Ahoy! Many thanks to all those in the past who have contributed to or commented on GLAIVE, a low-tech weapon design system for GURPS 3e.

I recently received a couple of inquiries about updating the project for 4e, along with 4e-flavored updates for the spreadsheet aid originally created by Ryan Williams. An updated spreadsheet alone doesn't make the project fully 4e-ready, but sure goes a long way toward it!

The spreadsheets are posted for readers' benefit. Along with them come the obvious questions:

Is there a need to update all of GLAIVE for 4e? Is there any interest? What form would it even take?

There's a new forum topic for anyone interested in discussing.

Clearing out some old links I'd noted, here's some good reading for game designers (or just detail-happy GMs) wanting to give good, hard biology a friendly nod:

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/

Wow, this is a heck of an article by Michael C. LaBarbera, professor in Organismal Biology & Anatomy at the University of Chicago. It's a layman-friendly grand tour of how size and scaling work in reality, and what that means for B-movie creatures – and by extension, game-table monsters. Scaling of area vs mass and its relevant effects on cooling, terminal velocity, metabolism, and so on; mass and falling damage; mechanical difficulties posed by huge size; and much more – it's all there.

Here's some further musing on a SJG GURPS Forum post I just made. The question: How to keep "challenge level" right for PCs going into combat – not so easy as to be dull, but not so deadly as to litter the cave with PC corpses?

The question was posed by a D&D player just starting to GM GURPS, which makes it a particularly good one for him to ask; GURPS combat can be much deadlier than D&D players might expect, leading to that cave-floor litter. But it's a good question for any GM to ask, new or experienced, whether changing game systems or not.

That's just what it is: a simple summary of ways to handle this matter in character/creature design. Short and sweet.

Two notes:

1) A recent tech upgrade borked all links to ancient (static HTML) GURPS Diner material. Should be working again now.

2) The site's new graphic theme offers a lot more potential for content placement and other customizations than the previous one. But, yes, it needs some clean-up first. It looks very... busy. Will improve things.

There's been a big outpouring of thoughts and sadness over the passing of D&D creator Gary Gygax. The words put down by other writers are far better than I can summon, so I'll add a very short note:

As the RPG world moved beyond the foundations Gary built, it's been all too easy to cast stones at the "clunky" rules and strictures of his original creations and their direct descendants. "THAC0? Alignments? Classes? Ha, that stuff's crazy..."

I, too, like today's more modern, streamlined games. But I've always kept respect for the D&D world, whether I play the game any more or not. Like so many, many others, I point to D&D as my start as a gamer. And throughout any temptation to poke fun at the game's outdated points, I've always returned to one key thought:

Question: Did we have fun with the game?

Answer: Hell, yeah, we did.

That single truth trumps any and all dismissal of the game, and is the highest form of thanks that a game's players can return to its maker.

To have turned a clever idea into a whole new genre of gaming – wow, few of us messing with game-related design or writing will ever make a smidgen of that impact.

I never met Gary, despite a couple visits to GenCon and even a trip to the original TSR store in Wisconsin. I wish I had. He did great things.

I'm glad that 4e now incorporates something as simple and basic as a size for characters! SM, what took you so long?

My friendly little quibbles with SM as s/he stands (Basic Set p 19) are as follows:

DECIDE has been a busy little topic for discussion. In the spirit of designer's notes, here are additional notes not on the idea behind it, but on the specific implementation I used.

More under-the-hood musings for fellow monkey-wrenchers.

"What's a role-playing game?"

Who among us hasn't responded to that question by the uninitiated, or enjoyed a good reply put forth by other gamers?

Actually, I don't know how many versions of the latter I've heard or read. "An RPG is a form of collaborative storytelling... " "It's a kind of play-acting..." "Remember back when you played Cowboys and Indians..."

And so on – a hundred ways to start out explaining. RPGing is nothing overly complex, as we know, but it is one of those things that's easy to demonstrate in person, hard to describe otherwise. (My gaming group started its RPG career playing D&D profoundly wrong, as the text's "how to RPG" instructions just didn't work for us.)

I forget what spurred this topic – it was probably some comment on a gaming forum – but I'll add my take here on what a role-playing game is, simply because I don't think I've ever written it down. It's nothing special in the least, and for all I know, has been used almost verbatim by someone(s) long before me. But anyway, just for fun:

I ran across a GURPS page – "lens" as it's called – on Squidoo.

http://www.squidoo.com/gurps/

The first link given is to my GURPS Diner, for which I'm grateful, but it's the old defunct address. I'd like to request an update to the link, but there's no owner listed for this "lens", and no way that I can find to locate an unnamed Squidoo "lensmaster".

If you know (or are) the "lensmaster" for that GURPS page, please give me a shout! – end –