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Old 12-28-2019, 03:08 PM   #1
steam_bucky
 
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Default Car wars - Continuing characters - how did you play them?

In my group, continuing characters wasn't really a thing, but I was keen for it.

Corporate Car Wars looked like too much book keeping for my crowd. It was easier to manage driver and gunner team? Prize money for winning duels just seemed to complicate things too. Players would have different amounts of prize money. If you played in divisional games - Div 10 but someone had 20k of prize money, they could still only have a 10k car in a a div 10 battle. What was the point of having more money than another player?

I am pretty sure some of you guys worked it out. I would love to hear you did continuing characters. Thoughts?
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Old 12-29-2019, 06:38 AM   #2
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Default Re: Car wars - Continuing characters - how did you play them?

Save cash to move up Divisions perhaps ? Hiring a couple of top Mechanics to fix systems between events ?

Training in different skills costs cash to . We had characters that were run for years in late '80's & early '90's & ended up with impressive ranges of skills .
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Old 12-29-2019, 02:29 PM   #3
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Default Re: Car wars - Continuing characters - how did you play them?

"The trouble with science is that it can be perverted."
[#6, _The Prisoner_]

My experience with "continuing characters" was with New Omaha Vehicular Assn. -- among the continuing characters:

-- A character with Martial Arts skill in the triple-digits (the player was a fan of _Remo Williams_...)

-- An Omnicidal Maniac cyborg

-- A group combining "the Flying Elvises" and the MONDOs

-- Villains based around every chintzy comic-book archetype one could think of (including one based on The Beatles)

So, my opinion on the subject is... colored. :)

Before I got involved with NOVA, I did a lot of "solitaire" gaming, based around a truck stop. I learned real quick the flaws of the continuing-character system -- most importantly: Skill Bloat happened early, unless one adopted a non-linear skill-level-increase model. In my case, I went with:

-- 10 "general" skill pts. = 1 specific skill pt.;

-- skill increases cost: [(square root of next skill level) x 10] (so +1 was 10 specific pts., +2 was 14, +3 was 17, etc.)

-- one did *NOT* get skill pts. for beating lower-level characters (think of the
"school bully", who only ever beats up those weaker than himself; his skills start to "rot" from lack-of-challenge, until he finally winds up getting clobbered by someone who likes a challenge... >:) )

It wasn't all negative, tho' -- one feature I developed was "starting characters get three Combat skill levels, and six Non-Combat skill levels"; "combat" skills being defined as "anything one regularly uses in an arena duel" (the various driving skills; Gunner; Handgunner; etc.).

Sadly, due to a lack of other players, I was never able to properly "blind test" my rules; so I don't know for sure if there are any flaws which have escaped me.
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Old 12-29-2019, 05:55 PM   #4
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Default Re: Car wars - Continuing characters - how did you play them?

The friend who introduced me to the game had a little side game he called Mafia Bar raids. Your character went in firing a tear gas or concussion grenade as they pushed the door open, and then shot a bunch of pedestrians with various gear (usually heavy pistols).

From there, I developed a group called the Anti Mafia Society (AMS) that basically funded whatever vehicles we wanted our characters to use when we weren't doing arena scenarios. So, there was a large group of continuing characters my friends and I played as we used Car Wars Pocket Box, then material from the Car Wars Compendium 1e, Boat Wars and Aeroduel.

The first character I seriously made, Frosty the Gunman (yes, a takeoff of the holiday song), ended up under other names in many of my roleplaying games. He did enough Mafia Bar raids and adventures to end up as a Handgunner +12 and with a stack of skills--maybe at Gunner +5 and about 25 known and recognized kills.

Frosty the Gunman, under one of his different names, is presently in my western RPG, Aces & Eights. He got his arm blown off by the PCs in that game but is still truly badass for he was built using GURPS Black Ops.

The friend who introduced me to Car Wars I have long since lost track of, but he did get me into creating cool cars and cool characters in the Car Wars and GURPS universes some 30 years ago.

For the new edition, I'll figure out something if I have people interested in more than just one-off duels.
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Old 12-30-2019, 07:41 AM   #5
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Default Re: Car wars - Continuing characters - how did you play them?

Quote:
Originally Posted by steam_bucky View Post
I am pretty sure some of you guys worked it out. I would love to hear you did continuing characters. Thoughts?
Just to make sure you are not overlooking the obvious, but have you read through Chapter 4 (p. 38) Characters? I feel like it is pretty complete. But it has been 30+ years since I ran a CW campaign, so no doubt I am forgetting a lot. And our campaign was pretty light-weight.
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Old 12-30-2019, 10:31 AM   #6
baakyocalder
 
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Sacramento metro, California
Default Re: Car wars - Continuing characters - how did you play them?

Quote:
Originally Posted by steam_bucky View Post
In my group, continuing characters wasn't really a thing, but I was keen for it.

Corporate Car Wars looked like too much book keeping for my crowd. It was easier to manage driver and gunner team? Prize money for winning duels just seemed to complicate things too. Players would have different amounts of prize money. If you played in divisional games - Div 10 but someone had 20k of prize money, they could still only have a 10k car in a a div 10 battle. What was the point of having more money than another player?

I am pretty sure some of you guys worked it out. I would love to hear you did continuing characters. Thoughts?
Money buys clones, gets your car fixed, pays for cost of living and can get you new cars. Obviously if you want to just drive and shoot, the character rules aren't an issue. If you want a character who starts with an Amateur Night victory and ends up a Division 100 duelist, it helps to make money.

Car Wars is much simpler to keep track of character stuff than many of the RPGs of its day. The vehicles also took only one sheet each due to the abbreviations used for gear. New game should be a little easier to run--as the complexity of design is much less because the three math things to balance will be from a menu instead of going, 'I have a budget of X dollars, I have Y spaces and Z pounds to build the perfect vehicle.'
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Old 12-30-2019, 12:58 PM   #7
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Default Re: Car wars - Continuing characters - how did you play them?

Quote:
Originally Posted by 43Supporter View Post
...Skill Bloat happened early, unless one adopted a non-linear skill-level-increase model...
To be fair the CW skill system is already non-linear. Each skill level costs 10 points only for the first few levels. Beyond that the number of skill points required per level increases.

That said I agree with 43: that it isn't non-linear enough and I too adopted an exponential cost structure.

The advantage an exponential system is that when a character dies, by the time the surviving characters have gained another level, the newly introduced character is only going to be a level or two behind them (assuming he does his share and earns roughly the same SP's as they do each encounter).

If x is an arbitrary number of SP's representing a new Level in any skill

Lvl 0 = 1x SP
Lvl 1 = 2x SP
Lvl 2 = 4x SP
Lvl 3 = 8x SP etc.

Thus if we say x is 10, a level 2 character needs 40 SPs to raise his SP to total to the required 80 SPs. In the same time he has been doing this his equally industrious level 0 character should have also earned 40 SPs, enough to get him to level 2.

The low entry cost of skills will tend to encourage spreading them about among a host of skills rather than over-specialising. For example to get Level 4 would need 160 SP. You could get 16 skills to Level 0 for that.

Apart from that tweak, for Car Fights the basic character rules are enough (messy and inconsistent with each other, but unless you decide to take the entire CW character system outside and shoot it, you aren't going to get that anyway).

As an alternative you can use Gurps Autoduel 1 to convert characters to and from GURPS roleplaying rules. Use GURPS for the non-fighting/driving stuff and use the derived stats suggested for the combat aspects.

I personally didn't bother with a full conversion and just used the more developed GURPS descriptions to wing it when I thought dice modifiers were appropriate (which given the canon CW system is that the referee makes up an appropriate target number it isn't that far from canon).

In my opinion CW needs some structured background to make play interesting. I preferred a road campaign to an arena campaign (with the option to take part in Arena fights when the money was tight). That provided a reason to develop non-vehicular combat skills which itself reduced skills bloat. If you never do anything other than shoot and drive in your campaign why would you even take the less combat oriented skills (like Security, Stealth, Lawyer etc.)

You could also run CW like a old-school Traveller campaign. Both offer 2 Dice based skill systems. Base your game in the badlands and substitute "Star Systems" for towns and "Star Ships" for cars and trucks and you can use the sector generation system and associated trading systems and encounter tables without too much extra work (you'll need to adjust you population factors and find a suitable dollar to mega-credit conversion factor). There are plenty of published scenarios (even some solos) you can re-purpose with some minor translation.
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