skadefryd

There's a history in some countries of eunuchs being able to hold very high ranking offices. I believe in some parts of Chinese history, they were actually preferred for civil service jobs.

Yeah, this is a pretty balanced take on things. 4e was great at making characters feel powerful and enabling everyone to contribute well in combat, but it was bogged down by decision paralysis (sometimes leading to very long combats––though I guess 3e had the opposite, where the party wizard would have to spend forever deciding which spells to memorize) and an illusory breadth of options that frequently boiled down to only a handful of good ones.

With 3E, we tried hard to make the game feel more like D&D than 2E did, but 4E made the game feel less like D&D, actually less than 2E.

Could you elaborate on this? I know 2e had a big "out of the dungeon" component (fighters get castles, druids have to hunt down their superiors and defeat them to level up) and 3e was very much about "back to the dungeon". Is that what you're referring to?

It's not much of an improvement over the last election, especially considering the prominence of the Edward Snowden scandal! I expected the Piratenpartei to be a shoo-in for the Bundestag, especially because Germany has just about one of the worst copyright regimes of any Western country. It seems like the German pirates also focused too much on hip-looking ads rather than on actually trying to snare voters. What do pirate parties need to do in order to start winning some elections that matter?

You might also like Sil, a minimalist Angband variant. The game is short (about 5-10 hours to complete). You must descend into Angband, as in other variants, but your goal is not to kill Morgoth, as that's more or less impossible: instead it's to steal the Silmarils from his crown, by force or by subterfuge. It comes with a real feeling of terror and fighting against overwhelming odds, very reminiscent of my first time playing Diablo.