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My big way of making DMing easier is to just steal wholesale from history. The first game I ever DMed, I set within the general setting of the Peloponnesian War, the second was Republican Rome, then medieval Japan and Russia. Then you can have naming systems, place names, maps, and clothing styles all ready to go. …

Well, that all depends. Occupied countries don't tend to be super vibrant economies, because having super vibrant economies can mean that they are no longer subservient. And that's not considering war damage and the resultant poverty.

I gained a fair bit of weight after college ended and the walking I was doing all day suddenly got cut out of my schedule, and I didn't cook for myself much at all. Warcraft didn't help much either.

Meanwhile, on Fox news, someone is choosing between a tape that says "We Told You So" and one that says "Sorry, We Were So Wrong."

That is a super tragic story, and (as I said in my post) the heroism of the Poles in WWII is often an unsung story, and it shouldn't be. I just think Alan Turing has a particular resonance because his ultimate fate wasn't a function of war (and there were a lot of people that were killed or captured because of the…

Huh, my list is just Baldur's Gate II, over and over and over again.

I think these days, I'm just as likely to not pirate, because Netflix and my cable's on demand features have largely enable me to avoid the issues that caused me to pirate in the first place.... I couldn't get a movie/series when I wanted it for a price that wasn't insane. When stuff like Attack on Titan is simulcast…

Especially since Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft are all made up from liberally poaching tropes from all sorts of other sci-fi and fantasy properties.

I would like to do another roleplaying game, but 3E/3.5 is so burned into my memory, it doesn't make sense to play much else. The people I play with are happy to make up new rules or steal other rules as we see fit. I keep finding that our house rules of Heal spells out of combat doing max healing, or you can rest…

I do see value in having realistic games for 'recreation' purposes... putting someone in a historical place and time to tell a real-life story, for instance, or show you what real medieval fighting or Russian helicopter piloting is like. But they're likely to be frustrating games, since you're gonna be playing…

It was clearly author appeal with that game though.... the designers spend months modelling the geology, weather, etc. Which is cool and all, but not what a game company would actually sink its time into.

The game from Reamde convinced me that this game had no chance of being a game I would want to play. Stephenson's idea of a world famous MMORPG had it being brutal to its players in a way that fell out of favor with Everquest. Smaller games like Eve still do the 'lose everything at death' and 'everything is free for…

That's one way... but I'd honestly rather see a movie actually deal with the after effects of all the comic book superweapon, supercure stuff a little bit more. Have Reed Richards try to make a Utopia in a movie. The Fantastic Four Vanquish Death. I guess the problem is then, what do the others do? I'd be nice if …

That whole story raised so many issues. Did Lois not tell Superman/Clarke Kent she was pregnant? Which could imply that that she was either also dating James Marsden at the time too, and didn't know, or that Superman just up and left without consulting her at all. Either way, Superman came off seeming kind of…

Yeah, I'm not saying its impossible, it manages to suggest that life is very difficult to start and yet super adaptable to astonishing conditions. Both of which are just assumptions that people seem to want to make because they want life to be more special than if it just originally here on earth. And I think that…

One could argue that this was the entire plot of Star Trek: The Movie.

I don't know if it would have helped. In the end, Prometheus was the epic love story of the android David and all buttons, everywhere.

The main character of the first Culture novel even described the Culture in terms of it being sort of the end of all civilizations. They'd hit upon a combination so potent that it would eventually overwhelm everyone else if not contained, and he distrusted the Minds on a very fundamental level, and was helping the…

I don't think it is the fault of technobabble, per say. Every science fiction needs a certain amount of additional technology to work, and a certain amount of vocabulary to make it seem like a real thing.