How do you milk a fish? A milkfish, of course, the semi-aquatic Yrth mammal that offers meat, oil, and milk to its medieval domesticators. The brief description in GURPS Banestorm suggests a cross between a seal and a manatee. Plausible enough... but how do you get the milk out?

Ogres. Hulking Trolls. Tree-sized Giants. Mountain-sized Jotun. If they're defined by a size bigger than us, then for this article, they're all Giants. Because whatever the specifics, they all have one thing in common: "TARG SMASH PUNY HUMAN!"

I'm liberating the Big Games notes on gaming Giants from my old GULLIVER rules for GURPS, to give them a proper new home within the Diner (with a little freshening-up too, including a pinch or two of content from other sections).

Although I've got some GURPS 4e-specific notes at the end, the general overview is useful with any game system. Yet it's all pretty brief; sorry, I haven't witten The Complete Guide to Gaming Giants. I'd love to add your notes and ideas here, if you too have played oversized PCs, NPCs, or even just "monsters".

Up the beanstalk we go, then:

My old GURPS Diner article Gird yer Loins! contained two simple ideas for better handling body armor in GURPS: dropping the troublesome PD stat, and introducing a new Edge Protection (EP) stat.

 

PD has indeed departed from GURPS 4e, so the first idea's text can be retired for good.

The second idea is not any official part of GURPS, yet it (or some variant) is used by many gamers and pops up frequently in online discussions of armor. I'm moving that part of the old article into its own new article here on the Games Diner. In the future, it may get folded into a larger treatise on armor; for now, here's the simple idea on its lonesome.

Speaking of slow pacing, how long's it taken me to get this posted?

Final notes on action time and pacing in RPGs. Food for fellow armchair game designers.

More on the subject of attack time and pacing in RPG combat systems, looking at a couple of old home-brew efforts.

Star Frontiers was a simple, pioneering science-fiction role-playing game with a really fun feel. And everybody loved Dralasites. You can move your SF game to GURPS with this update of my old Star Frontiers to GURPS Conversion Notes article.

In which T Bone begins a three-part muse on the topic of action pacing – especially combat pacing – in role-playing games. If you can stay awake through this, you win a pony.

"GURPS Japan has them. GURPS Swashbucklers has them. GURPS Rome has them. Why doesn't GURPS Middle Ages?" Sure, all throughout history Europeans have proven their adeptness as killing each other en masse, but they also did it mano-a-mano with more flair than you may have realized. A great look at historical fighting techniques in the lands of knights.

Look forward to Games Diner pirate talk on the 19th (at least, during the 19th in my Far East time zone). [Edit:] Or maybe not. The tech doesn't seem to be doing anything.

In other news: I'll be traveling most of next week, so don't plan to do much with the site this week.

The 2005 GURPS Diner article, brought into the new Games Diner site. One gamer geek's look at the new GURPS 4e and how well it satisfied his GURPSy wishes.