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. 

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.”

Here’s my first attempt at building something with GURPS 4e and Powers.  I noticed early on that this ain’t anything like designing vehicles for Car Wars.  With Car Wars, you pick a body-size and start loading it up with goodies– it’s not much more complicated than going grocery shopping provided you can add and multiply.  With GURPS, you think of a character or power… and then you attempt to model it with the rules.  This makes things much more subjective and you can waste a lot of time figuring out the best way to do things and then still feel like you’ve made a bad design decision or broken a rule.

Anyways, the advantage I’ve worked up was inspired by several different games of the 80’s.  First was the “Solar Power” from Heroes Unlimited.  Basically it just gave a die of damage per level of your character.  This was pretty disappointing.  Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had an entry on mutant stegasauruses with funny solar powers resulting from the weird plates on their backs.  This was more interesting.  I played Gamma World back then a lot more than the Palladium stuff, so I attempted to come up with some new mutant abilities for that game, but eventually abandoned it in frustration.  But now with GURPS Powers, I’ve got the tools to actually finish my rough ideas….

Heat Wave (+300%) Affliction-1 (Biological, -10%; Cone 13 hexes wide, +180%; Contact Agent, +150%; Stunning, +10%; Secondary Affect– Attribute Penalty -4 to ST, DX, and HT and -2 to IQ, +20%; Increased 1/2 D x5, +20%; All-Out, -25%; Costs 3 FP, -15%) [40]

This attack creates a wave of intense heat that stuns the victims and in some cases causes a heat exhaustion that can last minutes.  At range 1-10, the attack is resisted with a HT roll.  At range 11-20, the attack is resisted at HT+3.  (Note that the victim can roll each second to break out of the stun if he fails the first time.)  If the resistance roll is missed by 5 or more the victim suffers the attribute penalty.  Note that it actually costs 4 FP to use because of the biological modifier.

A note on the cone: it’s 1 hex wide at range 1-3, 3 hexes wide at range 4-6, 5 hexes wide at range 7-9, 7 hexes wide at range 10-12, 9 hexes wide at range 13-15, 11 hexes wide at range 16-18, and 13 hexes wide at range 19-20.

I just spotted a possible error in my design….  Do I need to pay the +10% for stunning when the Attribute Penalty is only a secondary affect?  Hmm….  Dunno.  Well… I’ll hit the books.  I cringe at the thought of posting this on the SJGames board– it’d break my heart at this point to find out that there’s a much more appropriate way to build this thing after I spent 2 hours fiddling with it!

“1986, Steve Jackson Games® releases GURPS®, the Generic Universal Role Playing System. Not take anything away from Steve Jackson, ‘cuz he is one of the great game designers or our industry, but the idea of a “universal” game system wasn’t new. Palladium Books had been doing for six years, starting with our first publication back in 1981. Today, those same basic rule and concept of play are still the foundation of our role-playing game, have spawned mega-hit RPG after hit, and is more popular than ever. “

http://www.palladiumbooks.com/profile.html

Okay. I was there.

The first gaming stuff I ever bought was the black pocket box Car Wars and the Double Arena expansion set, the Basic D & D boxed set with the Green Dragon on the cover, and an unbelievably weird game called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I continued to buy stuff for those games over the next several years, and also ended up playing the original First Edition AD&D, Gamma World, and Battletech.

I remember what the 80s gaming scene was like. And I remember vividly the fear and trembling with which I opened that GURPS box so long ago. Reading and playing that material with those first few world books that were released, it quickly became obvious that the bar for RPGs had been raised.

There’s a lot more to GURPS than simply coming up with a cross-genre “universal” system.

If you look at the early RPG’s, you see a lot of repetition and variation among the same set of ideas. You had attributes, classes, alignments, saving throws, and levels. Each of these ideas were generally made up of simple rules, but as the systems were extended with new rules, it would take more and more rules to make things to work and work together. In programming, we call this sort of thing a “kludge”. Kludges can work, but as you add features to them they tend to get unstable and unwieldy.

What Steve Jackson did with GURPS is this: He took all of the RPG ideas and came up with a higher level abstraction that could easily model any role playing character or situation. Levels disappeared and were replaced with “points”– a much more flexible and accurate representation of character value. Alignments disappeared and were replaced with more generic mental disadvantages and quirks. Classes disappeared and were replaced with generic advantages and skills lists. (An elven fighter/mage and a bionic superhero with psionic powers could be designed with ease. GURPS made blending various “class” concepts a cinch.) Extraneous attributes that weren’t really useful for anything were thrown out. Saving throws were derived naturally from attributes, skills, and advantages. “Monsters” were constructed with the same generic rules, instead of requiring a separate system.

Steve didn’t invent every single one of these ideas himself– he acknowledged his debt to other games. But he was the first to compile a system with this elegant combination of simplicity and scope. Steve applied the principles of good design to RPGs. His design was like that of a good software engineer. And not only did he solve the character/NPC/monster/multi-class problem, but he also hard wired his system to be easy to use in play and also to emphasize Role Playing over “Hack and Slash.”

Because GURPS is such a good design, its source books are easy to adapt to other systems. Sourcebooks from other systems are easy to adapt to GURPS. Because GURPS books don’t have to repeat the same old rules over and over, space is freed up and authors have room to try to make the definitive RPG treatment of their subject matter. Over time, GURPS has gone from being the simplest RPG to use to now having the most elaborate collection of optional add-ons of any system. And as far as background for science fiction campaigns, lots of settings have gotten RPG world books that probably wouldn’t have been covered otherwise. Settings that haven’t scored their own world books can be campaigned in by using the generic rules in GURPS Space and Ultra-tech.

Palladium has always had good artwork, fun books, lots of adventures, and innovative concepts. I’m sure the system has evolved over time. But GURPS set the standard for cohesion, consistency, modularity, and scope– and it has not been surpassed. Its more than just one the “same basic rule and concept” for several genres. It’s one system for any genre.