Car wars - Continuing characters - how did you play them?

[swordtart]

Originally Posted by 43Supporter

...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.