Welcome to your doom!

Garfield and Jon at hospital. Garfield, his pipe lit.

Is this pipe?

As a Brit, I always assumed the American system worked like that because of freedom or something.

You made a clerical error.

Pic-er-nic baskets, specifically.

Weirdly, it’s the opposite for us - my grandad, my dad, me and my daughters even all went to the exact same tiny primary school (obviously over the span of 100 years!). We don’t move very far at all.

That said, my parents now live in France. Maybe it just kicks in later for our family.

If you’re the DM, you can just fall back on Rule Zero - the rules are what you say they are :)

You’ve done a really nice thing - I’m sure these kids will never forget it. I sometimes forget how much harder it was just to acquire stuff as kids.

Honestly, I think it’s just a matter of Games Workshop doing a Nokia - the company became successful focusing on creating good products then changed to focusing on making money. (Fun fact - a Nokia engineer actually created a prototype smartphone before LG or Apple, but the money guys felt sticking with the old super-profitable ones was the way to win).

The biggest advantage over 40k, from my perspective, is that Grimdark Future uses turns, I.e. ‘my unit, your unit’ instead of ‘my whole army, your whole army’. Each side moves each unit once per round, but you just take turns moving units getting there.

Grimdark Future Firefight is my favourite though - instead of huge battles, you take smaller teams. It feels more cinematic. Units don’t die as easily and you can pin a unit with suppressive fire. If you attack someone on the edge of a platform and knock them down, you can boot them over the edge. And best of all, it’s fast - games can be wrapped up in under an hour easily.

Oh, almost forgot - you don’t actually have to buy anything either. The standard version of the game, with army lists for all armies, is free. The army building app is free. You can buy advanced rules if you want more nitty gritty, but you’re literally good to go right now.

May I recommend trying Grimdark Future, in that case. Particularly Grimdark Future: Firefight.

The 40k lore is fantastic and tons of fun. Unfortunately the rules not so much. The rules of Grimdark Future, by contrast, are very clean and well balanced.

Fortunately, you can map the lore of 40k directly onto Grimdark Future (like I suspect most people do) and end up with the best of both worlds.

Another big advantage of Grimdark Future over 40k is that it is mini agnostic. If you want to use 40k minis, go for it. If you want to use 3rd Party minis, that’s fine too. Lego people, plastic soldiers, pebbles - all good.

By contrast, the official line for playing 40k in Games Workshop Stores and GW Tournaments is that the minis need to be GW, no 3rd Party minis allowed. (It didn’t used to be this way, and many store owners will be happy to turn a blind eye, but that’s the official stance).

If you are interested in this route, Wargames Atlantic do a superb line of very affordable minis that can be used - Death Fields.

I hate to say it, I think you might be in the minority here.

My take has always been that D&D isn’t an adversarial game - the DM isn’t trying to ‘win’, they’re just trying to keep things entertaining for the players.

The trouble with random is that it doesn’t always follow story beats, and doesn’t always feel fun.

A big boss not getting any hits in due to bad rolls deminishes the perceived threat, and the ultimate value of the victory. Stupid zombies that just won’t stay down despite the fact that everyone is now bored with them can easily be kept down.

As long as you know when to do it, it can be super useful for everyone.