Failing To Prep Is Prepping To Fail

Daosus' comment in this post reminded me that it's not just failing to read the rules that leads to a player having no fun.

AD&D's Oriental Adventures is an example of the players not bothering to do any of the prep needed to make characters that fit the setting.  Kara Tur isn't the same as Greyhawk and they just treated it like a normal D&D campaign and didn't do any of the social stuff that so enamored me with it.

I had medieval Japan on the brain and even with GURPS (which the players already were fine with) they didn't bother learning fuck-all about being a person living in the Sengoku period with magic.  One even took my copy of GURPS: Japan home for a week and didn't even take it out of his bag.

WW2 at least has movies they likely have seen for them to base their characters around.

Traveller is a world with near 50 years of material and a new player will have to take sips from the firehose or they will not even know what they don't know and there's just too much to do on the fly now for the GM.

Something that's important about this lack of preparation is the player's character is, nearly always, FROM the world setting!  They are members of their home culture which isn't a late 20th, early 21st century American.

The players who read the material get back more than they put in.

The players who didn't are always either bored or upset that they aren't getting what they wanted. 

Just So You Know

If you hit play on Attack of the Clones as you begin construction of the Lego Acclamator set, you will be able to finish it before its first appearance in the film.

The same cannot be said for making the Lego Venator set.  But you will be done before Order 66.  

When Does The Campaign End?

I have successfully managed to play a campaign with fewer than two sessions a year.

That campaign is technically still out there, but I think I didn't start it properly and it is thus painted into a corner.  It's defacto dead even if it's not dejure dead.

Marv and FuzzyGeff are at a cliffhanger in Twilight: 2000 and that campaign will run until one of us gets sick of it.  I will badger them to keep playing until that someone is me.

But when is a campaign over?

I don't tend to make settings that have an end point.  You don't reach a conclusion to the story there.

There are campaigns that DO have an ending point.  If the players reach that point, the campaign is over and they win!  Or they fail and give up or die.

I've had several campaigns just peter out and stop.  Most times when I run out of ideas for the world that I'd created.

I've had a few where the players stopped showing up.  Hard to keep going when there's no way for a player's character to be absent from the world.

I've even had a couple where the players flat said they didn't want to continue that setting any more.  This happens most often in Traveller where the party is the crew of a merchant ship.  Economics & Accounting is not near as exciting as it sounds. 

Private Property Is Good

Reading quotes from Cea Weaver has convinced me, beyond mere greed, that eliminating property taxes is the way to go.

Florida seems poised to do so.

I was in favor of it just because it reduced my mortgage payment.

Now I am in favor of it because it's so much harder to add a tax than to increase it.

A tax on owning something means that you're really renting it from the government.

And that gives them the idea that they own it and once they think they own something they do seem to love giving it to someone else.

I do notice that New York Fucking City isn't proposing to even reduce property taxes as they eye stealing from property owners. 

It's The GM's Job

The GM being the arbiter of when to make a roll or not is their job.

That can be zero rolls if they like what the players are doing and think they should succeed without involving chance.

That can be many rolls if they want chance to have a larger role in the game.

It can be anything in between.

If can be zero rolls if they dislike what the players are doing and they think they should fail without giving them a chance.

And, for the absolutely stupidest of my readers:*  This decision about how many rolls is independent of the game rules.

It's not a GURPS thing.  It's not a D&D thing.  It's not a Hero thing.  It's not a Traveller thing.

It's a GM thing.

The GM and the players should get on the same page about how often chance is involved.

I tend to roll a bit more often than some because I don't want to railroad the players into being defacto NPC's who only have a little agency.  Letting it to chance is more fair.

If I wanted to control all the characters fully, I'd write fiction...  And you can see from the infrequent snippets of Sabers and Sorcery how well I am doing.

*So stupid, in fact, that I've decided to reply to the comments I've shitcanned until they realize that they are not being allowed to talk.  Not because they're not raising good questions, but because they're being a dick about it and that's contraindicated by the commenting rules.

Kinda Sad

On one hand, it's sad that a series I am enjoying will never have another book written by a dead author.

On the other hand, at least you can know you have all the books they wrote.

It's especially nice if they completed the series before they died.

Tolkien got out the whole Lord of the Rings.

Saberhagen got out the entire Empire of the East/Swords series.

I don't think that Rosenberg had finished with the Guardians of the Flame series, but he had not come back to it in the four years between the last book and his death; but he had been writing other things.

I don't know if Herbert got to the end of Dune because I didn't manage to finish the books he wrote, let alone the ones that come later by someone else.

Somewhere around here I have the compiled CoDominium book, "The Prince" which is supposed to have all those stories save the Motie books. 

We're on the clock with the Jhereg novels.  Stephen Brust is not a spring chicken any more and he's got two books left to write. 

I have never read a word of A Song of Ice and Fire, despite enjoying the first few seasons of Game of Thrones.  I think George RR Martin is gonna run out the clock on that one and it will be an unfinished series with a dead author.

Make A Roll

FuzzyGeff is something of a math geek and his knowledge of statistics has colored how I do gaming once I learned a bit of statistics myself.

Because of things like the critical failure's default of 18 should result in a mean rounds between failures almost ten times worse than a rifle that is KNOWN to be unreliable.

That same critical failure would mean half the air wing of every aircraft carrier would be in the drink every cruise.

Many commercial aircraft would become lost and need constant guidance to find the airport and it would become insane to fly at night because of the darkness penalties.

There are a myriad of things that require a bit of knowledge, but no actual skill to perform and, if there's no stress, a person just does.

It's that stress part that can, often, be missed when a GM says, "make a roll."

Too many people look at the rules and see more places to make a roll than another rule-set and declare the new game bad because you CAN make more rolls...

But it is, and has always been, the decision of the DM or GM to call for a roll in any given situation.

If they suddenly start calling for more rolls when you change from D&D to GURPS it might mean they want you to work harder for it and D&D didn't have the mechanism to force you.

Twilight: 2000 has no mechanism for making the character respond to something creepy and frightful.  GURPS does.  So when in the catacombs under Częstochowa, I can call for a Fright Check and impose a reaction on the character.  T2K is a pure honor system to act afraid that I've seen fail over and over.

So GURPS has more rolls than T2K because of having rules to handle the frightened.

Which brings us to "GURPS sucks!"

Did the GM call for a roll under a rule that the game you prefer doesn't have that caused you to conform to the character you created?

The fright check from the T2K module "The Black Madonna" ticked off a couple of people who had played at my table under the OG T2K rules.  It thrilled others.

YMMV.

But, if we're going to overgeneralize, then I would say that the real reason that some people hate GURPS and cannot stand that other people enjoy it is because they are lazy.

They don't wanna work to make the character.  They don't want to put in the effort to learn how to assemble the character they want and, having failed to so, blame the game.

Then they don't want to be exposed to many die rolls, because a die roll is chance and chance is something they cannot control and without that control they may fail and without being able to declare, "I win!" they don't want to play. 

Contrast this to the person who did read the rules and learned to make the character they wanted.  They're never complaining about the rules.  They're an example of being satisfied by a successful application of labor.  Mike Rowe would understand the feeling.

The epiphany of realizing the complainers never learned to make the character they want to play comes from noticing that I have converted so many character from other games JUST to learn the rules.  I.  Have.  Never.  Failed.

GURPS has never failed to be able to accommodate a character from a different game.

Traveller, Twilight: 2000, AD&D 2e, Champions, Shadowrun, etc.

4th edition of GURPS is better at it than 3rd edition revised, but even 3eR never actually failed.

Not that the haters ever read this far. 

 

I Still Support Them

Years ago I commented that I support the end of the Islamic theocracy in Iran.

I still hope the people of Iran manage it.

They appear to be trying to do it again.

On the plus side the IRGC doesn't seem to doing its normal murder lots of people to suppress protests thing.

It probably helps that it's not Obama in office this time around.

Best of luck to the people of Iran!

That's Where We Lost You?

Harvey and I watched "Primitive War" tonight.

The Vietnam War with dinosaurs!

A couple of small things I noticed.

It's set in 1968 and the M203 wasn't fielded until 1969.

An XM177E2 shouldn't have a plastic stock.

A 1968 AKM shouldn't have a groove in the stock.

YOU NEED TO COCK A SINGLE ACTION PISTOL FOR IT TO WORK!

Interestingly, the people making the dinosaurs were using the latest scientific ideas for how they looked.  The CG wasn't awful, but they definitely needed more budget to realize the vision.

Nitpicks aside, the equipment was remarkably accurate for the period.

I wonder how many of the extras were recruited from Vietnam reinactors. 

Dumbass Shitheel Was Involved

I finally got to the bottom of why The Lovely Harvey refuses to make a character and play in our reindeer games GURPS.

I knew she'd had a bad experience with Dumbass Shitheel and a little throw-away fantasy world I'd made for them to play in and for her to learn how to game.

But I'd no idea how bad.

She'd known Dumbass years longer than I had and he'd not only left her hanging, he actively led to her character getting killed.

That was in game.

The way he treated her about it out of game made her say, "I'm never going to do this again!"

Worse, his treatment of her was reinforced by, some, of the people at my table when she hung around an kibitzed when we visited Iowa and from how some of her questions were answered at my 30th birthday party gaming session.

I think I know which people too.

I don't think they're still in FuzzyGeff's group any more.

Hazing and chauvinism are not good ways to get women involved in the hobby, gentlemen.

She got the impression that she was thought to be stupid because she didn't know everything we knew about gaming.

How could a beginner?

She's definitely not stupid.

She was just never given a fair chance at learning the game and then was treated poorly by some people AND overhear them being chauvinistic sexist pricks while I was doing GM stuff.

In a lot of ways I am happy that I lost contact with a few of them.  Might lead to me getting a sore throat from the screaming I wanna do at them. 

SecWar Sends

Six weeks ago, Senator Mark Kelly — and five other members of Congress — released a reckless and seditious video that was clearly intended to undermine good order and military discipline. As a retired Navy Captain who is still receiving a military pension, Captain Kelly knows he is still accountable to military justice. And the Department of War — and the American people — expect justice.

 

Therefore, in response to Senator Mark Kelly’s seditious statements — and his pattern of reckless misconduct — the Department of War is taking administrative action against Captain Mark E. Kelly, USN (Ret). The department has initiated retirement grade determination proceedings under 10 U.S.C. § 1370(f), with reduction in his retired grade resulting in a corresponding reduction in retired pay.

 

To ensure this action, the Secretary of War has also issued a formal Letter of Censure, which outlines the totality of Captain (for now) Kelly’s reckless misconduct. This Censure is a necessary process step, and will be placed in Captain Kelly’s official and permanent military personnel file.

 

Captain Kelly has been provided notice of the basis for this action and has thirty days to submit a response. The retirement grade determination process directed by Secretary Hegseth will be completed within forty five days.

 

Captain Kelly’s status as a sitting United States Senator does not exempt him from accountability, and further violations could result in further action.

 

These actions are based on Captain Kelly's public statements from June through December 2025 in which he characterized lawful military operations as illegal and counseled members of the Armed Forces to refuse lawful orders. This conduct was seditious in nature and violated Articles 133 and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to which Captain Kelly remains subject as a retired officer receiving pay.

I wonder how big the reduction in rank will be.  I wonder how big it CAN be.

When I first heard this idea floated I was surprised that retirees are still held to the UCMJ.  I had no idea. 

The Elk Always Knew

GURPS: Gun Tech just landed.

It's the long awaited supplement that lets us gun nuts calculate gun stats from real world information.

Way back in 3e, we back of the napkin calculated that there was no game difference between .280 Remington, .270 Winchester and .30-06.

We did this because of my relaying the debate between my uncles Robert.

My mom's sister's husband insisted that .30-06 was ideal.

My step-mother's brother insisted that .280 Rem was superior.

Both agreed that .270 Win was clearly inferior.

I have official 4e stats for .30-06 and .270 Win that I have disputed because a smaller bullet going faster should carry more range.

.30-06 is 7d+1 pi, Acc 5 and Range 1,100/4,500.

.270 Win is 7d pi, Acc 5 and Range 900/3,600.

Gun Stats disagrees!

.270 Win with a 130gr bullet at 3,060 fps calculates to 7d+1 pi, Acc 5, and Range 1,140/4,800.

.280 Rem with a 120gr bullet at 3,150 fps calculates to 7d pi, Acc 5, and Range 880/5,500.

.30-06 with a 150gr bullet at 2,740 fps calculates to 7d pi, Acc 4 and Range 890/3,700.

.30-06 with a 150gr bullet at 2,920 fps calculates to 7d+1 pi, Acc 4 and Range 950/4,000. 

These are not what I was expecting at all!

This is just on an initial skim of the rules. 

Everything Went Bad

FuzzyGeff and Marv's character, after escaping the Battle of Kalisz ended up near the town of Złoczew.

Realizing that their small still would take almost three weeks to brew up a tank-full of wood alcohol for their Humvee, they decided to scout the town.

It's being held by about 200 Soviet troops who are holding townsfolk hostage to make the farmers and workers comply.

One of those farmers contacted the player's characters and convinced them to help.

Their plan was to take the three NPC's attached to the party and an M240 and slaughter the filthy commies as they stood at attention for morning formation.

But they failed to account for the tenacity of the sentries placed to keep the locals in line.

Inattentive and armed with a spear, an AK-74 and just one magazine, they should have been easy to sneak up on.

FuzzyGeff's plan was to do so and slit some throats from behind.

This is when we found out that, despite, having a bayonet; Marv had not taken any skills to use it either as a knife OR a bayonet.

To make matters worse, he botched his stealth roll on approach and the guard with the spear who began screaming for help.

FuzzyGeff was able to dispatch his quarry with a slash to the throat and a stab to the vitals.

Marv was not so lucky.  The dice was agin' him. 

We ended with Marv unconscious, FuzzyGeff rallying the troops to do an ambush on the Russians as they pour out of the school they've commandeered as a barracks and the Soviet's getting ready to respond to the alarm raised by sentry number 2.

We sit here until, probably, next time Fuzzygeff can come down to visit. 

Is This Thing Still On?

Took some time off blogging to get ready for FuzzyGeff to come visit.

Not everything at home went right and I didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked with him, but since he gets on with Marv well enough not all was lost for his trip.

Ran GURPS: Twilight 2000 for the first time in... um...

I don't think I have ever actually played my conversion for 4e.

My oldest archived copy of the 4e conversion pdf is from October 2016.  The oldest copy of the odt files are from Jun 2007 and they still have 3e stats for the vehicles.

I converted it to 3e more than once and the last version of that is from 2016!  The first was ad-hoc and while I was still in the Army in 1988.

For a while I maintained version of the conversion for both 3e and 4e. 

Annual ATF

Dissapator Dottie.

Coors Banquet Beer.

HC Cigars Series White Shadegrown.
 

Almost 8 Million

 In March I said that I'd broken five million visitors.

It too me three years to go from three to five million and less than a year to add another three.

Thank you, dear readers, for stopping by and reading my humble ramblings.

May 2026 treat you better than 2025!

Fine By Me

Governor Walz accuses President Trump of politicizing the massive levels of fraud occurring in Minnesota.

Fine.

If politicizing it means that it will end and the perpetrators are punished then let's be political about it!

Clearly it was already politicized because the list of states where there are large Somali colonies are not Republican controlled.

I want the fraud to end.

I want the fraudsters punished.

I want the colonists removed.

I am fine with force being used to accomplish all three things, so merely making it political doesn't bug me in the least.

Got The Heat On

It's New Year's Eve and it's time to do a cleansing sage.

That means fire.

There will be some fireworks and board games with drinking too!

Spring Tension

After learning compression, tension, torsion and shear; it drives me nuts to hear someone calling a compression spring as being under tension.

Stirring Controversy

In my experience... (second only to "no shit, there we were...")

I've found that Colt has a better trigger out of the box, but that the revolver will go out of time faster than a Smith & Wesson.

S&W's triggers "wear in" to being very good after a few hundred rounds, but can be irritating right out of the box.  S&W tends to be more durable than Colt once you have years and years of shooting it.

This position is, apparently, controversial.

It is also based on a very small sample size, I haven't bought many new revolvers.

Zero Maintenance

 "Zero maintenance," is vendor code for when it breaks you have to replace the whole thing.

h/t Freefall

Upside Downside

On the down side, I might be getting to the age that I need little blue pills.

On the up side, I might need little blue pills at my age!

Godless Furrin' Ranks

I've made a table of all the military ranks to be encountered in my T2K setting.

It was not that hard, but a pain in the butt to transcribe from wikipedia to odt file.

Not every nation uses all the same ranks as the others.  Some skip ranks.

The US has four ranks (PV1, PV2, PFC, SPC) for the single rank of "private" for example. 

Also fun is the Bundeswehr Heer and Nationale Volksarmee use the same ranks, but at slightly different levels in some places.

Contact With The Enemy

Marv and FuzzyGeff are making GURPS 4e characters from my Twilight: 2000 conversion.

"Why is there this (repeated error) here?"

What error?

"This one.  Oh and another here too."

FUUUUUUUCK!

I've sent the pdf out to about a hundred people and not once did I get feedback on the character template section.

I remember the patron error.  At one time every military template had it.  Then I removed it; or so I thought.  About half the support templates still had it.

Forgetting that 4e changed shooting a select fire rifle from two skills (light-auto and rifle) to just one (rifle) also happened.  Since light-auto also encompassed light machine guns I changed Guns TL/8 (Light-Auto) to Guns TL/8 (LMG). 

Move To Hill 410

From the text as written in Funny New Guys and comparing it to the real world...

You cannot get there from here.

The text says that Plei Ya Bo is half a mile west of Firebase 23.  There is no suitable hill, so I put it 2.94 miles away on top of a 410m elevation.

The base is now 18.79 miles to Plei Hodrong Thoung; 18.09 miles to Plei Me's Special Forces camp; and 28.32 miles to the Pleiku air base.

For Sufficiently Large Definitions Of Near

Firebase 23 on Hill 562 "near" the villages of Plei Hodrong Thoung and Plei Ya Bo; 23 miles Southwest of Pleiku air field, 10 miles north of the SF Camp at Plei Me.

You might be able to embiggen...

Plei Me is the southern point of the triangle.  Plei Ya Bo is the western point, Plei Hodrong Thoung is the eastern.  Pleiku is off the map to the northeast.

Firebase 23 is at the little kink of the east-west leg of the triangle.  There is no 562m elevation there.

 It's more like Hill 450.

This is the only likely hill between the "nearby" villages and fitting the distances from the other two landmarks.

Assuming the QL19 highway is the same as Route 6C this is a good spot.  It's within the 7 mile, 105mm howitzer range of the road (about 5 miles), but too far from Plei Me (13.6 miles) to support it.

I think, now, that the "nearby" villages mark points on route 6C which is a smuggling path from over the Cambodian border rather than an actual road.  In that case, the path goes right past the firebase.

That's also why the commies want it destroyed, bringing us to the beginning of the campaign! 

Boris Please

Funny New Guys is set in 1967.

"Boris the Spider," by The Who came out in 1966.

Will spider-chimera get the, affectionate, nickname of "Boris?"

Or does Boris become the n-word for them?

Or both... depending on how mixed the company. 

We Can't

Can't stop Sharia because religious freedom.

Can't deport anyone because birthright citizenship.

Can't stop illegal aliens from... anything because they have the same rights as those here legally.

And I wonder.

Was the Constitution and Bill of Rights always a suicide pact?

Did the founders and their extensive notes and correspondence about freedom and liberty intend for it to become the chains of anarcho-tyranny? 

Because That's Why

Whenever anyone questions why you've bought any particular gun just reply, "because it delights me you joyless scold!"

I've had this conversation about my .45 Colt Anaconda a couple of time and I am fully aware that they made and make them in .44 Magnum.

Don't care.

That giant gun in the, by modern standards, under-powered round gives me the giggles and I really can't see anything changing that.

Strangely, I never see them complain about a S&W 25-5  when the Model 29 is the same gun except in .44 Magnum...

I get the same delight from my useless .25 ACP guns.

I went out of my way to find a .38 Super Gov't Model in as plain-Jane trim as I could get and then "ruined" it by putting a short trigger and arched mainspring housing on it.  It delights me to do so.

Having a clone of an M16, M16A1, M16A2 and M16A4 delights me.

The XM177E2 clone delights me even though I had to make a short barrel rifle of it and am only a fraction of an inch shorter than a 16" barrel with the moderator screwed onto the end of the 11.5" barrel. 

The purple AR delights me.

The people who are grimly utilitarian about gun ownership should really start relaxing.

Once your needs are met, Maslow, you can move up the pyramid. 

PEQ-2 Mounting In More Detail

In the dark times, before there were Rail Adapter Systems, you clamped a bracket to your barrel:

Then you put on your handguards and attach a mount to the bracket through the holes in the handguard and then attached the AN/PEQ-2 to the mount.

SIMPLE! 

The advent of RAS makes it a lot simpler:

You just mount the bracket straight to the RAS handguard and Robert is your mother's brother.
 

Cyberpunk

I've done a few attempts at doing Cyberpunk.

They run into problems.

The biggest one is something that happens to a lot of campaigns.  People stop showing up on the regular so you can't plan on their role in the party.

The setting itself is a bit of a problem since most of the books are (were?) single protagonist and most games are multi-player.

But the biggest problem is the net-runner part.

First, too many friends knew that computers did not work that way, and would be stupid to make them work that way.

Even accepting that computers work that way, the guy with the deck gets their own mini-adventure while the rest of the party twiddles their thumbs.

The two most successful versions of it I ran didn't have the net-runner deal.

One was like combining Navy SEALS and Sneakers.  It was fun, but the party got butchered by a competing team.

The other was having the party be cops in 2037 Des Moines.  That worked shockingly well.

Doing a Shadowrunesque version with GURPS worked pretty well, and the reason computers worked like the fiction was magic computers are inherently so much faster and near unlimited storage as compared to silicon that the security shit you have to put up with is worth it.

That's the only time I've ever seen anyone try to explain why computers don't work like the real world. 

Power To Truth

 

 

There's a reason I have a '12 Caprice PPV not a '68 Chevelle.

Totally Worth It

 

A DIY sequential fuel injection conversion for a 1978 280Z!

Spoiler...  At the end he gets it back to stock power and mileage.

I'm guessing that it will be a lot more driveable.

Why didn't it make more power than the stock rating?  Those things are determined by the mechanical parts he didn't touch.

He got power back because he fixed the parts that had become too worn to work and were too complex to properly troubleshoot.  Even Sarah-N-Tuned just replaced everything with new-old-stock. 

Cart Ahead Of The Horse

While double checking a couple items for T2K, like the AN/PEQ-2, I noticed that they all pre-date rail systems that are common today.

"That's impressive, where on the rifle does it go?"

Doesn't that looks like a pain in the ass when it comes time to inspect under the handguards?

Proprietary mountings were the norm before the widespread adoption of Picatinny rails. 

Character Building Exercise

Tomorrow I have to get two of my players to make a couple of characters in advance of FuzzyGeff's imminent (not eminent you stupid autocorrupt) arrival.

JT needs a Funny New Guys AND a Twilight: 2000 character.

Marv just needs a T2K.

I have suggested that Marv make a 27 year younger version of himself and create a former Pershing II missile technician.  Making yourself as a character has a long history for helping figure out the rules in a skill based game.  Marv was once an electronics technician for the MGM-29 Sergeant.

Marv's character's commanding officer, "Well, we've fired all the rounds we had and there will be no more made...  Here's a rifle, welcome to the infantry!"

Marv's character, "FUCK!" 

T2K has the Pershing II making it to 1997 because the INF treaty wasn't on anyone's radar in 1985 when T2K was first published.  I think one of the modules even mentions a ruined city having been hit by one. 

"Vote For Me Because I Hate Jews!" <-- Not My Position

Governor DeSantis is term limited from running again.

That means every "Republican" in the world is putting their foot in the ring.

So far I have gotten Fecesbook recommended posts from two that are all about divesting from Israel.

Oh and some family first stuff too, but divest from Israel!

SIGH.  I thought BDS was done.

Just as a lot of Jews were considering jumping ship from voting Democrat to voting Republican too.

I recommend they register Republican so they can help pick a gubernatorial candidate who's not aligned with the National Socialist American Worker's Party.

Some of the verbiage of that "family first" stuff sure rings familiar.

History doesn't repeat, it rhymes.

The good news, however, is these people don't seem to capturing much in the way of voter recognition. 

Made Out Pretty Well

Harvey got me this absolutely deadly projectile weapon!

The "primers" are the triggers and the spring that lobs the plastic projectile is contained inside the case.  The problem is when you load a round and close the action, the "primer" hits the breech face and goes off.

3D printing makes for a lot of fun!

A sword shaped dice box was not something I'd even thought of, and here it is.

Willard gave the best gift, though!

He says that it's been whining about being at his house among the Smith and Wessons.

If it looks familiar, it's the same gun I sold him to pay for my air conditioning a few years ago.

When To Be Weird

FuzzyGeff did some weird for T2K by making a sniper that thought his M21 rifle was enchanted.  The stock was carved with runes and he spoke words over it at night to maintain the magic.  This character and his rifle made two incredible rolls in a row that affirmed his belief AND convinced a couple of the other characters that it was magic in action.

This is being weird correctly.

Then there was Doug.  We shall call him Doug because that is his name.

Doug wholeheartedly embraced the idea that you could make ANYTHING with GURPS.

And he did.

The problem was he didn't do so within the confines of being a member of the party or adherence to the concepts of the world.

Doug was a disruptive agent.

He routinely did not take hints and resented when more blatant methods were used.

Nothing we tried would get him to get along with the party, so I eventually had to ban him from my table.

The New Mauser

The AR-15 has become the new Mauser.

Just about everyone is converting to some variation of the AR now.  Some closer to the original than others...

 

Just Like Grampa

The Sportsmaster only gets a decent cleaning once a decade.

It doesn't NEED cleaned like an arms room was taking it back.

I always do the bore after I get home, but most of the time let the mechanism get dirty.

And .22 rimfire always leaves a lot of gunk behind.