Building a Car Wars Arena
 

I am looking to put together a list of things to consider when drafting your own arena for Car wars. Any suggestions welcome whether...
- Obvious - "It should have walls"
- A small detail - "Give buildings DPs"
- An element to consider - pillars, pits, ramps, water, etc.
- An idea - "Booby Traps"
- A crazy idea - "Wheelbarrow Wars!"
- Something that worked for you - "a figure 8 track"
- Something that didn't work - "Wheelbarrow Wars"
- location - middle of the desert, parking garage
- back history - how it came to be
- a track idea - L-train in abandoned city

I hope to put all the ideas and some of my own into an article.

Thanks.

Re: Building a Car Wars Arena
 

Here's one: "How does the arena management enforce rules during events?"

In events I run, tire shots are disallowed; invariably some wiseguy decides "I'm going to take a tire shot anyway -- how's the arena going to stop me?" (The answer involves a couple pounds of Plastique wired into the crew seats, replacing some of the padding so the weight stays the same; and a trigger using IR rather than radio or radar, just in case someone tries to slip a Bollix past Tech. >:) )

Re: Building a Car Wars Arena
 

Nice! I like it!

Re: Building a Car Wars Arena
 

What other rules have you used or experimented with?

Re: Building a Car Wars Arena
 

Bruce Lam of AVRO wrote a good article on arena design. The AVRO Web site is no longer online, but I have a copy of the article on my Web site.

SWAT HQ Salvage Yard - AVRO Resources - Arena Designing
http://www.seanet.com/~owenmp/avro-2000/index.shtml
http://www.seanet.com/~owenmp/avro-2...na-design.html

Re: Building a Car Wars Arena
 

The article is excellent! Thank you.

Re: Building a Car Wars Arena
 

Yea, I like this post. You can just think of the astestics of arena, or you can give it a well thought our history and story which I think adds to the duel.

Who are the sponsers?
What do the sponsers want in a duel?
What will they provide?

Re: Building a Car Wars Arena
 

Yea, I like this post. You can just think of the astestics of arena, or you can give it a well thought our history and story which I think adds to the duel.

Who are the sponsers?
What do the sponsers want in a duel?
What will they provide?
Some of the arenas is the regional books listed how popular an arena was and your prestige was based on that. The more popular, the more prestige you got as it was probably more televised. Not so with the lower end arenas.

How was this arena created? Some arenas were previosly built places, the Armadilllo comes to mind. There was a article about how they would wall off multiple blocks in Tokyo and create a city arena. How did the arena come to be????

Where are the cameras placed? Could there be a known area in the arena that you would know would be filmed so that a confirmed kill doubles the prestige.

An arena can have personality and advantages and obstacles. It can add to story as much as the contestants.

I still want to create an arena dedicated to trike combat that was popular for the companies that were still cutting down forests to create lumber. Somewhere in the CW lore mentions that loggers preffered trikes. How about and arena that has multiple obstacles like a forest where different trike companies have duels showing of their wares.......

Re: Building a Car Wars Arena
 

Well, for one: Racing events -- it was my idea to cap not only the number of spaces available for weapons (1 sp. per $15,000 of budget -- yes, that meant D5 and D10 were hand-weapons only >:) ), but to also cap the amount of damage a weapon could inflict (in my case: 6 points total -- and that includes damage from fire mods and such). NOVA had a rule about capping spaces, but it didn't keep pace with weapons tech; we had people showing up with "two spaces" of HMGs. It really put the focus back on racing -- and by that, I mean having to do stuff like shoving other cars off the racing line.

I'm a fan of "vintage" racing, so one idea I had was to run "classic duels" -- that is: Nothing except what's in the Pocket Box rules, or nothing which wasn't in _DCW_ 1st ed., or what-have-you. I even tried some _Chassis and Crossbow_ events.

In general, anything which got away from seeing the same cars week-in-week-out (a particular problem with NOVA's events, but that's another diatribe), I tried to run; the idea was to avoid getting into a rut, which is what really kills games (and gaming groups).

Re: Building a Car Wars Arena
 

I have long fantasized about running one of my super-scale events as Death Rally: Jurassic Park and putting huge wandering genetically engineered dinosaurs on the course. There were rules for those someplace.