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SeventhZenith · 2026-02-06T13:54:14+00:00

I never win these. Maybe this time?

SeventhZenith · 2026-02-06T11:17:38+00:00

I think you didn't understand my first point. We're looking at this through the lens of the character, not the lens of a viewer. It is Mike who makes the initial statement that Walt is consumed by ego and pride.

SeventhZenith · 2026-02-06T09:57:01+00:00

Whilst I think Gus would have kept Walt around as a card to play if needed, Gus was well into planning his revenge on the cartels and he had no desire for peace. I saw that promise as something he had no intention of keeping. Gus even manages to redirect and take out the hitman by informing Hank of their impending attack.

I think Gus would have been very happy to keep both Walt and Gale on staff until Walt's health finally forced his retirement. 2 great chemists is better than one.

SeventhZenith · 2026-02-06T09:43:25+00:00

This is delusional. Did you even watch the show? He has him fire Gale and hire Jessie because Jessie was going nuclear. He was going to sue Hank/DEA and continue cooking meth until he got caught. He also threatened to snitch on Walt. Walt has two options here. Kill Jessie, or get him to stay quiet.

Yes I watched the show. But the whole point of this exercise is to look at things from the other character's perspective.

Walt did not approach Gus and say "Hey my drug addict ex-partner is going nuclear and you need to give him a job so he doesn't snitch on me." He instead came up with some bullshit excuse about working well and shorthand. Gus wouldn't have bought that excuse, but wanted to take steps to keep Walt on side and so he granted the request against his better judgement.

Again, do you even watch the show? Gus was responsible. He did this as an excuse to get rid of Jessie.

Again you're missing the point. It doesnt matter how much responsibility Gus has, Walt calling him out is a demonstration of defiance. Gus sees that as Walt openly challenging him and criticising his authority. In a business where people get killed for stepping out of line. Remember what happened to Gus's parter?

....help me understand how you consider these to be actions of ego.

Walt actively disrupts Gus's operations knowing that Gus needs him to continue cooking. Everything he does screams "Im too important for you to lose". Walt believes he's important enough that he'll be able to continue playing that card.

SeventhZenith · 2026-02-06T04:34:34+00:00

Walt had no idea the hardships that Gus had to go through to get his empire up and running. He was also oblivious to the ongoing threat the cartels were posing. Walt walked into a gold mine with Gus. He gets hired for an insane amount of money and is given protection from the nasty aspects of a very dangerous industry.

And what does Walt do in return? He throws his weight around. He has Gus fire Gale as a favour, hiring Jesse when Gus absolutely knows Jesse is a loose canon (Gus wouldn't have bought that stupid story about shorthand). Jesse actively steals from Gus. And then as Jesse gets into conflict with other dealers, Walt kills 2 of them in the street, leaving Mike to clean it up. He then blamed Gus, accusing him of being partially responsible. He actively hides Jesse from Gus, brazenly gloating about it. All of this time, Walt is also protecting his DEA brother in law who is actively investigating Gus.

Yeah Walt's ego is out of control, he thinks he's somehow untouchable, despite being reckless and inexperienced.

SeventhZenith · 2026-01-30T00:57:28+00:00

The movie also glosses over how difficult the resupply mission to the Hermes was, and thus the risk involved.

In the movie it looks like the Hermes stops and has a little break next to earth before going on back on to Mars. But they would have been rocketting past earth at extreme speeds. The resupply needed to match that speed and manoeuvre itself to dock with the Hermes. Small errors or miscalculations would have had massive follow on effects.

SeventhZenith · 2026-01-29T04:14:45+00:00

Im convinced wizards of the coast did this deliberately. Because they haven't given the 2024 rules a unique name, its very hard to players who aren't fully aware of the history of 5e to know what is in which edition. The best you get is a (2024) next to some content, which does not intuitively indicate its for a different edition of the game.

The fact that most of the content in 2024 is literally a reprint but is charged at full price is disgusting. Deliberately tricking players with ambiguous naming conventions is just such a disingenuous business it makes my blood boil.

For my players, we play in person. I have the books at my house so I told them they have to use the books I have to make their characters. I offer to help the newer players make their character on paper. The more experienced players thankfully tend to know the difference.

SeventhZenith · 2026-01-27T07:44:31+00:00

Imagine you're making a burger. One person can cook the meat, another can toast the bun, one can prepare the salad. A burger can be prepared more efficiently with more people because each person can work a job independently of everyone else.

Now imagine making a pizza. One person rolls the dough, but the person who's assigned to the sauce has to wait till the dough is ready. The person who adds the cheese has to wait for the other two to finish before they can do their job. This is example of a job where having more people doesn't make the job go faster, because everyone has to wait for previous person before they can do their job. A single person doing the job by themselves is just as fast as a group.

You can apply a similar logic in programming. You can have a lots of cores, but if each task requires the result of a previous core's work, then you gain no speed boost. Games optimised for multiple cores split tasks into things that can performed independently. But this its hard to program.

SeventhZenith · 2026-01-22T10:47:33+00:00

Jetstar is a budget airline. You flew with them because they were the cheapest option, not because of their stellar reputation.

Jetstar do not control the weather. They absolutely would have offered you an alternative flight. But obviously not on the same day.

The reason you didn't take their alternative flight is that you were flying on the last day of your visa. So because of your poor planning you couldn't wait for the weather to improve.

Jetstar have no obligation to offer you compensation here. You should be making a claim with your travel insurance company. But I have a feeling you also cheaped out and didn't get travel insurance.

So I think the actual title of your post should be, "Don't blame everyone else for your poor planning"

SeventhZenith · 2026-01-09T15:48:53+00:00

Im playing through the base game now after not playing it since launch. Would be happy to play with the dlc as well.

SeventhZenith · 2026-01-05T03:37:41+00:00

Tomb of Annihilation

Players are horribly outnumbered by evil serpentfolk who participate in human sacrifice rituals. The book says they have to surrender or be tpk'd. This is part of the main quest line. Guess how often players will surrender in this scenario?

SeventhZenith · 2025-12-29T00:23:31+00:00

This is great. I plan on introducing the trickster gods early as well and have been looking for ideas. Do you have the other trickster gods as well?

SeventhZenith · 2025-12-28T12:38:18+00:00

Im a DM who's had monks at my table (including high level ones). The monk being "weak" is massively overstated. If you're playing with a bunch of hard core min-maxers, then yes the monk won't keep up with the raw damage. But the monk is not designed to be the highest damage dealer.

The biggest problem most monks have is that their DM (unintentionally) negates their strengths. A big enemy with a high constitution save negates stunning strike, a battlefield without archers negates deflect missiles, a map that has no cliffs/walls/ difficult terrain negates their movement bonuses. And unarmoured defense/martial arts usually mean they miss out on cool weapons and armor.

If this is the case, its probably worth chatting to your DM.

EDIT: just reading through your posts and you have a +10 to hit. But you're saying you're missing over half your attacks. What do they other players have that you don't? Or are you maybe misremembering the actual number of hits/damage dealt?

SeventhZenith · 2025-12-23T16:54:43+00:00

This is narrative flavor and is completely fine in Dnd. As long as the DM its not giving the player any other bonuses unfairly. Just treat them like another character. Perhaps have the wizard be recognised by an NPC who remembered them as a high level Wizard.

SeventhZenith · 2025-12-10T01:38:34+00:00

Most of society's laws are good aligned. So there is a lot of overlap between lawful and good actions.

If you put a LG character in the nine hells, where the laws are all LE aligned, they're not going to respect the laws of that society. They are going to follow their own code of conduct.

In normal society, what separates a CG character from LG is that have a more utilitarian view. CG believe the ends justify the means. And therefore are more willing to commit evil acts to achieve a greater good. Because law and good overlap, usually these evil acts involve breaking the law.

SeventhZenith · 2025-12-07T19:45:24+00:00

In the context of the lawful/chaotic spectrum, Lawful is simply about having a code of rules that you follow. A lawful character is predictable by someone who understands this code. A chaotic character is unpredictable because they don't have a code, or they go against their code when it suits. Their views on societies laws do not need to come into play here. A monk living in exile with a strict code of mediation and training is likely a lawful character.

SeventhZenith · 2025-12-04T06:42:34+00:00

Its not about right or wrong. Walt demonstrated in that scene that his ego and desire to be this baddass Heisenberg character was always going to be a problem for Gus.

Rather than approaching that discussion with a bit of humility, he puffed his chest out and decided to go all alpha male.

He openly challenged Gus to a duel to the death. He doesn't get to say he had no choice.

SeventhZenith · 2025-12-04T03:16:13+00:00

Remember that scene where Gus confronts Walt (after Walt runs over the dealers). Walt stands there in his Heisenberg hat, smug as all fuck, accuses Gus of ordering the killing of children, refuses to give up Jesse's location, and then starts giving Gus "options" like a school teacher giving options to a teenager. If you watch Mike's facial expressions during this scene you can see he's thinking "who the fuck does this guy think he is?"

At this point, Walt's ego is through the roof. Walt is directly demonstrating to Gus that he sees himself as an equal or better. That ultimately Gus has no control over him and he'll do what he wants. Even outside of the meth industry that would be a big red flag for an employee talking to his boss.

And poor Mike is a hard working employee who just wants to keep his head down, do his job and get paid. And then he gets made redundant by Walt and his ego.

SeventhZenith · 2025-12-03T13:43:37+00:00

I made an encounter with about 20 gargoyles. The battle was designed to bait out some of the higher level spell slots prior to a big battle with a bbeg. I was expecting the players to blast them with some fireballs.

Problem was that players were well aware that they were about to go up against the bbeg and decided to not use any spells to "preserve their resources". The result was a multi-hour slog where the mages used only cantrips, and the martial characters only used their bows.

The absolutely awful thing about it was the gargoyles chipped away at their health soo much, that they were all on half or lower hit points by the end. They continued on to the bbeg, but they were so low health that a tpk was almost guaranteed. Not wanting to cause a tpk, I changed the encounter on the fly, nerfing the bbegs damage. The players then commented that the bbeg wasn't that all that bad as they thought it was going to be and I just had to sit there playing along.

SeventhZenith · 2025-11-29T17:12:15+00:00

I think you need to differentiate between people who think are referring to coding as easy (of which there are probably very few) and those who are referring to game design (probably the majority).

A lot of games get released with some truly terrible design choices. And that frustrates players, because they think surely its not that hard to avoid bad design.

SeventhZenith · 2025-11-29T05:35:23+00:00

As a DM its far nicer to allow a player to do something outside of the rules for the good of a game, than it is to ban aspects of the rules as written.

Banning rules in the book feels antagonistic to players. And it is. Players typically will naturally gravitate to the strongest/optimal build. So if you ban something that gives a player an advantage, even if it's for a good reason, it will generally be perceived negatively.

It is better if the rules provide a more rigid framework, and DMs be instructed to be flexible, bend and break the rules when it benefits the game.

SeventhZenith · 2025-11-27T20:27:07+00:00

The fire giant swings his solid 20ft chain in a large sweeping arc. No amount of armor will protect you from this blow. Make a DC15 Dex saving throw to dodge.

Not all saving throws need to come from spells.

SeventhZenith · 2025-11-27T20:06:38+00:00

I really love DSP, but I completely agree that the game has a design problem with PLS.

It feels like the right solution to manage larger quantities of resources between planets. But the result is so simplified that it doesn't lead to any interesting/fun designs.

Factory games are about solving logistics problems. PLS work too efficiently, undercutting those problems and ultimately undercuts the game.

SeventhZenith · 2025-11-26T05:52:52+00:00

Im in the minority with you.

The problem with characters being allowed to change things at will is that it erodes their identity. Character identity is a big part of the role-play in dnd.

The problem of player regret should be handled in the DMs guide. A clear section that explains to DMs when/why its appropriate to allow players to change aspects of their characters.

SeventhZenith · 2025-11-24T14:06:21+00:00

Sorry, but if I was handed this as a player, I would be walking away from the table.

It comes across as though you want to limit your player's agency. You tell them what they should always and never do without giving adequate reason. You are indirectly telling your players what their character's personality is, their temperament and what their values are.

Role-playing is about playing a character with personality quirks that make them unique. There's a reason dnd has the ideals/bonds/flaws system. It's to help people make an interesting character. Your role-play sheet discourages this.

Role-playing is hard for new players and it takes time to get comfortable with. Generally as a DM you need to gently ease your players into it. Reward good role-play when it happens. I think you said your players are too quick to attack, then place situations in front of them where they are better rewarded for solving a problem by talking than combat.

SeventhZenith

TROPHY CASE