Roleplaying experiences without a GM in Car Wars?

[swordtart]

I generally played the solos (and therefore by definition GM-less) by "turning the board round" and looking at the tactical situation from the viewpoint of the "baddies".

Sometimes this is hampered by insufficient knowledge on what the attacker is trying to achieve (other than being a target for the players to knock down). Consider the following.

"As you drive past the on-ramp a stock Piranha swings out behind you at 11" range matching your speed. He begins firing immediately and will not engage in communication."

This is a common format for solo scenarios and it provides all the necessary tactical information to conduct the fight. What it doesn't provide is any indication of the WHY which would help you determine the non-player opponents actions in the ensuing fight.

If we had the additional information that (for example) "The Piranha driver has been paid $10,000 to stop at least one vehicle in the convoy (escort or cargo hauler)", we could more easily determine his actions in the fight.

For example his logical target will be the vehicle he thinks he can kill quickest (probably the tail-end Charlie). He will break off once he has mobility-killed one vehicle. We can probably assume that he was paid half in advance he will also probably break off once he has suffered $5,000 in damage. If he thinks he has a good chance of taking out his chosen target, he might hang in a little longer as he'd clearly rather make some profit by completing his objective, but he clearly won't want to make a loss. He also definitely won't fight to the death as even a full pay-off wouldn't cover cloning and vehicle replacement expenses.

In published solo's this very information is often available after the fact. Often the "you win the fight" paragraph will contain something like "You find photos of your vehicles on the drivers body and $5000 in cash. Clearly this was a mercenary hit."

This is probably an attempt to maintain suspense as to the attackers motives, but in reality it serves no useful purpose after the fact. Once the firing starts the fight is going to end one of two ways. Either the players win (in which case they get to read the paragraph) or the players lose and the game is over. Not knowing the motivation doesn't add any real suspense (as the players are responding to being fired at rather than the unknown motives of the opponent), the mystery is in who hired them and we still don't know that. Hiding the motive only makes interpreting the appropriate behavior of the opponent more difficult (or random).

I would suggest that when you set up your scenarios that you have a clear motivation established. Once that is in place, it is much easier to place yourself in the NPC position and take the most appropriate action to achieve their goal.