy when I fully upgraded my drill and got that tonic that takes all your weapons except your drill away, makes your drill do more damage and plasmids cost half as much to use. Suddenly every single fight was me charging and mauling everything in sight like a teleporting,…

You almost have to have seen this by now, but on the off chance you haven't, please drink deeply of Coldsteel the Hedgeheg: https://www.youtube.com/wat…

Mechwarrior Online is eating my bra-a-a-a-ains… It's the sort of thing where I'll play a couple of matches and be good for the day, and then I'll go for one…last…match and have that "perfect match experience" and be at it for another hour. Still chipping away at my replay of Bioshock 2 and Master of Magic, although…

I have mixed feelings about that, because the idea's been around a lot longer than the term. Nobody calls Master of Magic a "roguelike" because each map was randomly generated. I think you're probably right and that the prevalence will correct downward at some point - and I expect the buzzword to be a lot less buzzy…

Heh, I was reading this and mentally saying "really?" again and again. Even when I was a kid, I figured the story was just the excuse they came up with to fling the next pack of new robots at us. Heck, even them being robots felt like a convenient trapping for letting me kill them, steal their unique power and then…

Yeah, this is a key point. Same thing with calling FTL a "roguelike": cunning level design is not what makes FTL work.

It's ironic that for a modern roguelike to be good, it either needs a gameplay model that doesn't really care about map design or else the dev team actually needs to be better at map design, not worse. You can tell when a roguelike was designed by someone to get around a lack of map design skills because it shows up…

That's actually who I was thinking about when I typed that. That article about his tweets, oy…

He sounded thoughtful and articulate in this interview, too. This is not always true of actors, as it turns out.

The only time I remember actually using the Deck was in a one-off where we said specifically we were doing this to inflict the Deck on the universe. The PCs wandered into the center of a small village with very little in the way of setting or backstory and started "blessing" the townspeople - and each other - with…

That part of the game frustrates me, because if everyone stays and shoots, they win, and if they charge over an exposed playfield, they lose. I can't tell if I need to be adding light mechs to the mix to run around like an idiot, or if i need a whole lot more LRMs. I can't say I much enjoy the LRM mech playstyle, as…

Heh, the Deck is like getting the players to flip the table for you without them realizing it. Just wait, kids, just wait…

The games are all so loaded with heavies (and to a lesser extent, meds) that I tend to run either light or assault—and I think sometimes it shows in my playstyle. (I get aggressive in assault mechs instead of picking a good firing line and staying put. Bad habit.) I'd love to play with a WHM or something but I just…

Nobody ever means to buy that DLC, it just sort of happens somehow…

Erg. Yeah, I think in this case I'd make the staff an NPC, and not an entirely cooperative one. Not hostile and not a Derailment Engine, but just…sometimes a surprise. Any outright betrayal or rebellion should be carefully plotted beforehand, but you should be able to stress that the wizard really doesn't have this…