daf bit: Bava Batra 55

Rabbah learned from Ukba b. Nehemiah the Exilarch: if land is bought from a rich landlord who himself bought the property in exchange for taxes owed, the sale is valid. This only applies, however, if the seller acquired the land in exchange for the land tax; if he bought it in exchange for the poll tax, the sale is not valid. The land tax is associated with the land (so land can be bought for it), but the poll tax is associated with a person so his land cannot be bought for it. (55b)

(It appears that we are discussing cases where the first buyer bought it from the government. An individual is permitted to sell his land without saying why he needs the money, after all.)

D&D: character optimization

I commend this response to a discussion about optimizing RPG characters, by akitrom, to my role-playing-gamer friends. This captures a big part of what made ralph_dnd such a fun campaign: it's primarily about the character development, not the power development.

When I want to play an optimization game, I'll go for one of the German-style games of that sort, like El Grande or Merchants of Amsterdam or Hermagore. Optimization games can be fun for several hours. But when I play D&D (or similar games), that's not the kind of game I'm looking for.

Ralph's game ended several years ago, and I still enjoy remembering and telling stories from it. I've played in, and enjoyed at the time, RPGs that were less about character and more about optimizing power; I don't even remember the names of most of the characters I played in those games. I enjoyed it then, but it didn't stick and it's not very interesting to me now. What attracts me now is the role part of "role-playing game".

Which is kind of funny because I'm a pretty inhibited player, and not very good at role-playing, until I've been with a group and a set of characters for a while. My character in Ralph's game was pretty under-developed for the first several months, while some others sprung to life in the first session or two. Keeping the game journal actually helped a lot.