Kennon said:

You're arguing that there is a distinct difference between "play" and "place during setup," with regards to the out-of-house penalty.

If this is true, then there is no out-of-house penalty for "placing during setup." The words, "Cards affiliated with a different House cost 2 additional gold to place" are never mentioned in the official rules nor any of the FAQs. Any time that the rules refer to an out-of-house penalty, it only mentions "playing" the card. This includes the section on the setup phase.

@Laughing Tree- I know you said you've lost the taste at the moment for the literary discussion, but I did happen to reread something of yours regarding an English lit professor who put LotR on par with Stephen King and the like as shallow genre fiction, unworthy of a paper. As an English Lit guy myself, I find this kind of stance from your professor extremely juvenile. There are several "canon" writers who were complete hacks in their day and are now highly regarded. Charles Dickens being one of the most prolific examples. I've seen (though not taken) entire courses on his works, but he spewed out serialized works at a prodigious rate in order to be paid by the word essentially. (~Much worse than any accusations of Jordan having done the same thing. ) *shrug* Don't get me wrong, I love many of his works, but in many ways he was the Stephen King or Danielle Stell of his day.

@sWhiteboy- Check out this rules thread here. I'll not claim to personally be an expert on the matter, but as ktom has been the resident go to rules guru for many, many years and as such chosen to judge the GenCon Championships several times, I'll defer to his judgement and reasoning on the matter.

Kennon said:

I wasn't a big fan of that prof. Its ironic you bring up Dickens since she absolutely loved Charles Dickens and often hailed him as one of the greatest writers ever. She would also consistently hate on Hemingway whom she called overrated. I did not support her takes on either Dickens or Hemingway. I probably should not have brought her opinion up as I disagreed with that prof more than I agreed with her.

LaughingTree said:

I may have agreed with everything you have said on this thread so far but this... this deserves applause. I salute you sir.

LotR bored me. I've read epic fiction and LotR just isn't compelling to me. Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, and LotR is by far the one I liked the least.

World building and background research is nice, but if the writing is contrived, the dialogue unbelievable, and the motivations for the characters thin, it is just not good on an objective level. Don't get me wrong, there are a number of books and authors I devour like cotton candy, because some aspect of it is intriguing to me (I am a fan of some bad fiction), so I am not saying that someone shouldn't be a fan of LotR, I'm just saying if we are going to compare it to other well known works in its genre it comes up short on a number of objective scales. It may blow the others out of the water on certain subjective scales, but that is a different thing entirely.

Back on the topic of teachers saying that something is "not worthy of a paper," back in the late 80's I had an English teacher who made a crack about comics being "kids books," and so for my term paper that quarter did my entire paper on Symbolism in Comic Books (this was about the same time Watchmen and Dark Knight were first released, though another strong theme of my paper was Marvel and anti-mutant hysteria). Point of story, the teacher changed his attitude on comics books, gave me high marks on the paper, and asked to borrow several of the titles I had written about.

I may not care for Tolkien, I think his writing is dry and boring (I hate reading the flavor text on the cards for LotR LCG), but he created an amazing world and I love playing games in the setting. I'll watch the movies, but doubt I'll ever read the books again.

Darksbane said:

Since I got married, I got the best game buying impulse control system on the market...*sigh*

JerusalemJones said:

lol... did some one just use the phrase "on topic" in this thread? I kid! I kid!

edit: In all fairness, I guess the real phrase used was "back on the topic".... carry on!

Ratatoskr said:

Having Kids works even better.

Venryk said:

There's a truth if I ever saw one.

Guess my wife and kid are broken, cuz I still buy games and they play them with me now.

Venryk said:

7 more weeks and I'll get to find out about this first hand

Darksbane said:

Congrats!

Ratatoskr said:

Ditto!

Darksbane said:

Oh, grats!

Grats! I hope for your sake your kid sleeps! (mine seems to think he's a teenager already and sleep is for the weak)

fhornmikey said:

The point is not if the kid sleeps or not, the point is if you manage to stay asleep until the wife finally gets up.

Thanks guys, I'm looking forward to it. Little girl is due on or around July 4th.

If actual delivery is on the 4th, then that day will be all the more colorful & meaningful (assuming that you are a US resident).