Donward

Obviously it's not my baby but I always prefer a system that is fairly simple and intuitive to use for the notional battles fought. I've been in too many games where some autist is stubbornly folding his arms while we spend an hour going through the special results tables and erratta because he won/lost a meaningless (or important) skirmish. This is on top of playing with guys who are inveterate min-maxers and will literally try to compute every single result that could arise for their round. I'm more of the speed chess guy who prefers a quick and fun game and for you to hurry up with your god damn turn. And don't spend all the time yakking and not paying attention to the game. Yes I just dumped an entire amphibious army on your coast. Yes, it is threatening your capital and you have no units around to do anything about it. If you were paying attention you'd have noticed. NOW GO! As for the RPG. Combat is great and coming up with a cunning strategy to beat an opponent is neat. By I always kinda dug the role-playing aspects and seeing how the story progressed more than the orc stomping.

The late Don LaFontaine could make any movie sound awesome in the trailers. Also, we can thank Futurama for making "The Forbidden Zone" relevant again.

Also important is the tactical setting of the weapons. Pikes (spears) being relevant well into the gunpowder era. You get the weapon that you need to win battles.

Just use the analogy of modern weapons. You can buy 10 Mosin Nagants for one AR-15. And I would say those 10 guys would be better than the one using the AR. But obviously that's not how battles work. And we see guys pay for weapons that are orders of magnitude more than the percentage of improvement that weapon gives you. As for the swords, you have religious and social significance to factor in as well. Plus not every opponent faced by those fully armored knights will be similarly armored.

Well. It looks like ISIS has or is close to taking control of Palmyra. I guess it's too much to hope for Indiana Jones to come save the day. http://m.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32820857

Per the Regia site, here are some fines that most of the posters here should keep in mind. Raping female slave: 65 shilling fine. Holding a woman's breast: 5 shilling fine. Seducing a free woman: 60 shilling fine. Throw a woman down but not lie with her: 60 shilling fine. Not baptising a child within 30 days of birth: 30 shilling fine. Removing a nun from a nunnery without permission: 120 shilling fine. Let this be a warning to ye!

This website purports to have a list of Anglo Saxon prices for common items. http://www.regia.org/research/misc/costs.htm Three examples of horses range from 193 to 308 pennies. A sword ranges from 81 pennies to 308 pennies (latter "with scabbard") A spear is 33 pennies. A male slave is 197 pennies, a female slave 131 pennies. A "Dunghill dog" is worth 4 pennies. One Kenneth Hodges of the University of Berkeley has a list of medieval prices (granted 700-900 years after our time period) but it is still interesting. http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html A "cheap peasant's sword" is 6 pennys in 1340. So I guess we have the Iver Johnson of the medieval world. A draft horse could be 10-20 shillings. A warhorse anywhere form 50 shillings to 80 pounds.

I'm skimming through a couple different online sites for the Domesday book and both are being singularly unhelpful. If there is one thing that I'd wager is that horses were every bit as rare and valuable as swords. Edit: Cobs = Horse, often times a light draft horse.

Relevant. http://xkcd.com/1527/

No one would ever accuse me of being a social justice type, if a kid from the hood can get five years for holding up a convenience store and robbing a hundred bucks, the individuals who took part in this should be facing federal prison time.

I guess a question has to be asked about the economy of the game. Clearly the basic level of the economy is agrarian with other areas that have greater value be they mills, or control of bridges or fordes, tin mines, wool production, forest products and whatnot. As most of us know, the Saxons used the "hide" as a basic taxation value for the value of a set piece of land which could support a household and which could be applied to other valuable real estate. That particular mill is worth ten hides, etc. And with an economy comes ways to tax/extort moneys with obligations going up and down the food chain. The lure of capturing treasure and loot is always lucrative but I'd imagine it to be a more rare and audacious enterprise with corresponding levels of threats. Loot a church and you'll face the potential wrath of other clergy and the populace. Once you have the loot, how do you divvy it up among your bully boys? These are problems that still plague organized crime operations to this day where "big scores" can result in deaths and infighting among co-conspirators or attacks by other gangs. Hence the need to bury ill-gotten gains like the Staffordshire Hoard buried in 7th-8th Century Saxon days. And depending on how long the timeline of a game lasts, there should be a factor for weather and random events such as ample harvests, plagues or that greatest of scourges... A.D. 671. This year happened that great destruction among the fowls.

I've got zero problems with spiders outside. They're an important part of the circle of life. Inside is a whole nuther story. I spent a good portion of my childhood living in a ramshackle two-bedroom house built in the 1920s which was infested by every manner of six and eight legged creatures. I remember the orange shag carpet with multiple dark, sticky stains. At night, sleeping on the top of my bunk bed, I would look down and watch the stains, counting them and occasionally they would move, skittering across the floor. They were wolf spiders. Fuck wolf spiders. They get the shoe. Or the piece of paper towel, where they are squished, tossed into the fireplace and then burned just to make sure.

Relevant? Maybe I've been playing TANKS too long. But we've gotten to the point where video game characters get to make the beast with two backs? That's a long ways from playing a sexually frustrated Italian plumber grubbing his way through the sewer pipes.

We can see it in this country. I've seen several stories coming out of the Baltimore area about police officers reluctant to make arrests in certain communities. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-ci-violence-surging-20150518-story.html#navtype=outfit&page=1 Rawlings-Blake also downplayed concerns expressed by some Baltimore officers that members of the force are hesitant to make arrests after prosecutors brought charges in the Gray case, and that criminals might take advantage.

Yeah. I hate defacing my motor vehicles with stickers although I do admit to reading and chuckling over the clever bumper stickers. As with everything, there are multiple theories and nuanced ways to apply them. I've mentioned before and I guess I'll repeat it again, the failure of some of these is expecting the criminal element to behave in a rational manner. Obviously it is an extreme example but if you have a biker gang who is not afraid of getting into a gunfight in front of law enforcement officers who are watching, no amount of deterrent will stop them. Fortunately events like what happened in Waco are rate. And like a lot of crime is directed inwards and not onto the general populace.

I never understood the rationale behind advertising that you had expensive, easily portable items in your possession that you leave at home or in your car unattended and that are things which criminals like and use. You wouldn't put on your house "I've got a thousand dollars of jewelry inside". Nor would you put a bumpersticker on your car stating "I leave a couple hundred bucks in cash under the driver seat". But folks routinely put crap like that on their houses as if the "Trespassers Will Be Shot, Survivors Will Be Shot Again" sign is really a deterrent to the meth head who has just watched you hop in your car at 8 am and drive to work. Ditto with the guys that have NRA bumperstickers or who leave "bug out" bags in their SUV because they think they'll have to hoof it when society breaks down and they find one day that someone has smashed their rear window with a chunk of concrete, taken the bag, your goodies and your AR-15 rifle.

I've been wondering that myself. I think we are just so darn polite that there's no one to say alright you screw heads, this is how it will be. For me as a "consumer", post-fall of Rome Britain sounds great. Any game mechanic that works there can be transferred to other geographical settings. We'll be seeing an increase in public interest for the time period considering that BBC has a new series coming out based during Alfred the Great's time. Any combat or battles is usually low key involving a handful of individuals. We have external and internal threats. As you mentioned a wealth of different characters and/or races. But again, this is more Toxn and gang's baby. And I'll be gone I assume for most of the heavy lifting over the summer.

I guess it's the question of licking down the Who? What? Where? When? Why? (And always) How? I think we have the When?

Yeah. Nice try old man. What Tolkien REALLY wanted was nine hours of orcs and goblins running randomly into the swords of heroes, an Elf/Dwarf love affair, 92 seconds featuring Beorn, the Worms of Dune and Smaw-ooog getting killed by... Oh screw it, I'm still pissed.

I was going to use a flippant response like "Sure, when they start strapping suicide vests onto their chests". But then I remembered that I've eaten potluck served by my wife's relatives. And veggie meats and the accompanying vegetarian fare served by Seventh Day Adventists truly are a crime against humanity.

Wait. You mean the ultimate infantry squad does not consist of a rogue, a ranger, a wizard or sorceror, a bard or cleric, a monk or paladin and a couple of meat shields like a fighter and barbarian? *Rolls dice and and checks charisma bonus against the results table to see if the audience laughs.*

Ever since I started playing World of Tanks, August 28 of 2011, I've been hearing about this other game and how it was going to be so much better. It's four years now and I've even tried to play Wart Chunder and tried to be part of their neo-Nazi forum community. There is literally nothing that they've done which makes me want to spend time there. Literally it came down to me saying "Fuck it" after I damaged my tank one too many times running over a useless stump or rock on the way to stop a capture. That and bouncing shots in my Soviet anti-aircraft gun truck while I LOL killed ten enemy tanks with it.

Oh yeah! You can tell the new Mad Max: Furry Road movie is such a liberating and pro-feminist movie by the sexy, slow motion, BDSM, chastity belt scene with teeth for a vagina.

In keeping with the escalation of violence aspect of the discussion. Why is it that literally every movie, game and story involves the hero starting out by killing anonymous henchmen, working his way up the hierarchy of badguys, knocking off lieutenants, the main baddies right-hand man before finally the main villain (who often treats the hero to dinner where he explains his secret plan) meets his end. And along the way, literally every single badguy henchman in the horde will give his life for the cause. I mean, you'd think after the first 10, 20, 100 of your comrades got swatted, number 101-200 would think twice about the beauty of life and the state of their retirement plan and whether the career path that they chose was really correct and maybe they should have studies more at community college. Oh, sure, there is always the one henchman who tries to chicken out and he is usually killed trying to escape by the main badguy in order to show just how bad he is. But there isn't ever really a point where the henchmen as a group say "Fuck it" and develop some sort of collective resistance to being victim number 11, 21 or 101 in the movie's killing spree.

My review of Mad Max is on Movies I Haven't Seen is up just below/above.