Recent content by Thomas Shey

And yet things are called action-horror all the time. There's usually one of two things going on when that's the case: 1. The main protagonist is an exception to the general rule that the antagonists exceed the capability of the protagonists, sometimes because the power level of the...

In fact there's a fairly well known example of this (mixed with horror): Penny Dreadful. Though its mostly set in Victorian England, and important character is an American gunslinger. (Come to think of it, that was true in the novel Dracula, too).

There's also, in the past at least, been a tendency to focus very heavily on what would be read as single-genre things, enough so that even when you did get multi-genre works, there was a tendency for people to only see them as one of them. Lovecraft is a notorious example here, since he's...

Yes, but this thread isn't dedicated just to D&D. If you prefer, you can adjust my statement to "Everything is not about D&D, you know." Neither the original post nor where this thread is should make someone think that, even if there's some D&D terminology in use.

Ah, okay. I just have to note you need to be specific that you're talking about "hit points" in the D&D sense; there are plenty of games that use what they call "hit points" but have them translate into actual injuries.

It would probably turn on how common/easy it is to do enchantment, but really, until you do the magical equivelent of mass manufacture, its going to be hard to have common magic items and not have a fair number of people who know (at least in general, like any craft there will be matters of...

I'm still not clear on what you're getting at here. Is it that hit point damage in D&Doids never translates into serious injury? Or...?

I'd suggest prisons became a thing when the combination of corporeal punishment and exile became considered either undesirable or impractical, because the truth is, you weren't going to kill people for every ruddy thing.

Because you still need to do other things with that hand, like it or not.

Then you shouldn't have said "just about every fantasy game". There are plenty of non-class-based fantasy games, some of them (RuneQuest for example) not exactly unknown.

There are certainly characters who have skills and sometimes powers (Obfuscate for example) that lean into that.

Yup. That's the point. Outside of Superworld powers and a few things like mutations in some games, BRP hasn't tended to have a framework for that sort of thing, because its sun-source (RuneQuest) predated that conceptually and there's a certain--hostility?--in the fandom to that sort of thing...

I'd say it tends to be the case in D&D settings that there's more tolerance for situational violence than their is in our world--and less assumed governmental monopoly on violence. Which, as you say, was true of a lot of our own world throughout a lot of history once you got away from very...

A good part of my wife's job is logistics. She then comes home and plays computer games, many of which are focused on--logistics.

I dunno, man. Some people find ways to turn their hobbies into jobs, and some of them even avoid losing the joy while doing that (largely because they like so much of the hobby having to do it consistently enough is not painful). I'm not going to say most people can pull this off, but its not...