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Old 09-25-2016, 06:01 PM   #1
illuminchaoti999
 
Join Date: Jan 2016
Default Car Wars League

Hey,


I'm looking to start an autoduel league with a few friends for a couple months, just to play a little.

We only have 3 people, but we all really want to play, and we would love to do a persistent AADA league, rather than building cars and just playing disjoint games.

I'm not sure exactly how to do something like this, every car wars and even the gurps autoduel book is very very vague on exactly how to run arena campaigns, both with players on the same team and competing. There's also 4 different competing rules for cash prizes across the books. L'Outrance only has cash prizes for amateur and corporate events, but no rules for regular divisionals! They don't even talk about safe lines or surrender! Gurps autoduel and car wars deluxe have very different prize rules, one saying that the winner gets 50-150% of the total value of all cars in the event (which is a lot of money, for Div 10, winning a single 4 person duel event would be enough to buy two Div 10 cars, at least, and not including salvage). And the winner gets to salvage. The Gurps Autoduel rules are much more reasonable, saying the prize pool is equal to the top dollar amount of the division, and provides modifiers based on the part of the season, gives percentages of the prize pool awarded to 1st 2nd and 3rd, and specifies that winners of professional events don't get salvage rights. The only thing that's not as good, is that there's no award for kills, and that it has the wrong definition for kill. The disadvantage is that I'm not sure if the money given is adjusted for gurps autoduel rpg, or can be used for regular car wars games.

I know the Corporate Car Wars rules are the most fleshed out and realized, but it seems like that works better over multiple seasons. Plus, we're pretty short on time already, and I'm not sure if people are up to quickly making 18 characters and however many cars and equipment $150,000 buys. Also, I mean, its not really the AADA circuit, its a separate league.

My rules draft kinda looks like this, I'm basically having everyone make 5 characters with 50 skill points each, they can be of any type, but I'm suggesting they make 3 duelists, or 2 duelists and a gunner (if you have a multi-person crewed vehicle, who has to die for you not to be able to earn points based on the given AADA ranking point system?), a mechanic, and a paramedic. I'm giving everyone 30000 to make vehicles for Div 15 competition. Prizes are given out normally and so are points, by the Gurps Autoduel rules, but you get an additional $1,500xPR of arena per kill in sponsorship money. At any time, a team can send out a paramedic to try and save a fatally wounded duelist, and the paramedic can't be fired on without disqualification, but unintentional hits or shots are not penalized. At the end of the mini-season, top 3 duelists will go to the regional championship, if a team has multiple duelists in the championship, the team(s) without duelists will play as the other duelists.


How does this sound, ok? And what's with the vagueness and inconsistency in the various car wars books?

Last edited by illuminchaoti999; 09-25-2016 at 10:00 PM. Reason: corp wars
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Old 09-26-2016, 02:37 AM   #2
Pacey
 
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Leeds, England
Default Re: Car Wars League

We do a corporate league event, details here: https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/file/COR...v0cHcQ6IALplOA

[not sure if that's accessible to non-members - PM me if you can't get it and want a copy]
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Old 09-26-2016, 03:32 AM   #3
swordtart
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Default Re: Car Wars League

Vagueness and inconsistency, flexibility and options ;)

CW is at it's core a table top tactical battle game. All the Role Playing and Campaign stuff is retro-fitted and the product of several authors. Rather than try to pull together a homogenous rule set (and undoubtedly end up loosing someone's favourite bits just because they were incompatible), they were generally left alone (but left in their original context where they should at last be self-consistent).

In real life there are multiple "authorities" on tournament rules (UK has Rugby League and Rugby Union who both play a game that can be called Rugby but have slightly different rules). Soccer has many organisations that have different rules (and even within an organisation there is lobbying from various teams to change rules).

It shouldn't be considered a fault therefore if particular Arenas (and groups of Arenas) have different rules. AADA is an umbrella group that covers road users as well, so it is inherently flexible. An arena billing itself as AADA may only be an affiliate and exempt itself from some "Standard Practice" for pragmatic reasons.

The AADA may well enforce safety regulations in exchange for allowing the AADA logo to be used, but these may only extend to spectators and arena staff. The death or injury of competitors in an integral part of auto-duelling, as long as the competitors has been advised what the risks are before they contract to take part, the AADA will likely have no objection to whatever those risks are.

Safe exit routes from the Arena are considered by some to be "Sissy" (and this is reflected in some of the Prestige penalties). Some Arenas may choose not to allow them. These Arenas will likely have a higher injury rate than others and will be less popular with experienced duellists, but they are likely to be very popular with the media (Blood!!!) and therefore may be able to offer higher prizes to the more desperate end of the duellist community (I am looking at you amateur night heroes here).

My expectation is that you would feed the Amateur night with expendable characters who might win enough to retire but risk death in the process. You might start your campaign here. Each event they can feed in a character and depending on how it goes, their characters will become sufficiently experienced that they no longer wish to enter them into the meat grinder or they expire (or get invalided out). For the players I would expect this to be a cost to them rather than a pay-out. They sponsor the recruit (they pay for the 5K or whatever of amateur car and equipment), the recruits keep any prize-money (i.e. it goes out of game) but they then become a more experienced character on the team that sponsored them.

If a team that didn't sponsor them wants to hire a crewman, they will pay a standard transfer fee to the sponsor that is some function of the characters current prestige. A crewman can also buy themselves out of their contract to the sponsoring team by paying the transfer fee themselves. I would allow the player who currently holds the crew members contract to decide if this occurs (on behalf of the crew member). They may decide to take the money if they have a full crew roster with better crew.

I would establish standard fees rather than allowing the players to negotiate amongst themselves as players have a nasty habit of wrecking the economy and these are supposed to exist within a wider professional duelling team framework. I would also base fees on Prestige rather than skills. Prestige is readily measureable and likely published within the game world (as ranking). The skills themselves are only evident when they are used successfully and are much harder to measure within the game world. This may lead to a less "gamey" mechanism where you may get someone who is really good but has had a run of bad luck cheap rather than paying a fixed price dependent of skill levels.

The difficulty I had was what to do when only a single player wants to compete at a particular division (because his team isn't skilled enough). Playing other opponents (i.e. not your own crew) in a duel where you have no stake can lead to implausibly suicidal play styles.

It might be easier to hire on vehicle crews at each event (and have no standing team other then support crew - mechanics, medics etc.) so anyone can hire the best they can afford. You can still maintain a overall roster of vehicle crewmen and keep track of the individuals skill and Prestige progression (which will set the rate that they can be hired on). You can also allow players to agree personality quirks that develop as the game progresses e.g. "After narrowly escaping a fire, Dave McAllister will never drive a gas car again". As the character is part of the pool anyone can hire from, this quirk will affect all players equally and will therefore be inherently balanced.

Last edited by swordtart; 09-26-2016 at 03:40 AM.
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Old 09-26-2016, 03:43 PM   #4
illuminchaoti999
 
Join Date: Jan 2016
Default Re: Car Wars League

If we had additional time and/or players, I would probably use corp rules like the one above, but I'm not sure if people are able to spend time building 18 characters and lots of cars. I like Pacey's rules though, I'll save them for another time.

swordtart's are good too.


I don't think I have a lack of creativity, but I do best when working from a well established world set, like in (modern) classic traveller. We might still do the corp rules anyway, since I really really, do like Pacey's ruleset. I'll have to ask players when I finish my ruleset which they like better. The other issue with corp is that games will take more time, since you have lots of vehicles out there, I mean, I wonder how that works with many corps, you'd have like 8+ cars running out there.

Still though, I want to make this more in the world, like, the corp rules are in-world, but people wanted to play Gurps Autoduel as AADA members, but it didn't work out, so this is a concession of sorts.

Last edited by illuminchaoti999; 09-26-2016 at 04:01 PM.
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Old 09-27-2016, 10:37 AM   #5
Pacey
 
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Leeds, England
Default Re: Car Wars League

Feel free to amend "my rules" to suit. I've just noticed the document I gave the link to is to the old rules. We amended them earlier this year to simplify them a bit (reduce the amount of admin required) - latest doc is here: https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/file/COR...pkTGEbBMgMR8gA


As for multi-car events, yes we do sometimes have quite a few cars in play at once - our next one has 6 cars per team, so with our 4 teams, 24 in total, in a fairly small, open arena. We quite often fail to finish a game in a single evening, so simply make notes of the current state of play and stick down vehicles with blue tac (dropped weapon counters get stuck down as soon as they're placed).
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Old 09-28-2016, 10:40 AM   #6
J. Roberts
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Default Re: Car Wars League

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pacey View Post
Feel free to amend "my rules" to suit. I've just noticed the document I gave the link to is to the old rules. We amended them earlier this year to simplify them a bit (reduce the amount of admin required) - latest doc is here: https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/file/COR...pkTGEbBMgMR8gA


As for multi-car events, yes we do sometimes have quite a few cars in play at once - our next one has 6 cars per team, so with our 4 teams, 24 in total, in a fairly small, open arena. We quite often fail to finish a game in a single evening, so simply make notes of the current state of play and stick down vehicles with blue tac (dropped weapon counters get stuck down as soon as they're placed).
Thanks for sharing the link. But your Critical Hits table--a d100 roll in Car Wars? I feel faint.
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Old 09-28-2016, 12:10 PM   #7
Pacey
 
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Location: Leeds, England
Default Re: Car Wars League

We like to be different, and take things to the max... :)
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