Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

In developing a campaign setting for a Car Wars setting, it’s crucial to know what is available at any given point of time. Therefore, any list of equipment for Car Wars must include the date at which it became available. Vehicle designs should also include the date the car was produced– and variants and options should list their dates as well.

With this information, campaigns could be run in specific time periods anywhere from the Chassis and Crossbow days on into the far future. The Sunday Drivers/Crash City scenarios have entirely different flavors depending on the equipment that is around!

This sort of thing has long been a feature of Star Fleet Battles, and Battletech partakes of it to some extent, too. I’ve long been curious to know what kind of world it was where the Hotshot design could take the Division 15 championships 2 years in a row. What kind of vehicles were they dueling against? Was the Hotshot actually a thing to be feared on those freeways of yore? The background material just doesn’t say…. It’d be a lot more interesting if it did!

Taking this concept even further, you could build random encounter tables by year and by geographic location. And with that you could create scenarios and campaigns based on long distance travel in different areas.

Finally, one of the most exciting things about playing Car Wars back in the day was having to adapt as new equipment became available. With the above information, the Referee can start the campaign at a specific time and place, and then steadily release new gadgets on a quarterly basis. Players that don’t upgrade their vehicles will get to face off against opponents that have invested in retrofitting….

Deluxe Car Wars (10 phase movement chart)–

Movement: “When vehicles move during the same phase, the faster one moves first. For vehicles traveling the same speed, the one whose driver has the faster reflexes may choose when he wants to move.” (p.

Fire: “Combat may occur during any phase, before or after movement. To attack, a player simply announces that he is firing , and names the weapon being fired and its target. If a vehicle is being moved at the moment he announces the attack, the vehicle completes its movement for that phase; then the attack is resolved. Results of an attack are applied immediately, before any other vehicle can return fire or move.” (p. 14)

Car Wars Compendium 2nd edition (5 phase movement chart)–

Movement (addendum): “When vehicles are moving at high speeds in close quarters, it may be desirable to move the cars in alternating one inch increments during each phase, until that phase’s movement is done. Keep in mind that each vehicle is still limited to one maneuver per phase.” (p. 5)

Fire (change): “Combat may occur during any phase, after movement. To attack, a player simply announces that he is firing, and names the weapon being fired and its target. Results of all attacks during a phase are applied simultaneously. The referee may wish to have players declare fire secretly, by writing their fire/no fire order down on a slip of paper and handing it to him, or by some other method.” (p. 2

Car Wars, 5th Edition (3 phase movement)–

Movement (change): “In each phase, the fastest vehicle goes first. In case of ties, the player with the higher Driver skill goes first. If there’s still a tie, roll dice. The low roller goes first. Keep the same order until the next turn, even if the speeds change in mid-turn due to a crash.” (p. 3)

Fire (change): “A vehicle may declare fire at any point during its move, except during a maneuver or during a phase in which the driver failed a control roll. To attack, a player simply announces that he is firing, and names the weapon being fired and its target. If the target is still elligible to fire, and has a weapon that can hit the attacker, he may declare return fire. Only the attacker can be targeted. Return fire is considered simultaneous….”

The Car Wars background material is a result of the 70’s grognard influence hanging on into the eighties. I remember as a kid reading the timeline the Car Wars opened up with. I was only in elementary school at the time, so I couldn’t really pay attention to read it all the way through. (Of course, I read it now and am shocked to see that I’m living in the timeline. I really never expected to see this day– surely the Russians should have blown us up by now, right?)

The Car Wars background, like that of Ogre, was not designed to be compelling in and of itself. The Car Wars background was merely a form of “gaming glue” rigged together for the sole intent of rationalizing a series of death-prone anarchistic freeway and arena combats.

As the system grew, each new scenario required additions to the timeline in order to justify the new rules and adventures. This theme was followed religiously on everything from the history of terrorism and the Boy Scout Commandos all the way down to the introduction of Armored Boats. War Games are simulations– and science fiction games back then had to at least go through the motions of being concerned about ‘realism’ and plausible future histories.

(Today, we open up the new Starter Sets and… it’s just now there. There’s not even a preamble about how successful Car Wars was or how the new system will ultimately play out. Hobbits would be very displeased with this: any event of such importance should be accompanied by a “few appropriate words.”)

Anyway, the GURPS books for Car Wars are odd. Your typical worldbook covers a fully fleshed out book series– or at the very least a good hackneyed gaming premise. When you read a GURPS Autoduel book, you see a war game’s background material through a lens focused on grist for role-playing scenarios. The material is being treated the same way as Foster’s Humanx novels or Brin’s Uplift series.

Now, I do appreciate how the original GURPS Autoduel book brought Amateur Night to life. Even such an old standby can be energized by a referee that’s willing to stretch into the realm of GMing….

But somehow… I’m not sure that the background can grow indefinitely as a full-on role playing focused genre. At any rate, GM’s that are interested in that have a lot of work cut out for them. If you want to run a full on cutting edge GURPS campaign… you’ll be stuck adapting a lot of old material into the new system. GURPS Autoduel 2nd edition has not been well supported with magazine articles and new supplements.

No, I don’t think regurgitating and repackaging to old material is the way to go. You can’t go back. Long time ADQ readers will probably see any rehash as being inferior to “the good old days.”

And so we see that Steve Jackson Games is leaving the door open revising the background: not only did they omit the original timeline in the Starter Sets, but they’ve added a new gimmick to the sales blurb:

“After the grain blight . . .
“After the mutant plague . . .
“After the cities turned into fortresses . . .
“After the countryside turned into a war zone . . .
“After everything fell apart . . .

“The roads belonged to no one.
“And the right of way went to the biggest guns.”

Mutant Plague, huh? Where are they going to go with that? Reading through the Arena Book, it doesn’t seem as if things have changed all that much, though. Pedestrians show up in events more often, so that makes the arena combats sound much more gritty and violent. Also there’s talk of a cycle gang made up of Amazons…. Hmmm….

On the whole, we could be passing up an opportunity here. Before we release a new design system, before we hammer out a series of definitive scenarios and adventures, before we retool our spreadsheets… we need to look at how Car Wars stacks up against other table top war games and other post-apocalyptic role playing games. We need to set some goals for this whole project that will set us up to delve into new ground and richer deposits of gaming goodness. THEN we need to rethink our background material in light of these goals.

The background material for Ogre and Car Wars was rigged to produce a very specific outcome– an environment perfect for table top wargaming. If our goals for the system extend beyond the original boundaries, then we need to come up with a set of premises that can establish our new vision.

The Swiss Army Knife and the Leatherman are great tools. There are hundreds of tasks where these gadgets contain all you need to get the job done quickly and neatly. But you don’t take on a big project with only a Leatherman. If you’re making a chair, building a house, or fixing a circuit board, then success depend on your having something more.

Of course, I’m leading up to a metaphore here:

The GURPS basic set is a sort of Swiss Army Knife. GURPS Vehicles is a heavy duty Leatherman. On the other hand, Star Fleet Battles is a draw knife, Battletech is a nail gun, and 5th edition Car Wars is a soldering iron.

Even though you can get generic utility tools that are good for all kinds of things, there’s still lots of tools that are good to have around. GURPS Vehicles might just be the cats meow, but it just can’t do “Car Wars” like Car Wars does. The rules platform dedicated to the job can sacrifice its general applicability in order to become perfectly suited to the task at hand.

On the other hand, Car Wars did evolve it’s own system for handling characters, skills, and experience. Some of the most popular articles in ADQ were geared towards a blend of autoduelling and role playing. However, Car Wars character rules weren’t really designed…. they just kind of accrued over the years with more and more things getting added on at random. It all started with “grenade equivalents” and went downhill from there.

In this way… GURPS and Car Wars need each other: If Car Wars tries to do the things that GURPS does best… then Car Wars ends up getting silly. But if GURPS tries to absorb Car Wars by encouraging an upgrade to a clunkier more complex GURPS system for vehicle combat… the “Car Wars-type” players go play something else.

The first step in the support and development of Car Wars should be an article that condenses and extracts everything you need to use GURPS Lite with Car Wars 5th edition. A series of articles should then be released on a quarterly or bi-monthly basis that follow up on the premise with fully fleshed out adventures and scenarios.

The articles should attempt to distill the essence of Car Wars. They should be designed with introducing the new player in mind whether he’s a role-playing type or war game addict. These adventures should not be created haphazardly; the adventures should be tested and come with designers notes and play tester comments. Later adventures could focus on specialized topics such as using GURPS Cyberpunk with Car Wars adventures or creating Autoduelling themed worlds for GURPS Traveller.

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Unlike Star Fleet Battles, “doomsday” never came to the Car Wars gaming system. Compendium 2nd edition made great strides towards compiling and revising everything, but several loose threads were left untied while Aeorduel, Tanks, and the new 5th edition came along to muddy the waters yet again.

The net result of this is that there isn’t a definitive edition of the game in existence. (5th edition can resolve this… but it hasn’t yet.)

Off the top of my head, here are the major versions of Car Wars:

* The Original Black Pocketbox Edition

* Scott Haring’s Deluxe Car Wars compilation/revision

* First Edition GURPS Autoduel (featuring Scott Haring’s pre-Vehicles ‘port’ of the Car Wars rules)

* The Car Wars Compendium (Second Edition)

* Second Edition GURPS Autoduel (featuring Christopher Burke’s tweaks to GURPS Vehicles)

* The new 5th Edition Release

Of course, the are several incremental steps between these milestones– what with new gadgets and rules coming out with each ADQ and supplement….

Chassis and Crossbow, the major Car Wars “sub-genre”, comes in 3 flavors: the ADQ 1/3 version, the Dueltrack version, and the “Mutant Zone” version.

I tend to think of GURPS Vehicles as being the ultimate evolution of Car Wars. That may not be entirely true, but it helps to comfort me with a feeling that the Car Wars concept has been supported and developed by Steve Jackson Games over a much longer continuous period of time.

In trolling the web I’ve found a few positive reviews of 5th edition Car Wars like this one:

http://www.rpg.net/forums/phorum/rf08/read.php?f=338&i=10&t=4

However I haven’t found anything positive regarding the GURPS Vehicles varieties of Car Wars. There is some good resources for the brave over on GURPS Net, though:

http://gurpsnet.sjgames.com/Archive/Vehicles/Autoduel/

I do own a copy of GURPS Vehicles, GURPS Mecha, and even GURPS Traveller Starships. I admit that I really don’t have a clue on how to get any play out of them. (And I always thought I was pretty smart for being able to understand Car Wars, SFB, and Battletech….)