Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Building a Comprehensive Vehicle Design Canon in the Face of Evolving Rules

Steve Jackson came out with Uncle Albert’s Catalogue From Hell… why didn’t he ever come out with the AADA Vehicle Guide From Hell? And why in the 5th edition did he just scrap all of those perfectly good designs?

Well… there are many reasons behind the decision, but there’s actually a technical reason that quickly puts the brakes on any such proposal.

If you go through all of the old car designs… and if you rebuild them from scratch according to the Compendium Second Edition Rules… you will find that as often as not, the totals for cost, weight, and top speed end up not matching.

There are numerous reasons for this: some equipment was either changed or left out of Compendium second edition, rules for top speed changed a couple of times, and then there are the typos and errors…. Sometimes it’s clear what the mistake is from the context, sometimes not. Sometimes old designs that came out at exactly $15,000 cannot be made to do the same under consistent and revised rules no matter how much fiddling you do.

In other words, it’s a major headache to go over all of this stuff– and the numerous errata that were published don’t always settle the issue!

How do we keep the new game from ending up this way?

Actually, Scott Haring has this by the tail:

“In the course of testing the new Vehicle Design System, we ran every design already published for the new edition of Car Wars to make the sure the new system didn’t make any designs invalid.”

Every time you alter the design system… you have to go back to the entire canon of vehicle designs… and make sure that you haven’t broken anything.

That’s a lot of work. (By the way, that’s the same principle behind Unit Testing Frameworks that we use in software development.) The process can be automated, though, so there’s no reason not to do it.

The development of the old Car Wars game was so dynamic and so… uh… bold… that a set of canonical designs never got established. The available gadgets changed so fast that no one would ever use a design more than a year old.

Because of the way the new system is marketed, Steve Jackson cannot afford to ever invalidate the current 5th edition designs. It is one of the things that I like best about 5th edition: that there is a set of standard designs available. Of course, by buying half of the currently available material (my pal bought the other half), I have quite a bit of cash sunk into 12 glossy colorful laminated vehicle record sheets.

Steve… Scott…. Please don’t break the new canon of Vehicle Designs. And once the new design rules are released, please don’t break them either. You guys seem to be onto this allready– please don’t compromise it!

I don’t regret what happened in the good old days…. There was a lot of stuff that needed to experimented with and tinkered with back then. It’s all part of the development process. With the 5th edition, you all have demonstrated that you learned a great deal during the past 20 years… and going forward with the new system, we just can’t afford to alienate those that have allready bought in.

Of course… breaking the game can be tolerated a little easier if you offer killer economical “Compendium” type releases later on…. But there are other alternatives that should be considered first… especially if they don’t involve me throwing out my glossy laminated vehicle record sheets! (They are pretty. Much better than SFB and Battletech!)

In developing a campaign setting for a Car Wars setting, it’s crucial to know what is available at any given point of time. Therefore, any list of equipment for Car Wars must include the date at which it became available. Vehicle designs should also include the date the car was produced– and variants and options should list their dates as well.

With this information, campaigns could be run in specific time periods anywhere from the Chassis and Crossbow days on into the far future. The Sunday Drivers/Crash City scenarios have entirely different flavors depending on the equipment that is around!

This sort of thing has long been a feature of Star Fleet Battles, and Battletech partakes of it to some extent, too. I’ve long been curious to know what kind of world it was where the Hotshot design could take the Division 15 championships 2 years in a row. What kind of vehicles were they dueling against? Was the Hotshot actually a thing to be feared on those freeways of yore? The background material just doesn’t say…. It’d be a lot more interesting if it did!

Taking this concept even further, you could build random encounter tables by year and by geographic location. And with that you could create scenarios and campaigns based on long distance travel in different areas.

Finally, one of the most exciting things about playing Car Wars back in the day was having to adapt as new equipment became available. With the above information, the Referee can start the campaign at a specific time and place, and then steadily release new gadgets on a quarterly basis. Players that don’t upgrade their vehicles will get to face off against opponents that have invested in retrofitting….

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If the old 10 phase movement chart seems like a lot, try SFB….

32 phases called ‘impulses.’ (I suppose that was just to confuse people who might think it had something to do with impulse power??)

Each phase has an ‘impulse procedure’ that is nearly as long as the entire Car Wars 5th edition rules…!

To really play the game right, you have to have the “Speed Changes During a Turn” rule from Advanced Missions… very tricky to get the hang of and plenty of sticklers here for new players to get confused on.

And though you can’t design starships in SFB (not the same way that you do in Car Wars anyway…) you get the same kind of complexity every single turn by having to fill out your Energy Allocation Form.

The net result of this complexity is that you get the most sophisticated range of tactical options that are available in just about any war game. It also takes a lot of time to learn and to play it. And there are no 6 person scenarios that can be played to completion in a single sitting.

SFB and Car Wars Compendium 2nd edition both have this in common: “Secret and Simultaneous Fire”. This rule is very realistic, but a pain to implement. The makers of SFB published Battle Cards to help people pull this off. I spent some time myself to make up my own with index cards. Each player would supposedly play one every phase revealing their orders.

In reality, this idea never got traction. Battle Cards haven’t been reprinted and our Car Wars games drifted away into the usual off-the-cuff fire announcements anyway. It was just too much work to try to consistently implement the rule– especially if it was just an optional suggestion. This of course led to the “me, too” fire response during the same phase that anyone announced fire. This is one more instance of Car Wars players anticipating the 5th edition rules!

“Secret and Simultaneous Fire” is a good idea, but computers can handle it much better than us table-top gamers. It’s critical that the rule be enforced in SFB because it’s much more common for people to pick up random weapon hits on an attack. That made players think hard on whether or not they should fire first. (If they didn’t take out a photon or two, they’d be in big trouble….)

Anyway… the 5th edition rules codify the way we tended to play Car Wars. The new rules fit the feel of the game and it’s easy on the referees. Players that like the old rules can still implement them in the new game if a particularly hairy situation merits it. The standard game, on the other hand, should be as simple and quick-playing as possible. (SFB rightly makes distinctions between its “Basic Game” and the “Commander’s Rules.” Car Wars should follow that pattern if it’s going to have additional complexity layered in….)

Because of this rule change and others like it, we can play twice as many games in an evening– and we look forward to the game twice as much!

Deluxe Car Wars (10 phase movement chart)–

Movement: “When vehicles move during the same phase, the faster one moves first. For vehicles traveling the same speed, the one whose driver has the faster reflexes may choose when he wants to move.” (p.

Fire: “Combat may occur during any phase, before or after movement. To attack, a player simply announces that he is firing , and names the weapon being fired and its target. If a vehicle is being moved at the moment he announces the attack, the vehicle completes its movement for that phase; then the attack is resolved. Results of an attack are applied immediately, before any other vehicle can return fire or move.” (p. 14)

Car Wars Compendium 2nd edition (5 phase movement chart)–

Movement (addendum): “When vehicles are moving at high speeds in close quarters, it may be desirable to move the cars in alternating one inch increments during each phase, until that phase’s movement is done. Keep in mind that each vehicle is still limited to one maneuver per phase.” (p. 5)

Fire (change): “Combat may occur during any phase, after movement. To attack, a player simply announces that he is firing, and names the weapon being fired and its target. Results of all attacks during a phase are applied simultaneously. The referee may wish to have players declare fire secretly, by writing their fire/no fire order down on a slip of paper and handing it to him, or by some other method.” (p. 2

Car Wars, 5th Edition (3 phase movement)–

Movement (change): “In each phase, the fastest vehicle goes first. In case of ties, the player with the higher Driver skill goes first. If there’s still a tie, roll dice. The low roller goes first. Keep the same order until the next turn, even if the speeds change in mid-turn due to a crash.” (p. 3)

Fire (change): “A vehicle may declare fire at any point during its move, except during a maneuver or during a phase in which the driver failed a control roll. To attack, a player simply announces that he is firing, and names the weapon being fired and its target. If the target is still elligible to fire, and has a weapon that can hit the attacker, he may declare return fire. Only the attacker can be targeted. Return fire is considered simultaneous….”

Battletech tactics are much more positional than Car Wars. If you win the initiative roll in one-on-one, just put yourself in a spot where your weapons do better than his. If its lance combat, you see people saving back their small/fast mechs to move last… and then bringing them behind the slow/heavy mechs to shoot their Medium lasers into the backs.

Battletech is much more dependent on luck: a good critical hit can often take out a mech and the positions that make these shots possible can be won with a single initiative roll. Loosing three initiative rolls in a row can cost you the game!

The Car Wars dog fight moves too fast to allow such chess-like maneuvers– but initiative goes to the highest bidder! Whoever’s willing to be the most reckless (or whoever has the better acceleration) gets to move first. This crucial component of the tactical equation is NOT left to the roll of the dice!

Having initiative isn’t everything in Car Wars, but there are times where having it can be decisive. A car fired upon can automatically return fire. But if you have initiative, you can move into an opponent’s weaponless arc to fire your weapons. If you began the turn in just the right spot, he may not get a chance to return fire at all unless he’s willing to do a violent maneuver! Even if you don’t go for the kill, you can still sometimes score a point blank shot when your opponent has to be satisfied with taking a standard one.

Combining this tactic with a ram can end the game. At 80 miles an hour, you get 8 inches of movement in a single phase. Don’t end your turn within this killer zone of another car! At the same time, drivers going for this kind of position are more likely to wreck and have less control over the exact position of their car. They end up having to go straight for a lot more of their turn. The layout of the arena has a big affect on whether or not a driver can pull this off.

Compared to earlier versions of Car Wars, this is all a snap as far as rules go. Ai yai yai… the number of arguments we used to have over speed modifiers back in the days of Compendium 2nd edition! Every second of the game was fraught with bitterness– “At this angle, your car gets half it’s speed modifiers.” “No-uh!” “Yuh-huh!” And so on…. Argh!

All the angst is gone in the 5th edition. Duelists spend more time thinking about tactics and less time arguing over rules. Taking out those complicated speed modifiers REALLY helps the game a lot.

Thank you Steve Jackson!!

There’s a pleasure in designing a Car Wars vehicle that no other game has captured.

When people come up with their designs… the arena provides an environment where they can PROVE their mettle. It’s objective. Good tactics and luck affect the outcome, but in general the quality of the design goes a long way toward determining the outcome.

The “laws” of the game strike down all idiocy. In a sense, it’s okay to be a Munchkin in Car Wars. Everyone can be one and it won’t ruin the game. In fact, trying to outwit all those other Munchkins is actually kinda fun.

If you try this in a GURPS game with a 100 point limit… then you get into all of the one-eyed one-legged illiterate manic depressive telekinetic sorcerer type stuff going on. Munchkins are a problem there and they interfere with the group dynamics and the overall narrative flow.

And even with GURPS Traveller Starships…. If you come up with a cool design… there’s not really a way to prove how good it is. How ‘good’ it is is beside the point. What you’re really doing is coming up with ever more detailed backround material for the purpose of providing an interesting backdrop for character interaction.

After enjoying Car Wars for so long… I continually get disappointed by any other game I try to pick up. Even if I’m playing another game… I still think of myself as being a “Car Wars” player!

The Car Wars background material is a result of the 70’s grognard influence hanging on into the eighties. I remember as a kid reading the timeline the Car Wars opened up with. I was only in elementary school at the time, so I couldn’t really pay attention to read it all the way through. (Of course, I read it now and am shocked to see that I’m living in the timeline. I really never expected to see this day– surely the Russians should have blown us up by now, right?)

The Car Wars background, like that of Ogre, was not designed to be compelling in and of itself. The Car Wars background was merely a form of “gaming glue” rigged together for the sole intent of rationalizing a series of death-prone anarchistic freeway and arena combats.

As the system grew, each new scenario required additions to the timeline in order to justify the new rules and adventures. This theme was followed religiously on everything from the history of terrorism and the Boy Scout Commandos all the way down to the introduction of Armored Boats. War Games are simulations– and science fiction games back then had to at least go through the motions of being concerned about ‘realism’ and plausible future histories.

(Today, we open up the new Starter Sets and… it’s just now there. There’s not even a preamble about how successful Car Wars was or how the new system will ultimately play out. Hobbits would be very displeased with this: any event of such importance should be accompanied by a “few appropriate words.”)

Anyway, the GURPS books for Car Wars are odd. Your typical worldbook covers a fully fleshed out book series– or at the very least a good hackneyed gaming premise. When you read a GURPS Autoduel book, you see a war game’s background material through a lens focused on grist for role-playing scenarios. The material is being treated the same way as Foster’s Humanx novels or Brin’s Uplift series.

Now, I do appreciate how the original GURPS Autoduel book brought Amateur Night to life. Even such an old standby can be energized by a referee that’s willing to stretch into the realm of GMing….

But somehow… I’m not sure that the background can grow indefinitely as a full-on role playing focused genre. At any rate, GM’s that are interested in that have a lot of work cut out for them. If you want to run a full on cutting edge GURPS campaign… you’ll be stuck adapting a lot of old material into the new system. GURPS Autoduel 2nd edition has not been well supported with magazine articles and new supplements.

No, I don’t think regurgitating and repackaging to old material is the way to go. You can’t go back. Long time ADQ readers will probably see any rehash as being inferior to “the good old days.”

And so we see that Steve Jackson Games is leaving the door open revising the background: not only did they omit the original timeline in the Starter Sets, but they’ve added a new gimmick to the sales blurb:

“After the grain blight . . .
“After the mutant plague . . .
“After the cities turned into fortresses . . .
“After the countryside turned into a war zone . . .
“After everything fell apart . . .

“The roads belonged to no one.
“And the right of way went to the biggest guns.”

Mutant Plague, huh? Where are they going to go with that? Reading through the Arena Book, it doesn’t seem as if things have changed all that much, though. Pedestrians show up in events more often, so that makes the arena combats sound much more gritty and violent. Also there’s talk of a cycle gang made up of Amazons…. Hmmm….

On the whole, we could be passing up an opportunity here. Before we release a new design system, before we hammer out a series of definitive scenarios and adventures, before we retool our spreadsheets… we need to look at how Car Wars stacks up against other table top war games and other post-apocalyptic role playing games. We need to set some goals for this whole project that will set us up to delve into new ground and richer deposits of gaming goodness. THEN we need to rethink our background material in light of these goals.

The background material for Ogre and Car Wars was rigged to produce a very specific outcome– an environment perfect for table top wargaming. If our goals for the system extend beyond the original boundaries, then we need to come up with a set of premises that can establish our new vision.

The real beauty of Car Wars is that Munchkin types are restrained by a set of ‘real’ economic and physical laws. Granted, the laws of economics and physics are pretty twisted… but there is a method to the madness.

Years ago I introduced the game to a die-hard Battletech junky. He immediately set about to designing the ULTIMATE car. It had a killer set of weaponry and could go from 0 to 60 before you could blink. It ended up costing $60,000 or so– not including the cost of his funky hero tires.

Of course, it was black.

So I tell him, “that’s a lousy design.” (Ouch.) Probably the meanest thing you could say to a power gamer, right?? He gave me this look like he maybe wasn’t going to get a chance to come over that much anymore….

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Look. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll take a convoy of three cheapo $20,000 cars. I’ll be nice, I won’t even take any dropped weapons. Let’s see how many of my cars you can take out in a freeway duel.”

So here he comes… barreling down the freeway. He blew up one of my cars while another one pulled into position for a T-bone. In less than twenty minutes, I had to explain to him what the confetti rule was. Carbon Aluminum frames just don’t seem to do that well in collisions, after all….

He walked away from the table with some food for thought. Little did I know that I had created a monster…. But it was very satisfying at the time to see the bizarre compulsions of a power-gamer punished by the common sense forces of a fairly decent game system. Economically, his design made little sense in anyone’s fleet. (Sadly… the Midville supplement got in on this wackiness with it’s patently absurd super-dooper TV show police cruisers….)

The Munchkin went on to become our group’s most pernicious player. Our arenas became haunted by metal armored gas guzzling ram cars that mounted flechette guns. It seemed that for all intents and purposes, he had finally ‘cracked’ the design system. It appeared that we either could switch to similar designs that took advantage of every single design imbalance… or just eat pavement.

The gaming group then began to drift apart at that point. We began playing games like Axis & Allies and Shogun when we did get together….

Anyway… the lesson here is that as you add equipment and gadgets to the game, you should never add something that makes other equipment useless. Laser Guidance Link, Ramplates, Spoilers, Airdams, APFSDS ammo, and Gas Engines took a lot of fun out of the game because they made so much of the other equipment irrelevant. It’s good to see the 5th edition right some of these wrongs. A clean slate was necessary after all of the hubaloo in the later Uncle Albert’s. (I was glad as anybody to get the Compendium, but really… no Uncle Albert’s catalogue ever topped the first two.)

Every piece of equipment should enhance a variety of vehicle concepts and philosophies. If any design philosophy can dominate the game too much, then the game will be no more fun than an Ogre game where the all-G.E.V. force can win every single time….

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.