Old CW vs New CW
 

Which is edition is more fun? I can't answer I didn't give the new edition a chance. I was in a bad head space when I got my kickstarter and basically gave it away.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

They're different kinds of fun. Old CW came to be a fine-tuner's dream. Highly detailed, vast realms of accessories and systems. Tends to demand a lot of time, but if that's the kind of thing you enjoy doing, then you want to be spending the time on it.

New CW comes in hot and sometimes ends before you know what's going on. It's low-fi zoom-and-boom, the X-Wing of vehicular combat.

Of the two, the latter is the one I've got the time and patience for these days. That doesn't make the former not-fun, just not the particular flavor of fun I'm looking for these days.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

OG CW Player here.

Turhan makes some cogent points. However: OG CW is only as time-consuming as one chooses to make it -- while _Catalog From Hell_ is 200+ pages, 98% of what's in it can be ignored for basic "[n] men enter, one man leaves" arena matches. (I can show you some of my designs from back-when; practically nothing on them is not either required to make the vehicle go, inflict damage on a foe, or protect one's self from foes.) CW6, OTOH, is exclusively for arena-type events, and tournaments particularly; it might make for a good "pickup game" at a con, but the novelty wears off fast.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

Despite sharing a frenetic, wildly chaotic theme - vehicle combat by armed and armored automobiles - the two games are utterly different in style of play - particularly in terms of what I like to call "Zoom" and "Boom".

"Zoom" and "Boom" are characteristics, not of the action being simulated by the ruleset, but of the physical actions taken by the players themselves. These measures are among the key differences that differentiate the "modern" game design aesthetic from the "old school" of design. Modern designers care at least as much about the pace and type of the physical actions the players execute - the choreography, so to speak - as they do about the dynamics of the physical system being simulated.

"Zoom" refers to how far the player moves their token everytime they touch it. In 6e, the token is typically moved 3-5 token lengths, 9-12 inches, everytime the player's occasion to move - "turn" - comes around. In 4e, by contrast, the player's token is typically moved 1 token-length - 1 inch, and is frequently not moved at all in any given phase, before the primary action passes to the next phase.

"Boom" here refers to how often the player is given an opportunity to damage the other player, and what physical actions they take to do so. In 6e, the player gets two shots on the vast majority of their turns, and each shot involves rolling a handful of colorful dice, with overwhelmingly positive odds of doing at least /some/ damage to the other player. Contrast to 4e, where the player gets typically one firing opportunity every 5-10 phases, rolling at most twice per shot, with typically only 2-3 dice per roll. With highly significant odds of doing no damage at all, and having to wait through a very significant number of their own "turns" [actually phases] before they have another firing opportunity.

4e, as a game, has a radically different /feel/. It's almost contemplative, even stately, by comparison, compared to 6e. [And that's before you contrast the complexity of the build systems.] This is not a bad thing, per se [Some of the most popular games in history are contemplative and stately in this sense - Go comes particularly to mind], but it is very, very different. It's actually remarkable how different they are, and how they demonstrate how different two games with identical themes can feel.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

Thank you Heat Death. I hadn't looked at it in those terms, but I suspect that is why it appeals to new gamers as it often takes a while to get invested in games that take the more contemplative approach.

I would imagine also that as Pre-5th edition your design decisions could effectively scupper any chance at a win and it took so long to determine who won (min 10 minutes per second of combat), you might spend months before you were even competitive.

I enjoy CW as an RPG rather than a purely tactical game, but since that largely had to be bolted on anyway, I am not sure it favours any version of the game. As games like Necromunda and Gorka-Morka added a campaign element that was arguably less crunchy than CW I don't see it as an issue. You could easily allow the addition of specific equipment cards as a function of some mission without too much effort.

My only gripe is that you don't seem to be able to buy just the rules pack on this side of the pond. I'd stump up £20-25 quid for the rules, dice counters and play mats etc, but I am not that interested in buying a starter set for £60 just to add obtain some plastic models that don't really fit with my view of CW (I already have plenty of modified hot wheels from playing 5th edition). Mine are cars with guns, the included models seem more like weapons with wheels added. I also like a road based game (with Rigs and cycles) and that isn't part of new CW (yet).

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

This.

It was absolutely possible to "lose during the build phase" in 4e [and a lot of people seem to have really liked it that way]. The simplest recipe for doing so was to not take a fire extinguisher to cover your rocket or ATG ammo. Another was to deemphasize or misallocate your armor. In 4e, car construction is, in itself, a well-put-together rational-backpack optimizing problem, which also requires avoiding some very real [and, I strongly suspect, intentionally-placed] pitfalls in the build system. It's an interesting, if slightly thin, solitaire game in and of itself.

In 6e, by contrast, the build system is constructed on an exceptionally well-balanced mathematical foundation. Building a car is not so much solving a rational backpack optimization problem, as it is choosing which mechanically distinct but mathematically balanced attack modalities sound the most fun to you in any given game [setting fires, sniping from a distance, ramming, etc].

While there are synergies to be found between different weapons systems (i.e. packing laser and flamethrower combos), it is almost impossible to win or lose during the construction phase - a randomly generated car in the hands of an experienced player will probably beat a carefully designed killing machine in the hands of a newbie. The build phase isn't a game in itself the way it is in 4e - that cognitive load has been transferred to the tactical maneuvering battle in the game itself.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

Back in the day, I played in a Corporate Car Wars Campaign. My company's motto was, "Olympic Motors: our cars are good, our drivers aren't." It was in reference to my poor dice rolling luck in games.
Car Wars, like Champions, Battletech and others, were old games with a rich 'meta game' of intricate design systems where a spreadsheet was needed to eke out a great design.
With CCGs that meta game came back huge. The best part (to me) of many CCGs is the deck building. Two of my favorites are the Battletech CCG, where there were many strategies to use and defend against; and Maple Story (and Transformers a bit), where each card had two separate uses and finding a balance between a good top and a good bottom of your cards are the key to winning.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

One possibility for why gaming taste has shifted: we have the Internet now. Lots of 1980s-1990s games have soloable mini-game extensions – for example Car Wars and Battletech unit design, GURPS Vehicles (and arguably character design), Magic deck construction – and I think that's in part because it was a way you could play the game (or at least things related to the game) when your buddies weren't around. Now there are practically infinite opportunities for talking about the game with other people who get it.

I'm not saying it's a complete shift - there are still people who build Magic decks (though testing them doesn't take as long as playing CW). But for a game meant to appeal to the mass market, it's an inevitable change to make.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

Except back-when, we didn't *have* spreadsheets -- vehicle design was by hand, or *maybe* a calculator; and 99.8% of the stuff being published never actually saw the arena floor.

My go-to Div. 15 design was a Mid with XH chassis, Heavy suspension, Large plant, 4 PR tires [NOVA banned aimed tire shots, for practical reasons], a driver, two linked RRs, two linked SDs, and 257 points of armor, with maybe HESH and HEAT for the RRs, and Explosive ammo for the SDs -- and That Was It. You want to talk about "cutting the game down to 'zoom', and 'boom'", well, there it sits. Our "meta" was "How fast can I punch through 60-odd points of armor?". (The answer was "about three volleys". :) )

The main reason games took all afternoon was, to be blunt, "Hurry up, Eric" -- players overthinking moves and attacks.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

My working theory is that back in the day, it was sufficient for a boardgame to offer the sheer novelty of executing a complex simulation by hand. Almost any simulation. Game design as we know it now - tension management, balance, OODA loops, that was all secondary. A boardgame could be a more complex, more realistic simulation than any plausible home computer, and boardgames targeted an audience, many of whom were mostly interested in the joy of just experiencing simulations. There was an article in an early Space Gamer that speculated whether home computers would ever be able to execute games even as complex as the more complex simulation hobby games of the early 80's. They were pessisimistic, and this was a commonly held opinion.

People who wanted detailed simulations put up with executing the crunch by hand, because 8-bit 64k computers simply couldn't do it. These people wanted detailed simulations, and hobby games were the only technology that could deliver that, so that's what they bought.

Then computers got better at crunchy simulations than TT games could ever aspire to be. People moved on to, among other things, Empire, Civ and the 4x genre. All those people are playing DCS and ARMA now. Anyone can now experience a better simulation on their phone than any playable boardgame back in the day could offer. So boardgames now don't try to compete with computers. They play to their remaining strengths, i.e. the social experience, the kinesthetic experience of the components and mechanics, the deeper access to game-state information, lengthened OODA loops, and the intractability of human opponents.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

And yet: That was not necessarily the case. I have a couple examples from Metagaming sitting within arm's reach (_Stalin's Tanks_; _Rommel's Panzers_), which are spectacularly uncomplicated. And then there's SJ's own delvings into uncomplicated games -- _OGRE_, of course; _TFT: Melee_; heck, even _One-Page Bulge_.

I think the idea back-when was not so much "executing a complex simulation by hand", but "executing a complex simulation by hand *in as simple a manner as possible*", rendering down detail wherever possible. One could have games like _Harpoon_, or _Air Superiority_ (god love GDW, but did they ever get over-detailed); but one could also have games like the one mentioned earlier. And that, sadly, is where _CW_ went off-the-rails: It started simple, but so much barely- or un-, necessary stuff was added... well, I've told the tale of seeing prospects walk up, take one look at _Catalog From Hell_, and walk away. What _CW_ needed was, to put it mildly, a Rules Purge -- delete or move to companion manuals anything which wasn't necessary for arena fights, and have a "basic set" which is just, as folks like to say, "Zoom, and Boom".

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

I don't think we're actually disagreeing. but I'm definitely using a broader definition of "complex simulation" than you are.

None of the games you mention, and especially not "One Page Bulge" (112 counters!) would be considered "spectacularly uncomplicated" by non-hobby boardgame standards (e.g. Monopoly, Sorry, Snakes and Ladders, even Catan).

Chess and Go are already well outside the realm of "uncomplicated" by mainstream standards, and while Melee, OPB, and Ogre may have a smaller decision space than Chess or Go, their decision space, combined with the number of units in play at any time, is far larger than that of mainstream boardgames even today, let alone back when they were published.

Car Wars when it was first published as a ziplock or pocketbox was already a substantial beer-and-pretzels wargame, well outside the realm of "uncomplicated" as defined by the Parker Brothers pantheon of the time. I agree completely that by the time the RPG and worldbuilding elements were folded into the core rules, you had a total package that was indeed very intimidating even to experienced hobby gamers, and that was definitely in need of a significant editing pass to restore focus to arena and highway duels [as Battletech has done recently with their "Battlemech Manual" book].

I believe the Car Wars blue box later republished as Car Wars Classic was intended to be this, but speaking from experience as a young gamer in the early 90's, it didn't go nearly far enough, and contained editing and organizational choices that significantly damaged it as an entry point to the franchise for new players. Indeed, I have no confidence that that release was ever handed to players completely unfamiliar with the game for playtesting.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

[nod] While games like _OGRE_ and _OPB_ might have a lot of individual pieces on the board, the game mechanics aren't all that complicated -- as we said back-when: "If you can count to ten without taking your shoes off...." :)

I cannot disagree with you there -- I'm still working on getting the OG CW rules rewritten in a manner where someone completely unfamiliar with the game can actually find a given rule.

But I do count that sort of thing as part of "complexity" -- if it's hard to find a rule, or understand a rule as-written, that's as bad as "take the cube root". (In my perfect world: I'd like to have a rulebook which reads like LEGO instructions -- *no* words required.)

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

Part of my issue with CW was inconsistency. It seemed almost every time a new supplement came out it didn't just add rules, it changed how the existing rules worked. Unfortunately these supplements were not always compatible with similar rules or identical equipment in other supplements (presumably written by other people).

When these were all compiled together, rather than take a simplification and unification approach they were all just bundled in often using the exact same words from the original issue resulting in contradictory rules in the same book.

As an example, rather than invent every more complicated liquid dropping weapons, there could have been a single liquid dropping weapon and the different effects achieved with a variety of ammunition. We had smoke screens and paint sprayers with different magazine sizes. Smoke grenades and paint grenades produced the same size counter and used the same weight grenade, why couldn't the dropped weapons use the same logic. Or why even have dozens of different droppers when in fact you could have simply created a grenade "dropper" and have it drop every effect type from flaming oil to tear gas.

Aircraft (including Helos) should have been left out completely, they effectively make the Car part of the game pointless, ditto Tanks. Racing was the antithesis of what it should have been (painfully slow) and exposed the fundamental illogic of the control system. Did anyone play Hovercraft, all that nonsense with vector movement. I was really excited when I got an extra supplement with my Black and Green compendium boxed set, I was crest fallen when it turned out to be Boats (not least because all those rules were already in the compendium, so my bonus was some maps (or blue paper) and some counters. Someone should have actually looked at the 10 wheelers and compared them to a real version.

Why was the skill system so random. Traveller managed to use a 2d6 skill system that had a universal mechanic. CW Mechanic skill has a table, Running skill adds a fixed benefit and no roll is required, Gunner skill provides a bonus to your roll to hit.

Not to mention the equipment that ceased to exist, the cars that ceased to be legal after a reconsideration of a fundamental component (Gas engines for one) and the way design strategies flip-flopped as the latest hotness was introduced.

5th was a valiant attempt to rationalise, but the lack of a vehicle design system and the "collectable" way the books were published undermined it for me.

Sometimes I like to dust of Mini Car Wars, a whole game on a sheet of A4. Sometimes less is more :)

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

I started playing Car Wars in the late '80s ('88, iirc). I've always loved the idea behind Car Wars. But, no one ever wanted to play with me. The few times I did get to play, most of the players were either really obnoxious or incredibly new. I had a few good games, at the random cons, but most of the time, the games were . . . bad.

Late last month, I picked up 6th Edition.

I just finished my second game of 6th Edition (I'm 0 and 2, both losses). And, I can say, I've never had as much fun playing Car Wars than in those two 6th Edition games. Hand of Bobb agrees (he won both games). He had agreed to play the first game, even though he hates Car Wars ("I want to play a game, not simulate geometry in my head"). And willingly offered to play the second game.

He likes this version. I like this version. It's a better game than the previous versions. It's easier, and more fun, to play.

But, we aren't into all of the finagling every last power point or mph out of the car, and wrangling every ounce. We'll play BattleTech if we want to flex our design muscles.

So, for me, 6th Edition is the "most fun" edition.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

HOLY MOTHER OF KITTEN, YES. That was the Big Complaint back-when, esp. during the infamous "Gang Of Four" Era (in one case, the rules decisions were based around "however A Certain Midwestern CW Club does it, rule exactly the opposite, because their leader is Annoying).

The example you provided -- this is part of my Long March through the rulebook. There's also stuff like the VSG, which only existed to put Vehicle-Level Damage on checkpoints -- goodbye.

10-wheelers, and Hovers, are being dealt with. Racing -- honestly, if you can find a copy of the old _AutoVentures_ _TurboFire_ book, use that; it's substantially less FUBAR.

This is why I am so bothered by being the age I am -- if I had been but a few years older, I could have prevented much of this. But at the time of the "Gang Of Four", I was still in high school, and I'm pretty sure SJG would not have offered the position of "_CW_ Guru" to me at the time....

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

Circling back to the OP topic of Old CW, vs. New CW, I found an fascinating nugget of game design philosophy tidbit buried in a powerpoint presentation on the Harpoon game's website:
https://www.admiraltytrilogy.com/pdf...n_HarpoonV.pdf , page 17.

They go on to say that Harpoon very intentionally uses both in different places. Neither is "right" or wrong" per se. They tend to use design for effect, particularly when the real-world process they're modeling is not fun - i.e. mathematically hard fire control solution calculations.

I would say that CW4e (as well as SFB, Battletech, etc) is a prime example of design for cause, while CW6e is a prime example of design for effect.

[I also think a lot of the philosophical divide underlying differing houseruling approaches is a result of some players wanting to houserule better simulation of a process into a game, vs wanting to design houserules for a particular desired effect.]

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

[nod] Having played _Harpoon_: It's not actually all *that* difficult; there's just a lot of factors to cover (and not all of them actually come into play, if you'll pardon the pun -- for ex.: If it's a clear day, one can ignore modifiers for rain, fog, etc.). Same can apply to OG CW -- most arenas events are "clear weather" and "flat, paved arena"; so most of the TH and handling mods can be ignored.

"The world is what you make of it, my friend -- if it doesn't fit, you make alterations." [Stella, _Silverado_]

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

Every group had that one person -- sometimes more than one -- who was a brilliant vehicle designer but always crashed and burned on turn 3, doing a 15 degree bend at 30mph.

When I started playing with a play aid that shows not just your handling status but what happens when you reach that status, I stopped being that guy. Turns out if you don't maneuver as much, and keep your handling status in "Safe", you get a lot more driving in. :D

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

I think a key point to bear in mind for us grognards who are comparing 80's CW and the new version is that we are 40 years older.

As a teenage boy raging with hormones WINNING was the whole point. I would screw every advantage out of the rules I could and spent more time arguing rules than playing the game.

As a 50 something I still spend more time discussing rules than playing but now it is because I have a job, children, and can't actually dovetail my limited free time with my contemporaries that have similar responsibilities and discussing rules on forums is my only outlet. However in compensation for the free-time I have lost I have gained perspective instead. Like Elsa I learned to "let it go". When I do play games I am more interested in playing than winning. I no longer feel the need to play the gamer rather than the game. I now get more fun out of games I used to find frustrating even when I am playing with other people who haven't grown out of the "WIN AT ALL COSTS" mindset.

Also having children means my standards are lower. Games like WH40K are deeply flawed but they are still more fun for me than the Moshi Monsters boardgame :)

I am still learning though. I am DM'ing D&D with my daughters and in our previous session we had a TPK and I came up with a clever reason to bring them back that was still consistent with the scenario. I felt quite proud that I hadn't "cheated". This week we had another TPK because of a lack of experience on their part. On this occasion I just reset the dungeon like it was a save game.

It felt wrong doing it, but in retrospect it was perfect. They had fun. They didn't have to create new characters and bin the ones they were growing fond of. I didn't have to bin the whole campaign. I didn't make my 9 year old cry and feel like a mean parent. They actually got to learn effective tactics and cleared the whole thing out the second time around without any difficulty. I didn't have to fudge any rolls or dilute the effect of their decision making by faking out the effects of them.

Afterwards I realised that the reason I was playing was to spend time with my daughters, not to show "tough love" to teach them the most efficient way to explore a dungeon. I had been seriously considering destroying any interest they had in the game by imposing my own purist idea of how the game should be played.

Every day is a school day :)

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

I can attest to Mr. Goodwin's statements re "that one guy" -- had a fellow at Another Game session a couple weeks ago who failed *every* single die roll he made that day; have not seen a full-on Gamer Meltdown like that in some while.... :P

And when I was in NOVA: It wasn't about "win at all costs" for me; I was more the Lee Petty "take the position one can get, and move on" -- it's just that said position was usually 1st, as the rest of NOVA was entirely too predictable in their designs and "tactics"....

As to 6E: There's some things about it I like, and others I dislike; it's just that the latter far outnumber the former, so I'm not that interested in it.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

If I could just get the Rules Box in the UK I might be interested in giving it a go. I was in the USA on business a week ago, but wasn't able to find it in the few stores I had access to.

I am not prepared to drop £60 or so for a two player set where most of the money seems to be for 3D models that don't really inspire me.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

For clarity, the Rules Box does not contain any of the build cards to create your cars. Those are in the starter sets, along with the dashboards, bases, and models.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

I understood there were 12 prebuilt cars on the double-sided vehicle record sheets.

But my main point stands, I am not willing to spend over £60 on a game that I might not like. Others will and I am sure SJG has done their market research but it's too a high an entry point for me.

Which is why I guess I am still in the CW Old Editions forum :)

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

The Rules Box does contain the pre-built record sheets, which have the build cards for those vehicles and a dashboard printed on them. The movable components of the dashboards (the speed dial, tires and power plant tracker, and armor trackers) are not included. They are in the packages that the physical dashboards ship with. So you would need to work out a way to manually track these items if you only had the Rules Box. You would also need to pick up an accessory pack that included the car bases, or find a way to approximate them on your own.

This is not an attempt to discourage you picking up the set, just trying to make sure you are aware that it isn't designed as a stand-alone component, and does not include all the components you need to play the game.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

Lots of good points here. I will admit to not having gotten the 6e rule set as yet. But after reading this thread, I'll admit to being tempted.

That said, my current method of keeping my hand in the game now that I am an empty-nester is to design and build my own counters that actually look like the vehicle built, custom maps, and scenarios.

Can some of these be ported to 6e? Unknown hence my curiosity at looking at the ruleset.

Will I get to play these maps and vehicles I build with anyone? Unknown.

Arena only play, while good for some level of play isn't enough to keep me coming back for more. The lack of ability to build your own vehicles turned my boys and I off to 5e almost as soon as we opened the package.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

So far as vehicles are concerned, not really. I mean, conceptually, sure, you can do something like that, but the whole basis of how vehicles are build and operate is entirely different. It'd be like taking spacecraft built with GURPS Vehicles rules and adapting them to a game of X-Wing. If you've got, say, a vehicle design in old CW which is built around flamethrowers or dropped weapons or a turreted laser, you can build a vehicle similarly built around flamethrowers or dropped weapons or whatever because all of those items exist in the new game. But don't expect it to feel like even remotely the same thing.

As for maps and counters, I imagine you'd need to work up a suitably scaled turning key, but that should be feasible, though you might need to come up with some way of dealing with very long ranges. New CW is built for Hot Wheels-sized cars on a typical dining room table. If you were to scale down to 1" counters, it's at least theoretically possible to shoot at things much, much farther away than the new CW accounts for.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

I'll break down and buy the 6e rule set eventually.

In the meantime, I'll keep making maps and counters for for the 1"/15' editions.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

I ported the Killer Kart from 4e to 6e.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=176325

In the article I talk through the process of aligning the armor levels to the machine gun damage levels, and how and why I decided on which accessories to include to duplicate the feel of the car, relative to (especially) other Killer Karts in a typical Amateur Night scenario.

Turhan is absolutely right - there's no real mechanical process for porting a car over. You'll be able to match the theme of the weapons and relative levels of weapon damage and armor without too much trouble, but different kinds of weapons are much more different mechanically from each other than they are in 4e (where most weapons, regardless of their name and theming, are pretty much just generic "guns"), and moreover, a lot of the equipment doesn't /have/ one-to-one correspondences between 4e and 6e. You're just trying to build to a "feel" more than a rule, and whatever you build in 6e will inevitably feel quite different than it did in 4e, because the two games are intrinsically incredibly different, as I've written above.

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

One of the key differences between 4e and 6e, that I may not have taken fully into account in the Killer Kart design process, is damage and defense.

In 4e, if you miss, you miss cleanly, and do zero damage.. If you hit, you'll do (on average) the expected value of the nD6 your weapon rolls. So you can determine really easily how many landed salvos you can expect your armor to be able to take from a weapon with a given number of dice.

In 6e, your attack roll will give you the expected value of stars over it's dice, but those stars are then subtracted from by the defense roll which is (mostly) proportional to the target's speed, with modification due to range rerolls. So really, you're gonna land at least some damage more often, but when you land damage it'll be less than the expected value of your weapon's dice. Whether that balances out or not depends on how recklessly your target tends to drive.

A fuller analysis of equivalent effective armor levels between 4e and 6e would need to take into account the expected value of the defense dice from a target driving at an "average" speed (i.e. 3), vs. what the target speed modifiers (if you use those in your 4e game) do to the probability of a hit landing at all in 4e.

[I have a C# library I've developed than can do some pretty fancy dice calculations, including expected values and expected values of rerolls on CW6e dice, and one of the features I've added to it since I wrote the Killer Kart article was a way of chaining to-hit rolls and damage rolls to find the expected number of landed damage points per a to-hit-roll-plus-damage-roll 4e-style attack. That would be a more apples-to-apples comparison to a full CW6e attack-roll-minus-defense-roll attack for calculating how long a given amount of armor could be expected to last against a given weapon in each game.]

Re: Old CW vs New CW
 

What I discovered almost by accident regarding <=4e was:

• Speed has the most global interaction with the mechanics
• Speed is the variable that changes the most often
• The information required to resolve everything related to a car's speed is on multiple pages, often in large tables with very tiny print that was fine when we were 14, but not so much now that we're 54

The solution was that play aid that I and another forum poster came up with basically independently of one another, that put all of the information for a given speed -- and only that information -- on a single page of a small booklet, with an attached pointer to handling status and the expected safety margin ("safe", a number, or "XX"). Change speed, turn to the appropriate page, have all of the new info. It eliminated the perennial question, "how fast were you going again?" because that number is in big bold print so that anyone can glance at you and tell. It had the added effect that having the handling status and safety margin at a glance made it feel more like actually driving a car and gauging how fast you're going versus road conditions and knowing more or less how fast you can take a given turn. No more accidentally crashing two turns into duel because you made the wrong maneuver at the wrong time and biffing the roll. No more flipping through pages to find the modifiers you need. And no more "How fast were you going again?" (Original thread here, and I keep forgetting that I was the one who started it.)

(Edit: And evidently I've also forgotten that I mentioned it up thread...)