Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (role-playing game)

The game is set in the post-apocalyptic world of Mark Schultz's underground comic book series Xenozoic Tales. (ISBN 1-55878-073-4) Players take the roles of humans trying to survive against sabre-tooth tigers, dinosaurs and other creatures from the distant past.

The game uses the second edition Twilight: 2000 rules. Players create a character defined by six attributes: Strength, Agility, Constitution, Charisma, Intelligence and Education. The character's skills, each ranging from 1–10, are derived from the ability scores. To use a skill, a player must roll a 10-sided die under the character's applicable skill score.[1]

In the September 1992 edition of Dragon (Issue 185), Rick Swan liked the simple and easy, laid-back approach of most of the rules. He was therefore surprised at the complexity of the combat rules, calling them "gratingly out of synch with the user-friendly approach of the rest of the game." Swan used calculating damage from a demolition charge as an example: "You divide the Damage Point value by two, take the square root of the results, and multiply it by 5. Square root? What’s a square root doing in a game with rampaging dinosaurs?" Swan concluded that most gamers should likely give the game a pass: "[Combat is] too hard by half. Fans of the comic book should get a kick out of the informative sourcebook material and Mark Schultz’s exquisite illustrations. Roleplayers, however, may wonder if a premise this modest is worth all the effort."[1]