So you’re getting closer to something I agree with, but your argument is all over the map:

As stated in another reply thread, the fact that all virtual items are supposed to have zero monetary value is one reason it’s often not considered gambling.

I don’t know if the “standard loot rotation” has anything to do with whether the mechanic is gambling or not, but the second part is potentially worth thinking about.

Diablo is probably a good example whereby the random loot is completely severed from the monetary cost. But that’s not really the game I had in mind.

I think there are two questions that need to be separated from one another:

Magic would lose one of its most entertaining methods of play, though: the draft.

An argument can be made that because no prize has resale value, it isn’t gambling. The odds of winning anything of value are always zero.

4e was like playing a pen-and-paper MMO. Classes were well-tuned, each came with its own talent specs, main stats, weapon specializations, etc. These were all things that had been in DND before, but the influence of popular games like WOW and Everquest was clearly there.

Where does the line get drawn?

I find it the likeliest reason Swamp Thing was cancelled. It was a service-selling show for a service that soon isn’t going to be sold.

Yes, though the magic could make the whip more powerful. The main issue I found with the whip is that overall movement control is not quite as smooth as other similar titles, thus making the whip harder to be effective with.

Star Trek: Voyager, actually. 

Some of the particularly good weapons are either hard to find repeatedly, or they’re absurdly expensive to recreate.

Circle of the Moon was *very* difficult.

That’s really all that was needed: a reasonable means of bringing back what was broken. It’s really the fear of losing a really good weapon *forever* that meant I hardly felt comfortable using it. 

What is being left out is that cultural expectations for the sexes don’t always line up with political freedoms as stated by law.

Per the abstracts, the researchers used data about the political and economic freedoms of countries, then sampled men and women from those countries, then researched their interests. They found a positive correlation between freedom and greater division of the sexes by said interests.

Again, none of those links to abstracts discuss any actual evidence for sex-associated interests being biologically ingrained. All they do show is that they have sample evidence that countries rated with greater social and economic equality counterintuitively correlate to a greater division of interests between the…

“There are biological factors at play, and they maximize when the social ones are removed.”

Men and women have different interests because they are subtly told that men and women should each have different interests.