wordman

wordman, 9 days ago

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.

wordman, 19 days ago

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

wordman, 28 days ago

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.

wordman, 27 days ago

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.

wordman, 1 month ago

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

wordman, 1 month ago

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.

wordman, 1 month ago

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.

wordman, 1 month ago

Millions of New Yorkers turned MAGA without them already. Take a look at who “represents” Long Island in the House of Representatives, for example.

wordman, 2 months ago

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).

wordman, 2 months ago

I’d put down the Browns trade for Watson the same year as slightly worse.

wordman, 2 months ago

But the Browns guaranteed all the money, and Denver didn’t.

wordman, 2 months ago

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.

wordman, 2 months ago

Eh. In these kinds of articles, the story is less “rich seize more wealth from others” than it is “assets already held by rich increase in ‘value’”. Almost everything in this article is “stock price go up” and, therefore, the somewhat imaginary “wealth” number of anyone holding that stock goes up. Basically, the headline could be “changes in stock price make the notional wealth of billionaires fluctuate”. Sort of a non-story to me, because everyone listed in this article could have done absolutely nothing all year, and these numbers would have changed regardless. More interesting (if only slightly) would be an article about changes to their actual assets (i.e. did they increase or decrease shares in their company, etc.). I don’t really get the “let’s keep score” for billionaires thing the media does in any case, but this article is on the more useless end of that useless pursuit.

wordman, 3 months ago

I use Leap (ironicsoftware.com/leap/). One of its better features is that it works great on top of any “folder system”, or even multiple folder systems. Also uses the metadata/tagging system of the OS, so plays nice with other tools.

wordman, 4 months ago

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

wordman, 5 months ago

I read this post as a question.

wordman, 8 months ago

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.