AADA Arena Setup Rules?

[swordtart]

There are no "rules" as such. As in real-life it would be a decision for the arena designer. You could use existing designs as a guide or inspiration or you could just make it up.

If you are concerned with fairness (which is the usual reason for wanting some hard rules) then just allow everyone in your group to contribute. You could come up with a hybrid design or a consensus design or in the worst case several disparate designs that you take turns in using (as a local Autoduel circuit).

My arenas are thematic and geared for my group size. As we are a small group (2-5 cars per event) I generally have 6 gates (there will usually be several unused gates in an event). This allows a simple d6 allocation of gate number and so we don't have to be as concerned whether any particular gate offers an advantage (though symmetry will help).

Starting speed is usually a player option. As I like gritty realism in the preparation stage (where we basically have as much time as we need) I prefer to limit start up speeds to what could be achieved from a standing start. Small arenas tend to have smaller run-ups.

Some of my dirt-poor arenas are drawn on a single sheet of A4 paper (8 squares by 10 or 40 x 50 yards). The run up for these is 25 yards (5" at 1" scale). Clearly a car with ACC 5 could be at 20 when it hits the gate and a car with ACC 10 could be at 30 when it hits the gate etc. With an arena this small hitting the gate at 30 means you are going to need to turn 90 degrees over the next two seconds and so this mechanism helps prevent people from over committing and crashing out through control loss before the combat has even really started.

This may seem very small (and it is) but for AM nights when gunnery skill is poor and you are likely to have no computers it reduced the time to get into range. A full combat might last 10 seconds in total. This is short, but I have seen arenas 8 times the size only take 20-30 seconds. This means a sponsor could put on 8 small bouts simultaneously and end up with 8 x 10 seconds of combat footage to sell to the networks rather than 1 x 30 seconds (and 8 smaller crowds who are close to the action).

Generally it is good practice to place a blocking obstacle between gates on opposite sides of an arena to stop cars shot-up before they even get fully out of the gate (sufficiently large distance if effectively an obstacle).

When stipulating designs you will quickly get a feel for which ones overly benefit from an arenas quirks. There are 3 options.
1) Fix the arena - in reality this would be expensive (and the larger the arena the more expensive it will be) so it probably isn't realistic. If you don't care about realism (or can think of a cheap workaround) then this won't be an issue
2) Set a limit on the cars - this is cheaper and as long as everyone knows in advance that "Dropped Weapons are banned" then it's probably the best solution.
3) Ignore the issue and let players exploit the quirk, this will probably end up with very specialised cars and may make the game a bit "samey". If this arena is part of a circuit then players will have a choice about building a vehicle optimised for this area with it probably suffering in others (and this could indirectly impose a budget constraint on them as running multiple vehicles might increase their running costs. This could also affect skill choice (if you know DWs are king then why spend points in gunner). I'd avoid it though if you have only a single arena.

Other than that a common practice seems to be to choose some local facility (Mall, Carpark or sport arena etc.) and just base your design on that including all the issues that such a design would impose as features.

You can have lots of fun on a simple 8 x 11 area. With 6 gates (one centred on each of the short sides and two equally spaced on each long side. Put a 1" square indestructible bunker on the long centre line between each pair of side gates.

In my games these serve as pedestrian refuges, camera platforms and also have an arena controlled enforcement weapon. These are so high that they are always above the 45 degree arc of non-universal vehicle weapons but are themselves universal and can therefore generally target top armour.

In some events (most Am Nights) these are just used to punish rules infractions and are controlled by a Gunner-2 with HR computer. They mount triple weapons (VSGs for AM night) and depending on the infraction they will fire one or more linked weapons. The number of guns that wil be fired is specified in the rules and it is a legitimate tactic to add top armour to buy protection against specific infractions. The budget of AM nights means that this will need to be balanced with other threats.

On special events these guns can instead be placed under computer control with the target vehicle determined by crowd vote. Usually these are judicial events in rough towns where death-row criminals are forced to duel for the crowds entertainment. The voting system varies but it needs to be fair (so no on the spot decisions) and should be set out as a set of conditions (we usually base it on the contestant with the lowest current prestige after 3 turns being the target - with ties being determined randomly). Prestige is recalculated dynamically so if everyone starts with zero prestige failing to get a kill quickly will put you at risk (which handily prevents players from lurking). Of course a popular criminal (as a former duellist maybe or just a survivor from previous bouts) stands a better chance of having the crowd do his work for him. After enough bouts he may earn his freedom (or at least have his sentence commuted).

No hard and fast rules, just plenty of options.

Oh and a lesson hard learned. Don't fall too much in love with a complicated design that you invested too much time in. You may only ever get to play it once and in my case we never even got to finish a circuit before most of the cars were destroyed and we ran out of time. Some of the events that occurred in that one event however were EPIC and still some of my fondest CW memories, I just wished I'd spent less time designing and drawing it out as half the arena went largely unexplored.