Have you ever used Car Wars in other settings?

[Chris Goodwin]

Dragon Magazine once included a Car Wars-like set of vehicle construction rules for Star Frontiers; another issue included a set of advanced rules for vehicle chases for the Top Secret RPG; and the Gangbusters RPG includes its own rudimentary set of vehicle combat rules. (Interesting factoid: the city battlemap sheet included with Gangbusters includes scenery at two different scales: one square per five feet, and one square per fifteen feet. Applicability to Car Wars should be obvious.)

Also interesting; as all three of those games are percentile-based, and in fact Top Secret and Gangbusters share some common rules, these ought to be portable one system to another.

[Toltrin]

The police were not happy with my jury-rigged quad BB-Gun machine guns (I stole from the county fair) I put in a turret on my Mustang.

[Mayor of Midville]

Originally Posted by Toltrin

The police were not happy with my jury-rigged quad BB-Gun machine guns (I stole from the county fair) I put in a turret on my Mustang.

You know what they say, photo or it didn't happen.

[Angrytubist]

My group once used CW as vehicle combat in a Gamma-World game (pre-4e GW) though the characters were given CW skills skill-points as an addition to their Gamma-World sheet. We also gave damage adds based on gunner+character-level and used character/monster HP instead of DP for pedestrians. I remember it being fun, and working surprisingly well, until we started getting magic/psionic vehicles/vehicular-weapons.

Thinking about this makes me wish I had time to run a Mutant Future/CW mashup. (alas I'm too busy running my current Tunnels & Trolls game, and trying to convince my (wonderful, in case she's reading this) girlfriend to play some Car Wars with me)

[ckosacranoid]

last year i was running a big eyes/small mouth rpg game that used the besm system for the rpg rules..we started with dark furtre for car combat and then after a few games i switched to cars wars for a few games and found out that trying to keep things going back and forth just got got to pwerfull after a while and let the game drop i should post the cars and stuff on ehere for a fe that where rather insane to say the least.....

[Manycubes]

I translated the rules for Waste World and Armmageddon RPG's into Car Wars in order to have larger battles. Both worked pretty well.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Chris Goodwin

I don't know much about the Deadlands universe.. isn't that old west with magic?

Aramis, did you have vehicular combat in the Traveller universe, or was it Traveller characters for roleplaying in the autoduel 'verse?

Both directions, actually. Originally, it was just to use CW as a vehicle system for CT, before I got Striker.

[Chris Goodwin]

Out in the galaxy, there is a race called the Targ. Much technobabble ensues about how they came about, but the upshot is that, while they are carbon based, their metabolism and various bodily systems are rich in silicon, and are based more around what we on Earth consider trace elements -- lithium, arsenic, gallium, and phosphorus. One of the side effects is that they "speak" in radio frequencies. The Targ themselves may or may not have natural radar.

They, and their technology, are in a sense "living metal". Not in the Terminator 2000 flowing mercury sense, but in... umm.. more technobabble here. Their animal life and technology are almost one and the same. They have built themselves up not through inventing but through breeding their technology, forcing it to improve through harsh competition and selection.

As part of this competitive and selective breeding, they've discovered how to access warp space. Their living ships are capable of tessering (the verb descended from "tesseract" meaning to rotate through four dimensions) into warp space. They are a little decadent, and they like to fight for the sake of competition. When they refer to competition, they mean it in the twin senses of "inter-species competition" and "competition as sport", and while they are capable of distinguishing between the concepts much of their culture doesn't really care.

In a word, they fly around the universe looking for other races to fight against.

They come out of warp space near what scans showed to be a rather mild-mannered yellow dwarf system with a few gas giants and some rocky planets down near the primary. As soon as they tessered back to realspace, everyone on the Ravenous Raptor felt their living ship shudder and shake, and essentially go completely blind and deaf to the universe outside the ship. Their most knowledgeable techno-healers had to consult with the Loremasters near the spindle to determine what was wrong, but their ship's senses were overwhelmed by the radio noise in this system, eventually determined to be emanating from one of the rocky planets. Unexpected, given the star's makeup, but everyone on the ship also knew that this meant there was advanced life here. It might be time to pay the locals a visit and test them in battle...

A race that mostly communicates through radio doesn't get far without being able to filter out the things they don't want to hear, so they were able to not only calm their ship but make sense of the radio haze; they can naturally sense our radio output and even learn our languages from audio and video broadcasts. In the most amazing coincidence they've found in all of their wanderings, the locals in this system seem to have come across the Targ's primary competitor design: the four-wheeled vehicle, though here they seem to build them rather than breed them.

The Targ's vehicles are essentially living metal, silvery over an endoskeleton with exoskeletal protective elements. They look kinda creepy and organic. They run on rubber tires, which are actually a separate organism bred together with them in symbiosis for generations, and one of their favorite foods is a hydrocarbon-rich methane sludge. Good thing they passed plenty of methane and other hydrocarbons on the way into the system. They tend to be armed with spiky bits, acid projectors, noxious gas generators, flammable hydrocarbon generators, and the occasional natural maser.

Oh, and their cars eventually regenerate, if not killed, though they can be incapacitated out of a duel; they are pretty hard to outright kill.

Earth's autoduellists vs. alien invaders!

[thudthwacker]

Originally Posted by Chris Goodwin

Earth's autoduellists vs. alien invaders!

Now that would be the winning entry for the inaugural AADA Scenario Design Contest, Free-For-All Division.

[Chris Goodwin]

Fantasy races in Car Wars

Given that we have spells and dragons and undead, why not? I came up with the point costs to play the various races through the SWG (scientific wild guess) method.

Dwarf: Dwarves are smaller but denser than humans (an adult dwarf is approximately four feet tall, weighs 200 pounds, and takes up .75 spaces as a passenger). Dwarves are stronger than humans; they gain +1 DP, +2 GE (or +50 pounds) carrying capacity, and +2 to all melee and hand-to-hand damage. They are extremely skilled at echolocation, which they would normally perform in caves by singing, whistling, or tapping on a wall with a tool, but are not limited to this environment nor these methods of making sound. It costs 40 points to play a dwarf.

Elf: Elves are slender and taller than humans (6'6" tall, 150 pounds, 1.25 spaces as a passenger). Elves start with three levels in Running, and one level in a ranged combat skill of their choice (usually either Handgunner or Missile Weapons, or the Mage skill if those rules are in use). Elves can see into the infrared, equivalent to night vision goggles. It costs 45 points to play an elf.

Gnome: Gnomes are even smaller than their cousins, the dwarves (a gnome takes up .5 spaces as a passenger, is two feet tall and weighs only 50 pounds, or can be carried as 4 GE; they themselves have 3 DP, a carrying capacity of 4 GE, and do -2 damage in all melee and hand-to-hand combat). They start with one level in Mechanic and have the same echolocation ability as dwarves. They can learn Driving skill normally, but vehicles built for humans must be modified to be driven by a gnome ($500, no weight, no space for permanent modification or $1000, 50 pounds, .5 spaces for one that can be stowed away when not needed); a gnome can fit into a gunner position with a booster seat ($20, 10 pounds, .5 spaces). They can use 1 GE weapons, or larger ones that have been specifically modified to their hand size (doubling the cost). It costs 25 points to play a gnome.

Orc: Orcs are about the same size as humans, and have the stereotypical tusked face. They start with one level each in Melee Weapons and Martial Arts, and gain +1 DP, +1 GE carrying capacity, and +1 to all melee and hand-to-hand damage. While orcs have a bad reputation and a vaguely unpleasant appearance, personality-wise they're regular people, the same as everyone else. Orcs can see into the ultraviolet, equivalent to night vision goggles (but in different frequencies than their cousins, the elves). It costs 40 points to play an orc.

Troll: Trolls are big. 7' or taller, 300 pounds, 2 spaces as a passenger. They have 5 DP, the equivalent of 1 point of metal armor all around, 9 GE of carrying capacity, and do +3 damage in melee and hand-to-hand combat; further, all melee weapons wielded by a troll do full damage to vehicular armor. A single troll can lift 800 pounds or more on his own; three trolls working together can lift a two ton car by themselves! A troll is considered wounded at between 1 and 4 DP, and is unconscious at 0; a troll can only be fully killed by fire or laser damage. Trolls regenerate from damage other than fire or lasers, at the rate of 1 DP per hour; given the appropriate support (nutrient solutions and the like) a small part of a troll will within a day regenerate into the equivalent of a mindless clone of the original troll, and the troll's mind can be uploaded as normal via Gold Cross. It costs 100 points to play a troll, if the referee allows them at all.