Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

The image to the right basically sums up the latest change. In other words you no longer required 4-sided (D4), 8-sided (D8), or 10-sided (D10) dice for Dinosaur Cowboys! I had initially included these dice specifically for Panic Speed of certain dinosaurs, so that the random range was fairly close to the base Speed. For example a Runner has a Speed of 10, and used to have a Panic Speed of D10 (1-10).

With my v2.5 tweaks I went to ONLY D12s and D6s. To achieve a similar random range modifiers are used. So going back to the Runner, their Panic Speed is now D12-2. Obviously anything with a modifier to Panic Speed has a minimum of 1, so technically the range ends up being 1-10 still, just with 2/12 chances to end up with a total of 1 (since rolling a 2 or 3 would be modified to 1).

Overall this is a great change as it reduces the barrier to entry to play the game. I figure most players have some history of RPGs in their past so getting D4s and so on isn’t that tough, but there is always a chance there are new players who only have the basics.

I’ll be retaking the “Components of the Game” shot (which the above image was cropped and edited from), which also means I can include some new miniatures in there from my recently painted stuff. I also updated The Saloon code to use the new Panic Speed values (and adjust the font size on PDF export as necessary).

Anyway here are the current v2.5 dinosaurs with this change:

The latest batch of Dinosaur Cowboys changes also included some other big reworks, mostly around formatting. For example now there is a Statistics Overview section before “The Turn”, which I learned from the Judge Dredd Miniatures Game rulebook really helps give an idea of how a character is defined. This was especially necessary because I use a lot of the statistics in the combat section without the reader having much idea of what they do. Similarly I included an example Weapon statline at the start of the Combat section.
I also shifted around the Statistic Improvement Cost page, mainly compressing it by removing (now redundant) descriptive text. I also changed the Quidel “Creating a Character Example” end result to be a screenshot of the PDF posse roster instead of plain text.

So yeah, lots of touchups that should help make the game more accessible to new players.

As I said before, look for v2.5 near the end of this month. In the meantime you can still get the latest rulebook copy synced from my computer on my bleeding edge Dropbox.
But yeah look for the official release after the Battle to Seattle campaign is done. Speaking of which, Lake Tahoe battle tomorrow night woo hoo!