Old CW vs New CW

[43Supporter]

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.

[swordtart]

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.

[Aleph]

Originally Posted by swordtart

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.

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.

[swordtart]

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 :)

[Aleph]

Originally Posted by swordtart

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

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.

[Vulcan Stev]

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.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Vulcan Stev

Can some of these be ported to 6e?

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.

[Vulcan Stev]

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.

[HeatDeath]

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.

[HeatDeath]

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.]