I know the article is a threadbare simile, but it more than misses the whole point of Galadriel’s character in the books/movie. For even someone like Galadriel who meets this beyond-human ideal of beauty, purity and “goodness”, the power of the One Ring to dominate life is so corrupting that it would simply turn her into a new Sauron. Which is why after failing to resist temptation, Galadriel leaves Middle Earth and goes into the West. If there’s one point that is hammered in repeatedly throughout the Lord of the Rings, it’s that such absolute power cannot be used for good, despite anyone’s best intentions, and the only recourse is for it to be destroyed.

It’s been an absurd mishandling of the IP by Take Two. Will probably be permanently stuck in early access with only maintenance development at best.

A lot of people (myself included) had the update installed automatically by Steam with no option for rollback, so it caught people off guard.

It’s buried in the article, but yep it’s a Boeing.

I agree that D&D will always exist, I am just personally uninterested in the direction the game is going with the OneD&D, and I think the source of this muddling path is do to the failure of the original business maneuver with the OGL revision. I don’t really see things getting better under Hasbro, so any major shakeup might be a good thing overall.

Kinda .

I don’t think Tencent would be a particularly great owner for the D&D brand, but they might have been more hands-off than Hasbro went it comes to mucking with the business model, and a major shakeup for D&D could be good. Honestly, WotC (or just D&D) could be doing better if it was an independent operation as opposed to subsidizing the Hasbro revenue sink.

Hasbro has no clue what to do with the game since their games-as-service, closed ecosystem plan went kaput after they backed down on the OGL revision (which would have been necessary to shut out other VTTs and ensure player & DM subscriptions). I think the recent lay offs of senior people in the D&D related teams suggests this as well. This article doesn’t seem well sourced at all, but a shake-up would be very interesting at this point.

Side-stepping some of the speculation and impact on the traditional market/fanbase, I am curious about the interest in D&D in China, as a Tencent acquisition would presumably make it much easier to market the game there. From the searching I’ve done, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of interest in D&D, and there’s no official translation into Mandarin. The movie didn’t do great at the Chinese box office, although Baldur’s Gate 3 did fine? Obviously, if Tencent does put together a subsidiary to design a version for the Chinese market, I’m not sure if they’d want to start by translating/adapting existing books or using the ruleset to design a bespoke version (either with a fantasy setting or based on relevant Chinese IP.)

I don’t really care about the honor of Rian Johnson, but I don’t think your points are correct.

why are there suddenly cloaking devices in star wars

Cloaking devices were introduced in Episode I

why don’t the imperials hyperjump in front of the fleeing rebels?

The tracking device makes hyperspace jumping a game of hopscotch. There’s not really a point.

why can several characters leave a chase in progress visit some planet and come back to the chase still in progress?

Yeah, this one is kinda dumb, but it’d be possible for a small ship to escape unnoticed and get out of range in order to jump to lightspeed.

the holdo maneuver breaks several in-universe rules about how hyperdrive works.

Those rules are established in the books/supplemental materials, which aren’t canon to the film series. The film-makers have no obligation to respect them. Episode 7 also breaks/rewrites the hyperspace rules.

Luke’s character “development” happening entirely off-screen (and throwing out better character development from decades of books) makes the flashback scene completely unbelievable.

None of the books are canon. It makes sense that people change over long time skips, and they did outline the rationale for his mindset changes in the flashback.

It was a shock reaction image that became popular on r/cth and kind of became a mascot for the sub & then later for chapo.chat/hexbear.

Honestly, we all got so used to it that it became a nothingburger internally, just a way to tell someone to eff off. I was surprised to see it actually affecting people post-federation, but that’s also attributable to the emoji bug.

CW: Article on the source of Pig Poop Balls

On alternative to traditional hit points can be seen in OSR/NSR games derived from Into the Odd. The game still has HP, but it stands for “hit protection” instead of health/hit points. In Into the Odd, there are no attack rolls, you just roll damage dice. HP is then a buffer that resets after an encounter to absorb a hit or two. After that, characters and monsters start taking all damage to their strength stat, which provokes critical damage checks that can knock them out of combat.

So, the result is that combat is very fast, a couple rounds at most, and very decisive/deadly without having the classic OSR issue of your 1 HP wizard dying because they ran into a cat.

I think that should be okay. People have fun with Genesys and other die systems with special colored dice. Only having two dice types should be okay, and in a VTT the hope v. fear check would be automated anyways.

Looks interesting but a bit finicky. The 3-page character sheet looks somewhat cumbersome, but it could be okay if all the rules and actions/ability a player can take are on it so that they don’t need to reference anything else.

Southern doggerland

Yeah, I remember playing D&D in high school. If you don’t have a lot of maturity, it’s easy to fall into violent power fantasies that the freedom of a TRPG offers versus a CRPG.

This is why I’m really glad for modern session 0 agendas and safety tools to set expectations and keep people on the same page.