THE TAKEOUT MENU: Flyaway Missives from T Bone's Games Diner
#005, March 20 2008

== POSTED TO MAIN SITE MARCH 31 2008==

== EDIT 2008.04.07: Playtest over; PDF file no longer downloadable ==

Hi ho, merry subscribers. The Games Diner hasn't sent a newsletter for a year, and for good reason. There's been no project calling for collaboration or testing, and I don't think anyone wants a newsletter just to report what's new on the site. (We've got RSS for that: http://www.gamesdiner.com/node/feed )

But now I've got somethin'. Three topics to cover here:

1) General site news
2) An overview of site direction
3) A (very small) product bound for e23, calling for your review and suggestions!

1) ===SITE NEWS===

OLD AND NEW STUFF

First, thanks again to all those who – almost a year ago – made suggestions for GULLIVER Mini. It's been well-received, and downloaded 600 times as of this writing.

Let's see, what've we got that's a little newer...

Some new rules articles, in the form of "Rules Nuggets". Vaguely unpleasant name, that, but it gets the idea across: little rules bits that don't deserve big supplement-style treatment. Some of these I've mined from languishing GULLIVER text. Others are new. Please suggest other rules bits you think would fit there.

Then there's a review of Banestorm; some points about Size Modifier in 4e; a refreshing of old notes on playing Giants; thoughts on a good way to describe roleplaying to the uninitiated; some musing on whether stat costs should increase, decrease, or stay flat as the stat rises; a look at statting Godzilla; and a nice updating of Edge Protection (EP) rules.

Stuff with silly acronyms includes GUTHS: GURPS Unified Theory of Hitting Stuff, and DECIDE: Drop Excess Combat Info from Defense Evaluation. Both are updates of old GULLIVER material. DECIDE has been an unusually popular (or at least debated) article, much more than I expected, given its rather simple premise.

There's a fine contributed article by Ben Finney, GURPS Metric. The title is self-explanatory, but there's more to it than you might think; it's a very thorough work.

That's roughly a year in review. Nothing compared to what a serious gaming site puts out, but it'll do.

You'll see links to all of the above on the site's first three pages, so I won't bother pouring the links into this message.

BORING STUFF

(Heh. Like that doesn't describe the whole newsletter.)

Spammers have been giving the site more love than actual readers have. Alas, that's not even surprising. As of a month or so ago, creating a forum topic now requires login; that's where the spammers were hitting hardest.

(Notice how "Access Denied" is the site's most-viewed page? That looks like bad site design, but actually the page rocketed to the top after I set the login requirement for forum topics. The massive "Access Denied" hits are, I believe, unlimited Cosmic Blocks vs attacking spambots. Ha, take that.)

Forums, of course, are mostly intended for collaboration, and without collaborative projects in place, there hasn't been much forum action at all. But more on that later.

Elsewhere in anti-spam efforts, the Akismet service and Captcha seem to keep comments and what not pretty clean, but please let me know if you spot a long-lingering offense. Or if you're trying to post something legitimate and it's not working!

(Speakin of Akismet: Much of the spam it catches is posted under nonsense names like wzrehhjhw, yyqzteram, and qoglyqqhigt, or simple first names like Mark or Ivan. Take care: if you make a post under a name like the above – a single-word "normal" name, or the name of a Great Old One's first cousin - your post stands a better-than-usual chance of being tagged as spam.)

All that is really for the interest of fellow site operators. Overall, I've got spam under control now, with legitimate comments coming through just fine. Don't hesitate to drop by and leave some words.

Finally: The requested and long-promised Open ID login is now a reality in the newest version of Drupal, the CMS upon which the site runs. But it'll be some time until I can upgrade, as not all all of the site's back-end features have been updated to match. So Open ID is still down the road. My apologies for the wait.

OTHER MISCELLANEA

Not all of this is new per se, but it may be new since the last newsletter:

You can rate site content with 1 to 5 dice. (Come to think of it, given the RPG theme, I should have made that 1 to 6. There are no five-siders.) When you read something, please rate it! I may add a "highest rated content" list soon.

The once-wonky polls should be displaying correctly again, though I have no currently open polls.

Site search should be working fine as well now, letting you sift through the growing mass of content.

2) ===SITE DIRECTIONS===

CONTENT FOCUS

You'd think from the above that I just love tinkering with the site. But no, I'd rather make fun stuff.

*Lots of it*, in fact. But time for the Diner – and gaming in general – is so limited. I'd love to write more about actual game experiences, past or recent; share more campaign and adventure notes; review games; ponder deep gaming questions; and so on. But with time too short, I purposely hold back. There are plenty of gamers out there already doing a great job writing about such things.

So the Diner will stick to its own odd little niche: rules additions and hacks. It's a pretty dull field for many would-be readers, but it's where I think I can squeeze the greatest original output into limited time.

That'll pretty much mean three areas of content:
1) New material for existing games (as in yet another GURPS idea that few would care about)
2) Updating of old material (such as dredging up and polishing more bits from the old GURPS Diner)
3) New game development (mainly, the infrequently-mentioned Project T)

PROJECT T

You may recall I earlier asked for real-life weapon data for use in this project. Or you may not remember, as it's been so long. This is the world's slowest-moving project – just far too little time devoted to even keep momentum going. (Translation: "Man, what were these old notes even about? Gonna have to start over on this part...") So far, "T" stands for "vaporware".

But I'm striving to move ahead. You know I haven't even bought GURPS Martial Arts (4e) or Dungeon Fantasy yet? Simply because I know that doing so will leave me glued slack-jawed to the pages, and will steal precious dev time away from T. Now *that's* dedication to work!

A slight, slight overview: The project is born from tinkering with original RPG engine ideas (thus making "T" actually stand for "The last think the gaming world needs"). As the geological epochs passed, I realized I was working on two things:

1) A wildly incomplete and sparse "framework" for building a variety of RPGs, with no innnate preference for simple vs complex, rules-light vs -heavy, story vs simulation, etc. A nearly-blank slate.

2) A specific melee combat game built on the above – one intentionally, unapologetically, riduclously over the top on the detailed simulation front. Just for the heck of it – for the R&D experience if nothing else, but just maybe for fun, too.

So that's that for now. I hope to have something from 2) to show before too long.

OTHER PROJECTS

Looking at existing big GURPS works at the Diner, I'd wondered whether it'd be more fun to turn some of these into e23 products. I think that updated and polished versions of, say, GLAIVE, COSH, GULLIVER Mini, etc. could be viable (if very unofficial) products, and maybe even score a few bucks toward that bandwidth bill.

But I'm not keen on the numbers. Take a look at GULLIVER Mini. This puppy is FREE, and yet scores only 600 downloads. Now, not a lot of gamers come to the Diner, so there's an obscurity factor at work. Yet if you look at e23 downloads at http://e23.sjgames.com/hot.cgi , you'll see that out of the store's nearly 3000 offerings, a mere five (5!) have racked up more than 600 downloads. (Unless I'm reading something wrongly...)

It may sound odd to do a big job for free while balking at doing it for a little cash. But for the *extra* work that would be required to bring any item up to salable e23 snuff, I don't think the monetary reward would be worth it.

What do *you* think?

All that said, I'm going ahead anyway with the Diner's first e23 project. And you get to see it today, lucky you.

Wait, don't get your hopes up too high...

3) ===REQUEST FOR REVIEW AND SUGGESTIONS===

I made a fun little object for my own use, and thought I'd also offer it on the Diner as a PDF download. It's a 10" "GURPS Range Ruler" for measuring distances on a combat map. The gimmick: it's pre-marked with Size and Speed/Range indicators, plus handy excerpts from the same Table.

Hey, how about *that* as an e23 product, I thought. I contacted the fine folks there, though with reservation: even a dollar or two is a lot for a single page. The e23 folks and I agreed that it's more of a free item. In fact, they really like it as such: a great freebie to toss into orders and to hand out at conventions, they replied with enthusiasm.

That sounds like fun to me. With e23's support, I'd like to first request feedback from you:

1) Please download the PDF at http://www.gamesdiner.com/forum/e23_project_2008 . This is open only to Diner registered users, so you'll have to log in: http://www.gamesdiner.com/user . Needless to say, please don't openly distribute the file.

2) Please suggest improvements or additional uses! Comments in the forum are fine (as is email). Forum comments may be visible to visitors, but that's OK; the original forum topic and download shouldn't be.

3) The format is only a quick job, done in Apple Pages. e23 prefers a Photoshop file, which they want to modify to their liking (fonts, etc.). Alas, I'm a real hack at P-shop, and no longer own a copy anyway.

The e23 team can re-create the document from scratch in P-shop, but is anyone willing to graciously take a shot at it, giving e23 a base to work with? They'd really appreciate it, and so would I. I'd be happy to plug your site, or graphic design service, or what have you, on this site, and I'll ask e23 whether they can help too. (For example, it should be possible to leave your name and URL on the PDF download.)

If you know Photoshop and can help, please let me know and we'll discuss details.

4) As always, a better name is appreciated! "GURPS Range Ruler" is fine, but bland. Still better than the originally-planned "GURPS Awesome Range Finder (GARF)".

Ooh, I know, "GURPS Range Indicator Plank". That suggests the catch copy: "Get a GRIP!"

But if you've got better, speak up. I do need to keep things classy, as this is bound for e23; that's all that's saving future visitors from encountering a download called "Ten Inches of T Bone".

5) Feedback deadline: March 31. I'd like to ship it to e23 after that (though if someone's helping with P-shop, we'll of course have to take that schedule into account).

===THAT'S ALL===

Thanks for reading!

T Bone
tbone@gamesdiner.com
Visit the once-again NEW T Bone's Games Diner!
http://www.gamesdiner.com