Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

I ran Steve Jackson and David Ladyman’s “Convoy” scenario for Car Wars this weekend.  It turned out to be a nice break from the more competitive one-on-one games I was playing last summer.  Because this was going more into a role-playing territory, we spent a lot less time haggling over rules interpretations and tweaking designs.  This gave the games a much more casual feel.

I won’t spoil the scenario for those that haven’t played it, but it is a good one. 

My player ended up killing a laser armed station wagon.  He left his mechanic with the kill to salvage the laser while the rest of the convoy headed into town.  This avoided a $5,000 penalty in the final payout, but the mechanic was spotted by a “Cyclones” cycle gang member as he was finishing up.  In our next session we will play out the Pack Attack scenario and see if the lone van can make it back to town.

My player is calling me to set up the next game and emailing me his team’s stats.  (Always a good sign….)  I’d like to have each scenario connect to another in a logical way… and have consistent consequences to the choices of the player.  We plan on playing out the road trips from city to city, so I’ll need to get some better maps of the the Memphis area and then come up with some patrons, encounters, etc.  I think the AADA Road Atlas and Survival Guide will have most of what I need….

I really like the more-or-less low tech equipment of the pre-”Uncle Albert’s” days.  We are running with just Car Wars and Truck Stop right now.  I want to emphasize the desperation of the common man, the danger outside of fortress towns, and the rarity of advanced equipment.  The PC’s are a rare breed… but even with the cash they picked up from completing their mission, there’s only just so powerful that a PC vehicle can get.  Civilization is only justbarely out of the “Chassis and Crossbow” era– and cloning is still experimental and not widely available yet.

There’s been a couple of more sessions since the last post.

In one we convinced a pilot to give us footage of the Quaker vessel being destroyed.  We got full footage of the life boats being shot to pieces.  Gruesome.  The guy gave us the stuff on condition that it be reworked to not look like it was coming from his plane.  Our trusty mathematical master of topology and vectors is hard at work on this even as we speak….

We then went to break into the warehouse.  There was only one guard… I decided that as a reporter I was just doing my job– to heck with the cops.  A fellow PC picked the lock and we began to search.  Investigation of a strange noise led us all to being incapacitated.  As we came to, police were storming the building….  At the end of the session we had retreated to a mysterious secret hideout the was under an open “secret passage” in the floor.  On surveillance equipment we noticed the police finding my knife that I’d dropped during the scuffle.

In the next session we examined the equipment in the hideout.  Two other PC’s managed to find us and let us out.  Finially– the whole group is together!  We sent a robot to spy on the hideout we escaped from and caught the police dismantling everything.  We tracked the evil twins to a hotel.

One player went to the bar to find out if anyone had seen them.  He ended up getting drunk with a dentist that was in town for a convention and strange activities involving midgets.  The player roleplayed out his part in his thick russian accent.  He didn’t find out much other than that the twins had come into the building.

I took my turn at finding things out.  I ended up bribing a bellboy.  I passed him a $20 bill with the classic handshake trick.  The GM made me roll… I got a 04 on percentile dice!  Woo-hoo.  The kid was impressed.  Man I was slick.  I got the room number.

Now what?

Not a lot is happening in each session.  We are making more jokes now and being just generally stupid.  We also don’t have a coherent strategy– there’s no leader and no feel that we’re all on the same team.  I think it’s odd that the two times we’ve really pushed the plot to the next point its been because of me stepping into my intrepid reporter persona and just getting it done.  I worry that that sort of thing will get me killed and I’m frustrated that once we get to the next plot point, things tend to fall apart as we fumble whatever opportunity that we have.  Some of that is due the story… but I think more is due to the fact that we’re a bunch of goofballs.

If we’re actually going to save the universe, we’ve really got to get our act together.