Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

After mulling over the idea of Grit for a while, I realized something: Given a long enough timeline I’m going to prod this game to death (thus the dino-prod image to the right). What I mean is if I keep looking for stuff to change or improve or edit I’m going to find it…or fabricate it. Hitpoints worked perfectly well (as Red_Starrise pointed out yesterday), and yet here I am coming up with a different mechanic for them. Sure it’s a neat mechanic, but it’s also more complex (both to learn and to use), and that gets away from my original goals for the core rulebook.

So what does this mean for Dinosaur Cowboys? It means that I need to just say (in a western accent) “These here rules be done!”, release v1.0, and bask in the glory of completing a project. Otherwise I’ll keep coming up with new ideas and new mechanics that I’ll try to shoehorn into this game just because it’s my current project. Normally I’m so incredibly ready to be done with a game, but with Dinosaur Cowboys it’s different because I’ve really enjoyed the process, still like the setting, and generally think it’s one of the most solid rulesets I’ve come up with. But my brain keeps churning up new ideas, and forcing them into a nearly-finished project is probably not the best strategy.

I was aiming to release v1.0 by the end of Christmas, but instead I think I’ll try to wrangle ‘er up before the end of October. Maybe even by Canadian Thanksgiving (it’s kind of western…) which is October 10th. Having a deadline is a good idea since otherwise I could see floundering around, making small tweaks and needless changes and so forth until the year 2285.

The downside to finishing the rules is it’s hard to maintain outside interest and fans of the game without continually releasing or updating something. A game that never changes is kinda hard to get psyched about, I guess. Maybe that’s why splatbooks were so common for D&D and the like. I think this blog will be less active after v1.0, and probably more focused on battle reports and the like. We’ll see how that all pans out when I get there.

So what I’m saying is v1.0 of Dinosaur Cowboys will be available October 10th, 2011. Set your sun dials, boys and girls.
OCTOBER 11th EDIT: Whoops that was a lie. End of October instead!

Vacation
And on that note I’m going on vacation, since nothing is as productive as not working, haha. I’ll be out next week, but have scheduled two image based posts for September 26th and 29th. Until then, cowboy…