Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

I went to the local comic shop this weekend for the “New Guy Night” HeroClix game. It could just be my location, but I thought the Freak/Geek level was pretty high. I got loaded up with a bag full of super hero clicky thingies in addition to the official complementary Hulk figure. The guy next to me gave me a nice Batman figure and the Judge gave out bags of eight figure teams to play the night’s session with. I had just about the exact same experience when I tried the Mechwarrior clicky game at a convention, so if you have the slightest interest in where the mainstream has gone for tactical board games, you can try them without paying a dime and get more than enough stuff to play just by going to one of these gaming groups that tend to meet in comic shops.

The judge made sure I had someone to play with– being the only “real” bonafide “new guy” he took charge of me himself. Some guy tried to buy his dice while we were playing and he had to pause to award swag every twenty minutes or so, but he did his best to at least give me a moderate amount of attention. Our first game we played without powers and I got used to the “basing” tactics and the ranges. I never did get the hang of the line of site rules, and I think that diagonal movement was treated the same as straight-line moves. In the second game we played with some of the powers– some pieces had damage resistance or stealth… and others could force a die re-roll once a turn. Without spending a few hours examining each piece and studying the rules, there’s no way to really understand the real capabilities of a piece. Sure, the main stats are right there for all to see, but there’s tons of color coded extra stuff that you have to know to get the full story. We didn’t really finish the second game, but I got the gist of things. The game is a little more abstract than the MechWarrior clicky game. The Battletech derived game forces you to coordinate infantry and vehicles with your Mechs to get the best effects– and “pilot” cards and equipment can further customize the behaviors of the BattleMechs. The Super Hero game seems a little bit more simplified, and has a large amount of off-the-wall variety in the pieces.

It is neat that there’s “rated” events every week. I got signed up with a WizKids membership and all of my games and results are tracked there. Rulebooks and other information is all available online. (All of these niceties would have been really great for a game like Car Wars. Too bad “autodueltimes” never took off for 5th edition.) On the other hand, having to buy two eleven dollar packs of figures to play in an “official” tournament type game sounds like a little bit much… and keeping track of the constant stream of gimmicks just seems tedious. I have to admit that the gaming models of the seventies and eighties have been soundly demolished by more modern approaches– and with good reason. Nevermind that WizKids is a hundred times more evil than Steve Jackson Games ever thought about being– these guys have a market, they cater to it, they’ve made it accessible, and they’re very organized. The Clix phenomenon combines the themes of dumbed down eighties tactical games with the marketing model of Magic the Gathering– and it is just plain unnerving to see the nerds line up to buy package after package of prepainted plastic “toy” miniatures. But that’s okay… the old school games got beat fair and square. The old school games didn’t hardly seem to put up a fight…. Even if you don’t like the new stuff, you’ve got to respect it. A little. Sort of.

Um…

Okay, never mind.

After a two hour discussion deep in the night (and a few follow up emails and phone calls), Earlburt and I have come up with a campaign approach that addresses the deficiencies of our previous attempts. The first major constraint is that they’re only two participants in the campaign. Usually that means there’s no referee for arena dueling events– and in role-playing adventures, one person generally gets stuck refereeing and never gets to play. Our basic idea is to move toward each player taking on several individual characters or groups of characters and following their movements around the country during 2029 or so. We’ll take turns refereeing for each character and alternate playing the ruffians and cycle gangs that populate the highways. As much as is feasible, we’ll have the “NPC’s” of one session be the continuing character groups of the other (refereeing) player.

In our first “corporate Car Wars” campaign, we experimented with a large variety of massive duels meant to tour all the various flavors of dueling scenarios. Because we failed to create a fleshed out arena schedule, this soon devolved into “rules negotiations” wars– before each session we’d both carefully debate each nuance of the game to favor our current roster and pet tactics. Also, games that required large amounts of vehicle design put Earlburt at a disadvantage while games that required understanding the implications of the rules in an unusual setting put him in an advantaged position. Whoever could successfully lobby for a game that favored their strengths would usually win.

In our follow-up role-playing campaign set in the years 2033 and 2034, we discovered that the usual $80,000 pay-offs left little room for development. Sure, we could move to a big-rig or helicopter oriented game, but that’s not really where we wanted the focus to be. Another thing was that the character advancement rules were pretty broken– you gain skill levels pretty fast just by playing scenarios against cyclists. What we want to do now is focus in on the amateur duelist that’s just getting his start and is slowly scraping together the funds to patch together a decent dueling machine: the classic rags to riches campaign, but set in a grittier, poorer world. It’s no accident that Car Wars characters begin the game dead broke.

The first phase of the campaign will be a series of 4-on-4 arena duels. Characters begin with no wealth, no prestige, base level in driver, gunner, and handgunner, and a killer-kart. The first several scenarios will consist of arena combats featuring four killer-karts versus four killer-karts and fought by a total of 64 duelists. The survivors may salvage their kills. We’ll be playing Team Amateur night, which is a little different than the usual free-for-all. In a 4 on 4 match, there may be more than one surviving car on the winning team. They will each get to salvage their own kills and gain additional prestige for being winners of the event. People that score a kill but lose their car will still get some salvage– but they have to live to do it. (I don’t think I want to add incentive to actually murder people, so I wouldn’t allow duelists to pick up the salvage of people they kill.) That gives three outcomes for a person surviving a duel: keep a car and salvage his kills, “killed” and salvage kills, and “killed” with no kills to salvage.

Note that some variants of the Amateur Night rules have a winner-take-all component. If you lose three events or if you win, you can no longer enter anymore amateur night events. In the preliminary round of a Team Amateur Night game, two teams of 16 duellists each will play. They will be broken up into four 4-on-4 Killer Kart events. The four duellists from each team that have the highest amount of prestige (using the dollar amount of their salvage to break ties) move on to a special 4-on-4 “Stinger” event.

After two preliminaries are run (each with two separate teams totalling 32 duellists on a side), the top ranking duellists from the two Stinger rounds advance to a special 4-on-4 “Joseph Special” round. Meanwhile, the duelists that failed to advance into the Stinger round compete in a second-chance “Outlander” round. (If there’s ever not enough survivors to make a 4-on-4, downsize the event to a 3-on-3 or 2-on-2.) The highest ranked duelists from the both “Outlander” round and also the ones that failed to advance to the “Joseph Special” round come back for a last-chance “Stinger-RR” round. Finally the top ranking duellists from the “Joseph Special” and “Stinger-RR” rounds return for a final “Hot Shot” round.

The Amateur Night events are run in this order: 4 4-on-4 Killer Kart events, 1 4-on-4 Stinger event, 4 Killer Kart events, 1 Stinger event, 1 Outlander event, 1 Stinger-RR event, 1 Joseph Special event, and the final Hot Shot event. This is (in effect) a loose form of a double elimination tournament. Final team and duelist rankings are based on prestige scores and the salvage value of the kills. Comparing this to Allston’s rules, each Amateur Night contestant can play in up to four events– but the the salvage money will be spread around a little more. Duellists that score low prestige might not get invited back if the death rate is low enough. Everyone has a small chance of getting a Hot Shot, though.

         +- KK --+
     + --+       +
     +   +- KK --+
     +           +--> S --+
     +   +- KK --+    |   +
     + --+       +    |   +
     +   +- KK --+    |   +
O <--+                |   +--> JS --+
|    +   +- KK --+    |   +         +
|    + --+       +    |   +         +
|    +   +- KK --+    |   +         +
|    +           +--> S --+         +--> HS
|    +   +- KK --+    |             +
|    + --+       +    |             +
|        +- KK --+    |             +
|                     |             +
+---------------------+------> S2 --+

64 total duelists are entering. One-fourth of those will continue to the “Stinger” round– and half of those will go on to the “Joseph Special” round. One eighth of the original duelists will go to the “Outlander” round. This means that less than half of the initial duellists will progress past the first round. One-third of the Stinger and Outlander contestants will go to the Stinger-RR round. Half of the Joseph Special and Stinger-RR contestants will go on to the Hot Shot round. All of the surviving “Stinger” duelists will at least play a third round of some type… and the very best of the “Outlander” round will get a chance to take on the worst of the “Stinger” round.

(What if one team completely wipes out the other team in the “Joseph Special” and “Stinger-RR” rounds– and literally kills all of the opposing duellists?? In that case, dig back into the duelist rankings of the other team. Some of the guys that didn’t advance from the “Killer Kart” rounds might get tapped to come into the “Hot Shot” event!)

After the 14 Amateur night events are run, each player takes stock of his surving duelists. Those with vehicles and/or enough salvage money to become professional duellists may move on to compete in AADA sanctioned events. (Many arenas on the L’Outrance circuit offer off-beat “tag team” and “cat and mouse” events that would be highly suitable for the continuing campaign.) Those that have next-to-nothing may join pedestrian defence forces of a small or medium sized town. Duellists that fall into neither group may become bandits or join cycle gangs.

One idea of the campaign is to play all of the classic scenarios with continuing characters instead of building custom vehicles from scratch for each game. Hopefully, each player will end up a small cycle gang. If two duellists (with roughly equal vehicle values) are traveling to an arena to compete, then each gang can bid for the right to attack one of the duellists. The lower bidding gang may then pack-attack the other player’s duellist with cycles and cars that total in value no more than the bid amount. If one player can amass a large enough cycle gang, then he can play a Midville scenario against the other player’s pedestrian force and duelist characters. Also, players can pit their duellists against their opponent’s pedestrian forces in a Wheels versus Walkers scenario. Players that travel to regions where the classic GURPS scenarios were set from the Survival Guide supplements may opt to play those as well.

If players are feeling particularly competitive or if they want additional duelist characters and gang members, they can agree to play another series of 14 amateur night event games to bring in some new blood. Otherwise, the primary goal of the campaign is to create a believable continuity for scenarios and to also create balanced background information for characters before they become fully fleshed out for more “serious” role playing sessions. Just as Traveller characters are built with a series of die rolls to generate their background, we’ll do the same: but instead of die rolls and table look-ups, we’ll use Car Wars scenarios. (In a similar vein, the 64 character and 14 event Amateur Night games will produce enough data to develop “realistic” simulations for randomly generating Amateur Night graduates….)