Zompist Bboard Again

I mentioned the same point here, linking to this article:
https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/b ... en-else.md

English dungeon (underground prison) and French donjon (castle keep). Interestingly, Dungeons & Dragons became Donjons et Dragons in French, which is technically a mistranslation... but sounds better than any alternative, being an alliteration and a rhyme. So, French gamers also use the word don...

I had the impression that the enthusiasm was already dying down.

Has anyone heard about Creationism recently? It seemed to gain traction a few years ago, but we hardly hear about it nowadays.

My plan is to run a tutorial session, with premade characters, before committing to a full campaign. You may be interested in that. As I said, I have one player who doesn't speak French, so I would make an English-speaking group, if you don't mind a GM who's a non-native speaker.

The core mechanics are available online, for example here:
https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm
Though it's based on reference documents, and as such, it's a bit dry. I will buy the Player's Handbook as a PDF and make it available to my players.

I said I wanted to play tabletop RPGs again, but didn't have the time. Well, too bad. I'll make the time, if I need to. I'm starting a campaign of Dungeons & Dragons , 3.5 edition, set in the Forgotten Realms, with me as the Game Master. I already have a few players. One of them doesn't speak Fr...

Generally, atitudes towards women's clothes are basically a double bind, which I'm told is the best way to drive people crazy. There's no good option and there does not exist a set of clothes women can wear that people won't loudly object to. (It'll either be too long or too short, and that's just ...

- The earliest gospel is structured like an allegory. I thought this was briefly discussed in the video, but maybe not. All the gospels are written with some sort of agenda. Sorry, I haven't watched the video. Maybe later. Well, obviously the gospels were written with an agenda. I don't deny this. ...

The most compelling argument for me is the fact that the gospels are structured like allegories. The events are drawn from the lives of Romulus and Moses. The ends mirror the beginnings. Physics, and even common sense meaningfulness, take a back seat to the arrangement of symbols. Plus, these stori...

Do we have a date for the fir-fur merger? I've been trying to find one. According to John C. Wells, in Accents of English : The merging of these various Middle English vowels seems to have started in northern and eastern dialects of English in the fifteenth century; by the sixteenth it had spread t...

I'm a bit confused about the role of accent marks in languages that use the Latin Alphabet. I used to believe that they usually mark stress, but now I've got the impression that they sometimes mark the one syllable that is not stressed, like, for instance, in the surname of the notorious French fas...

Random musings about heroic fantasy. Why does Legolas use two swords in the film version of Lord of the Rings ? He never does so in the novels. I wonder if the film version was influenced, perhaps subconsciously, by the Ranger class from Dungeons & Dragons : it can fight with two swords, and it'...

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 11:56 am Just finished writing the raw version of my book, Rock the Future: Progressive Rock gestern - heute - morgen. Now it comes to proofreading and refining the text, then I'll try to find a publisher.

Oooh, this sounds interesting.

This isn't really more specific, but it's still weird.

In French, the word charleston, or charley for short, is used to mean "hi-hat cymbals". Apparently the hi-hat was first popularized by drummers playing Charleston dance music.

U.S. government project X is a real societal problem. The government feels pressure from voters to do something about problem X. They find a bazillion dollars and appoint a department to solve this problem. Five years later: the project somehow cost three bazillion dollars, but did absolutely not h...

I have an itch to start playing tabletop RPGs again. Unfortunately I really don't have the time.

I played the original Sonic games on the Mega Drive, back in the day: I replayed them recently, and I think they hold up pretty well. I've never been a fan of the 3D Sonic games, though.

I hear people here who sporadically have [ɪɘ] for /ɪ/ where I personally have [ɘ] - has anyone else noticed this in any other English varieties? I've heard some Americans who have a diphthong like [ɪə] for KIT in certain environments, especially before voiced plosives. I'm not sure where it's from,...

Ah, similarly, I remember my parents needing subtitles to watch a Denys Arcand (a Quebecois filmmaker) movie, which felt odd -- never had any problem understanding the dialogue. My copy of Starbuck (2011 film from Québec) includes subtitles only for a handful of lines, the ones that are really impo...

AFAIK their/they’re/there are true homophones in most varieties of English.