Silver Freefeet Repulse Waves of Bizarre Demon Attackers
December 31, 2007
We played Dimension Demons again recently. The last time we played, we took a while to get the hang of the rules and I played a series of painstaking hit and run attacks with the “demons.” A typical situation would be maybe a one-in-six chance of taking a city with similar chances of getting a demon shot to pieces. The humans fire first, though so they get a pretty fair chance to disrupt the attack even if they can’t completely eliminate any attackers. And any demon that lands on another unit (or on a volcanoe when he pops back) is gone– a much more likely event than the others depending on where you pop in. In a steady game of attrition, I ended up losing so many demons that I could no longer attack.
My opponent played much less cautious game. He placed his transports close together and concentrated four demons on a single city. If he targeted his demons on the edge of the map, he had a much better chance of landing in his target square. This resulted in a pretty fair chance of his taking one out, but my sliders reacted fast enough to make such assaults less likely in future rounds. He failed to take the city– and when he popped back his demons landed on each other resulting in an insane amount a casualties. After adjusting his strategy, he tried again. I decided to purchase several “thumper” units instead of the usual mix of defense forces. In three additional games, my thumpers easily chewed up any attacking demons. The demons went from having a low chance of success to almost no chance at all. Thus goes our second session with this reviled game that’s been labeled as being one of the three worst of the old Metagaming line.
The balance of power in the game is extremely fragile. The demons are relatively weak, but have extreme mobility and a chance to produce new units. Humans are powerful, but if they concentrate their forces, they demons will simply attack in the weaker areas. The thumpers are so powerful that they have to be completely eliminated before an assault begins. If the humans can concentrate more than one thumper attack against the demons each turn, then demon casualties will be pretty heavy. Once the thumpers are eliminated, the demons can begin trying for a city. Once the humans lost enough units, they will not be able to cover all of the cities. The humans will have to react quickly to any attempt to establish a breeding program… but if they do, the demons can simply take a city on the opposite side of the board and start another one simultaneously. (Alternately the demons can commit everything to defending the first one.)
Luck plays a large role in this game… and with the exception of thumper units, it’s difficult for either side to concentrate their firepower enough to work around the need for luck. One rule that could simplify the planning of attacks would be to declare that units that teleport on the same turn cannot materialize on top of each other. Losses hurt the demons tremendously as it is… but losing two or three demons to an unlucky phase in may be what’s breaking the game. The demons need to be able to concentrate four demons in an attack without fears of such debilitating losses or else the game just stalls as each side waits for a lucky break. As you resolve each transport of a unit, check to see if it is landing on one of its fellow teleporters. If it is, roll a die to determine which surrounding hex it actually ends up in. If it lands on a unit that did not engage in a transport move, then both units die as they normally do. You might declare that this “bonus” only works with units using the same transport– and if units from different transports phase in to the same place, they’re in trouble. Pop backs might work as if all of the units were coming from the same transport, making them a little safer: then you only have to worry about falling into volcanoes or landing on units that didn’t take part in the attack!
Just based on these few games, the standard Dimension Demons scenario appears to be unbalanced and difficult to “fix.” It appears to be highly suited to solitaire play, however. As long as the rules favor the humans, there’s very little for the human player to do except sit back and repulse demon attacks. It’s only until things disolve into a free-for-all that you really need to players to take the role of either side.
7 CAR WARS Rules we Forget to Play By…
December 8, 2007
In addition to improving our game with a couple of well placed house rules, I imagine we could stand to benefit by playing a few more of the “official” ones…. Playing amateur night duels, we had cars that would take several hits from machine gun fire slowly whittling away at the power plant and ther driver’s body armor DP’s. This was especially frustrating if you were rolling one’s and two’s for damage. With chances to set the car on fire and consequences for getting wounded, both of these outcomes will be less likely to be shrugged off! Another thing was that we were perhaps a little overzealous with our rams. We might not have been if we cut the damage back like we were supposed to and also slapped a chance for concussion on the duellists, too. (Page numbers below are from Compendium 2e.)
1) Subcompacts and light-weight Compacts only do two thirds damage in rams. That includes Killer Karts and Stingers! [p 13]
2) Head-on, Rear-end, and T-bone collisions can cause concussions. Take the amount of speed change for each vehicle and divide it by 10 (rounding up.) In T-bone maneuvers use the ramming vehicle’s speed change for both vehicles. Roll two dice for each crewman. If the result is less than this target number, then they are unconscious for a number of seconds equal to the amount by which they missed the roll. [p 14]
3) Debris is produced when a vehicle takes more than 10 hits of damage. Don’t forget these when collisions occur! Hitting debris is a D1 hazard and does 1d-3 damage to each tire. Debris can only be hit once per phase; starting the turn on top of debris does not trigger damage or hazards. [p 15]
4) A vehicle takes a D2 hazard if its driver is wounded. (Hits to body armor do not count as wounds.) [p 31]
5) Wounded drivers have all skills at -2. [p 31]
6) A vehicle has a 2 in 6 chance of catching fire on any turn that its power plant takes damage from weapons fire. Roll at the end of the turn to check for this. If the vehicle catches fire, each occupant, component, and armor facing takes a hit of damage on that turn and on all subsequent turns until the fire is put out. Body armor protects against burning damage. [p 31-32]
7) Immediate medical attention can generally save the life of duellists knocked down to zero DP. Duellists that go to negative DP must roll 5+ to stay alive. To keep you alive, a paramedic must roll 8+ with -1 per negative DP and a bonus of up to +3 for the quality of his equipment. The paramedic roll must be made at the arena and every 15 minutes during transit to the hospital. Once at the hospital, the character must roll 2 dice and get result greater than the negative DP amount in order to survive. (A roll equalling the negative DP amount results in crippling.) The character must stay in the hospital one week plus one additional week for each negative DP at a cost of $3000 per week. [ADQ 4/4]
On that last rule there, we were playing a somewhat more forgiving rule for our last two games that we shamelessly pilfered from GURPS 4e. We declared that immediate medical attention could automatically bring back anyone that goes down to -2 DP. For every full -3 DP’s a character drops, he has to make a “health roll” of ten or less on three dice. (Missing that roll by one or two results in a crippling injury.) Characters that drop to -15 are too mutilated to have a chance of coming back into the game. We also played that hospitalization costs are paid for by sponsors. I haven’t decided which way I prefer better, yet. I think I would like the characters to have a better chance of staying in the game after going to negative DP’s, though. Amateur night characters certainly wouldn’t have the cash to pay for hospital bills the way that the ADQ article described…. (I thought we were insured?!)
A Speed/Range Modifier Chart for CAR WARS
December 6, 2007
As Kizan requested, here is an alternative speed range chart in text format so that you can cut and paste it into the spreadsheet of your choice. These modifiers grant additional penalties for hitting speeding targets while maintaining the original flavor of the game. On average, to-hit mods tend to be more or less in the same range as in the classic pocket box rules. (The original rules added a whopping -6 to-hit on top of the standard range modifiers– this contributed greatly to making rams much more viable than direct fire weaponry.) See the previous posting for a jpeg image of the same chart.
Team Amateur Night Smack Down at Southtown, Indiana
December 6, 2007
We played a couple of “Team Amateur Night” events this past weekend. We used 4 stock Killer Karts on each team at Southtown Arena in Indiana. These were pretty complicated games running about three hours long each (but only hitting at about 15 seconds of game time.) We played mostly by Compendium 2e rules, though we agreed to simply reset handling tracks at the end of each turn and also to use a modified speed/range chart. The chart was basically pulled from GURPS 4e, but I converted mph to yards per second and CAR WARS “inches” to yards. Taking the GURPS modifier and adding 6 to it results in something pretty close to the classic CAR WARS modifiers but with (at medium-short range) maybe a -1 or -2 penalty for high speeds added onto it. The cool thing about it is that speed mods have no effect at long range… and a lot of effect at close range.
On our first event, we entered the arena on opposite sides. My opponent entered the central area immediately, but I pulled my vehicles toward each other so that they could enter the central area from a middle opening instead of one of the diagonals. As we entered the central area in two groups of two, my opponents 4 vehicles were converging on them. My opponent had much better targeting mods due to the set-up. I was suddenly very afraid– I was sure that he could get his group to tailgate mine and pick us apart one by one with little chance of return fire. I accelerated and split up, hoping that one group could somehow cover the other.
Things got ugly for my first group. All four opposing vehicles converged on them and they took heavy fire as they continued to accelerate attempting to leave the central section of the arena. My other vehicles circled back to come to their defense. One of the opposing vehicles made an extreme maneuver in order to get a shot in. He failed his control roll and he turned sideways and began to roll. The mob of vehicles continued to converge and one slipped around the rolling vehicle and then made a sharp turn to get another shot off. He failed his control roll as well and began a spin out. My cars turned to exit the central area and one of them failed a control roll, skidded, and then rammed a barrier.
My other two cars slowed down and concentrated fire on the spun out vehicle while the other vehicles attempted to pull around back into the action. The now stationary target could do nothing to prevent us from shooting up the driver. This left us with 3 cars on my team versus two on the other. In the final face off, I used one of my damaged cars to ram one of my opponent’s fresh cars. I had a pair of other vehicles slow down and combine fire against the other, taking out its driver from the rear.
On our second game, we agreed that the 4-on-4 “in formation” game was maybe not optimal. Off the cuff, we agreed to have vehicles from each side enter in pairs in each of the four gates. We rolled 1d6 to determine how fast each group was going and agreed to abide by the “tag team” rule of no fire unless we had no more than 2 vehicles in each section. The idea was the break things up a bit and make things a little less predictable. We also worked up some rules to make the speed modifiers come out a little more sensibly. (See the rules for “Head-on”, “Crossing the T”, and “Tailgating” below.)
The faster pairs entered the central region directly. In one pair, my opponent slowed down faster than me by just 5 or 10 mph or so. He was able to shoot up my car and sideswipe me multiple times and killed my vehicle in two seconds. In a similar situation on the opposite side, I had a similar advantage, but was not able to capitalize on it due to missed to-hit rolls, low damage rolls, and also to my not realizing that the sideswipe was a viable tactic.
In another corner, I slowed down to 5 mph while my opponent accelerated away. As soon as I could fire, I began shooting at his rear and quickly killed his driver. On the other side, our two vehicles fanned out, heading toward opposite corners. My opponent turned on a dime and got a lucky shot through my side before I could react. I turned back to face him down, taking more fire to that side. I turned into the central area, but miscalculated my turn. Another speeding opponent on the inside was able to take me out with a shot that just barely could hit that weakened side…. That was a mistake that easily cost me the game– especially when combined with the bad luck in another of the pairings.
One of my surviving vehicles ended up chasing one of the opposing team. I’d occasionally get a shot off, but the penalties were generally pretty bad and the walls in the arena were effective in eliminating the continuous fire bonus. In the chaos, I was reduced to a single vehicle. I ran it out of the central section just as two opposing vehicles were rounding the corner. As I’d lost my MG to an opponent the aggressively targeted fronts in spite of the extra penalty, I was hoping for a T-bone at 35 mph in order to save face. Things didn’t work out– the t-bone turned out to be a head-on, and the extra damage was enough to kill my driver permanently.
So we ended up each with a single victory and some continuing characters. We drove a lot more conservatively in the second game after all of the wipe outs in the first round. With to-hit targets running in the 9 to 11 range, we quickly discovered the importance of rams in the second game. I’m considering shifting the to-hit bonus for translating the GURPS targeting mods from +6 to +7– that would encourage a little more shooting and a little less ramming, hopefully– but I wouldn’t want that change to negatively impact other events beyond the amateur night scene. Here’s my current proposed chart:
We had discussed using these house rules to eliminate handling status tracking, but I was concerned about its effects on a series of small D1 maneuvers and hazards that got more dangerous. After seeing these two games run with almost excessive use of d6 maneuvers being used in the dog fights, I’d almost consider using both systems. Any Bootlegger, T-stop, d4, d5, or d6 maneuver should require a driver skill roll as described in those house rules– on top of any control rolls required by the handling status. Of course, that adds complexity to an already complex system… which kinda defeats the purpose of the house rules…. It’s just a thought, though.
One thing was sure, we didn’t want to do all of our amateur night duels in the same arena. The next time we duel, it will be at the Amex Proving Grounds. We’ll have pairs of vehicles enter each of the four gates and then swerve off into their respective corner pockets– forcing hopefully a fairer initial duel than what we got with our last game. I’d almost recommend not giving the contestants complementary body armor like we did just to make sure things end quicker. Making to-hit rolls slightly easier and punishing hard core maneuvers a bit should create some more interesting games, I think….
