T Bone's Games Diner

Dinosaurs may not have been as heavy as previously thought. Those are the words of scientists who found flaws in the models used to estimate weight:

"Palaeontologists have for 25 years used a statistical model to estimate the body weight of giant dinosaurs and other extraordinarily large extinct animals,” said Gary Packard, from Colorado State University, whose research will appear in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology this week.

“We have found that the statistical model is seriously flawed and the giant dinosaurs probably were only about half as heavy as is generally believed.”

In other words, dinosaurs are just as big – long and tall, that is – as the fossils have always told us, but the flesh on those bones may have been far less bulky than thought. To make that distinction in movie terms, an Allosaur at the cinema would cheer the speedy new Godzilla over the lumbering old one as a better depiction of saurian kind. (Well, a vastly oversized saurian, anyway.)

This is welcome news to me, as massive weight has been the bane of GULLIVER's attempts to apply "natural encumbrance" rules to dino designs.

Whoops. An earlier post announcing a minor update to GULLIVER Mini had broken links. (My own dumb fault, not the software's.) The break probably didn't throw off many people, but for new visitors, here are the proper links:

To the GULLIVER page

Straight to the download links

Finally, a long-postponed task is done. I've organized rules-related content on this site for easier browsing. You'll see categories on the right, under "Content Stuff". Here's the quick guide:

New menu

blog

All posts coming under the arbitrary heading of "blog post". Not a particularly meaningful category, but there it is.

The GURPS Diner

Still a hand-made list of article links. It's convenient for quickly picking out key GURPS articles, but see the categories below for more.

rules articles

The main courses: big, meaty articles on rules, play aids, or other gaming topics. Mostly the acronymed stuff (GULLIVER, FEND, DECIDE, etc.), with goodies like GURPS Metric too.

rules nuggets

Simple rules ideas that are too short for a big article. More are on the way!

rules adds

Supplementary info for specific rules published on this site: clarifications, commentary, other notes. Stuff like update announcements for GULLIVER, added notes for GLAIVE, etc.

rules talk

Miscellaneous talk about rules or gaming: rules questions, examples of use, design ideas, connections to real life, comments on gaming, more. Pretty much all content not in one of the above.

reviews

Reviews of games, books, or whatever strikes the gamer fancy. Not much there yet; contributions would be great!

Other navigation notes

There. That change doesn't add any new content, but should re-introduce some items that weren't easy to find.

Finally, note that at the end of each full article are tags applying to that article. Click on any of those to get all articles with that tag. For example, the tag "GLAIVE" will return all articles tagged with "GLAIVE".

Next cleanup tasks

Other menu groupings may still call for some fixes. Please let me know if you see anything broken!

There is one annoyance still plaguing me: a "More..." link that appears at the end of posts in lists, even when the whole post is already displayed and there is no more. I hope to have that fixed soon.

Thanks always for your visits and comments. (And if you see a "More..." link after this sentence, please ignore it.)

Intro: "It's just a scrape!"

In heroic fiction, an endless succession of lucky nicks, scrapes, and near-miss bullet scratches let a hero get bloodied a lot without getting dead real quick. Even under a gritty combat system like GURPS', it's easy to set up such hide-saving grazes that handle heroic flesh-wounds – and, as a bonus, simulate armor deflection of attacks better than the old Passive Defense stat did.

These rules are born of some old writings, but please take a new look anyway; there's a lot of added and updated material.

Intro: Under Cover

This rule looks at the matter of letting shields provide cover instead of a DB bonus. That option offers some interesting benefits, from a nicely-restored (in 4e) ability for shields to protect passively, to detailed protection by body location, to shield walls and other defensive tricks. It all meshes nicely with existing game rules for cover, too.

Intro: "Is that a Frisbee?"

"Sir! We demand that you halt this tea party right now, and give us back our shields!"

"Er, begging your pardon, brave Knights of the Shire, but we haven't seen any shields..."

"Those... tea saucers! Give them back!"

Hmm, just how big is a Halfling's shield? And what happens if the little chap picks up a human's shield?

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 3 p8 offers some nice rules for Pixie weapons and other "tiny tools" – not generic, physics-friendly stuff, but quick'n'dirty guidelines for easy play. While shields got left out of that discussion, handling them in the same quick'n'dirty fashion is pretty easy.

Over the next few days, expect some new entries in the "Rules Nuggets" category of short-ish rules articles.

Or not-so-new entries. The first pair on the way are halves of a previous entry on shields, now cloven into two separate items: one on Shields and Size, the other on Shields and Cover. Two topics that play well together, but they are independent all the same, and each deserves its own entry.

While recycling old stuff isn't too exciting, it is a chance to further polish things and keep them up to date with GURPS 4e. (Note: Some of these entries will link to each other; forgive any non-working links to items that are still in the post queue.)

Other entries will include more bits liberated from old pages, plus some fresher stuff. Among the latter, there are a couple of topics that I'm still working out; I expect to post a forum topic or two asking for help in hammering out the ideas.

This old article adds a fun bit of spice to the standard GURPS magic system. The simple addition of distinct languages for spellcasting lets you create as many unique magical traditions as you like.

I'm calling it v1.1, though even that's a stretch. There's no new content in the updated GULLIVER Mini ('cause, hey, none's needed!). The changes are:

• Some wording changes
• Row order in Agility Table reversed (not sure why I had it as I did)
• More legible serif font (hey, the designer types were right!)
• Better PDF output

Give your old copy a little refresh!

To the GULLIVER page

Straight to the download links

You'd never point a gun at your own face, right? Well, with some guns, you have to.

I was perusing some of the fun stuff over at MyArmoury, and found this nifty page of wacky historical combined weapons. Guns with axe heads. Daggers with spring-loaded blade-catchers. Weapons that sprout... more weapons.

And pictured here: fancy-schmancy eating utensils with built-in flintlock pistols. Critical miss on your dinner roll. Take 3d damage. (Unless, that is, the barrels point away from the eating end; it's hard to tell from the pic. If that's the case, your dinner date eats the damage instead. It's the Quicker Breaker-Upper! [tm])

It looks like James Bond and Q would have fit in just fine a few centuries earlier. Hmm, I haven't kept up to date on recent GURPS books; anyone know whether the system has tackled the mixture of muskets and melee weapons?