Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Figuring out how to purchase a car in GURPS 4e can be a little confusing.  There more than one way to do it!  What the best way to do it?  It depends….

First off, you need to set an average starting wealth for the campaign.  Jeffro suggests you go with about $5,000.  It’s a rough setting… and though the citizens have the right to bear vehicular arms, they’re still recovering from civil war and the food riots.

If your character is poor, he gets $1,000 to buy stuff.  That’s plenty of cash for a M.O.N.D.O.!  A struggling character can afford to pick up a cycle or a really cheap car with $2,500.  A comfortable duelist can spend $10,000 on low end car while a wealthy one can easily try his luck in division 20 events with $25,000.  Keep in mind that this money goes not just for his car, but it has to buy the rest of his equipment and pay for repairs and expenses, too!

If you’d like some additional spending money to start your character off with, you can spend points for cash: 1 point gets you $500.  Even though a punk player can take “Poor” with $7,500 at no cost in character points, it will generally be better for you to just spend your points on actual levels of wealth.  On the other hand, that punk player may have a valid character concept if he’s modeling a rough cylclist with a bad reputation and few job prospects.

I think signature gear should only be used in extraordinary cases.  The only example of it that I can think of from ten years of ADQ would be the Foxbat’s super-duper car.  The vehicle is central to his character concept and background… and cinematically speaking it should always be with him; if it’s stolen or anything the character should get a chance to get it back somehow.  Each point here gets $2,500 worth of gear, but I would avoid this as the Signature Gear concept doesn’t generally fit with the Autoduel setting: people generally change cars, upgrade & modify them too much for any of them to ever become “signature.”  Also, the cinematic nature of Signature Gear is rarely implemented given the “roll playing” nature of Autoduel rpg’s.

The last way to pick up equipment is via a Patron.  In this case, the player does not necessarily get to design his stuff; he’s stuck with the “standard issue” of his organization.  He can’t always use the stuff for his personal side adventuring jobs, either.  He might be required to useonly for special missions and assignments for the patron.  On the plus side, the player might get to use totally different gear in each game session and he won’t have to bother with doing bookkeeping on his maintenance costs. 

GM’s can use rank to put a cap on the overall value of the equipment an organization will provide to a character if they feel the Patron’s point cost does not cover the value of the equipment.  For instance, a Rank 0 policement might just get Body Armor and an SMG while riding in the back of the riot van.  At Rank 1, a cop might get use a patrol bike.  At Rank 2 he will get a decent squad car… and at higher ranks he’ll be assigned a hot-rod interceptor or souped-up helicopter. 

Note that in other GURPS genres, equipment and vehicles are sometimes modeled as allies.  This is an unnecessary exercise in an Autoduel campaign: the various costs relating to vehicles are well known and have been worked out since 1981.  There’s no need to introduce a complicated variant for accounting for vehicles in a more character oriented manner.  Now if you were going do something like design all your space ships and battle ‘mechs as characters for your campaign, that’d be a different story.  Otherwise, Jeffro suggests you avoid it unless you’ve got a weird situation where the car, like Knight Rider’s “Kitt”, really is an ally.

Hopefully this will help you choose the right way to get gear for your character.  It’s somewhat complex, but there’s definitely an option there no matter what kind of character you want to play.  And it all works more or less out of the box….  Wealth levels, extra cash, patrons, and rank give you all the flexibility you need to capture the essence of your character’s vehicle assets.  And with the case of the patron approach, you can even a eliminate a lot of the accounting associated with managing vehicles in a campaign. 

Luke wasn’t the only one to get mugged.  It all started when a lone Ice Creature discovered what he thought was a Snack-Warmer.  It sure was hot inside the base, but the Taun Tauns were quite a delicacy:

He evidently went back to his buddies and let slip the news.  Soon, other Ice Creatures began to drop in:

When the Imperial fleet jumped in, a whole party of Monsters were trapped.  The Rebel leaders simply looked the other way when R2-D2 mercillessly taunted them:

These scenes were obviously cut from the film because they so clearly establish a moral equivalency between the Empire and the Rebellion.  It’s sad, really…. 

Well… okay… maybe it had more to do with the fact that these scenes do absolutely nothing to propel Luke, Han, and Leia further into the action.  Even worse, the ice monster sequence that did make it into the film was probably the worst special effect in the entire series.  All you see is this big arm at first.  (Woah!)  Then when he’s coming to eat Luke in the cave, he looks like this stupid unmoving maniquin that’s just being rolled along the passageway.  Barf.

No, but Luke, Han, and Leia are really what its about.  But just sitting back and watching the films again, I have to say that the plot is really lacking something there.  You know… the films really need an epic prelude that undermines the centrality of those three… and that establishes R2-D2 and Chewbacca as being the chief spys and the key movers and shakers of the entire Rebel movement.

No… no….  Nevermind.  That’s a really dumb idea.  Forget I mentioned it.

After taking a close look, there are quite a few key rules that changed in Car Wars between the version 3.0 pocketbox rules and the Scott Haring Deluxe Edition revision.  Most of the big changes that came later had to do with making advanced versions of the sections of rules that were originaly just glossed over: the collision rules, the incendiary rules, the grenade rules, the encumbrance rules.  All of these subsystems would later get supersized into advanced editions, but its often the little things that have the bigger impact on the flavor of a game.

Debris was a much bigger deal in the early version of the game: it caused a D2 hazard instead of the D1 of the later editions.  And almost any collision could cause a whopping D4 hazard to both parties.  These two rules can make it a lot harder to keep all four wheels on the road!

Perhaps the biggest change is in the Crash Tables.  I didn’t notice this back when I reviewed the development of the key  maneuver rules, but the Crash Table was originally a 1d6 affair even up to the Deluxe Edition.  (It wasn’t until the first compendium that they switched to a 2D6 table.)  This can obviously have a huge effect on the outcome of your crashes; it makes the soul-numbing “Roll and Burn” a much more likely event!  On the other hand, if you are using the Deluxe rule of subtracting your Driver skill from your Crash Table rolls, then skill can go a long way toward ameliorating the problem. 

I’ve played by the Compendium 2e rules religiously for the past while, but this discovery makes me think that the original relex roll system and the “1d6″ crash tables with subtracting driver skill are a satisfactory approach to running the a game.  There was still room for improvement… but I don’t think that Compendium 2e had the best solution anymore: they clearly dropped the ball when they moved Driver Skill back to being practically meaningless in a crash.

In our last post we got an overview of Don and Freda Boner’s “Deadly Dungeon.”  Let’s take a look at the combat system of this old game.  If you play it, you may want to turn it off, in which case a general knowledge of the code will help you.  I’m more interested in the overall design, myself.  Here’s a partial listing:

In each round of combat, you are presented with two choices: you can attack with your sword or shoot arrows.  Your character has a combat rating and the computer also tracks how many arrows you have.  Monsters have a combat rating, but no arrows.

If your combat rating is less than or equal than the monster’s and you elected to sword fight, you go directly to a the routine pictured above, “SwordFight_Disadvantaged”:  You have a one in five chance of killing the monster outright.  Otherwise you are told that you wounded the monster.  This leads to a one in five chance of you being killed outright.  If you survive, “Blood is everywhere!” and you have only a one in three chance killing the monster.  Otherwise, you are dead.

If your combat rating is greater than the monster’s and you elected to sword fight, you go directly to the SwordFight_Advantaged routine.  Here you have a one in ten chance of being killed outright by the monster.  If you survive that you have a one in four chance of killing the monster by cutting it in half.  If you fail that, you have a one in seven chance of having to repeat the SwordFight_Advantaged routine from the start.  Otherwise, you kill him!

Bear in mind that these routines have short waits interspersed with the text in order increase the suspense.  (Oh, baby!)

Finally, if you elected to fight with your bow, you go to the ShootArrows routine.  If you have no arrows, then you are killed outright.  You have a one in twelve chance of being killed, a one in twelve chance of killing it, and a ten in twelve chance on wounding it and therefore having to continue fighting.  If don’t have the arrows to continue shooting, then you’re dead.  Otherwise you fire again with basically a four in nine chance of killing the monster.  If you missed, then you have to start this whole routine over.

If my math is right, you have only a 31 in 75 chance of surviving the SwordFight_Disadvantaged routine.  Given that, you probably want to save your arrows for the tough ones….  But remember that running out of arrows in a fight is instant death, so you don’t want to use them unless you have at least 6 or 8 on hand!

Kind of anti-climatic, isn’t it?  I do give them points for coming up with an unusual system; combat does produce a range of colorful text descriptions even though you don’t have much choice in how things play out.

Does combat even belong in a text adventure?  It sure didn’t do much for Zork I or Zork III.  As far as “Deadly Dungeon” goes, it has mostly been an impediment to me actually playing it.  If I actually attempt to solve it, I’ll most likely disable it.  I may not have to, now that I know how it works… but really… what does it add to the game?

This is disappointing given the percentage of the game’s code that is dedicated to combat resolution.  Things haven’t changed for the combat-laden text adventure in the 25 the years since then: even in the hand of interactive fiction Grandmaster Graham Nelson with his The Reliques of Tolti-Aph the concept is practically unplayable.  A flabberghasted David Whyld asks, “did he actually think this kind of thing was what people wanted to play?”

Is there a solution to the problem of integrating a combat system into a text adventure game?  Dan Shiovitz says, “the solution is, don’t use random combat and skill checks because they’re dumb.”  What do you think?  Can you come up with a premise for adding combat to a text adventure game that actually makes it more fun?  Even better… can you do it in a 16K basic program on the TRS-80?  It wouldn’t be sporting if we didn’t level the playing field with the Boners, after all!

That bizarre world modeling rpg-puzzle hybrid that is the Text Adventure may have gotten its start with the mainframe Colossal Caves Adventure, but it was Scott Adams and the TRS-80 that not only brought the concept home to the masses– and they went an order of magnitude further by opening the way for hobbyists to write their own adventure games. 

My own first exposure to Text Adventures was on a school TRS-80.  (We called ‘em Trash 80’s.)  It was a pyramid themed game… and I remember vividly the rooms and secret passages of it.  It was a somewhat realistically toned game… and I’ve never successfully identified the game as an adult, even with all the resources of the Internet.

As a child, I was fascinated by the concept of computerized adventures.  All of the books I had on constructing them were written for the TRS-80; I didn’t actually own one, though, so I could never type them in!  That tantalizing glimpse as a child is probably what’s held my interest in the things all of these years: the idea of adventure is so much more alluring than the real thing.  Playing the things too often has more in common with debugging incomprehensible computer code than any of the actual genres the medium attempts to emulate.  Even though mazes are decried by today’s “I.F.” insiders, even the most tastefully done one-room conversation oriented art games are at heart a collection of twisty passages, all alike.  The object is still to find an acceptable end game… through grueling trial and error more often than not.

At any rate, here is a particularly obscure cassette title that people probably even paid real money for back in the day:

I vividly remember attempting to translate the type-in code onto my Atari.  I got stuck with the animation code on the above title screen and quickly gave up. 

Yeah.  This is not a hoax.  There really were adventure game authors with the name “Boner.”  I wonder what it was like for them in middle school?  It couldn’t have been that bad, though: I mean, they lived at a time when there not even modules for D&D… and there was only one Dragon in the entire campaign world.  It wasn’t until after TSR released their first expansions to the game that they changed its title from “Dungeon and Dragon” to “Dungeons and Dragons.” (!???)  That’s my theory anyway, and I’m sticking to it! 

Above we can see the all-but-forgotten technique of utilizing a two word parser and a third person ”puppet.”  Scott Adams pioneered this style and it has been little seen since….  It was handy to use this approach back when parsers were so crude that you needed a device to explain why the computer so often failed to understand your instructions: just blame it on the moronic “puppet” entity!

Most modern connoisseurs of high falutin’ “interactive fiction” would not touch a game such as this with a ten foot first edition Chainmail pole.  There’s a pretty fair amount of combat in the game… and getting killed means starting all over.  There are ways to put the game into an un-winnable state… and there are bugs in the inventory tracking system that allow you to pick up the same object more than once in some odd cases– and then you can’t get rid of these non-existent objects!

One unusual thing that the authors did was to break the game up into 3 distinct levels.  The maps, however, have the usual illogical compass directions of the day… and the action ranges from inside to outside, so I’m not even sure why the game is called a “dungeon.”  The combat system is pretty deadly, however: all of my attempts to work on the third level of the game have ended in combat fatality for my poor puppet.

We’ll take a close look at that combat system in our next post.

Flipping through the old Dragon magazines from the days of my youth, I’m shocked by how many oddball products the market could support back then.  My there was some freaky stuff:

I’ve never played this game, but I am comforted to know that it existed.  Just having advertisers like West End Games made Dragon magazine fun to pick up.  You know, I probably didn’t get involved with Paranoia for much the same reason I didn’t buy the original Illuminati in black pocket boxes: the covers.  Illuminati had one of the most frightening images my little 12 year old mind had ever seen… and Paranoia was just so flagrantly in-your-face ice-cold satirically intimidating that I just knew I was no where near savvy enough or cynically witty enough to play that game.  The guys that made that game had to be so tough-minded and sophisticated, I knew I’d never be able to keep up with them.

I did see a new version of Paranoia at a game store recently.  What a waste!  I mean… first off they called it “Paranoia XP.”  Did they really name it after a Microsoft product?  Argh!  I spend too much of the day staring into Microsoft product of some sort or another.  You think my down time is going to be spent with a game that has a that vibe anywhere on it?  I think they even went so far as to put a caricatureof Bill Gates on the cover.  Sheesh.  They had to take one of the most densely packed conglomerations of distilled coolness… and wrap it in some lame lampooning of the guy every Linux zealot loves to hate.  That’s just so petty.

Here’s probably one of the most unusual games I’ve ever seen.  The photos of the box covers didn’t scan so well, but here’s their banner:

Wow!  You should see the cover art, though.  It’s almost like some sort of Renaissance painting or something.  You have these humans that look almost like old paintings of Ancient Greece or Biblical characters… and they’re intermixed with some of the most truly alien creatures I’ve ever seen.  I was obviously too immature to play a game with such an air of depth and scope.  Ah… the Skyrealms of Jorune… I’d love to see an actual copy now that I’m old enough to appreciate it.

I love this one.  There’s just been so few companies to get ahold of a Tolkien license and then actually treat it with the respect it deserves.  This image is awesome: probably the high point of the Lord of the Rings right there….  You know, if you look at all of the references to the creature the ring wraiths rode on, it’s not quite clear if it’s a reptile-pterodactyl type thing or if it’s a bird of some kind.  This image is so respectful of the source material, that it somehow manages to capture that ambiguity.  Too cool.

I hadn’t read enough Tolkien at the time to appreciate such radness… and besides… the advertisement subtly gives the message that this not some stupid hack-and-slash beer-and-pretzles game.  They give the impression that playing such a cool game would be a serious commitment.  I’d have had to give up Car Wars or something and that just wasn’t going to happen…!

A nifty post about the makers of MERP is over here at The Lost Level.  He talks about a set of articles detailing the history of nearly a dozen rpg companies.  Go read up on ‘em and maybe you can put together a case that the eighties really wasn’t the Golden Age my nostalgic old self thinks it was.  I doubt it, though… the CCG and MMORPG induced crashes we’ve seen since then have done to much damage to make me think otherwise.

Ah… the babes of Dragon Magazine.  They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.  Is that a good thing or a bad one…?  You decide!

Check out this Zoar-Cher amalgam straight from the White-bread Dimension:

Didn’t she appear in the live action He-Man movie? 

If TSR got really desperate, though, they’d do the 80’s equivalent of ‘photoshoping’ girl-band rock stars.  For instance, this is obviously a chick from the rhythm section of the Bangles:

Please tell me she has some sort of cloth lining under that chain mail….

Borrowing from popular media of the day is tricky work… the lawyers might make you regret it.  To round out the rest of the magazine, the editors would often take a girl-next-door approach:

Here we get the gymnast from your 7th grade state history class.  Then there’s that quiet girl that always sat up front on the bus:  She was really shy and probably liked horses or something.  Nobody liked her for some reason and you never figured out why.  (If you’d known she was tops with a Cure Light Wounds Spell, I’m sure you would have asked her out.)  Finally there’s the 1/8th Cherokee chick that was heavy into dancing and authentic Indian crafts.  (Don’t call her outfit a “costume” or she’ll correct you: it’s regalia you clod!)

The movie originally opened up with Luke observing the space battle above Tatooine, but the scene was cut because the hat he was wearing was just too embarrassing– even for the man who would later create Jar-Jar Binks!

We also would have gotten to see the “Toshi station” where Luke oh so wanted to go pick up power converters… but that scene was cut because Luke’s nickname was so irritating and also because Lucas later decided that a crystal ball did not fit so well with his vision of the Star Wars ethos: 

I had the Star Wars storybook as a kid and it also contained images of the following scene that hit the cutting room floor.  Man, I thought Biggs was cool.  I could not figure out why they cut him, but then in the nineties Lucas reinserted some of his scenes when he released the altered version of the film.  Oh!  The pain!  If only we lived in a world where Lucas had someone near him to tell him he was out of his mind….

You remember that scene with the shiny black miniature Death Star looking floating droid thing with a syringe?  I never could figure it out as a kid….  I mean here we are in this high tech supernatural universe and Vader can’t pull a Jedi Mind Trick while using some kind of high tech brain imaging.  No… we’ve got a floating death star with a syringe!  It just doesn’t fit.  Well, you should have seen what Lucas originally had in mind: a black droid with a mohawk and an earring!  “I pity the fool that don’t tell me the location of the hidden rebel base!”

He’s another lousy scene that should of stayed on the cutting room floor but that Lucas had to dig back up for his re-envisioning of the film.  At least you get to check out the frightening pre-slug Jabba:

And check out this rendition of the famous Remote and Blast Shield.  This image upset me even as a kinder-gardener with only a dim memory of the movie.  I guess the Marvel Comics artist lacked the necessary stills to pull this one off and had to make it up based mostly on the script?

And here’s the scene where Frodo is entering the Mines of Moria… oh wait… wrong movie.  You remember the scene where Chewbacca gets frightened and Han just randomly shoots his blaster down an empty hall?  It never did make any sense to me.  Apparently, Lucas originally had something different in mind there as we see below.  Hmm… maybe he was running out of special effects $$?

But if I was slightly confused by Han shooting down an empty hallway, I was quite perturbed by Obiwan Kenobi’s light-saber duel.  He just gives up!  He holds his light-saber straight up and lets Vader kill him.  Right.  (Luke, did Ben forget to tell you that not only do Jedi Knights venerate lying, but they are also heavy into ritual suicide.)  The comic book adaption of that fight is much better; Kenobi talks a little more smack and appears to go down fighting.  Here’s line that got cut from the film that puts one of Ben’s more cryptic remarks in context:

Here’s a particular juicy bit… in the earliest cuts of the film, Luke’s father was well known and well thought of.  Personally, I’d like to live in a universe where Ben’s not a liar, Luke didn’t kiss his sister, and where Vader was not Luke’s daddy.  This scene provides some evidence for those that think that things really were intended to be that way as the first film came together:

Here’s a scene that demonstrates how Lucas’s revisionism truly knows no bounds.  You can tell this is the revised adaption from 2006 because Lucas had Dark Horse comics remove the part where Luke screams “Carrie!!!”  instead he makes them put in some lame line about ‘Technicos.’  Right.  You’re not fooling anyone, George.  It’s bad enough that you’ve altered the movies, but could you at least stay out of the comic adaption and leave things be?

The big news from Steve Jackson’s latest address to the masses is that Munchkin will continue to dominate the efforts of the company for the foreseeable future.  The tongue-in-cheek card game accounted for over 55% of sales in 2006… and Steve reported in a recent message board post that he is hard at work on Munchkin 5.  He also remarked that in this new year, the company will drop everything at the first sign of a shortage in Munchkin product.  Letting Munchkin go out of print is like “leaving money on the table,” he noted.

Many GURPS fans got their panties in a wad at the news of what was to come for their favorite role playing game this year, but the fine print bears looking into.  Two new hardbacks are on the plate for 2007… including a third that was slated for 2006.  It would appear that the company has officially given the “240-page hardback every other month goal” the royal flush.  [Note to Editor: please cut and paste 'Cut and Run' joke #47 here.]  But don’t forget that the company plans on producing about as many online pdf pages for GURPS products ranging in a variety of sizes.  This e23 component can potentially double the amount of new GURPS material released in 2007– unless of course Munchkin sales rage out of control.

That said, what are the upcoming GURPS releases?  Marketing Director Paul Chapman recently stated that GURPS Ultra-Tech should ship in February and that GURPS Martial Arts likely to be released in the second quarter.  He also pointed out that e23 PDF releases in 2007 are likely to include “projects by David Pulver, Phil Masters, William Stoddard, and Sean Punch, covering everything from Infinite Worlds to supers to dungeons.”  GURPS Line editor Sean Punch has stated that he’d be editing High-Tech while Steve is editing Thaumatology– which will probably lead to High-Tech coming out first what with Steve having to do all of the boring run-the-company sort of stuff all the time.  Thaumatology might squeeze into 2007, Munchkin sales permitting. 

Should the GURPS fantasy gamer contingent be upset about such a perceived slight?  Not at, all, says Punch:  “Since 2004, fantasy fans have received Banestorm, Fantasy, and Magic… Fans of realistic historical gaming haven’t even received a crummy T-shirt, so it’s only fair that we give them High-Tech.”   If that doesn’t satisfy the fantasy crowd, then there are reports of a memo leaked from the Austin offices that Steve Jackson will begin confiscating power stones if he hears any more complaints.

And speaking of complaints, where is Ogre and Car Wars in all of this?  Yes indeedy, a couple of whiners have been heard on this point… nay, I say unto you, lo some have even gone on to write long winded heart-felt pleas.  Is Munchkin-mania a scourge and a plague upon our favorite gaming company stifling work on the fans’ favorite games?  Perhaps not, says Paul Chapman.  “The current situation is no different than the period when the entire SJGames staff focused on nothing but INWO, or the ‘all Car Wars, all the time’ era before that….  We’d all love to see Ogre (and Car Wars) returned to print, and succeed in a major way. However, the numbers (our income vs. our staffing levels) simply aren’t in support of such a move at the moment.”

Three game stores closed their doors in rapid succession early last year right around January; I’ve been stuck with browsing AD&D books at Barnes & Noble the past while until a Hobbytown USA opened up near by.  They have a fair selection of “Eurogames” and some wargames, but they don’t keep their selection up to date.  When I ask the clerks/managers about the latest stuff, they offer to special order it, but they never stock it.  They used to keep a fair selection of AD&D books, but they’ve been exiled from their prominent racks and are now tucked behind the big gaming table. 

The only game people play there is Warhammer 40k.  Things don’t seem to have improved much since my highschool days playing Car Wars.  The last bunch I saw trying to play Warhammer ended up working on their force designs, setting up mini’s, and arguing about rules for two straight hours– it took them that long to get anything started and at that point there was no hope of finishing the game!  Sheesh.

I can see the attraction of the mini’s themselves– this company has figured out how to market toys to an older age bracket. Woo-hoo.  But the game… I don’t see how people can stand it.  There’s just about no maneuver in it from what I’ve seen– people just line up their men and they start taking turns rolling dice.  There’s not even any flanking actions from what I’ve seen.  So it’s like Napoleonic battles… but without any tactical movement or positioning.  Soldiers just line up at short range and take turns unloading on each other.  There’s not even any prone or kneeling minis like my dark green WW2 plastic army men. I mean… do these space marines in the future not know the meaning of “hit the deck?!”

Maybe I’m just an old grog that doesn’t grok what’s going on, but it just appears that there’s little to no depth to this game.  If there’s a fan out there that can explain what’s fun about this game I’d be glad to hear it.  It really is just about the only wargaming type thing going in my area.  Can I be convinced to give it a try, or am I too stuck in the eighties to learn something new?

[Update 2/7/07: if these guys were playing near me, I'd suck it up and shell out the $$ for an army of miniatures and just go play Warhammer!  That's an amazing setup that club has....  Wow.]