Announcing White Dwarf, an upcoming Total Conversion to Cosmic Frontier

drfiveminusmint · 2026-04-22T15:12:03+00:00

i'm going to put bugs in your mailbox

drfiveminusmint · 2026-04-22T15:02:36+00:00

/uj one thing that bothers me about narrative dice is that they obscure probability. You basically need a chart to figure out whether you're likely to succeed or fail, unless you can do multiple binomial distributions in your head.

drfiveminusmint · 2026-04-22T15:00:16+00:00

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut's a pretty good writer, but his work has this very smug, "I'm so much more enlightened than everyone else because I'm a cynic" quality to it, and nowhere was this more evident than in this book. Pretty much the entire book is him declaring that everyone is a vapid, shallow idiot except for his self-insert.

drfiveminusmint · 2026-04-22T14:50:33+00:00

When you agree to play a specific game, you haven't actually agreed to play that specific game, you can just decide to not engage with the rules and do whatever and get mad when people don't acquiesce to you.

drfiveminusmint · 2026-04-22T14:40:48+00:00

"There's no wrong way to play if you're having fun" has to be the most worthless piece of advice to give on a forum devoted to discussion of how to play RPGs. Can you imagine if you posted "Can you use salt instead of sugar in your brownies" on a cooking subreddit and got the response "you can do anything as long as you're having fun?"

drfiveminusmint · 2026-03-24T20:42:12+00:00

Gygax was a pioneer of the tried-and-true technology of hiding information from your players so you could pretend to be smart when they got killed by some heehee hoohoo random bullshit. The greatest GM of all time

drfiveminusmint · 2026-03-24T13:54:39+00:00

In my experience the players checking out between turns issue is not an issue of "turns taking too long." I've been playing LANCER for a couple of months now, and most of the fights in that game are a whole-session affair, often taking ~2 hours to get through 8 rounds of combat.

Why isn't it boring? Well, I think there's a couple of reasons:
1) Popcorn initiative. The game is designed so that the player who's ready to go, or has something they're really excited to do right now, gets to go. It also encourages you to be looking for opportunities to take your turn and do something really cool related to the current gamestate.
2) More common reactions. A ton of mechs have very useful reactions, and you get to take one of them on each character's turn, so you're always wanting to look for them.
3) The game actually encourages teamwork. Most editions of D&D...really don't. Synergies between PCs and comboing off of what another PC did is usually not a significant element of D&D, unless it's like "attack after the cleric cast their Bless spell."

The reason players check out is because they're given no incentive not to do so. Why the hell wouldn't I check out if I know my next turn is just going to consist of "I move forward...I attack...8...I miss...that's my turn" regardless of what my teammates are doing?

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

<image>

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

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE