Tuesday, February 14, 2023

"Faaantastic!"

11 comments:

  1. One of the great values of gaming history.

    Got way more mileage out of it than Moldvay Basic or even Gamma World Third edition.

    Never got over it, either.

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    1. Deluxe Car Wars was indeed fantastic and occupied MANY hours of attention. But more mileage than Moldvay? Not on your life!

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    2. We shifted to AD&D early, so Moldvay is barely a blip in my gaming career. Car Wars, OTOH - we played it to pieces, literally, and then bough more copies and ran it as a homebrew campaign/light RPG thing for six or seven years before college scattering finally led to it fading out. Wasn't even mostly an autoduelist game for us - our characters ran a convoy protection business that turned into a general purpose "troubleshooters on wheels" thing, fighting marauding cycle gangs, corrupt local police, corporate assassins, a small fleet of AI-driven cars, and weirder stuff. And that was all before GURPS Autoduel came along.

      One of my fondest memories from my late teens, and it probably made up a good 10% of the total number of game session I've played in my entire lifetime. Never found another group that used Car Wars like that, closest I've seen were a few CW/Supers crossovers with Autoduel Champions.

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    3. That's great. We had a similar experience where, before Gurps Autoduel, the GM fleshed out a dystopic world that was a cross between Max Headroom, Judge Dredd and American Flagg. We played cops and were soon having entire sessions where we never set foot in a car.

      Car Wars sure sparked a lot of inspiration.

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  2. I've played nothing but DND my whole life. Moldvay at first. Then 1e. A taste of 2e. Nothing but old school ever since. Lot of home brew stuff with fellow grognards. Never tried 3e, 4e, 5e, but I always wanted to try other games, like Boot Hill, Call of Cthulhu, and Traveller. James, if you ever have a chance, I'd love to see a list of your Top 10 TTRPG's aside from DND, followed by an article dedicated to each of those games, explaining the basics, and the attraction.

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  3. Loved this game from the minute I saw it. I can still remember the Saturday Night Live episode where Carrie Fisher is joking about alternate ideas they'd had for Star Wars - "Car Wars - like Star Wars, but in cars" was one of them.

    That said, it did eventually bog itself down in a bit too much added stuff - new tech and weapons, some of which became effectively mandatory or eclipsed older options. The addition of helicopters, tanks, trucks and trikes were overall helpful for offering new things to fight against, but some things (Boat Wars, with all manner of naval stuff, and the Autoduel Champions supers rules) felt a bit out of place. Some of the best material appeared in Autoduel Quarterly, which left many players out of the loop - it wasn't the easiest magazine to find in stores, and not all of us subscribed to it.

    Can't say I've been happy with any of the attempts to relaunch the game, and I pretty much hate the current version. It's a shame - Battletech proves that a game with very similar complexity to CW toward the end of its first incarnation can be successful without major rewrites, although that IP does have the advantage of very popular e-gaming variations keeping it in the public eye all these years.

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    1. Very jealous that BattleTech is somehow evergreen while the premier autocombat rpg is somehow not good enough for people anymore.

      Not sure there actually is a better way to handle the spray of machinegun fire resulting in a minor fishtail that requires a D2 bend to avoid an obstacle which results in a spinout directly into said obstacle which immobilizes the car but which miraculously turns the vehicle's best weapons and armor into the exact position they needed to be set to for a game winning shot only for some other player to blurp the car with heavy duty flaming oil which up until then had been completely superfluous.

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    2. Yeah, this. I started with the plastic boxes, but for me, the era of Deluxe Car wars + Dueltrack was close to perfection in entertainment. We played for so, so many hours. None of the revisions since has grabbed me the way that did.

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  4. What a great blast from the past! This is one I need to introduce my kids to.

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  5. _Deluxe Car Wars_ was a central feature of my gaming in the late 80s, and as several others mentioned I was able to adapt it into a pretty successful RPG campaign. As I recall, I just added a simple 1d6 based skill system on top of the existing rules. In the modern day, I've found _Gaslands_ to be a good ruleset for capturing the classic autodueling experience. It's less detailed than classic Car Wars, but manages to produce a satisfying version of the "glorious chain of mishaps" that Jeffro alludes to above.

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  6. The Armadillo Autoduel Arena was our go-to Car Wars venue! We loved arena dueling more than open road fights. However we did do an epic all-day battle using both East and West Midville. Many MONDOS and gang members met their fates that day.

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