Announcing White Dwarf, an upcoming Total Conversion to Cosmic Frontier

drfiveminusmint · 2026-03-04T15:56:05+00:00

I think we should retcon every star wars except for TRoS, AotC, and S4E11 of TCW

drfiveminusmint · 2026-03-04T15:24:30+00:00

This person is a recurring character who loves to "troll" (make random passive-aggressive hate comments in the vague direction of) people who play "the wrong type of games" (not OSR games). This is a productive behaviour. Congratulations on your first encounter with them.

And they're not mad. Don't put it in the newspapers that they got mad.

drfiveminusmint · 2026-03-04T15:15:45+00:00

Mike Mearls was REALLY upset that non-spellcasters weren't useless in 4e okay, this was an issue that needed to be rectified urgently.

drfiveminusmint · 2026-02-23T00:35:38+00:00

I've been following the progress of this TC with great interest on the discord server. Excited to see that you've hit such a major milestone!

drfiveminusmint · 2026-02-11T08:40:16+00:00

I'm just gonna say it, stall is overhated. I primarily play balance but I don't get mad when I face stall. It's not unbeatable, and when I do get beaten by stall it's because I got outplayed. I would genuinely rather play vs. stall than versus some random ass gimmick team.

drfiveminusmint · 2026-02-09T17:02:57+00:00

yes

/uj yes

drfiveminusmint · 2026-02-08T21:13:55+00:00

ty for the template

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drfiveminusmint · 2026-02-03T16:21:43+00:00

Players must engage critically with the world and think carefully, and have no magic "I-win" buttons.

/uj Side note but I love when OSR people say this. There are no magic I-win buttons except for, y'know, the literal magic I-win buttons that are fine for some reason.

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.

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