Recent content by Teyrnon

Heads up, I just tried that search term, and that link isn't in the first hundred or so results. I had no idea there were so many websites about the academic study of games...Google has us all in bubbles and can't be relied on to show two people the same results.

I think that was someone overworked and not thinking clearly. Though something similar happened the last time I visited a McDonalds. I made my order, waited, then after about fifteen minutes someone came out, checked my order number, said something had gone wrong and they would have to refund my...

I was in my twenties in the 1990s and encountered many people complaining that THAC0 was counterintuitive and hard to grasp. It usually came from people whose first RPG was Vampire: The Masquerade. I think it was more a matter of not wanting to learn another game system than anything else.

I pre-ordered the Kindle edition but have yet to read it. I'm trepidatious about it because, from what I understand, there are about three layers of meta-narrative in those 309 pages. The whole story within a story within a story is a daunting prospect for me as a reader.

There seems to be quite a bit of information about the Hubble telescope in there. I have to give them credit because I would have been hard-pressed to work gravitational lensing in to a fantasy adventure as a key to solving it..

How does Castle Falkenstein fit into this vote schema? Or for that matter Girl Genius's setting. I think steampunk with magic and mad science counts as fantasy.

Here's a thought: a world where the god of war is actively preventing the development of guns because he likes warfare just the way it is. If the PCs want guns, they have to take out the old god of war and replace him with one more amenable to firearms.

I was merely giving my impressions gleaned from conversations with people who had very strong opinions about guns in fantasy settings. My own feelings can largely be summed up in the word apathy. I'm also drawing from an unfortunate incident in which I stupidly introduced a crystal ball network...

I chalk it up to people having rigid ideas about what fits into a fantasy world and what seems too modern. These ideas don't have to be historical and guns are an easy thing to point to as something that makes a setting feel modern even when they really don't.

In the very few LitRPG novels I've read the characters weren't aware that they were in a game but were aware of the physics of the world they lived in, which the reader realizes are imposed by game mechanics.

I've read two or three books in the genre. It doesn't really work for me. The conceit that characters are aware of the game mechanics that rules their lives was cute but got tiresome. One of the books had a passage where one character explained to another how inventory slots worked and remarked...

Thanks, they're also in Volume Six of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: The Road to Amber. Nice to see these stories collected.

Someone I haven't seen in a while dropped by my house last night ostensibly to return some dice he borrowed twenty years ago. I don't remember him borrowing any dice from me and certainly not a whole shoebox full...

It's time to reread both series of the Chronicles of Amber. I'd like to read all the short stories, too, if I can find them.

I don't know that I really have a favorite system. I like bits from a bunch of different systems that if any system ever managed to combine them coherently and playably that system would have a good chance of becoming my favorite. But since we're in an imperfect world my current goto systems are...