Started playing recently myself. At the start, recommendations have no idea what victory strategy you are pursing, and don’t get that much better at it. They do seem somewhat OK at recommending things that will solve particular problems that city has (slow growth, lack of amenities, etc), though maybe there are better ways available to you. Or, sometimes they notice that your city geography would support a particular wonder or give bonuses to a particular zone. So, if they recommend something that seems weird, maybe check to see if you are missing some mechanical concept. (VI has a lot of obscure interlocking mechanics that can be hard to see, particularly at first.)

This will disappoint Scott Hanson so much.

Geezer Butler is the most important member of Black Sabbath.

These critics should drop using letter grades, in favor of Victoria Jackson’s movie rating system:

• ★★★★: Pretty good
• ★★★: The best
• ★★: The worst
• ★: Pretty good

…and then award, like 15 stars to one team, and 3.5 to another.

Haven’t been paying attention. What stupid deal has Denver done this time?

Mileage varies, I guess. I’ve also been playing since the eighties (late Seventies, really). I’ve been a forever GM for most of that (not a forever DM, though). I have not been particularly active on game design forums, but still have seen every argument on this list someplace at least once a year, since at least the Forge era (so, about twenty years or so). Less often recently, maybe. Way more often earlier.

No team is near me, so I said to myself “I’ll give it a chance and root for the team with the best logo.” But then the teams were revealed and every single one of the logos is terrible.

Is this superficial and dumb? Absolutely. But I haven’t paid attention since.

Are kickoffs still a “live” ball, or a “dead” ball like punts?

Yao Ming (an NBA basketball player) has, nearly single-handedly, saved the lives of tens of millions of sharks by simply asking citizens of China to stop eating shark fin soup. Since he started doing this, the price of shark fins has tanked, and 90+ percent of people surveyed in China support a ban on selling shark fins.

All of that may be true, but it bears little resemblance to the case the US actually filed against Apple. If you haven’t read the charges, you really should. They are filled with reaches that have long been rejected in similar cases, and a desire for government to broadly micromanage. One type of charge, for example, could easily be brought against any company that makes a videogame for just a single platform.

Millions of New Yorkers turned MAGA without them already. Take a look at who “represents” Long Island in the House of Representatives, for example.

But the Browns guaranteed all the money, and Denver didn’t.

If you ignore WotC as being in its own league, a handful of companies are now the “top tier” of RPG production. I’d include Mophidius there, with Paizo and Evil Hat, maybe Chaosium. Their products have extremely high production values and large (by TTRPG standards) followings.

The are mostly known for 2d20 games (Star Trek Adventures, Dune), Dragonbane, Forbidden Lands, Mutant: Year Zero, and now publish some more classic titles (Twilight: 2000, Kult).

I’d put down the Browns trade for Watson the same year as slightly worse.

I sold a bunch of 70’s and 80’s tabletop roleplaying stuff when I went to college. A few years ago, I reacquired many of those titles at collector’s prices. Not my most brilliant financial move.

Eh. In these kinds of articles, the story is less “rich seize more wealth from others” than it is “assets already held by rich increase in ‘value’”. Almost everything in this article is “stock price go up” and, therefore, the somewhat imaginary “wealth” number of anyone holding that stock goes up. Basically, the headline could be “changes in stock price make the notional wealth of billionaires fluctuate”. Sort of a non-story to me, because everyone listed in this article could have done absolutely nothing all year, and these numbers would have changed regardless. More interesting (if only slightly) would be an article about changes to their actual assets (i.e. did they increase or decrease shares in their company, etc.). I don’t really get the “let’s keep score” for billionaires thing the media does in any case, but this article is on the more useless end of that useless pursuit.

I use Leap (https://ironicsoftware.com/leap/). One of its better features is that it works great on top of any “folder system”, or even multiple folder systems. Also uses the metadata/tagging system of the OS, so plays nice with other tools.

Apparently there are mics on the tips of the goal posts.

#thunk

As a Shadowrun player, I know that “arcology” is a much worse epithet than “hive city”. Well… unless it’s in Chicago.

I read this post as a question.

Third and long, Denver. Time for another ineffectual screen pass.

Armed only with the advice given here, I got 20/20.

The Mile High PA guys are seriously playing “Shake It Off” right now.

Denver can’t even tank a season properly.

Every year, I dream that the NFL will come to its senses and realize that Thursday night football sucks for everyone involved.

You might actually want to look for RPG systems that are a particular kind of bad.

Some systems with decent math behind them fail because they are too fiddly. They might have tons of modifiers to track, cumbersome rolling, lots of traits based on averages of other traits, and so on. Those types of systems can often be great for things like MUDs, because the computer can hide most of it from the player. And, maybe a roll takes 10 times as long, but that just means the software can do it in 10ms instead of 1ms, so who will care?

If Earthdawn was open licensed, I’d suggest it as being “the right kind of bad”. It’s weird exploding pool step system is interesting because the dice for each step are set up such that the average roll of the pool is approximately the step number.

An actual AI working for Forbes would have managed to get in a dig at Apple in the headline.

Something that crocodiles do has made them one of the longest lasting species on Earth, specifically by allowing populations to explode after massive disasters.

The way it works is: about 90% of baby crocodiles are eaten by… adult crocodiles. So, when a natural disaster (say) wipes out huge quantities of adults at once, baby crocks find themselves in world mostly without predators that eat them, this living long enough to become adults. These adults go back to eating new babies, preventing the population from running amok.

If you imagine the “evil humanoid species™”—kobolds or whatever—does this, you can imagine why the “good guys” are always surprised at how the “hordes” replenish so quickly after being “culled”. You can also imagine the “culling” of adults erodes and annihilates any culture that might have existed in an endless downward spiral.

But, oh, “that’s OK because they’re cannibals”.

I’ll take “new life form designed to eat plastic evolves to produce waste products worse for the ocean than plastic” for 200.

One Deck Dungeon is very compact and may work for you. It is, for sure, more on the “board game” side of things.

For decoration a basement, these would do:

• Action/Adventure: Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Comedy: Airplane!
• Drama: The Seven Samurai
• 3D Animation: The Incredibles
• 2D Animation: The Iron Giant
• Science Fiction: Blade Runner
• Mystery/Thriller: The Third Man
• Fantasy: The Princess Bride

While most of the states with zero are searching for both equally, I get the feeling that Wyoming is zero because no one searches for either.

HexKit

Hive. GM must track every drone in the hive separately, individual stats for each, movements must be tracked for each using (a series of) random tables. Each PC leaves a scent trail, tracked individually. Scent trail modifies random tables, “unlocking” several other tables.

The hive periodically floods. GM must track water level in each room, based on the time.

The Queen is moving on a clock, so the GM must track what she is doing “off screen” any time the PCs do anything.

There are distinct “breeds” of hive dwellers, with very different abilities and descriptions, but their names are really similar nonsense words, each with at least one apostrophe and glottle stop each.

Text alludes to a special item relevant to the queen, and the special location it is in, but neither is explained anywhere in the text or on the map.

Hive map is a winding set of rooms like looks like a maze, but is actually completely linear, so no choice the PCs make matters.

Some mech-related RPGs. Most contain rules for mech fights, and I gather you want to keep BT rules for Mech fights?

• Beam Saber – a “game about the pilots of powerful machines in a war that dominates every facet of life”. (CC BY 3.0, FitD)
• Firebrands – is a casual game about pilots in the universe of the lego mech fighting game Mobile Frame Zero. (PbtA)
• Lancer RPG – centered on shared narratives, customizable mechs, and the pilots who crew them in the future.
• Mecha – designed specifically to emulate both the combat and the drama of mecha anime. Core book contains three different settings, and advice on building your own. I wrote a Battletech SRS for this game: Succession
• Mecha Aces – a more minimalist, generic approach to mech gaming. The book includes four different settings. (Fudge)
• The Mecha Hack – a standalone game “of titanic warmachines and their intrepid pilots, made with The Black Hack.”
• Mecha vs Kaiju – Mechs vs giant monsters, both for Fate Core and Cypher.
• Too Good to Be True – A one-shot/short campaign game of “mercenary combat in a gritty future”, also known as 2G2BT. Still in beta.

They used to make OTF files, but stopped? Any idea what went into that choice?

AiTaS is a pretty good marriage of system and source material. I’d bet Cortex Prime could handle Doctor Who reasonably well, also.

Take a look at Ironsworn, a fantasy game built for solo play. It isn’t D&D, but will deliver what you are asking for.

With a name like Robert Conrad, there should be some reference to knocking a battery off your shoulder.