Supporting Car Wars: Foundations for Growth and Development Part I

The Swiss Army Knife and the Leatherman are great tools. There are hundreds of tasks where these gadgets contain all you need to get the job done quickly and neatly. But you don’t take on a big project with only a Leatherman. If you’re making a chair, building a house, or fixing a circuit board, then success depend on your having something more.

Of course, I’m leading up to a metaphore here:

The GURPS basic set is a sort of Swiss Army Knife. GURPS Vehicles is a heavy duty Leatherman. On the other hand, Star Fleet Battles is a draw knife, Battletech is a nail gun, and 5th edition Car Wars is a soldering iron.

Even though you can get generic utility tools that are good for all kinds of things, there’s still lots of tools that are good to have around. GURPS Vehicles might just be the cats meow, but it just can’t do “Car Wars” like Car Wars does. The rules platform dedicated to the job can sacrifice its general applicability in order to become perfectly suited to the task at hand.

On the other hand, Car Wars did evolve it’s own system for handling characters, skills, and experience. Some of the most popular articles in ADQ were geared towards a blend of autoduelling and role playing. However, Car Wars character rules weren’t really designed…. they just kind of accrued over the years with more and more things getting added on at random. It all started with “grenade equivalents” and went downhill from there.

In this way… GURPS and Car Wars need each other: If Car Wars tries to do the things that GURPS does best… then Car Wars ends up getting silly. But if GURPS tries to absorb Car Wars by encouraging an upgrade to a clunkier more complex GURPS system for vehicle combat… the “Car Wars-type” players go play something else.

The first step in the support and development of Car Wars should be an article that condenses and extracts everything you need to use GURPS Lite with Car Wars 5th edition. A series of articles should then be released on a quarterly or bi-monthly basis that follow up on the premise with fully fleshed out adventures and scenarios.

The articles should attempt to distill the essence of Car Wars. They should be designed with introducing the new player in mind whether he’s a role-playing type or war game addict. These adventures should not be created haphazardly; the adventures should be tested and come with designers notes and play tester comments. Later adventures could focus on specialized topics such as using GURPS Cyberpunk with Car Wars adventures or creating Autoduelling themed worlds for GURPS Traveller.