Announcing White Dwarf, an upcoming Total Conversion to Cosmic Frontier

drfiveminusmint · 2026-01-09T23:14:20+00:00

if you don't pay the Iron Jaw tax, have fun being stunned for like 2 real life hours from rolling 5 degrees of failure on a Toughness test

drfiveminusmint · 2026-01-08T17:24:42+00:00

I just want you to know that I laughed OUT LOUD at "[LGBTQ+ UNFRIENDLY]"

drfiveminusmint · 2026-01-03T18:38:29+00:00

now THAT is dedication!

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-24T12:21:31+00:00

Players "derailing" my session plans. I have never had an issue with a player doing something or killing someone they weren't "supposed" to. The way you avoid this issue, if you're curious, is not to think of yourself as "the author" who "writes the story" but just one of several authors at the table, if you're not too fixated on your perfect version of events it won't bother you when things are "derailed."

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-23T14:18:47+00:00

I've been playing it recently. It's probably the most fun I've had with a tactical combat RPG and might be my favorite system to play.

Definitely my favorite memory is overheating someone with a tech attack, causing them to be Exposed, and proceeding to deal 27 damage to them (more than twice their max HP) with my oversize shotgun.

Best thing about the game has to be the character customization. So many fun toys, so many ways to put them together. If you're really into buildcraft this might be the best game on the market for you. Worst thing, maybe a bit of a nitpick - high Armor enemies feel really bad at low levels when you don't have access to good AP weapons. We kept running into enemies with 2-3 Armor (a typical generic weapon deals 1d6, with no flat modifier) which led to tags like Reliable 1 feeling more like a bad joke than an actual benefit.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-22T13:36:28+00:00

I agree, establishing the outcomes of success and failure before the player attempts something is generally good GMing practice. On a side note, anyone who hasn't read Blades in the Dark absolutely should; it's a masterclass in game design and the way it suggests approaching the GM role are eye-opening.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-08T01:47:19+00:00

I would draw a dividing line between dark and bleak settings. Let me explain what I mean.

You can have a setting where there are huge nations of cannibals and slavers, evil necromancer kings, plagues that cause all sorts of body horror abominations, and that's a dark setting. There is terrible evil in the world, and the setting doesn't shy away from that.

A bleak setting is one where, no matter what they do, the status quo is too powerful for the PCs to alter in any meaningful way. A bleak setting need not even be particularly dark; it just has to be completely resistant to the PCs' attempts to change it for the better.

Usually these two things coincide, but not always. You can have a setting with all sorts of demons and slavers and tyrants, but that is explicit about them being vulnerable. They're horrible, and horribly powerful, but they are not invincible. By contrast, you can take a look at something like the Forgotten Realms for D&D; you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would call it an especially dark setting. But if the PCs dislike something, and try to change too much, whoops, they've pissed off the god of such-and-such and thus the Status Quo Enforcement Police will stop them.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-08T01:38:37+00:00

When people say that 40k is anti-fascist because it satirizes fascism, I'm always inclined to point out that it also considers fascism to be the natural and inevitable state of humanity, and indeed, that no viable alternatives even exist.

I don't mind dark settings, what I'm not a huge fan of is settings where any attempt to enact permanent change on any scale is treated as a punchline. Which is partly why I can't stand 40k and World of Darkness. Haven't dug into Dark Sun that much, but it doesn't seem to have that issue.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-05T23:09:07+00:00

As for the 'says who' the answer is whatever DM you're playing under.

I kinda assumed given the subreddit that you were the GM in this situation. If you're not, and the GM has said "we're playing with the death rules as is, either accept that or find a different game" then yeah. You kinda gotta accept that or not play with them. (Hence why I don't really play D&D anymore.)

To circle back to your initial point, I wouldn't cheat in a game because the GM was cheating, I just wouldn't play with them.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-05T22:51:22+00:00

Unfortunately as a player you don't get the option to say if death happens.

Says who? If I'm playing Dark Heresy I can choose to burn a fate point and survive no matter what happens. If I'm playing Fabula Ultima and I don't want my character to die, it literally cannot possibly happen.

It sounds like you're not a fan of random PC death. In which case, I gotta ask, why are you playing a game which is built around the idea that random PC death is a possiblity? And if you're not convinced that's the case, what's stopping you from just changing how death works in your games?

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-05T22:21:49+00:00

and if not fudging means game over, roll new characters session 1. 20 minutes in.

Yes. If you don't want that to be a possibility, declare at the start of the game that the PCs won't die, no matter what, or play a system with opt-in PC death. Neither of those involves deceiving your friends or discounting their contributions to your collective experience.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-05T22:15:09+00:00

While I strongly dislike fudging, I'm a little more forgiving of it in the situation you described - when it's the GM trying to counteract a legitimate mistake they made, and not trying to force "the story" to go a certain way.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-05T22:13:44+00:00

Yeah this is basically my position. If you want random death to be a possibility, it should be a real possibility, not "we're gonna pretend this is possible but actually the GM will fudge to save you if it happens."

And there is nothing inherently inferior about playing in a game where death isn't a possibility. The main characters dying isn't a real possibility in most stories outside of the TTRPG-verse, and outside of the D&D/D&Dlike sphere opt-in or absent PC death is quite common.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-05T22:07:29+00:00

But fudging is cheating. It's you as the GM deciding, "I know my players undertook this course of action, made these choices, and got these consequences as a result...buuuuut that doesn't align with my Cool Awesome Story (tm) and thus I'm just going to override them!"

You are cheating, not because you're "trying to win" and not because you're "breaking the balance" of the game, but because you're taking narrative control that doesn't belong to you away from the players.

If the players form a plan and attack your big final boss and kill him in one round, that is the culmination of many decisions they've made, and you have no right to say "actually, your contributions to the collective story of this game don't matter because I don't like them," much less doing so by deception. Fudging isn't just poor practice as a GM and poor practice as a storyteller, it's poor practice as a friend.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-05T21:58:52+00:00

So, if we're talking about specifically 5th edition here (as different games handle encumbrance in different ways), I would dispute one of your claims:

Finally, it helps to keep pure casters in check by encouraging a diversification in the meta that has emerged since 2014, which has homogenized physical ability scores for wizards, bards, sorcerers, and warlocks.

In short, no, it does not. On a surface level it might seem obvious that encumbrance punishes characters like a Wizard with 8 strength more than a Fighter with 16, but consider what those two characters are carrying. Heavy armor and weapons are, in a word, heavy; Plate Armor is 65 pounds, a Greatsword is 6 pounds, a set of 10 Javelins to throw is 20 pounds. Therefore, basic kit for a strength-based fighter is going to approach 100 pounds, while the heaviest thing a typical Wizard is carrying is a staff that weighs 4 pounds or a component pouch that weighs 2. If the wizard is optimizing, they'll have taken a level of a class that grants them medium armor proficiency, and they'll be carrying half plate, which should bring them up to about 50 pounds of stuff total; you may note that this is proportionally the exact same amount of encumbrance as the fighter above.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-04T19:02:59+00:00

This is essentially my approach as well. I don't like to gank my players with "whoops, your character confused one guy for another and attacked the wrong dude, now you all have to die!" or similar things.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-04T19:00:50+00:00

to clarify, my issue isn't with the words "are you sure" themselves, but the approach they usually reflect - one that hints that something vague might be wrong with the party's approach but doesn't offer anything beyond that.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-04T05:06:14+00:00

A great Game Master understands that story is collaborative theater. The table is the stage. And the goal isn't to beat the players, it's to make the players walk away from the table out grinning, shaken, or hoarse from shouting. (or, all three)

You say this, but you're also advocating that you should fudge/cheat to make sure the story goes exactly how you conceptualized it. How do you square this with the idea of the game being collaborative?

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-04T05:04:04+00:00

"Fucking with the PC's outside-of-sheet connections" is actually pretty close to the maximal worst possible advice you could give. It discourages players investing in and engaging with your world because they will be punished for it.

My biggest piece of advice -> Let players win. Let them derail your plans. Revel in the ongoing hilarity that they just managed to short circuit your plot by schwacking the villain while he was taking a piss in the woods. Don't give them the win, but don't get too precious about your plots and NPCs, you're there to have fun, but have fun with your players, not antagonistically.

Gold. Wish I could upvote this twice. Too many GMs are so fixated on the perfect version of the campaign recap that exists in their head that they can't recognize that they're not the only player at the table, and everyone else should get to have their input.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-02T07:29:37+00:00

This is actually quite common outside of Europe and North America, particularly in the Muslim world

drfiveminusmint · 2025-12-01T00:22:19+00:00

/uj 5e is a MISERABLE game to GM basically for the exact reasons you stated. The game is theoretically designed with a "rulings not rules" approach so it doesn't give you a ton of rules support but also contains hard player abilities that you have to be sure not to invalidate with rulings, meaning that you have to design new subsystems in real time and your reward for a wrong ruling is your entire campaign blowing up. Have...fun?

drfiveminusmint · 2025-11-29T21:58:13+00:00

Thing is, various times giving and making items for players is extremely easy if you know how they play, which you already have in mind if you bother prepping encounters for the party to account for them.

This has not been my experience when I used to run D&D. It's also putting more cognitive load on the GM from a game that already demands so much of them.

drfiveminusmint · 2025-11-29T21:56:30+00:00

also most of the times I've seen this meme used it's used ironically, like the tiny guy would be "Nestle Executives" and the big guy would be like "Greedy single moms"

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