This will disappoint Scott Hanson so much.

Geezer Butler is the most important member of Black Sabbath.

These critics should drop using letter grades, in favor of Victoria Jackson’s movie rating system:

• ★★★★: Pretty good
• ★★★: The best
• ★★: The worst
• ★: Pretty good

…and then award, like 15 stars to one team, and 3.5 to another.

Haven’t been paying attention. What stupid deal has Denver done this time?

Mileage varies, I guess. I’ve also been playing since the eighties (late Seventies, really). I’ve been a forever GM for most of that (not a forever DM, though). I have not been particularly active on game design forums, but still have seen every argument on this list someplace at least once a year, since at least the Forge era (so, about twenty years or so). Less often recently, maybe. Way more often earlier.

No team is near me, so I said to myself “I’ll give it a chance and root for the team with the best logo.” But then the teams were revealed and every single one of the logos is terrible.

Is this superficial and dumb? Absolutely. But I haven’t paid attention since.

Are kickoffs still a “live” ball, or a “dead” ball like punts?

Yao Ming (an NBA basketball player) has, nearly single-handedly, saved the lives of tens of millions of sharks by simply asking citizens of China to stop eating shark fin soup. Since he started doing this, the price of shark fins has tanked, and 90+ percent of people surveyed in China support a ban on selling shark fins.

All of that may be true, but it bears little resemblance to the case the US actually filed against Apple. If you haven’t read the charges, you really should. They are filled with reaches that have long been rejected in similar cases, and a desire for government to broadly micromanage. One type of charge, for example, could easily be brought against any company that makes a videogame for just a single platform.

If you ignore WotC as being in its own league, a handful of companies are now the “top tier” of RPG production. I’d include Mophidius there, with Paizo and Evil Hat, maybe Chaosium. Their products have extremely high production values and large (by TTRPG standards) followings.

The are mostly known for 2d20 games (Star Trek Adventures, Dune), Dragonbane, Forbidden Lands, Mutant: Year Zero, and now publish some more classic titles (Twilight: 2000, Kult).

I sold a bunch of 70’s and 80’s tabletop roleplaying stuff when I went to college. A few years ago, I reacquired many of those titles at collector’s prices. Not my most brilliant financial move.

As a Shadowrun player, I know that “arcology” is a much worse epithet than “hive city”. Well… unless it’s in Chicago.

You might actually want to look for RPG systems that are a particular kind of bad.

Some systems with decent math behind them fail because they are too fiddly. They might have tons of modifiers to track, cumbersome rolling, lots of traits based on averages of other traits, and so on. Those types of systems can often be great for things like MUDs, because the computer can hide most of it from the player. And, maybe a roll takes 10 times as long, but that just means the software can do it in 10ms instead of 1ms, so who will care?

If Earthdawn was open licensed, I’d suggest it as being “the right kind of bad”. It’s weird exploding pool step system is interesting because the dice for each step are set up such that the average roll of the pool is approximately the step number.

An actual AI working for Forbes would have managed to get in a dig at Apple in the headline.

Something that crocodiles do has made them one of the longest lasting species on Earth, specifically by allowing populations to explode after massive disasters.

The way it works is: about 90% of baby crocodiles are eaten by… adult crocodiles. So, when a natural disaster (say) wipes out huge quantities of adults at once, baby crocks find themselves in world mostly without predators that eat them, this living long enough to become adults. These adults go back to eating new babies, preventing the population from running amok.

If you imagine the “evil humanoid species™”—kobolds or whatever—does this, you can imagine why the “good guys” are always surprised at how the “hordes” replenish so quickly after being “culled”. You can also imagine the “culling” of adults erodes and annihilates any culture that might have existed in an endless downward spiral.

But, oh, “that’s OK because they’re cannibals”.

I’ll take “new life form designed to eat plastic evolves to produce waste products worse for the ocean than plastic” for 200.

For decoration a basement, these would do:

• Action/Adventure: Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Comedy: Airplane!
• Drama: The Seven Samurai
• 3D Animation: The Incredibles
• 2D Animation: The Iron Giant
• Science Fiction: Blade Runner
• Mystery/Thriller: The Third Man
• Fantasy: The Princess Bride

While most of the states with zero are searching for both equally, I get the feeling that Wyoming is zero because no one searches for either.

HexKit