Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

We did a gaming session last Sunday.  Only three players showed up and the GM just worked over our character concepts with us.  He was hoping to get at least one more person to show up to be the “hook” that drew the rest of us together on the adventure….

For the second half of the session we geeked out on a variety of topics: friends that disappeared after getting into World of Warcraft, why MMORPG games would never be a true role-playing experience, Infocom, Choose Your Own Adventure books, and so forth.

Geek talk is a tricky game in itself.  If you luck up and tell an anecdote that is actually interesting and funny to everyone else, you have to back off and let someone else have a chance to one-up you.  Nobody’s interesting if they just keep droning on and on and on….  Of course, to be a geek… you have to be completely into something that is so obscure and silly that no one be interested in it!  And to be really geeky, you have to be the sort that misses those social clues people start giving you to gently ask you to shut-up.  Ah… but you’re talking with other geeks, so the chances of overlapping interests increase.  But because geeks are such a fickle lot, it’s just too easy to get a “critical failure…”

I recalled that one player there had said something about playing Battletech at a previous game.  I asked him if he’d played lately and he said he’d played some… when he was twelve!  (Subtext: what kind of moron cares about that game anymore!?)  Definitely a critical failure….

I’d say we did fairly well for a bunch of geeks.  We kept it civil and didn’t engage in too many I-Know-More-About-Subject-XYZ-Than-You-Do games.  Still… I found myself wishing we had an Illuminati deck or something….

When I heard that Deluxe Car Wars appeared in Wil Wheaton’s collection of short stories, I absolutely had to track it down to read it.  I was disappointed at first… the first couple of stories are sentimental and didn’t quite draw me in.  The Car Wars reference was just a brief cameo to highlight Wil’s geekiness as a teenager.  No spinouts, bootleggers, or flaming subcompacts appear in the action of the stories….

However… the story about the Star Trek convention is surprisingly good.  I felt so many emotions reading it… going from excited to angry to horrified to cracking up to sad and all back through the list again.  The language is a bit off color, but nothing you don’t hear at a typical highschool.  The writing is not bad at all, though.  It’s strange… this guy that everybody (well, at least geeks, anyway) loved to hate is actually a real person.  If I ever watch the Next Generation again I’ll be rooting for the guy instead of rolling my eyes at him.  If you don’t think you can possibly ever become a fan of Wil Wheaton, then definitely read this book!

So buy the book because its Wil’s stuff.  You’ll be disappointed if you’re looking for cool Car Wars anecdotes like I was… but the rest of the book more than makes up for it.  It’s very entertaining and witty.

Finally– a car that suits your individuality and style.  For the duellist that isn’t satisfied with anything less than the best, we provide cutting edge weaponry and the latest in Armorplast(r) technology.  The Convergence from Mistui… it all comes together… right here.

CONVERGENCE.  Midsized; x-hvy chassis; hvy. suspension; large power plant; 6 solid tires, driver, gunner.  Armor: F 45, B 40, R 30, L 30, T 30, U 20.  Mounts laser in turret, MG front, and MG back.  Carries targeting computers for both driver and gunner.  HC 3; acceleration 5 mph.  Weight 5760 lbs; cost $24,820.

LO-TEK OPTION– Replace laser in turret with two linked MG’s.  Remove gunner’s targeting computer.  Add 12 points of armor.  Weight 5,756 lbs; costs $19,062.

 [Here's a car designed to work against the cyclist tactics of the previous post.  It can be improved upon, I'm sure, but every set of designs built with the pocket box rules has to have at leasted one heavily armored Mid with a turreted laser.]

My thoughts have been on the original Pocket Box and the cycle Pack Attack scenario lately.  (Keep in mind that dropped weapons only fired once per second even when on automatic back in that day….)  Just consider this a retrospective on dueling tactics of 2031….

The Last Refuge of the Honour-less

In the arena… targeting tires is a pretty wimpy tactic.  That such an act is dishonourable should mean nothing to the typical biker scum sort, of course.  Besides… you need to salvage the kill and too many hits on the internals can ruin the take.  Seeing as cycles attack from behind and also that there’s no Wheel Guards available in the original pocket box, a six-wheeled chassis and solid tires are the only deterrent against this cravenly and despicable tactic.

Close Only Counts…

If your cycles have particularly good acceleration, you might try sending a couple of cycles on a flyby if the mark is going particularly slow for whatever reason.  Consider tossing grenades for a good chance of taking out more than one tire at a time and/or quickly knocking out the tires that have been damaged by the rearguard.  Of course… if your flyby’s are acceleration 15 and armed with minedroppers, that wouldn’t hurt too much, either….  If the car could mount AP flechette grenades, this probably won’t work very well… but remember… those nifty little items weren’t available in 2031!

The Three Amigos

Your cycles can be dropped with just a couple of good hits, depending on your armor.  Your cycles probably can’t afford hi-tech targeting gear while your opponent in the fancy car probably can.  How can you even this up?

Attack with a lead formation of three cycles.  As soon as he starts shooting at your cycles, have the target of the enemy fire brake while his two buddies accelerate.  If the target dies, this helps keep your lead cycles from having to swerve around him.  On the next turn, your two lead cycles pick up a bonus for sustained fire… and the target can cancel out the 4-wheeler’s sustained fire by increasing the range.  If the target survives the following turn, send him directly behind one of the lead cycles in order to break the car’s sustained fire bonus altogether.  Get ready to repeat this process when he targets another one of your cycles.

To counter this tactic, a road car should carry a gunner and have at least two weapon systems that can fire to the rear.  Of course, if your were running a cycle gang… you probably wouldn’t take on vehicles that had six-wheeled chassis and a gunner, now would you??

For the cyclist more interested in getting out of trouble than starting it… Cycle Concepts presents the Pareto.  Smooth handling… tough… quick.  It will take you there and back again… and beyond.

PARETO.  Light cycle, large power plant, hvy. suspension, PR tires.  Armor: F 23, B 20.  HC 2; acceleration 15 mph.  Weight 797 lbs; cost $4220.

PARETO SIDECAR for above:  Hvy. sidecar; imp. suspension; PR tire.  Armor: F 5, R 5, L 5, B 5, U 5.  Mounts SS back.  One rider.  Wt. 750 lbs.; costs $1,575.  Cycle + sidecar HC 3, acceleration 10 mph.

[With the cycle, sidecar, and two sets of body armor costing $6,295, it doesn't seem like its that cost effective to take a two person unit into a game.  Maybe if you downgrade to HD tires, downgrade the suspension, and downgrade the powerplant it can become more feasable....  Still, with just the original pocket box, you've only got a couple of guys with SMG's and grenades....  Nah... I think I'll stick to little vehicles that carry big guns.]

This producted is slated for release on e23… sometime in the future.  The playtest is complete and David Pulver is working on a second draft now.  It will be edited by Scott Haring– you know, that fellow that put together Deluxe Car Wars, and the vehicle rules for GURPS Autoduel 1e, and that edited Autoduel Quarterly for about 4 years.

I’m really curious how well this product will do vehicle combat of course.  It seems that RPG’s are a niche market… and people that like design systems are a niche within that niche… and people that actually like to play out combats with their designs are an even smaller niche of the second niche that is a niche of the first niche.  Capice?

But there are some good ideas about vehicles in GURPS 4e Campaigns….  I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes in the new Vehicles book.

This is the continuing story of my adventures as a Car Wars crazed youth.  (Part I, Part II, and Part III were posted quite a while back….)

 So the thing about Car Wars… everybody played it.  It was like Magic: The Gathering and Halo put together.  All of my friends played it and lots of my friends’ friends played it.  You’ve got to remember the times, too.  Each of my friends owned a completely different home computer system.  Between the five of us we had a C-64, an Apple ][, an Atari 1200XL, a Tandy, and a random IBM clone.  If you had told us that the future held in store for us a world dominated by IBM clones and Microsoft software, we would have thought you were crazy.  Those IBM clones were ugly, expensive, and had the worst games….

But I digress….

At this point we’d played a few arena games.  Our cars would move like little tanks… point towards each other… and then we’d have a bit of a dice rolling contest to see who lived.  Your odds were greatly improved by having a good design, of course.  There really wasn’t a lot of maneuver and handling checks and so forth….  We pretty much just played point and shoot.  But we loved it.  And there was this one guy who played with us who… no matter what… was the first one to die in every event.  It was uncanny.

So I was at one of my other friends’ house that hadn’t played much Car Wars and he had all his friends over that I didn’t know too well.  One of those guys was a Car Wars nut!  He’d taken all his maps, cut ‘em up… and laminated them at school.  (His mom was a teacher.)  He absolutely had to play a race at the Muskogee Fairgrounds!

So the designing ensued.  The one copy of the lime green Uncle Al’s was passed around and fought over.  We rechecked our math and thought everything out.  Our work was interrupted when Weird Al’s “Fat” video came on MTV.  But finally… the strips of map were all layed out, the counters staggered around the track, and our record sheets were all filled out.

The green flag waved and… our cars literally inched around the track….  I don’t know how long it lasted, but it wasn’t long before everyone had left or gone to bed… and there had been no clear winner and not too much action.  Hmm.  Strange.

I was puzzled a bit but didn’t think much of it.  I mean… we were just kids, you know.  We loved these games, but they so rarely worked like maybe they were supposed to… but we didn’t care.  We had a blast just thinking about them and setting them up and tinkering with them….

It wasn’t too long after this that I was at my other friends house, for example.  This was the guy that was always the first to die in our arena matches.  We had like 9 or 10 people there and decided to play Gamma World.  We got our characters rolled up and the Gamma Master started the game.  Somehow we ended up in a melee and we began rolling the percentile dice.  Each of took a turn rolling… and it took maybe ten minutes or more just to get around the circle.  That’s just for one round of combat!  We might have played for two or three hours just to do one and a half fights.  Of course, only one or two guys every really scored any hits.  Probably the guys with Military Genius or Life Leech or something equally unbalanced.  So that game for most of us was just 3 hours of missing our to-hit rolls against some annoying and weird mutant!  Argh!

But it’s really only irritating looking back.  I don’t think we had any idea at the time that this wasn’t any fun.  No… we were having a blast.  You’ve got to keep in mind that the computer games of the time were for the most part even less fun than this!  And we were real young, too.

But back to Car Wars.  I didn’t really have any idea that there was something wrong with the way we played Car Wars.  Cars just crept along the map moving an inch or so each turn.  We generally kept the speed at 40 mph or so in order to be able to make a maneuver….  How else was it supposed to work?

So one day I’m at my friend’s house again… you know… the guy that always got blown up first in every arena match….  He says to me that we’ve been playing it all wrong all this time.  You don’t move 1/4 inch for each 10 mph of speed….  You move a whole inch for each 10 mph of speed!!

I was floored.  Not just to learn that all those years of gaming were… somehow illegitimate and silly.  But… to have to find out from… him….

Sigh.

(By the way, even after we played by the rules correctly, that guy was still the first to die in every game.  Uncanny!)

This sort of thing still happens, though, even with adults.  When I was playing Settlers of Catan for the first time recently I flipped through the rules during a break.  In a few seconds I noticed we’d been playing the cities wrong– they were supposed to double the production of the hex they were in!  The group I was playing with had just used cities as a way to buy victory points up until then!

Yeah….  It happens all the time.  It generally takes several readings of the rules and several games to find these things out no matter how simple the game is, but in every game there are a couple of killer rules that have a drastic impact on play and tactics.  Most people don’t bother to look for them… but me?  Ever since that gaming disaster with Car Wars… I’ve been… different….

“The bike I rode had a front armor weight of 180 pounds; it could stop blasts from twin Vulcans, and often did.  My bike had a vulcan mounted front and a smokescreen rear; this was about average for my gang.”

 – Fred Wolke, Bethel CT, ADQ 4/1

Hephaestus — Heavy cycle with CA frame, hvy suspension, medium cycle plant with superconductors, 2 PR tires, cyclist, VMG with 10 shots of ammo front, SS back.  Armor: F 30, B 7, two 9 point cycle wheelguards, 10 points CA around power plant, 10 points CA around SS.  Acceleration 10, Top Speed 120 mph, weighs 1,298 lbs, costs $10,124.

[I don't think CA frames or half-space cycle component armor was available back when Fred wrote his letter, but maybe he had some sources on the black market that I don't know about.  Anyways, this design was built with the Compenium 2e rules just to see if it could be done.  Does it make sense for a gang to be riding around in $10,000 cycles?  Not sure about that, but  if that's average... then there's some dudes riding around on 15 to 20 grand worth o' hog!]

[Edited 3/22/06 to correct a design error.]

When I got the Compendium 2e, I didn’t expect to ever need another revision to the rules again.  It turns out, though, that there’s quite a few good ideas that came later on.  Here are a few of the major rules changes that occured after Compendium 2e:

In ADQ 9/1, new AADA regulations required all competing vehicles to be able to travel 150 miles at their cruising speed.  Reflex rolls began to be set at 4 for all competitors.  (This of course made Driver skill much more important– level one and two each would increase the HC of the car by 1 automatically!)  Also, ADQ&A notes that anti-vehicular ammo (and various other odd “old school” equipment) ceased to exist.

ADQ 9/3 printed rules to fix the out-of-control oil gun action.  It no longer received the +4 bonus for targeting the ground and it made a smaller counter.

ADQ 10/1 printed the much needed rules from Uncle Albert’s Catalogue from Hell to fix Ramplates and Jump Jets.

Finally, ADQ 10/2 printed a new AADA ruling that measuring distances would be counted as a firing action.  (As a side note, this issue also featured a Backfire by David Searle that proposed a new system for creating a gas engine of any size, though I doubt they ever became official.)

Tired of not being taken seriously because you’re riding on a mere 2 wheels?  Don’t worry– times are changing.  When that chip on your shoulder turns out to be a pair of heavy rockets, folks will be pulling to the right to let you cruise on by.  The Psycho… a perilous cycle for perilous times.  Test drive one today at your local Cycle Concepts dealer.

PSYCHO.  Heavy cycle, large cycle power plant, hvy. suspension, PR tires.  Armor F 18, B 15.  Mounts one MG with 10 shots of ammo and two linked HRs front.  HC 2, acceleration 10 mph.  Weight 1,298 lbs.; costs $5,196.

[This cycle was built with just the original pocket box edition of Car Wars.  Five of these little thugs can take on a four wheeler in the classic Pack Attack scenario.  Just take along 5 sets of body armor, 10 grenades, one SMG, and two targeting computers.]