Trivia: The actor who played Alfred in all the '80s and '90s Batman films also played two different Doctor Who villains: once with the First Doctor and once with the Fifth.
@doppelgreener Kill the Moon passed the Bechdel test with flying colours; Mummy on the Orient Express narrowly squeaked by with a portion of a conversation which then lampshaded how much it was otherwise failing the test.
Two women locked in a room. They talk about woman A's unpleasant relationship with her mother, and then about woman B's doubt about her relationship with the Doctor. Woman B then laughs and says, "Two women alone in a room together, and we're talking about a man."
Unfortunately, Kill the Moon is a great example of how the Bechdel test isn't a good measure of... anything, really... when taken by itself and applied to a single text.
@doppelgreener I'm not saying self-answered questions are a bad thing, but that particular question seems like it's not a real question, just that he's got this answer burning a hole in his pocket that he wants to get out there.
@BESW Well, yeah. (And I guess I don't know in what way you mean there.) I acknowledge it isn't a good test on its own: passing the Bechdel test only indicates you've passed the Bechdel test. Still doesn't necessarily indicate you've treated women as, y'know, people with brains and personalities and competence and stuff.
@Miniman Yeah. This is not about SAQs, it's about this guy's repeated attempts to force a short reflection on the physics of flight into an RPG Q&A site.
@Miniman You are talking about his SAQ as if the act of creating it to legitimise his answer is a bad thing, though, or at least it seems that way to me.
And, well, half the reason I leave these comments is for the learning benefit of the people initially being addressed. So my "Actually it's fine" is as much for the guy being able to learn what he did is, in principle on some level, totally ok. :)
@doppelgreener I don't see it. Miniman's calling him out on literally copy-pasting a non-RPG answer into a new question context where he's fiddled with the tags to try to create a loophole into which he can place his pre-made non-RPG essay on an RPG site.
In other words: He got told his answer wasn't a good fit for the site, so he tried to see if he could exploit the site's willingness to consider simulationist approaches to shove the answer in anyway.
The simulation tag has an empty tag wiki and 9 questions. Of these, 4 are closed, one isn't really an RPG question, one doesn't actually appear to be about simulation at all, these two are game-recommendation questions where simulation was a requirement, and one is a question genuinely about simu...
Mmmm... not sure if I should actually quote them in here.
But, Brian and I both implied that this answer might be acceptable if the question permitted it, or on a question that permitted it. The natural conclusion is: "I still want to provide this info, oh hey, I can ask a different question about simulation!"
@BESW Actually I think I'm saying what you already know, but my point, I think, is this: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
We can assume good intentions, but that they've carried through on them poorly.
@dopplegreener honestly you must read all of darts and dried prequel coverage. The plot is 10 times more interesting and makes far more sense than lucas' drivel
Second seasons' probably best--first season is solid except for the female secondary character, and third season is too Merton-centric (and they lost a lot of the great supporting cast). But they're all good.
Oh, yeah. That was weird, even for that show's standards. I think it's one of the few that worked as a metaphor but was a little weak as its own story.
When Merton rejected Vince, saying that he'd grown up and had real friends now, Vince decided that killing Merton's real friends was the best way to get Merton to play with him again.
I think my favourite episodes were the ones where it turned out Corey Haim had become a vampire on the set of Lost Boys, and our heroes had to stake him--and then the next season, Corey Feldman shows up looking for Haim.
I was going to let my rantings from a couple of days ago go, but then this question happened. Which is as clear a clash of paradigms as one can imagine.
@Smurfton In particular, if the topic is potentially going to make someone uncomfortable or be especially contentious, or if it has a history of taking over the chat to the exclusion of all else for hours at a time but isn't close to the chat's ostensible topic, it should probably move to a place where only those who want to see it will be subjected to it.
We've actually made a chat for that, because it happens frequently enough.
Speaking of the Death Star, there was a petition to the US government to start building the Death Star by 2016. It received >25 000 signatures, which requires an official response. Pretty hilarious.
But can't the Hulk just get bigger? Sure, he's about a constant size in Avengers, but I thought that there was no established upper limit to his healing, strength and size?
So far as I know, none of the Movieverse Hulks have explicitly had the rage:power ratio thing going on--and the Marvel movieverse is having a hard time nailing down which version of the Hulk they're going with.
Rage:power Hulk gets taken out when he's attacked quickly with overwhelming force, before he can get mad enough to power up more.
They hit all the Bad Stuff with miscasting and condescension and Evil Foreigners and so forth, but they also gave the Evil Foreigner an anti-colonial-destiny speech which was clearly "He's got a point, though he probably shouldn't use it to murder people."
The 1959 Mummy has a really anvilicious moral about the stupidity of Europeans hacking apart other cultures and taking them home. Which is an anvil that needs to be dropped. They do it awkwardly, with a few cringe-worthy bits and some really bad "we couldn't find enough Egyptians, so how about some African Americans with Chicago accents and a white guy in face paint?" casting choices. But they do it. The anvil gets dropped without hesitation.
The 1932 Mummy is the only one of the three where the girl saves herself. It's got similar racial casting problems, but it focuses on the personal rather than the cultural narrative.
Also it's the only one of the three where ancient Egyptian priests aren't completely stupid.
The 1999 Mummy? It's got a running joke that Arabs are smellier and less pleasant than camels. That's it, that's the whole joke.
Seriously, though, both the 1959 and the 1999 Mummy have the titular character turned into a powerful UnDead being and buried next to his love as punishment for loving her and trying to make her UnDead. Apparently the proper response to "You have committed a blasphemous act to be close to your beloved for all eternity!" is "Let us help!"
The 1932 version is "Hey, that's not cool. We're gonna kill you long and slow and bury you in an unmarked tomb far away from your love, and we're gonna bury the tools of your blasphemy with you."
This is a much more reasonable response, especially compared to 1999's "We're going to punish you by making you capable of taking over the world and just hope that never happens."
Well, more active than last I checked. But its very bright blue.
No, it's worldbuilding for an RPG.
Anyway.
I am purposely being vague about the world I am building. I have a whole lot already made. And then I realized I have a major flaw in the ecology, such that it is not sustainable. I need to fix it in some way by adding something new or changing something. However, most of the things I think of end up changing too much of what I already have.
My question is: Is it worth it to keep looking for a better solution that will have the least change/impact on what I already have, or should I hand-waive an explanation, knowing that hand-waiving is lame... but not wanting to ruin or change too much of the world.
Can easily solve the problem with a magical handwaive.
I suggest putting a giant monster at the center of the world that eats anything in the environment or ecology that is superfluous, and exudes anything that is missing, thus acting a universal balancing agent.
In a word Don't.
You have smart players that like to take advantage of putting together common things to solve unique problems. At this point, my advice is to create even more convoluted problems and provide them with even more common items.
Your players obviously like doing this kind of thing...
I think that's good advice if i do say so myself, however i wonder how it will be taken by the community
However, there's another question which should be asked: are the players doing this because they think they have to?
As our site's questions clearly show, often players feel pushed into corners where they're "forced" to behave certain ways in order to stay relevant in the game.
If the players think the GM or the system is only survivable/winnable through MacGyverism, they'll MacGyver whether they want to or not.
I haven't seen any of the answers address the possibility that the players are doing this in response to the challenges they face, and I think that's really important to mention.
@Tritium21 One nitpick: Your last "if they're having fun" bit could be read as disregarding the GM's need to be having a good time too. A gruding GM makes for toxic gaming every time.
Also: poke me in three days and I'll see about dropping a bounty on that answer.
The tabletop RPG medium is so broad and deep that any piece of advice except "keep the safety and happiness of everyone your top priority, and don't be a jerk" is going to be useless to someone.
I'm playing a Ranger in a Pathfinder campaign. I've been looking over the spell lists, and I'm a bit miffed as to just what spells a Ranger can use - is it limited to only using the Ranger spells list?
If the Ranger can use other spells, how does it "learn" them? Can the Ranger keep spells not i...
SE has two measures of an answer's value: votes, and acceptance. Votes indicate the gestalt community opinion on the answer's value; acceptance indicates the querent found that particular answer most valuable to his particular situation.
It just bothers me that the poster has seen the other answers and hasn't accepted them. and even though he knows he is wrong BBlake isn't fixing his answer.
Mmm. And that leads into a whole big messy problem where treating things on the Internet like "fake" things cultivates an attitude that people on the Internet aren't real people, and then things go downhill fast.
@Aaron FWIW: (a) People will notice, because your edits bump the post. (b) Also the author will notice. (c) The review queues weren't doing that anyway.