The Gaming Den

Gelare- 4e was broken? What can you actually do thats honestly noticeable? To be fair, I didn't actually bother to check my sources on this one, but I heard something about stun-locking enemies, which I assume means they don't get to move ever again while you beat them to a pulp. If it means someth...

So, some years ago I picked up D&D 3rd Edition, and, excited as I was to finally get a chance to delve into the rule system and the game, I made a single-classed Bard 5 who could Cure Light Wounds and fire a Longbow once per round. Then 3.5 happened, and I got a little better at making character...

Man, I remember when I looked through the 4E PHB and discovered that Meteor Swarm, the most powerful attack I could find in that book and one of the most famous evocations from the last edition, doing 32d6 points of damage in 3.5, now did 8d6+int mod points of damage. 8d6. Not, like, 18, or 80. Eigh...

ckafrica wrote:Well do we need to work up other specialist classes like the beguiler and necromancer for the rest? I know frank did the summoner already.

And the Fire Mage.

About the infinity hotel, Let's say you have two infinite lists of entries, one of which has all the entries 0, and one of which has all the entries 1. The maximum value of any entry is 1. You now need to add 1 someplace. You can't stick it in the list with the infinite 1's, because it's already ful...

I play specialist wizards pretty often, I've never really had any complaints. You just specialize in an awesome school and dump the crappy ones, poof, free spells.

So are corporations. The advantage of democratic governments is that they are in theory beholden to the electorate. In contrast a corporation is beholden to turning a profit. True. That's a fact that holds less and less sway with me as I note the idiocy of the average member of the electorate, and ...

Infinity cannot grow by addition. Infinity + Infinity = Infinity. My favorite infinity argument (which I think I got from Asimov) is the infamous infinity hotel. Assume the hotel has an infinite number of rooms all given room numbers. Assume the hotel is completely booked. Now assume an infinite bu...

You just made the argument that having the corporations decide what they should be doing is more efficient than having any oversight. To be fair, I made the argument that having the corporations decide what they should be doing might be more efficient than certain kinds of oversight. I feel like so...

governments are incompetent (and corrupt), and there is no reason more regulation is necessarily better than less, even though in practice it might well be Everything about this sentence indicates a poorly thought out self contradictory position and falling hook line and sinker for the blatant fals...

What he wants is to convince you that monopoly's do bad stuff, don't self correct, and it's the policies of the chicago school that cause and support these bad things. By suggesting that it's the fault of our regulators and our laws you are also suggesting that it's the fault of the chicago school ...

So then the defence of Walmart as an example bad monopoly as an example of the bad effects of deregulation happens to be... That it isn't Walmart's fault because it's the fault of the deregulation? Isn't that the whole damn point in the first place? Are you forgetting that or are you making some we...

but since when did it become Walmart's responsibility to keep that from happening? It's everyone's responsibility to prevent the consequences of Walmart's practices from happening, Walmart just happens to be in the best position to do so. The federal government should be able to sue them for active...

Based on the problem statement, and contrary to IGTN's remark, this actually (provably) does not exist in the library. See, there's a countably infinite number of strings, but each individual string is of finite length (just like the set of all natural numbers is infinite, but any particular natura...

The example of Wal-Mart is not a good one, but there are plenty of examples of the exercise of monopoly power in reality rather than just textbooks. Frank alluded to the exclusive contracts problem, which can also be a manifestation of monopoly power. The 3M case from a few years back (anyone know ...

Oh, so that's what's been going on there. I saw the headlines, but wasn't sure what they actually meant.

Current events, by FrankTrollman. Always good for a roflmao.

Pretending to be something radically different from yourself can be fun? Heh. Seriously though, if my party goes out and does some incredibly heroic act, I expect the DM to show us that we've achieved something meaningful - and usually, that is indeed how it goes. If you accomplish some grand quest...

I wasn't convinced that this book would actually exist, so I was curious to hear what you all thought. It exists, as do an immense number of copies of it with varying degrees of inaccuracy (everything from misplaced punctuation to complete falsehood) Perhaps I read "log of all the other books&...

The first is called "predatory pricing", and has occurred many times in the history books, but rarely, if ever, in reality. I just couldn't let this go. Maybe there's no court-admittable evidence for this but can we really believe that Walmart doesn't engage in predatory pricing to drive ...

As an aside, I always liked the idea that the library is only one part of an extra-planar museum. What else could one find in this museum? A menagerie of creatures born from every conceivable DNA sequence? Something else? EDIT: Yeah, the Library of Babel, by that dude! That's where I've heard this ...

In essence, your argument against predatory pricing being a problem is that new entrants just have to enter every market that the monopoly owns (at the same time) to avert it. They need to begin at the minimum efficient scale is also a pretty impressive barrier to entry so they'll need a lot of sta...

Not good for DnD (due to planar travel, etc), but excellent for Call of Cthulhu. I was thinking of fleshing out and populating it a bit more, maybe introduce people who knew part of how to get useful information but not the whole thing. Planar travel would, of course, be blocked until the PCs figur...

@Frank: Can't really argue with that. Economic theory doesn't usually take into account stuff like getting shot in the face. I feel like I should probably stress that at no point did I say there should be no government, because all that stuff Frank said is totally true, and I'm pretty sure the Chica...

The Monopoly need not push themselves into negative profit margins because the Monopoly tends to have advantageous economies of scale. If the monopoly has advantageous economies of scale, it should not surprise anybody that they are able to outcompete their less efficient competitors. That's not ev...

You wake up on the marble floor of a vast lobby, lit by hundreds of chandeliers overhead. As you stand up and get your bearings, you see that this place is empty except for rows and rows of shelves, extending as far as the eye can see. Books of every shape, size, and color sit stacked tightly on the...