Road Warriors

[MattH]

I made a blog post about a little side project I’ve had going for a while.

TLDR: Gaslands is overrated, but Car Wars still rocks!

https://shellsplash.blogspot.com/

[Mr. Average]

I find myself sharing your sentiments re: Gaslands and Car Wars. I think, for my tastes, we’ve gone too far past the Simplicity Frontier and I miss the sophistication of games like Car Wars.

[Darkest Star Games]

Nice bit o’ kit you’ve got there MattH.  I’m betting you can have some real fun with those bikers, maybe a sort of “Weird Al meets Road Warrior” thing!

 

Mr. Average wrote:

I think, for my tastes, we’ve gone too far past the Simplicity Frontier and I miss the sophistication of games like Car Wars.

  I am with you, and it is something I am having difficulty with.  I know the crowd demands “faster faster faster” but to me though you may come up with the same “results” you lose a lot of nuance.  And to me a lot of the fun IS in the nuance and the grit.  I don’t need to get 3 fast-but-kinda-generic games done in an evening if I can get 1 game done that is detailed enough for my satisfaction…

"I saw this in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure I can do it..."

[Mr. Average]

Right? So much of the “feel” is lost. Battletech is much the same, a game that’s got so much flavor even if it is a more intricate “simulation.” There’s something different about “I’m firing my LRMs with the safety released – hot loaded with tandem-charge warheads – and I’m turning off the feedback discriminators on my particle cannon for a point blank shot!” when set against “Attack strength 3 versus defense strength 4, do I beat the roll?” Even in simplified games like Horizon Wars, which I do like a LOT, I find myself making up that kind of thing to enhance the game as it plays. Added nuance, you know?

In Car Wars, loading up on the right kind of ammo at the next truck stop always felt more compelling somehow. And yes, we always played with gas engines. There was a great campaign I once ran where the PCs had to dodge the Department of Transportation and Green Revolutionaries to get a sample of synthetic fossil fuel from Seattle to a research station in Florida for an Oklahoman petroleum company. I just don’t know if there’s enough nuance in Gaslands to play that the same way without a ton of modding.

[Mike]

So one of the reasons I don’t do car games in miniature is that the whole genre is about mad adrenaline fuelled chases.
This I find hard to buy into if:

The verdict? I don’t care that it’s not ‘fast-play’, that it takes around 3 hours to do 10 seconds of game time, or that there’s enough bookkeeping for an accountancy exam. Car Wars is still great.

I would rather just go and drive quite fast in my own car, or play a video game that really does get the adrenaline going.

So for me at least, faster and thus maybe simpler would be better.
I can add the story based bits to simple rules, but I can’t play a slow game fast.

Please consider this is a rushed post which is a bit meandering, I blame the diet and lack of energy, but hopefully, you get my jist.
Some games suit rules lite?

[Mr. Average]

I have had some very good results with Axles and Alloys, I’ll say, although it’s weak on the meta-game that is Car Wars’ strength.

[Deleted User]

That MG on the bus look so right.

[MattH]

Mike wrote:

So one of the reasons I don’t do car games in miniature is that the whole genre is about mad adrenaline fuelled chases. This I find hard to buy into if:

The verdict? I don’t care that it’s not ‘fast-play’, that it takes around 3 hours to do 10 seconds of game time, or that there’s enough bookkeeping for an accountancy exam. Car Wars is still great.

I would rather just go and drive quite fast in my own car, or play a video game that really does get the adrenaline going. So for me at least, faster and thus maybe simpler would be better. I can add the story based bits to simple rules, but I can’t play a slow game fast. Please consider this is a rushed post which is a bit meandering, I blame the diet and lack of energy, but hopefully, you get my jist. Some games suit rules lite?

I think if you’re expecting to experience an adrenaline rush from playing a tabletop game then you’re probably looking in the wrong place, and simpler less detailed rules won’t help – you would indeed be better off playing a video game!

I don’t mean to slag off Gaslands, it’s just not for me. Reducing the car to nothing more than a number of hit points, some weapons and a guy inside with superpower abilities might be quicker, but it feels insipid and bland to me. In the right company I can see it being kind of fun, but to be honest if I’m looking for a quick easy car combat game I’d pick the excellent and totally free Road Wolf over Gaslands any day. But I don’t regret buying Gaslands at all – it has some clever and interesting mechanics, and the photos and illustrations are inspiring.

Car Wars is like a long slow-mo action sequence in a film, or perhaps a bullet-time segment in a video game. It’s not actually that complex mechanically, it’s just very detailed and focused on simulation rather than abstraction, and lots can happen in a turn.

In a recent game I had a car being chased by bandits lose 2 wheels and roll. When a car rolls you pivot it 90 degrees and it rolls onto its side, taking collision damage to the side armour. Next phase it rolls upside down and takes damage to its top, and so on, decelerating 15mph each turn (5 phases), until it either stops or hits something. In this case the car rolls a few times until it hits the tree line by the side of the road. The car lands the right way up, pointing back down the road directly at one of the pursuers, and both the driver and power plant are still intact. So the driver tests to see if he’s concussed and passes, and then lets rip with his 2 forward firing Vulcan MGs at the bandit’s front right tyre, causing severe handling issues. He jumps out of the car and sprays the bandit’s tyre as it passes him at 65mp with his SMG, taking it out. The bandit keeps control, but is effectively a mission kill – it’s going to be a lot less useful tackling the convoy further up the road with only 3 tyres.

In Gaslands the narrative would have gone like this: Car loses hit points and is wrecked. Car respawns at the last gate, pays some VP or whatever, and is less likely to win the race. It’s kind of like Mario Kart with guns. Nothing wrong with that, I can see how it might be appealing, but it’s not my thing.

https://shellsplash.blogspot.com/

[Rhoderic]

Great stuff!

Good to know about the size issues with the Ramshackle bikers. I hope you didn’t end up buying them because of my thread about manufacturers in this (nominal) scale. I did suspect there would be size/compatibility issues with some of the ranges, but didn’t want to sound like some consumer watchdog with the “ifs and buts”.

Slow, bookkeeping-heavy rules intimidate me to be honest, but I don’t want rules that feel featureless either. A happy medium would be my ideal. If the prevalent philosophy for rules design has gone too far into “super-simple”, I’d sooner see a mild and measured readjustment than for it to snap all the way back to the opposite extreme.

I wonder if a ruleset where players have to make judgment calls about speed, turning, etc. with a real time limit and simultaneous movement would be feasible. That said, I don’t particularly see car combat being more adrenaline-fuelled than many other types of combat, such as mech combat, fighter aircraft/spacecraft combat or just plain skirmish combat (especially when it has a hack-and-slash feel to it). I do like the adrenaline rush of some types of video games (driving games, fighting games and air/space combat games especially) but at the same time I’m quite interested in emulating the style and feel of action-oriented video games, minus the stressfulness of the actual action, in tabletop gaming form. I see such rulesets ideally being fast-playing and having a focus on fast decision-making where mistakes are inevitable but completely part of the intended gameplay experience so they don’t ruin the game. Ignoring the video game connection, the same could hopefully work for a car combat game.

[Darkest Star Games]

MattH wrote:

It’s kind of like Mario Kart with guns

That’s actually quite succinct.  Sounds like Gaslands is meant to be more videogame-like, whereas Car Wars was meant to be more cinematic.

 

Deleted User wrote:

That MG on the bus look so right.

I thought so too, though there was a part of me that went “Oooo, how big of an ATG could it carry instead?!?!”  It’d be like the Ferdinand/Elephant of the auto world!

"I saw this in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure I can do it..."

[MattH]

Rhoderic wrote:

Great stuff! Good to know about the size issues with the Ramshackle bikers. I hope you didn’t end up buying them because of my thread about manufacturers in this (nominal) scale.

No, not at all, I bought them ages ago and only just got round to painting them. I have no regrets, they were cheap, and they’ll serve a purpose until I can find something better. Scale is weird and confusing when it comes to Hot Wheels cars. They all vary, but for some reason everyone seems to insist that they are 1/64 scale and that that is equivalent to 20mm scale. I can’t get my head around that, because in my day 20mm scale was 1/72, and so 1/64 would be closer to what used to be ‘true’ 25mm.

https://shellsplash.blogspot.com/

[Northern Monkey]

Firstly, they are some great looking vehicles!

I have a ton of Car wars stuff and Gaslands, I think there is plenty of room for both, Gaslands is quick, easy fun especially with a few players, yes it lacks realism but plays like Rock and Roll Racing (if anyone remembers that).

Car Wars is at the other end of the spectrum really, but still great fun if somewhat slow, sadly we just don’t have time to play it anymore, no one is prepared to use our sometimes limited gaming time to play out what tends to be only half a game, gone are those days of being able to have a 6-8 hour gaming session! Still I can spend hours making up new vehicles for my own amusement.

TL:DR Gaslands fits our time constraints though we would probably all prefer to have the time to play Car Wars

My attempt at a Blog: http://ablogofwar.blogspot.co.uk/

[Author]

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