[4e] Autoduelling (also, my return to GURPS)

[Chris Goodwin]

I'm now looking at GURPS again after a long time away. (Short version: 4e came out right after HERO 5e, and at that time in my life I could only focus on one generic system. HERO won. Now the stars are right again and I can look into GURPS again.)

And, autoduelling. I have both versions of GURPS Autoduel, and both 3e GURPS Vehicles books, none of which I have any intention of using for this. :) I also have a large GURPS 3e and prior library in general, and a large Car Wars library.

The idea is to do conversions of vehicles from Car Wars into GURPS stats, and to do all combat and campaigning and whatnot using GURPS mechanics. GURPS 4e is making that pretty easy; to the extent Car Wars generates real world stats for vehicles (top speed, acceleration, weight capacity), I can convert them to the units GURPS is expecting and roll with those. (Pun not intended.)

Most of the other stats are pretty easy to gauge, either with a more or less direct conversion from Car Wars or pretty easy to eyeball. Handling is Car Wars HC - 2. Stability is based on the vehicle type; generally 4 for cars, 2 for cycles. ST/HP comes from the vehicle's max load, probably from whichever is lower between that of the chassis and that of the power plant.

For weapons and DR, I'm going to use a 7x scale. I'll use GURPS 4e sources for weapons; multiplying Car Wars DP values by 7 generates really close GURPS numbers for HP/DR, close enough that I feel no need to tweak them. (Interesting to note, a Car Wars character with 3 DP is rendered unconscious by taking 2 DP of damage, which corresponds to 14 points in GURPS.) GURPS DR with the Ablative modifier works exactly like Car Wars plastic armor, and Car Wars metal armor can be treated as GURPS semi-ablative without any problems.

I'm having a slightly harder time pinning Vehicle HT down. I get that it represents overall reliability, but Car Wars doesn't really focus on that much except for the occasional roleplaying adventure with its own rules. I'm poking around a bit with starting with a base of 10, tweaking it up or down based on overall vehicle features (for instance, standard tires would be worth -1 to HT; running an old internal combustion engine would be worth -1 HT) but I'm not quite satisfied with that. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I'll post more as it occurs to me.