More notes on Sunday's game

Here are a few more notes on Sunday's DF game.

Windstorm really does need to do some damage to vaporous creatures, or at least move them.

I'm thinking it should do 1d at the normal level, 2d at the tornado level. That's the same as Air Jet equal to 1/4 the power of the spell. At the same time, it should fling the Diffuse or vaporous creature out with knockback appropriate to the damage done, or outside the radius, whichever is larger.

So a ST 0 diffuse air creature would get knocked by as if it had ST 1, and go 1 yard per point of damage. Most swarms would be badly damaged, but hey, a windstorm should do that to flying bug or bat storms. Kill a few or a lot, disrupt the weaker ones completely.

That's still enough to disrupt most flying and diffuse swarms in a few seconds but it's not as effective as just attacking them directly. If it's too weak I might double it to 2d/4d, but it's a very effective spell right now, which is why it comes up almost every single fight. I do need to play up its disadvantages more.

We talked a bit about the spell - if it really did tornado-force winds and all that entails, from wind force to damage to flinging objects that could hit with lethal speed, etc., the cost per area would have to be staggering. So it's just a swirling wind effect that mocks real winds. Effective, but not "wouldn't a real tornado just rip the whole fort out of the ground?" level.

Techniques came up for the first time in a while. Is it worth trying Acrobatic Stand at -6? What's the penalty for Head Butt? Etc. Some we use so often it's not a big deal - long weapons in close combat, for example - treating it more as a situational modifier than anything else. But all the varieties that don't come up except very occasionally in DF? I have a solution I need to spend some time writing about.

GURPS Character Assistant is my go-to tool for maintaining current copies of all of the PCs. I wish it had a few features, though. One that would really help me in play would be if instead of capping your stats and skills at their actual maxima, it would allow you to break them but flag them in red or highlight the box. That way when I have a human knight with the maximum ST 20 and someone puts Might +4 on him, I can just add 4 to his ST and have everything reflect that. That would just be very handy. I could make another tool that does this, but I'd rather just have that little feature in my current tool!