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Blue Ghost · 12-17-2018, 06:56 AM

I suppose.

The guy I was talking with was someone I met at Dundracon earlier this year or last year (I can't remember when), who was a key figure in Champions' founding and design. And I told him point blank that our group played Champions' "battles", but it was supposed to be an RPG, and we rarely did any non-combat RPing other than maybe a pre-battle research / setup session. We didn't interact with NPCs, roll dice for encounters, travel to other places and all the other stuff that you do in an RPG. It was essentially Car Wars or SFB with superheroes and villains. The characters were essentially dueling vehicles or starships, and the game itself (at the time, I don't know about now as I haven't played it in eons), used the impulse movement system.

Your "hero" was your play piece, and even though you built him like you would a car for Car Wars, there wasn't that same kind of investment in the character as say a D&D or Traveller character.

So I thought there might be some kind of logic operating in combat games that have an RP elements, like Car Wars, but for some reason don't capitalize or otherwise expand the RP elements. In all the other CW RP threads the conversation usually orbits around the fact that PCs only have three HPs, and therefore aren't really viable characters for an RP session as you're going to wind up dead sooner or later. That, and the emphasis of Car Wars is on arena combat, with the occasional road scenario here and there.

I've never actually done a corporate team game for CW, so yeah I missed out, but it's like CW, for all the RP aspects attached to it and written for it, doesn't seem to spawn a lot of RPing. Even this forum rarely, but occasionally, discusses CW RPing, but it's otherwise almost a non-factor. Hence the reason why I asked if other people did GURPS Autoduel either in lieu or as an alternative to CW rping, or maybe just as a separate game altogether.

I don't know. I get being invested in a character, but again it's like the characters for certain games are more play pieces than actual characters, and maybe that's what CW RPing suffers from.

12-17-2018, 06:56 AM	#13
Blue Ghost Join Date: Mar 2011 Location: Spinward Marches	Re: Was GURPS Autoduel a big thing? I suppose. The guy I was talking with was someone I met at Dundracon earlier this year or last year (I can't remember when), who was a key figure in Champions' founding and design. And I told him point blank that our group played Champions' "battles", but it was supposed to be an RPG, and we rarely did any non-combat RPing other than maybe a pre-battle research / setup session. We didn't interact with NPCs, roll dice for encounters, travel to other places and all the other stuff that you do in an RPG. It was essentially Car Wars or SFB with superheroes and villains. The characters were essentially dueling vehicles or starships, and the game itself (at the time, I don't know about now as I haven't played it in eons), used the impulse movement system. Your "hero" was your play piece, and even though you built him like you would a car for Car Wars, there wasn't that same kind of investment in the character as say a D&D or Traveller character. So I thought there might be some kind of logic operating in combat games that have an RP elements, like Car Wars, but for some reason don't capitalize or otherwise expand the RP elements. In all the other CW RP threads the conversation usually orbits around the fact that PCs only have three HPs, and therefore aren't really viable characters for an RP session as you're going to wind up dead sooner or later. That, and the emphasis of Car Wars is on arena combat, with the occasional road scenario here and there. I've never actually done a corporate team game for CW, so yeah I missed out, but it's like CW, for all the RP aspects attached to it and written for it, doesn't seem to spawn a lot of RPing. Even this forum rarely, but occasionally, discusses CW RPing, but it's otherwise almost a non-factor. Hence the reason why I asked if other people did GURPS Autoduel either in lieu or as an alternative to CW rping, or maybe just as a separate game altogether. I don't know. I get being invested in a character, but again it's like the characters for certain games are more play pieces than actual characters, and maybe that's what CW RPing suffers from.