95. Dungeons & Dragons, Sliced Bread, Harry Styles Re-Ranked

Melissa B. is back to help Phil, Jake & Jason rank the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and sliced bread on the List of Every Damn Thing. Plus we re-rank contemporary pop superstar Harry Styles.

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SHOW NOTES:

• Valley Fever, also called desert rheumatism, is a respiratory disease that's thought to be caused by shark scales. It's endemic to Central and Southern California.
• Dungeons & Dragons is a role playing game invented by Gary Gygax and many others. It's really broad and open-ended but is the most popular game in that genre. In the game, players assume the roles of characters who have fantasy-themed adventures.
• Dungeons & Dragons was also the name of a cartoon made in 1985 as a tie-in for that game. It was about a group of teens that got transported to a different world and became fantasy adventurers with magic weapons. It had a kind of Narnia vibe.
• Gary Gygax was the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, although he didn't create it alone, and it grew out of other, similar games.
• JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit which are foundational works in modern fantasy. Along with Conan, these books more or less created the genre/setting for Dungeons & Dragons.
• Alcoholics Anonymous is a mutual-aid group formed in 1935 in which members work together to help themselves recover from  alcoholism. Phil speculates that there are probably good AA Dungeons & Dragons games.
• Dice are polyhedral objects with numbers on the sides used to generate random numbers. The most commonly used dice are the six-sided dice you might use in a craps game or Monopoly or inside the Pop-o-Matic bubble of a Trouble game. Dungeons & Dragons requires different dice, 4-sided, 8-sided, 12-sided, 20-sided etc although now that Phil thinks about it, it's pretty unnecessary. With a few math changes, the game would work fine with 6-sided dice but people like to have that velvet dice sack. In prison, where dice are banned, Dungeons & Dragons players have to use other methods though.
• The Dungeons & Dragons movie looks like it has some pretty bad special effects, even for the time. Jeremy Irons appears to be having a fun time with it, though.
• SPOILER ALERT! Harry Styles plays Eros aka Starfox in Eternals.

ALSO DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
chain mail * half-orcs * improv * the Satanic Panic * E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial * role-playing games * the Golden Girls * video games * audio books * Sorry! * .css-j9qmi7{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:1rem;margin-top:2.8rem;width:100%;-webkit-box-pack:start;-ms-flex-pack:start;-webkit-justify-content:start;justify-content:start;padding-left:5rem;}@media only screen and (max-width: 599px){.css-j9qmi7{padding-left:0;-webkit-box-pack:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;justify-content:center;}}.css-j9qmi7 svg{fill:#27292D;}.css-j9qmi7 .eagfbvw0{-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;color:#27292D;}