Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

Version 2.1 Released!
Well I bet you didn’t expect this! After almost 4 months since the big 2.0 release I thought I’d release v2.1, which has a lot more fixes and improvements (some long overdue) than you’d expect from that little itty bitty .1 version change. Some of these were motivated by the upcoming Battle to Seattle campaign with my friends, while others were on the TODO list for a long time…but weren’t much fun so I didn’t do them :)

First of all though, get the PDF of it!
Download the Dinosaur Cowboys Rulebook v2.1

Now for the changes. Instead of dumping a big list of the changes I thought I’d take some time talking about each one:

• Made a Campaign Record Sheet for who fought who, etc.

As I played through the Windy River campaign I wished there was a consistent record of how the progress was. And with a larger multi-person campaign coming up I knew I’d need something to track the status of each Posse and who fought who. So I designed a nice little Campaign Record Sheet that lets you remember the details of each battle, see who took injuries afterwards, etc. I’d love to think of a more western-y or cowboy-ish name for this, but for now the cold, factual name will have to do.

Next up is balancing, with a lot of buffs across the board:

• Added a new Unbalanced Bonus at the 20 IP gap to grant an additional Yeehaw usage.
• Buffed Horned dinosaur from 26 HP to 28 HP, to be more competitive with King, who had quite a few more advantages. 6 more HP might seem like a lot (28 compared to 22), but 6 CTN compared to 4 is statistically a big jump too.
• Buff to Beast Attacks which now use DinoA/DinoD-2, similar to Lasso attacks. So for a 2 damage sacrifice Dinosaurs can apply Slowed or 4″ Knockback! Should provide more options during combat, and Slowed will help lock down enemies even more than Snap Attacks already do.
• Slight buff to Brawl Attacks of Shove and Trip to be 1A-1D instead of 1A-0D…in case a person actually needs to do a special move they don’t have to sacrifice as much

New features! Hooray! Always exciting to brainstorm a few of these. Since I know the mechanics of the game quite well (by this point I should! ;) ) it’s easy to say “Well, that seems like a neat effect” or whether something will be balanced or not.

• Added 10 Water Features that can be used for rivers, lakes, ponds, etc. to spice up water beyond just “it’s Difficult Terrain”.
• Added 5 Container Features for various crates and barrels…basically because I own nice resin sets of both and wanted them to do something cool
• Added Extreme Temperatures feature…have wanted to handle weather for a while, and eventually might elaborate on different weather as a whole separate Feature set
• Added Blinding Sun feature which is a fun one for deserts
• Added new barrel art in the Feature section (also pictured above to the right). Thanks Library of Congress!
• Updated Custom Game Sheet to include new Features (had to reformat)

Here are a few miscellaneous rewords, updates, and quality of life changes and edits. Well some are rather significant:

• Renamed “Knockback” (and all related text) to “Pushed”. Knockback is a bit too Diablo 2-ish (although I do appreciate a good Windforce nod), and Pushed fits better with the current effects of Slowed, Stopped, etc.
• Cleaned up “Pushed” special weapon effect to not explicitly talk about doing damage on hitting a surface, since that is covered in the rule
• Changed “Taken Out of Action” to just “Out of Action” with optional lowercase “taken” in some cases.
• Renamed variant Aimed Shot and Placed Shot to “Maneuver – Aim” and “Maneuver – Steady”. Also added variant “Action – Dodge” that gives +1 Defense.
• Clarified that Firing into Close Combat should only replace the Short Distance mod, NOT Long Distance
• Some Features and other rules applied XA-YD attacks, but not all listed a RTN/CTN, which was remedied.
• Added a “Traits per IP” table to the “Advancing a Posse” section to fully clarify at what IP count a new Trait can be selected
• Added a section explaining Brawl/Beast Attacks in Close Combat Special Cases and Dinosaur Combat
• Reworked title page to include original tagline, and move authorship to credits page
• Added link to The Saloon on the credits page
• Consistency of terms like “damage vs Damage”, “close weapon vs melee weapon”, etc.
• Right justify money columns for item and dinosaur cost
• Touched up Wounds/Injury table to be more consistent and accurate with terminology. For example Dinosaur Injury for 3x Difficult Terrain cost to just have Dinosaurs be affected by Difficult Terrain, since otherwise it made no sense

And some rather important balance changes and edits that I wanted to highlight separately. Namely Trait rebalance! Long overdue Trait rebalance, in fact. This part feels like a Dota 2 changelog…but like I said some of the Traits were totally useless compared to their counterparts. Now everything should be a bit more balanced and useful and give Posses more choice. I ended up removing one Trait and adding two new ones, so that’s exciting:

• Back Shot renamed to Coward Shot to avoid confusion with Shot in the Back rule
• Clever Shot now ignores Cover and Long Range. Basically rolled in Sniper Shot.
• Sniper Shot now gives +1 damage on Crit
• Escape now gives +1 Speed as well as no Snap Attacks
• Eviscerate reword to mention roll
• Neck Shot second stage added, and nerfed to +3/+5 instead of flat +4
• Nerves of Steel reword to mention roll
• Knockback Shot buffed to +3/+5, renamed to Forceful Shot
• Lucky decapitalize Attacks
• Onslaught reword
• Quick Hands give +Heal bonus
• Ranger slight reword
• Rush changed Turn to Activation
• Shake It Off expanded list before giving etc.
• Sniper count Crits as 3 instead of 2
• Tracking Shot added +1 damage
• Try Again lower case Attacks
• Whirlwind now hits all adjacent, added close weapon requirement
• Awareness not cannot be Shot in the Back
• Big Game Hunter now has Crit 11+ vs Dinos as well, removed second tier
• Boxer got buffed from +2 to +3 damage with Brawl
• Doctor reword to clarify result not dice
• Ferocious trait added for +damage for Beast attacks
• Heroic Effort was removed, as Nerves of Steel was basically better
• Piercing Shot was added, which ignores target Defense

And of course The Saloon was updated to reflect all these changes. I’m also going to use a more reliable link for The Saloon at http://saloon.thruhere.net/ instead of the older link (just from a free redirect service, so it goes down sometime). This change should be seamless to users of the program, and the old link will work as well since I use it in zillions of battle reports and posse entries.

Summary
All in all a great v2.1 release. I’m very happy to get the Trait rebalance done, and it was somewhat unexpected. I just started tweaking the Traits and a few hours later had them all updated. Getting a Campaign Record Sheet is nice too, and I’m sure will be useful for the upcoming “Battle to Seattle”. And of course who doesn’t love new Features?! Especially semi-critical ones like different Water effects.
As with every new release the game feels more stable and organized.

Now to start building the ol’ TODO list for v2.2 :)