The Gaming Den

But anyway, Emerald: Even if I let you use the EU as an argument, your numbers still don't work out. You can't get an exponential result out of a linear equation. You seem to be extremely confused here. “We have several hatcheries throughout the city. This, of course, is the most crucial phase, thou...

Emerald is doing Move #2 of people justifying shitty Star Wars plot points: bring out the EU. Disney sucks shit and I want to nail Baby Yoda to a cross, but I'm glad and genuinely appreciative how Disney nuked the shit out of your EU canon. I want them to take another creamy shit all over the Legend...

more than enough for the opening days the war when Kamino can churn out hundreds of thousands of clones every week or so. I just objected to that particular point because it's a perennial complaint that the Republic's and/or Empire's armies and navies are supposedly too small for the amount of terr...

The numbers don't work out. 2 million troops, even heavily mechanized, is not enough to pacify even a single major continent on planet Earth. The Republic has thousands of planets. More to the point, they can't work out, even if we increase the number to 1 trillion clone troops. The conspiracy needs...

The political message should be strong but it misses on a couple of key notes. It misses a couple of key notes because it doesn't do a good job (or any job) connecting the clone conspiracy to the operations of government. I mean, I understand what they were trying to get at. That the Republic is so...

Despite everything, I still think pound-for-pound Attack of the Clones is the worst thing to come out of the movie franchise. I don't think it's the most damaging movie to the franchise (that would be The Last Jedi) but it's definitely the worst. It's cringeworthy, convoluted, out-of-genre, makes th...

3) It's possible to do subtle propaganda. Other books have done it. Some of them are even good. But far too often bad propagandists just hit you over the head with a sledgehammer because they don't know how to present their opponents as three dimensional people. It's impossible for reactionaries to...

Just sticking to modern properties, the Mandalorian from what I see is well-received and Rogue One was also well-received. Clone Wars isn't as widespread but the fans seem to love it and from what I can tell normies are okay with it. The problem with Star Wars isn't that of intellectual or aesthetic...

I’m also curious as to why you think Attack of the Clones was more mature than the rest of the movies, unless you meant you meant you thought it was less. As Frank pointed out, the basic plot of Attack of the Clones is more 'adult' (as in, inappropriate for children) in several ways. [*] The twin c...

People have been shitting on Chrono Cross for the last 20 years, what the fuck are you smoking? Stop acting dense. Like with Fire Emblem 7 and D&D 5E, you can find plenty of people who think the game is godawful, but the opinion of that game among critics and gamers at large is that it's a cult...

I didn't watch TLJ, but perhaps it wasn't blatantly aimed at children and/or manchildren like every other movie in the franchise? People have porridge for brains if that's the case. TLJ wasn't any more mature, thought-provoking, or deep than the rest of the franchise (unless you think fake-subversi...

It's my expert opinion that: A) People who liked The Last Jedi don't really like Star Wars or the premise of Star Wars. That movie sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of canon, even properties off of the beaten path like Rogue One and KotOR. And not in a good way. It doesn't care about...

But while if you look at it in the broad scope you can sort of see the problems with the republic and the jedi, the movie isn't really FRAMING that, so either Lucas didn't mean it that much, or he sucked at directing which... I mean people can get worse at things they used to be good at? My opinion...

Know how Darth Vader probably could have been avoided? FUCKING GO BACK AND RESCUE HIS MOTHER FROM SLAVERY YOU DIPSHITS! I'm fine with this from a metafictional perspective. A big plot point of the prequel trilogy is that the Republic is corrupt and ineffectual, and the mystery cult enforcement arm ...

The thing is, the problem with Anakin having a creepy Freudian romance and Watto being a Jewish stereotype and the ridiculous YIPPEE space battle and Jar-Jar being Jar-Jar are aesthetic problems. The fixes to these things are obvious to the point of being boring, so they don't interest me. But even ...

I disagree with your premise - Phantom Menace sucks for reasons unrelated to how much they tired to cram in. No, it sucks exactly for that reason. Most of your list can be compressed. For example, the plot of 'infiltrate the Death Star and escape with the plans' are really one plot point. A lot of ...

I hold the position that The Phantom Menace is bad not because of Jar Jar and Anakin, but because the movie tried to do TOO MUCH SHIT for its running time. Let's review the plot points, shall we? [*] The Trade Federation has blockaded a peaceful planet. [*] The Republic is breaking down and can't de...

Paladin is mediocre by the standards of 5e. Fighter literally outstrips the paladin in DPR past very low levels. Also, this is extremely wrong. Paladin damage starts and stays strong. They get much better long-term and ongoing damage boosts and a number of superior accuracy boosts. Now, single-clas...

End-of-life 4th Edition (errata, math fixes, all of the options) is better than 5th Edition as it currently stands. There, I said it. Sure, 4th Edition was a broken mess with no rules except for combat mechanics, but the tactical minigame for 4th Edition is much more interesting than 5th Edition. 5t...

The authors of a Pokemon TTRPG book can sit down with themselves, choose answers for the open questions of the setting, and write them down so everyone who reads the book's intro chapter is on the same page. They can't pick the objectively true best way for the setting to work, because there isn't ...

I'm not the biggest Pokefan in the world. I played G1, G6, and some G7. The Pokemon anime, when I catch snippets of it, seems much better written than I remember it being, like Gargoyles or Transformers Animated. That said, I'm baffled that there are at least three completed or near-completed projec...

When I brought up the one-sided butchery argument, I was thinking more in terms of the PCs being able to retreat/pursue alternate victory conditions/surrender. Depending on the game and the genre, it may or may not be desirable to have half of the party unconscious before people decide to ask for a ...

Death Spirals affecting your offense but not your defense gives people a chance to surrender, flee, or pursue alternate victory conditions. Death spirals affecting defense is desirable if you want every combat to end in slaughter, with 80-95% of it being one-sided slaughter. That 5-20% of the time i...

It's an accounting nightmare, and lends no narrative benefits. It'd say it depends on the timescale. Tracking three effects with seperate durations in the triple-digits of minutes is bullshit, tracking three effects with durations in the single-digits of minutes is not. For stuff like heists and ho...

Any undesirable narrative side-effects for spells lasting a fixed amount of time? I think it's kind of lame and genre-breaking for every PC in every campaign to schedule their activity around fixed times of day. While there are heroes who schedule their operations around certain times, Batman doesn'...