Tenzhi

I found it pretty easy to avoid miniatures with 3rd Ed. Of course, one of the first things I did to the system was all but remove AoOs.

I concur. The LFG feature is under-used. Heck, I'd like to have TF functionality retroactively added to it. Being able to do instanced missions while queued up would be nice, too.

And I also am unable to comment on the Halloween event given that Test hasn't been accessible since at least Saturday afternoon.

If there is no pride in doing a task unless you and others are required to do it, then it follows that the pride does not lie in doing the task. Thus, where does the pride come from if not from the ability to have something others don't because they didn't "earn" it?

I hate to burst your bubble, but it's a relatively simple matter for a resourceful person to acquire such letters without participating in such activities. Purchase, craft, or steal...

I like how you start out with "this is completely divorced from anyone else" and then end with being proud of your fellows and admired their wearing of the letter because they earned it as well.

What about those who didn't earn one? The typical social pressures, eh? What would your fellows have done if they found someone with a letter who hadn't earned it, I wonder? In my school the Athletic letters treated the Band letters like second class citizens and most everyone else worse than that. I can only imagine what an all boys school would have been like.

If it was merely about there being value in earning the achievement, it wouldn't matter if other people "earned" it or not. The value in earning it yourself would be the same. Unless that value hinges on other people not having it who haven't "earned" it. In which case my estimation of your stance isn't a caricature at all.

The dictionary generally lacks its own context, but it gives definitions of words. One such definition it gives for elitist/elitism matches yours, and the proper context for such would seem to be political. The rest that I'm seeing basically boil down to having a superiority complex.

You've basically been talking about being unable to feel good about one's self without being able to feel like one is better than someone else. To point out that such an ideology is elitist hardly demonizes it.

Actually, it is. Your definition is also a definition of elitist. I suspect yours is most often used in a political context.

The Rules Cyclopedia is one of my favourite D&D books. Mainly because I find it to be well laid out and conveniently put together into one book. I'd like to see them go back to using one core rule book, and to be less wasteful in formatting.

I wouldn't say they look horrible, but I would say they look like someone hit the random button in the character creator and then added a few nifty new pieces to the result.

Or an aura of floating, blinking eyeballs.

I've never seen a July day that didn't warrant wearing shorts. Note that even 50 and 60 degree weather (Fahrenheit) is potentially short-and-t-shirt weather to me. And I'll take the trash out in shorts in the 30s and 40s (even below that if there's no wind).

I, for one, have always supported this suggestion when it arises.

Elitists, by their very nature, must stand on the backs of others. It's quite good to seek to better one's self, it's quite the opposite to require other people to be lessor in order to validate one's self. The latter is the elitist.

If someone wants to pay real money for badges, I say go ahead and milk'em for cash.

It is conditionally being required to do the task. There are often multiple paths to a given reward.

Just getting the elitism out into the open.