T w e n t y S i d e d
Either you give them too much loot, and end up with a bunch of little millionaires running around buying anything that strikes their fancy. Or you give them too little and your poor party is scrounging around the earth for spare copper pieces to restock their food supplies. I’m sure out there somewhere there’s a magical equation to fair loot distribution, but unfortunately nobody at all in the entire world at large has figured it out yet. And perhaps never will.
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
I don’t know if it is just me, but I can’t see the comic.
It’s not just you. But if you want, the strip is located here: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/DM%20of%20the%20Rings%20Page-78.png
I was wondering whether that was part of the joke. :p
Sorry, filename error. All fixed now! Thanks for the heads up
Hello.
I’ve started to post russian translation for ‘DMotR Remaster’ on comics-centered site: https://acomics.ru/~dm-of-the-rings-remaster/1
I’ve tried to contact you first via website email, but something probably went wrong (got no answer in two weeks), so I’ve just went ahead and released first few pages. The rest will go on twice a week until I make them to ongoing.
And this translation will be tribute not only to Shamus Young, but also to Dusker, who translated ‘DMotR’ and ‘Chainmail Bikini’ to russian back then in 2010–11; Dusker passed away in 2019 due to health issues.
What I always did with my party was give them a lesson in economics. When you come from the dragon’s lair with cart loads of gold, platinum, etc. and inject into a local economy, even a large local economy, the gold quickly loses any sort of meaning as the area experiences explosive inflation, followed by a total economic collapse. To chart a middle course, I allowed them to spend their money at 1 GP for 1 XP rate before arriving in town. (We played 1st Edition. Past about 9th level, it takes over 200,000 XP to gain even a single level in your class.) Most of their gold would be thus spent, and when they arrived in town, they’d have a sensible amount of loot.
By the same token, powerful magical items were not generally available, because nobody had the kind of money to buy magical items, so nobody had a stock to sell. Usually there were some common potions available, a traveling cleric, wizard, or bard might have some spell scrolls to sell, and you might find some +1 weapons (though usually non-magical +1 weapons; just really well made high-quality folded steel.) And you couldn’t sell the magic you found, because nobody had the money to purchase it.
It worked relatively well for us. And I usually fudged the magical loot table rolls to make sure that people in the party could make use of them.