classic arena rules

[illuminchaoti999]

Hey,

I'm trying to get a car wars league started locally, and need the AADA circuit rules for doing a AADA league. I can get the two arena books (Arena Book and the AADA Circuit book, the L'Outrace one for the maps and just copy them to my multipurpose map sheet. What I really don't know about are the rules, for AADA leagues and corporate duels and for special arena features. I think the two mentioned books have all of them, but there's this classic arena set that came out that says it has revised rules for everything. So I guess the question is if I can find the revisions somewhere, and just buy the two pdfs, or what.

Thanks

Edit: I just found the Arena Book 1. Is there overlap with this and the other Arena Book? Does that one have more stuff? It seems too, but I don't know for sure.

[Parody]

The SPARK circuits have used different scoring systems over the years. Most years there's no in-game component, just scoring based on placement and kills.

The CW5 Arena Book 1 resized many arenas from other sources to fit them on a smaller play area than scaling up their original. I'd skip it if you're playing the older rules and not scaling up.

Car Wars Arenas was a rerelease of arenas from other sources that hadn't been released at full-size before. You can find them all elsewhere, but you'll have to draw them yourself. ::shrug::

[illuminchaoti999]

I'm playing on the compendium rules, are you saying that they did the scale at some point away from the 1/4" squares? Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're saying with the CW5 Arena Book 1?

Also so that aside, if I got the arena book and the circuit book, I'd have all the arena rules, yes?

[Parody]

Originally Posted by illuminchaoti999

I'm playing on the compendium rules, are you saying that they did the scale at some point away from the 1/4" squares? Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're saying with the CW5 Arena Book 1?

All of CW5 is at 3" scale, so anything that would have been 1/4" in CWC is 3/4" in CW5. CW5 doesn't use a grid at all (there's no full-size printed maps) so it's not a big deal.

However, as stated on page 2 of the CW5 Arena Book 1, all of the maps in that book were designed for a 3 foot by 6 foot table. They aren't just scaled-up versions of the same maps, but redesigned versions using the same ideas. Compare the maps for Aladdin's Castle: in CW5 (p. 5 of the Arena Book 1) it's a 10 car length square arena, while in CWC (p. 3 of the Arena Book) it's a 21 car length square arena.

Originally Posted by illuminchaoti999

Also so that aside, if I got the arena book and the circuit book, I'd have all the arena rules, yes?

Between the Arena Book or L'Outrance and the Compendium you should have everything you need, yes.

[Magesmiley]

Parody is saying that rather than treating each 1/4" square on the maps in the books as 1" when drawing the arena on the map sheet, he used a different scale.

Each arena usually has its own special features which might have special rules. They all use the core rules from Classic Car Wars and/or the Car Wars Compendium though.

If I understand your question, you're looking for rules/directions on how to do an arena campaign, correct?

The back pages of L'Outrance is probably your best reference material. It was one of the later supplements released on arena dueling and should be fairly accurate for what you need. Given the tendency of Car Wars to have a fairly high character fatality rate in the arena, I'm going to recommend that you use the Corporate Car Wars rules from there.

To answer your question about Arenas vs. the Arena Book (and L'Outrance and arenas in ADQ): What SJG printed in these products was arenas at 1/4 normal scale. You had to get some map sheets and draw them at full size to play. (L'Outrance and the Arena Book had a few at ready-to-play size). The Arenas set gathered up these small maps from a variety of sources and printed them up at ready-to-play size (and fixed a few things as well).

Currently, Arenas, Arenas 2, and Classic Car Wars are the only products in print for the line (and thus the only source of ready-to-play maps currently).

You can still get electronic copies of most of the other products. There are several arenas in the Expansion Sets too.

Classic Car Wars is a reprint of a subset of the Car Wars Compendium. If you have the Compendium, you've got the rules from it. Classic also has an active errata list that is being kept up-to-date (see the sticky at the top of the forum). Some of the errata items there also would apply to the Compendium.

[Parody]

Originally Posted by Magesmiley

Parody is saying that rather than treating each 1/4" square on the maps in the books as 1" when drawing the arena on the map sheet, he used a different scale.

While true, I wasn't talking about that at all, just the difference between CWC and CW5 scales. :)

I should have directly addressed these overlapping questions about arena rules, though:

Will I have access to the special rules for playing in an arena, like the rules for banked turns?
Between the Compendium and the specific sourcebook, yes.

Will I have access to any special in-world rules for running a circuit?
The main set of those is Corporate Car Wars in L'Outrance. SPARK did something like that one year. Most of the time, though, our circuit duels are just "bring a Division X vehicle for play on map Y" without any special in-world rules.

How about real-world rules for running a circuit?
What SPARK has done for many years is assign points per duel based on position. For the last few years points have been based on the number of players in the duel: the winner of a 5 person duel gets 5 points, second gets 4, and so on down to last place getting 1 point. Ties split points and each person's lowest score of the year is dropped (so you can miss a duel without penalty).

Our previous scoring system gave first place 5, second 3, third 2, and everyone else 1 (the dreaded Pity Point). Again, lowest score was dropped.

In addition, we try to collect our house rules together so everyone knows those rulings. Ours are based on the CWRQ/ODQ, with a few changes here and there.

Hope that clarifies things. :)

[illuminchaoti999]

Thanks all, it sounds like I will get the cheaper CWC arenas book and l'outrace, and that should give me all the arenas and circuit background I should need.

I also checked my compendium and you're right Parody, all the arena feature rules like jumps and banked curves, are in there, I guess I forgot about that or had book-blindness or something.

and its interesting to know what SPARK does.

Once again, thanks for your help.