"… trying to replicate the perceived awesomeness…" See, that's your problem right there. Never do this! Make new awesomeness!

…Especially when his former co-host is the sort of person who was a certified dive instructor and wilderness survival expert. The talkative, showy guy is never going to be a good personality fit for the hard-minded by-the-numbers diver type. The internet tells me that Hyneman has no military experience, which…

Didn't Keira Knightley say the single worst thing about working on the Pirates movies was the monkey, too? It sounded like that thing had them all held hostage for all of its scenes.

Or something close to it, like Deadpool: Go Number Two or Deadpool: the Deuce.

I never know how seriously to take him, in a way. He always says he's just joshing around here, but then he makes a movie like Dogma (which I get why some people love, but I can't stand) and it's tough not to see him trying to dig a little deeper. It's hard to believe he never deconstructs his own work, like the…

Glad to clarify; I definitely got the impression that that went wrong somewhere.

No, I meant that as a compliment. I mean that it sounded like you were investing in the moment and letting the game play out as it would, not looking to powergame/grief the GM/grief the other players/etc. It's exactly the thing I keep not running into in those types of games.

"I'm not exactly sure what I was trying to accomplish" - I don't know, it sounds like roleplaying to me. You were trying to accomplish what your character would probably be actually doing in that moment, which is trying desperately to escape without a higher plan in place.

Honestly, at some level I expect that the baked-into-the-genre fear of dying is the reason why parties always seem to munchkin and/or loony up: to overcome it, or to render it impotent by laughing it off. Actually committing to that probable outcome seems to be beyond any party I've ever been a part of.

Same here! I keep hearing those stories and thinking "I wonder what that would be like." But every time I've tried it, somebody thinks it would be funny to take out the guards with a grenade instead of sneaking by, burning the ancient library down instead of going inside, etc. etc. etc. Everyone wants to be Old Man…

I just finished gushing about Sunless Sea above, but I'd love to see more atmospheric Gothic horror, where the gameplay is fairly low-key and sedate but everything presented is skewed and off-kilter in memorable ways. I'm not saying it's easy to do, but I don't feel like that particular style is overplayed at the…

Ooo, Sunless Sea… I was all set to type "I just don't see it handled well in games" and then you up and reminded me that SS exists. I still haven't been in a single good pen-and-paper horror RPG game yet (the party always munchkins it up and/or loonys it up, every time), but that game did a great job of capturing a…

I can't speak for the rest of them, but I clicked on this article hoping for content and now that's it's done, I still feel unsatisfied.

Why even set something like this in another country? Set it in your home town! ("Really really liking Edmonton" doesn't make you a native Canadian, for the record.) If nothing else, you'll add a needed note of self-deprecation - always one of Smith's strengths - but you're way more likely to make a realistic,…

Reading this has me reassessing his "don't give a shit about the audience" comment. I wonder if there's more of an element of despair in that than I'd initially thought. Perhaps he doesn't really understand what made his early movies work, or - worse yet - resents it because he wants to be a capital-A Artist, making…

Apart from the access issues of the time (satellite only?) I think there was a basic misunderstanding of initial audience investment. The people who got it often loved it, but the people who didn't get it, and get it quick, flipped to another channel. Bored kids, music nerds and the greatly curious got hooked pretty…

Echo what all of them said, but I'd also add that reviewers do play games differently than your average Joe gamer. I wrote reviews in the early aughts and I'd deep dive into a game, playing it for hours on end and then thinking about it for several hours at a stretch while I wrote and edited my review. It sounds…

I'll mertilize you, you masher!

There really was an American school of wizardry all this time, and we all knew their name all along! They have a Grand Wizard and everything!

Right now I'm reading Andrew Sullivan's Waste, which is gritty and sad in ways that have been sticking with me. After that, I look forward to actually finishing that Guns, Germs and Steel book that everyone was so keen on a while ago. I really enjoyed what I'd read, but need to actually, y'know, finish it.