Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Here’s my winning team from game 5 of our team amateur night series of games. (Only nine more to play!)

Alonzo Swartz
Prestige: 3
Kills: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Notes: 3/21/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Took out an enemy Killer Kart by blowing throw the front Machine Gun and setting the power plant on fire, but was “killed” a couple seconds later by a ram from behind.

Wayne Hertz
Prestige: 5
Kills: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Vehicle: Killer Kart with 15 shots left, no side armor on either side, and one point of damage to the power plant.
Notes: 3/21/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: After having his side armor blown off with a lucky shot from a badly damaged opponent, he narrowly survived a 2-on-2 hairball. When he drove to the other side of the arena to make a high speed pass against the remaining vehicle, his opponent missed– but he made his winning shot with a natural twelve!

Anita Valdez
Prestige: 3
Kills: 1
Driver Skill Points: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Salvage: Killer Kart with no armor except the 3 points on the back.
Notes: 3/21/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Anita focused fire on a single enemy for the first seven seconds of the game. On the 7th second, she took power plant damage from his prey just as she killed him. Another opponent closed in for a T-bone and Anita had no choice but to turn it into a head-on at the last moment. The damage rolled was exactly enough to give both drivers two hits of damage. Anita nearly died in the flames, but narrowly made her survival roll. (Technically, she should have been toast. My opponent generously declared that medical teams could quickly reach her because the battle had moved to the opposite side of the arena at that moment.)

Rodney Fischer
Prestige: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 1
Notes: 3/21/08 Armadillo Autoduel Arena: Rodney was shot up early on in the game, but instead of leaving himself open to SMG attacks while focusing on an opposing vehicle, he decided to take down a pedestrian. On two separate damage rolls he rolled ones… while the pedestrian was able to set his car on fire. The fire was just enough to knock Rodney unconscious and the pedestrian pulled him from the flames.

We had such a good experience with Armadillo Autoduel Arena that we decided to try another event there with random starting positions for the 8 vehicles. In the previous game, I’d had doubts that we were being completely consistent tracking damage, so I decided to track all damage scored in the game on a single page without any vehicle record sheets on it. I asked my opponent to pay attention to any duelists that had handling statuses drop below zero so we could keep track of their recovery correctly as well.

Rules wise, we decided to keep everything the same. The previous duel was so good that we didn’t feel the need to change anything. I think we might have been a little lax in keeping track of to-hit penalties due to maneuvers and hazards this time around, though. We kept our house ruled speed/range penalty chart, lenient survival rules, and our stingy skill award system. (We did end up dropping our gentleman’s agreement to do all movement for the phase first, then give everyone an option to fire after that. We also had some hinky fire at the very beginning of the turn before any movement at all. It’s probably time to reread the sequence of play rules again….)

Before we began, I suggested to my opponent that we be really fastidious for the first second of the game and pay extreme attention to the movement order due to the reflex rolls. He did not heed my request and moved most of his vehicles before me. This gave me the opportunity to react to his moves, and each of my pairs of vehicles on opposite sides of the arena ganged up on one of his cars.

On both sides of the arena we successfully took out our initial targets, though one took an especially long time to kill. By the grandstands, one of my cars lost its back and left armor and could not foil the following vehicle even when he dodged behind a TV bunker.

The other fight on the opposite side looked like a cakewalk until the nearly dead enemy lashed out with 6 points of MG damage to the side of one of my cars. That damaged car could no longer get in position without risking exposing a bare side, so the driver panicked and made a U-turn. He just couldn’t get his guns in position anymore after that even against the other closing enemy vehicle. That car’s “wingman” (my other car on that side of the board) got off a killing shot about that moment, but the other opposing vehicle was closing in for a T-bone. At just the last moment I turned in—converting it into a head-on collision. The damage rolled was exactly enough to do two hits of damage to each of the drivers. Body armor doesn’t protect from ram damage, so they were both knocked unconscious.

Meanwhile, over by the grandstands the hairball had shaken out so that we each were down to a single vehicle over there. Being very irate about the pedestrians from the last game, I said, “throw down your SMG, or I’ll kill you!” The pedestrian refused and responded with hand weapon fire. (The other opposing car was going too fast to bring his guns to bear for the next couple of seconds, so I thought I had time to take care of this. In any case, my lack of side armor on the car sort of forced me to target the ped anyway.)

I think I missed the pedestrian once, hit him for one or two points of damage on the next shot, and then did a single point of damage as I rammed him against his abandoned car. On the other hand, he managed to hit my power plant through the exposed facing. My car caught fire and the flame damage was exactly enough to cause my driver to go unconscious. To add insult to injury, the pedestrian pulled my driver from the flaming wreck—scoring a rare 3 point prestige bonus in the process for the sheer audacity of the act. The television crews at the event ate it up.

That left both sides with exactly one car each. My car’s left side was gone, but his car’s front armor was gone and he had only one DP left on his MG because he had taken down one of my cars already with a deadly rear-end ram. We took several seconds to accelerate and get into position. As we closed for the final pass, we traded shots. He missed, but I had rolled a natural twelve to take out his MG and set his power plant on fire. Even a parting sideswipe couldn’t even things up at that point, so he conceded.

The Armadillo arena has turned out to be an excellent location for our team events. It’s large enough that going any particular direction generally commits you to being in a particular sector for ten seconds—an eternity by Car Wars standards. Also, the randomized start positions in an already asymmetrical environment ensure that each pitched battle is subtly different as well.

Tactically, things were a wash. The Killer Karts are egg shells, but they can still take six seconds or more to kill even under heavy fire. Because we don’t reset handling status each turn, I drive much more conservatively. With our stingy skill point awards, that means I don’t pick up driver’s skill points in the games now. (We only give the usual driver skill point award for an event if the duelist makes a successful control roll.) My five mph pivot maneuvers leave me open to be rammed by my opponent, but the rams are risky and can cripple the attacker even if they are successful.

We were very pleased with the combination of solid Compendium 2e rules, the Armadillo map, and the minimal number of house rules. Sure, I have won three matches in a row now (and my opponent was nearly irate about that), but I’m not sure that Car Wars is a particularly good game to attempt to play competitively with only two players. There’s too many opportunities for serious mistakes to be made, and a lot of trust is required without a referee. We knew that going in, so the main purpose of the campaign was to generate interesting background for an ongoing alternating-refereeing type troupe style rpg. As far as that goes, my opponent is killing me. The flame damaged insane female from the last game is clearly a Daredevil with a High Pain Threshold. The minister that rescued my driver from the flaming wreck this game clearly has Enhanced Dodge, Luck and some sort of Code of Honor.

There’s a lot less salvage being generated in our games now because so many of the cars catch fire ever since we remembered to apply the 2 in 6 chance of fire for MG damage on power plants. Our slower speeds and larger arenas seem to cause a lot more vehicle losses as well. Winning a Killer Kart duel is worth some prestige, but the real money is going to be in the later Joseph Special and Hot Shot rounds. We’ve now played 5 of the 8 Killer Kart rounds—those high end events just aren’t that far off anymore. I wonder how much the dynamic will change when we switch Stingers… but we won’t have much time to adapt because the vehicle types will change pretty quickly at that point.

Anyways, this is great Car Wars…. Definitely some of the most fun I’ve ever had with the game….

The whole Gygax thing is surprisingly depressing to me. Mostly because I’m surrounded by people that wouldn’t understand. I imagine that I would have shrugged it off if I’d gotten just a little bit of sympathy the next day… but somehow… feeling misunderstood is draining and tiresome.

My first exposure to Dungeons and Dragons came while I was in elementary school. I was in a YMCA type summer camp and a Dungeon Master guy was there. He was a few years older than me and had the hard cover AD&D books by Gygax. I thought it was really cool and got a chance to play with one other kid. We were both really little and this guy was a few years older than us. We had official type character sheets on the neato parchement paper. All those numbers on it were just intoxicating. We were walking through some sore of dungeon and we came to a hideous statue built into the wall. It was a hideous face. The kid that was with me decided to crawl into the mouth of the statue. The DM said the the stone teeth began to chew his character to pieces.

I remember the DM being very angry that one of his characters had gotten killed.

Not too long later, I bought (at a Teacher’s supply store no less) the purple boxed set with the Green Dragon on the cover that came with the Keep on the Borderlands module. Later on, I found a real gaming store and discovered a whole realm of weird games like Toon and Burrows and Bunnies. I bought a Car Wars pocket box with expansion sets four and five and I also picked up the offbeat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rpg from Palladium. (This was back when TMNT was a trendy black and white comic book and before the market saturation had set in.)

It was a really awkward time to grow up. The computers we had were about to obsoleted by 16-bit Macs/Amigas/STs just as we were getting the hang of programming them. There were no clicky-base games, collectible card games, or shops holding Warhammer competitions every week. The RPG’s we had often spent very little space explaining how to actually run a game and often could not be played exactly as written anyway.

We were so young, we didn’t really understand the stuff we were buying. We just thought they were cool. We got a lot of play value out of computer games like Zork, Ultima, and the Bard’s Tale. Choose-your-own-Adventure books like Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons were more our speed, though. The Middle Earth Quest game books were much more interesting from a game mechanics standpoint, though I’d later learn that licensing issues had nearly destroyed the company that produced them. And Dungeons and Dragons… it wasn’t really something we played. We thought those hard backed AD&D books were the height of cool (and we loved playing with the dice), but we really did not know how to get a game together. Other role playing games would be designed to capitalize on this phenomenon: unplayable games with loads of supplements for people to use to spend time “not playing” the game! This is the hobby’s strangest secret.

But let’s face it. These people going on about how much Dungeons and Dragons meant to them and how it “saved” their childhood…. Maybe we just grew up in different places or something. What I remember is feeling effectively locked out of society. I couldn’t understand how regular people could be so taken up with the whole football player - cheerleader - prom thing. People were mostly mean and petty in middle school, but there was all of this time spent waiting: homeroom, on the bus…. And tinkering with these too-often broken and not-so-playable games was something to do while were being sorted and shuffled from one box to the next.

But the people that really got into it? I remember this little kid in my scout troop. He got hooked on D&D in a scary way. Bought literally everything for the game and had it in some sort of little shrine. He’d do completely random frightening stuff on camping trips… and as he got older, he got into drugs. I remember seeing him shuffling around down town, completely toasted out of his brain and with some doped up hippy-looking chick hanging off his arm. D&D was the thing he’d latched onto just as he’d begun his downward spiral into self destruction.

Then there was the dregs that still played it in when we got to college: the scary geeks, like the overweight dude that got addicted to MUDS and flunked out of college. I remember this other guy with a closet full of martial arts weapons drinking tea and babbling about his character. He always played a girl and the other characters would “hit on” his female elf girl thing. And he was so into it. Years later (and with the help of an operation) he would actually realize this deep fantasy of his.

I guess that after a lifetime of being influenced by Gary Gygax, I just have to look back and laugh at myself a little. We spent so little time playing D&D and spent so much time tinkering with it. We got a real kick out of criticizing the rules, breaking the balance of the game, and making fun of the premise. We thought the whole class/level thing was stupid, and spent immense efforts searching for the “right” way to model character development. And then, when we finally got around to actually playing these sorts of games as young adults, we soon realized that the simple rules and cliché driven themes were actually a big part of what made “real” gaming work. I don’t know. Being a gamer… even if you don’t actually play Dungeons and Dragons… a lot of what you do is to “fix”, refine, or extend what Gary Gygax helped create. And even if you’re not involved with role playing in general, a lot of game design is about taking some aspect of the D&D phenomenon and making it accessible to a new or different cross section of people.

I don’t know what to think. I’ve got mixed feelings, I guess. Thinking about Gary Gygax… this game… this entire oddball hobby. This is the point where I’m supposed to come up with some sort of pithy resolution to these ramblings, but nothing quite captures the melancholy I feel right now. But I do know that most of the stuff I see being written about Gygax misses it.

I guess I feel out of sync with regular people because they have absolutely concept of this gaming subculture I spend so much time getting wrapped up in. I feel out of sync with the people praising Gygax because the reality of it was that things didn’t quite play out the way they should have… and those hard back books mostly stayed on the shelf instead of on the gaming table. (I think we were about six years too late to unselfconsciously enjoy the phenomenon.) And I feel out of sync with Massively Multiplayer Online crowd because even though what they do looks really similar to D&D on the surface, I still feel they’re missing the most critical aspects of the game. (They’re missing out on, among other things, the ability of the players to define and redefine rules… and they’re missing the collaborative and improvisatory aspects.)

But thanks, Gary. We were young and goofy and the hobby itself was as adolescent as we were. It meant something, though. And it still does.

Here’s my lineup after the first two rounds. Prestige ratings will determine who gets promoted to the more expensive cars in the Team Amateur Night Campaign.

Fernando Rodrigez
Prestige: 5
Kills: 1
Driver Skill Points: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Vehicle: One Stock Killer Kart ($3,848 value)
Salvage: One Killer Kart with 2 hits to the power plant, no right or back armor, and only 6 shots left for the MG.
Notes: 12/1/07 Southtown Amateur Night (KK)– shot and killer opponent through rear armor after three seconds of continuous fire.

“The Gimp”
Prestige: 3
Driver Skill Points: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 1
Vehicle: One Stock Killer Kart with 9 shots left. ($3,273 value)
Notes: 12/1/07 Southtown Amateur Night (KK)– Survived event with car intact, but made no kills.

“Dutch” Wenger
Prestige: 1
Kills: 1
Driver Skill Points: 2
Gunner Skill Points: 1
Salvage: One Killer Kart with 7 hits to the power plant, 14 shots left for the MG, and no Right armor.
Notes: 12/1/07 Southtown Amateur Night (KK)– T-boned an opponent for a kill but rolled enough damage to knock himself out. Hospitalized.

Bobby Drake
Prestige: -1
Driver Skill Points: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 1
Notes: 12/1/07 Southtown Amateur Night #2 (KK)– Didn’t take a D2 maneuver in order to protect his damaged left side and ended up being killed after a few brief seconds of gun fire and maneuver.

“Dominoe” jones
Prestige: -1
Notes: 12/1/07 Southtown Amateur Night #2 (KK)– Came out of the gates side by side with an opponent who braked slightly while moving to the center. Killed by gun fire and repeated sideswipes with no chance to return fire.

Calculating Winnings and stats:

We awarded prestige more or less normally. To gain driver skill you had to successfully make a control roll or execute a ram. To score a gunner skill point, you had to successfully hit an opposing vehicle. If you make a kill, you get a single skill point: one in gunner skill if you used weapon fire to make the kill, or one in driver skill if you used a ram. (This is extremely stingy… none of the characters can really expect to gain a skill level even after playing in 4 duels.) If you survived the event, you could keep your vehicle. If you made any kills and survived, you could salvage them. Also, we’re playing that the duellists don’t have to take the salvage values of their kills right away– they can hold onto them until they graduate Amateur Night at which point they’ll consolidate everything into repairing a car or two and converting everything else to cash.

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….)

I’ve always liked the extra skills that were introduced for Car Wars in ADQ issues 4/2, 7/1, and in the Compendium 2e.  The thing was, though, that we never bought very many of them for our characters.  If you knew you were going to be dueling very much, you maxed out your character points on Driver and Gunner skills– and that was it!  Previously, I suggested using “General” skill point awards from duels and adventures to improve non-combat skills, but after playing Traveller I see there’s a less heavy handed approach to accomplishing the same thing– at least in the case of former Boy Scout Commandoes.

Not everyone can claim to have been a Boy Scout Commando– this is only at the referee’s discretion.  Players using these character generation rules have to use them in sight of their fellow players if they intend to use their characters in a game: you can’t just roll up a hundred characters until you get what you want.  (Go play GURPS if you already know exactly what type of character you want to play!)

To determine your character’s background, first roll up the standard Traveller attributes for your character.  These consist of 6 2d6 rolls applied consecutively to Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social.  Don’t worry if you don’t know when, where, and how to adapt these values to your adventures: a consensus has never really emerged even among Traveller fans.  You could even throw them out altogether when you start playing your character: in a high tech future, skills are going to be a lot more important than attributes.  If they do impact a skill roll, they should never improve a roll 2d6 skill check by more than +1 or +2.

Scouts begin the character generation process at age 12.  Each year they will make rolls to determine if they survive, advance, and if they persevere.  The survival roll is required because like in the corps is dangerous: that really cool character with nifty skills and attributes is likely to improve each year he stays in the corps… but you just might lose him.  Not everyone advances and not everyone stays involved with their troop; rolls for both of those are required each time as well.

To become a scout, roll your Soc attribute or less on 2d6.

To Survive, roll 6 or more on 2D6.  (Add one to your roll if your Dex is 8 or higher.  Add two to your roll if your End is 10 or higher.)

To Advance, roll 9 or more on 2D6.  (Add one to your roll if your Int is 7 or higher.  Add two to your roll if your Edu is 9 or higher.)

To Perservere, roll 7 or more on 2D6.  (Add one if your Str is 9 or higher.)

Each time you advance, you gain a new skill at base level.  When you advance to Tenderfoot, you gain the Handgunner skill.  First Class scouts receive Paramedic skill.  Star scouts gain Driver skill… and Death scouts pick up Gunner skill.  If a scout fails his survival roll, he’s dead.  When you finally get a character to survive the process, you can use the dead ones as fellow scouts from your character’s patrol that all died on a particularly gruesome mission.  If you fail a perseverance roll, then your character quit scouting for some reason and the process ends there; you do pick up your skills for that year, however.

Each year your character remains in scouting, he gets to roll on a skill table.  If he doesn’t have the skill he rolls, then he receives it at base level.  If he already has the skill, then he gains a level in it.  Low ranking scouts roll on the Skill Awards Table.  Star and Death scouts roll on the Merit Badges Table.  Scouts gain these skills in addition to the ones they pick up for advancement.

Skill Awards
1) Survival
2) Stealth
3) Scrounging
4) Handgunner
5) Runner
6) Climber

Merit Badges
1) Driver
2) Gunner
3) Mechanic
4) Explosives
5) Paramedic
6) Martial Arts

The only new skill in the above list is Scrounging– use that to help determine if your character can find supplies, ammo, and/or spare parts for jury-rigging equipment.

Once you survive your 6th year of scouting, fail a perseverance roll, or drop out, add up your character’s total skill levels in Driver and Gunner (including your base levels.)  If you have less than 3 total skill levels there, then round out your character by adding the difference in new skills or skill levels.  For instance, if your character was Driver-1, you could pick up Gunner-0 at this point.  If your character had no skill levels at all in Driver or Gunner, you might pick Mechanic-2 or even Politics-2.

The first character I rolled up with these rules had 9,9,5,7,10, and 3 for attributes and was Handgunner-1, Stealth-0, Scrounging-0, Paramedic-1, Driver-1, Gunner-0, Mechanic-0.  (Yeah, he actually did make his Soc roll to join the troop!)

Note that Car Wars skills are much more effective than their Traveller “level zero” counterparts.  But these rules can be used in either game, because most of the additional skills the Car Wars character receives will be in non-combat disciplines.  In Traveller, adding a few level zero skills to a character will probably not imbalance the game– in fact many referees do so already– but referees should be aware that this system can yield level 1 skills or even level 2 skills as well.  While characters should technically be able to join a standard military service after 4-6 years in the BSC, referees might want to limit this generation process to only those characters that are from a violent post-apocalyptic world– a world whose citizens might not have access to the usual Imperial careers!

A-Rogue was published in the May, 1987 issue of Antic Magazine.  Also called “Atari Rogue,” the game is not quite a port of the original mainframe Rogue ASCII-graphic adventure, but more of an adaption.  It is interesting to see how the author simplified the game in order to make it work in BASIC on an 8-bit machine.  (A more serious attempt to implement Rogue on a home computer would have to wait until the original authors could put together commercial versions for the IBM PC, Mac, Atari ST, and Amiga.)

Atari Rogue uses an altered character set to make the graphics.  You can see the typical layout of a level below.  For some reason it took the 6502 processor nearly a minute to randomly generate such a map!  The mazes fit in a 24×12 grid and the player was represented by the standard Atari cursor instead of the usual ‘@’ symbol.  Unlike the mainframe version, you cannot return to previously visited levels, but can only go further down.  The screen is updated by positioning the cursor and programmatically entering deletes and spaces/text, which occasionally makes for semi-animated visual effects.  That technique was not overly exploited, however.

Monsters do not wander in this version and do not remain to block your path if you successfully [w]ithdraw from them.  There are no hidden passages to search for and the items are randomly scattered about more like a random event than as an actual placed object.  There is no “Experience Point” counter on your display, so its not clear that you gain anything by defeating monsters.  On the contrary, your Endurance score (i.e., Hit Points) seems to go up each time you [d]escend to a new level regardles of how many monsters you kill.

Potions are a mixed bag: they can either teleport you randomly, summon a monster, heal you, feed you, or raise your Endurance score.  Perhaps the most insidious one is the one that rots your food supply.  You might think to eat a meal before trying a random potion, but that’s not an option: once you find one, you have to drink it or it completely disappears.  The same thing goes for weapons and armor: if you find a new item, you have to take it or its gone forever.

The simplifications of the game eliminate many of the tactical and strategic options that made the original Rogue so addictive.  In this version, you’re mainly left with choosing when to attack, when to withdraw, when to experiment with weird potions (if you find them), and when to use your limited number of spells.

So far, I tend to die with many resources left at my disposal.  Also, I’m way too reckless in battle and I’m not sure that the risk is even worth it.  I have no idea how far down the dungeon goes, so I’m not sure how close I’ve ever come to completing the game.  I wonder exactly how the experience system works and also what the actual weapon and armor statistics are, but I hesitate to examine the code because much of the charm of the game comes from the slight “fog of war” that ignorance of such things entails.

To run the game, I used the Atari800Win Plus emulator and the files from the Antic Archive.  Be sure to enable the “H” drive from the Settings screen if you try this yourself.  Also, the lines of code referencing the “D” drive should be changed as well once you RUN “H:AROGUE.BAS”.  (It is cool to have an Atari with that much disk space!!)  The code seems to work fine, though I did get an “ERROR 141″ cursor our of range error from line 190 one time….

In conclusion, the game is a cute abstraction of Dungeons and Dragons.  The fact that tunnels and rooms are essentially the same (and also that that objects and monsters are not persisted on the map) eliminates a lot of the point of the randomly generated layout.  While the author did achieve some semblance of Rogue-ishness, one wonders how memory and computing power could have been marshalled to give greater depth and a larger array of tactical options to the game.

Ron Edwards says on The Forge that “you remember [role playing games from your teenage years] fondly not because the game itself was good, but because it wasn’t.”  Ouch.  He’s right, though.  The things just flat out didn’t work, more often than not.

I remember this quirky guy we met that said he Dungeon Mastered.  We rolled up characters and he took us through a cave.  We examined everything and he wanted to know exactly how we went about with everything.  It took maybe half an hour just to cross an underground river.  Nothing ever really happened in the game and none of us ever saw him again.

Then there was the guy that gave me a copy of the 3rd edition Gamma World boxed set.  Man, I wanted to play that game.  On my birthday the following year I had set him up to Game Master.  He stood me up.  I’d probably never been so disappointed.  My pals rolled up characters and I tried to run things.  The “rank 1 wimps” fought a few mutant bunny rabbits and could hardly ever hit or do any damage.  Oh, the pain!

Then there was my friend that had cool games like FASA’s Doctor Who, GDW’s Twilight 2000, and Victory Games’ James Bond.  I borrowed the Doctor and even bought a few supplements but hadn’t watched the show much and couldn’t figure out how to run it.  Twilight, we rolled up characters one night and then couldn’t figure out what to do next.  We started playing Octopussy for James Bond one time, but I couldn’t get over the fact that the Faberge egg was just a blood spattered drawing on a crumpled piece of paper.  The props were really cool, but as a player I had no clue how to proceed with any sort of investigation.

I attempted to run the adventure that came with GURPS Humanx one evening.  It featured two bars/night club locations and I ended up arguing with the characters about what had happened where.  Evidently two night clubs was way too much setting for either me to communicate or for my players to comprehend.

Then there was the time that I thought that Dungeon Magazine’s short and simple adventures would be the key to making this stuff work.  I tried to run “Roarwater Caves” from issue number 15.  I was always the mapper in our group, so there was no one that cared to do that if I was Dungeon Mastering.  The players wandered aimlessly through a few rooms and then backtracked….  They were completely lost.  The bad guys of the adventure weren’t goblins or orcs, but… xvarts.  And, boy, did I get my fill of fart jokes that afternoon!

The only way I’ve ever gotten anywhere in a game was to ignore combat– in fact ignore all the rules– make stuff up, and start in the middle of the action.  Don’t require excessive map making or note taking: just present them with a situation and let the players go.  If they start barking up the wrong tree, then steadily introduce a crisis that they have to respond to.  If something’s not working, introduce totally new events until something takes.  Clichés are your best friend in all of these matters, because the players will immediately know what role they have to play.  But never ever name the bad guys something that rhymes with a bodily function!

In a recent post I remarked that in judging the elegance of a game “it is important to understand the design differences forced upon a game by its [designer's] choice of scope and granularity.”  Chris Warren has similarly concluded that when he attempts to make his game designs elegant, he’s “actually trying to make the game as un-complex as possible… for the amount… of emergence” that he’s trying to foster.  He defines emergence as being patterns that occur during play “that are not directly defined by the rules of the system.”

Under this measure, Conway’s Game of Life does very well.  Chess has many more than its fair share of openings, combinations, and killer tactics for a game with such few rules.  But interactive fiction’s hardwired emphasis on one-shot puzzles cause it to come up short here.  Computer Role Playing Games might, as a class, fair a bit better if the design is good enough: their model world construction might develop an emergent ecology of sorts in the course of play.  But the Role Playing Games from which the CRPGs originally sprang are an entirely different can of worms.

Role Playing Games seem to be so dominated by the requirements of an adaptive and coherent narrative that most rules tend to get thrown out the window in the heat of the game.  Take Traveller as an example: it didn’t take long for players to realize that excessive space combat lead to a depressing amount of character generation.  Sophisticated modern referees such as Karl Gallagher nearly eschew combat altogether– ultra-violence is reserved for orcs in other settings.  The throws that I require in the course of the game are mostly improvised according to each situation.  In terms of hard and fast rules that actually get used, I’d say that about 90% of them come from the character and world generation.  But those rules are only used to prepare for play.  What gets used during a game is probably only a page or two of charts and core rules.

I wish that modern play-tests for RPGs were more like… well… play-tests.  What usually happens is that the rules get tinkered with, proofread, checked for various flame war inducing factors, and so forth.  You rarely hear about, “when I ran a session with this new rule-set, this is what happened.”  You certainly don’t see transcripts of actual sessions!

I wish there were similar tools for RPG testing like what we have for software development.  I’d like to give a new game to five or ten different groups to play with for a few sessions… and I’d like to not only have a full transcript of the games, but I’d like to have each group’s rulebook automatically highlighted for each rules section that actually got used.  I’d especially like to have sections that were flatly contradicted or house-ruled highlighted in red.  That would give the designers some real information to work with, but I’m not sure that many designers care.  Sometimes I wonder if we’ve really come that far since the seventies.

But back to Warren’s remarks….  How can RPG rules be designed to maximize elegance and emergence?  Are there any good examples of this?  I mostly play the old stuff, so I wonder if I’m missing out on any major improvements….

We got together last night for the second installment of our Spinward Marches: 1111 campaign.  Last time we had travelled from Bowman to Flexos.  The players had helped a Darrian merchant out of a little scrape and so were offered positions helping to crew his far trader.  On Flexos, a small adventure seed spun out of control as the players ventured into the unknown.  Tensions ran high as they were sure they were all going to die for nearly every moment.

Going into the second session, I was perhaps a bit overconfident: things had gone well the first time mainly because I was lucky.  I made several mistakes this time around– or at the very least, several sub-optimal choices.  The overall narrative was forwarded somewhat, I learned a few things, and we did have our moments, so it wasn’t a total loss by any stretch.  A weekly Traveller game session is actually pretty demanding, though.

I have a lot of conflicting goals as a referee.  I want the players to have significant choices and I want the narrative to remain coherent.  I want every stat on the character sheets and world listings to impact the game.  I want failure to have real consequences… and yet I don’t want to ruin an adventure just because of a die roll.  I want to emphasize travel across many star systems as the backdrop, but I also want each world to be individualized and recognizable.  I want to balance all of these factors, but I also want everything to flow naturally with a sense of inevitability.  I want to run a good game, but I want the players to be able to take center stage.

Walston and Datrillion were very similar worlds.  The players had two brief stops on both of them and I even got them mixed up myself during the heat of the game.  I need to have a better cheat sheet next time….  One thing that threw me was that a bit part I had planned for Walston was thrown when the medic failed the roll to revive an NPC from Low Berth.  If Doc had only been Medic-2….

Another thing that hampered the session was that I was using Kenneth Bearden’s T4 task system with CT generated characters.  It was all rigged up for people with skill levels between 2 and 5 or so, I think.  Using it with the CT characters left the 2d6 “Average” task rolls too easy and the 3d6 “Difficult” task rolls too hard.  After a valiant effort, I gradually slipped back into roll-your-attribute-or-less on two dice with healthy modifers based on the situation.  I really have to come up with a better system for the next time.  What I really want is to have several possible outcomes with a single roll and  I want to avoid using multiple die rolls to determine a contest or to figure out how long it takes to accomplish something.

Another thing that seemed to drag was that the players would get to a world and then they wouldn’t really know what to do.  On Walston, my planned adventure seed just didn’t seem to fit the narrative when we got there.  On Datrillion, I felt like I set up the seed too overtly.  On both worlds I wanted to show several of the world details instead of just reciting the facts, but I just didn’t seem to pull this off.

Next time, I want to have some sort of play aid that shows a few options for them when they arrive.  This might be somewhat like the map of the town from Ultima I.  The players can decide to go to the bar, find out about tours, look for odd jobs, etc.  The options should vary from world to world, of course, and I should have some NPC’s or scenes worked out the communicate something of the culture of the world.  I want to try to use the old rumor technique to allow the players to investigate what interests them so that I don’t always have to bonk them over the head with an obvious crisis or cliché.

Let’s see what we can come up with for next time….