Re: [HoE] Hell on Earth & Car Wars

[PEGHopler@aol.com]

In a message dated 7/19/99 7:55:49 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
darrin@neobright.net writes:

<< If I were more familiar with the Car Wars rules, I'd do this in a 
heartbeat. In
 fact, my current impression of the Road Warrior rules is they are nothing 
more
 than a warmed over hack job of the Car Wars rules anyway.  The Car Wars rules
 are probably a lot more balanced, as they've been around quite a bit longer, 
but
 then again the kludge work PEG put together would go a LOT faster. If the 
focus
 of your game is going to be arena dules, might as well micromanage the 
battles
 and cut down roleplaying to a minimum. I guess the real issue is speed versus
 detail, and all that really boils down to personal tastes. >>

As the hack who wrote the "kludge" work, I've got a few bones to pick.

First, I freely admit I've played Car Wars. When I was in high school, my 
brother and I played lots of Car Wars (and that was back in the "old days" 
when the game came in a little zip-lock baggy). Was I influenced by the game? 
Sure, but show me a game designer who says he wasn't influenced by other 
games he's played and I'll show you a liar.

Anyway, here's how the current rules in Road Warriors came to be:

My main goal was to create rules that would integrate vehicle combat into the 
existing HOE initiative and skill system in a way that was fairly realistic 
without significantly slowing down play. As anyone who's done it can tell 
you, trying to integrate vehicles into a roleplaying combat system (which is 
essentially a man-to-man infantry simulation) is a royal pain in the butt due 
to the huge differences in movement speeds.

Specifically to avoid charges that I copied Car Wars (which is pretty much 
the standard by which other vehicular games are measured), I started out 
working on abstract systems which didn't require counters or measuring 
movement, or anything like that. None of these systems satisfied me because 
they all lacked the detail which I felt most players wanted and because they 
were bound to cause all sorts of questions if a player wanted to do something 
out of the ordinary (although these systems did give me some ideas that I 
used as the basis for the chase rules in Road Warriors). 

I eventually decided that I was going to have to do some sort of tactical 
system. The first few systems I tried were aimed at being able to use HOE 
minis, but trying to resolve vehicle movement at 25mm scale either required 
an enormous playing area, or changing the ground scale. Changing the ground 
scale caused all sorts of problems, because then the figures and car counters 
were ridiculously over-sized 
and pedestrian movement became almost insignificant.

This eventually led me to the conclusion that I was going to have to scale 
things down. I eventually decided on Car Wars scale (1"=15 feet) for probably 
the same reason Steve Jackson did: it's small enough to be playable on a 
tabletop and it makes the math very easy--10 mph = 1" of movement (10 mph is 
15 feet/second (14.6666...for you purists)). I also chose this scale for a 
reason that has already been pointed out on the listserv (and which I 
couldn't point out in a Pinnacle product): there are tons of car counters, 
road sections, and maps available from Steve Jackson Games in this scale. 

As far as the actual system goes, the details of moving the counters around 
are similar to Car Wars for a simple reason: the physics of vehicle movement 
are the physics of vehicle movement. I suppose I could have come up with 
fancy, outlandish names for the maneuvers, but that would have been a purely 
cosmetic change.

The actual play mechanics are pure HOE. The only real change to regular HOE 
mechanics was breaking the 5-second combat round up into five 1-second 
movement phases for vehicles. I originally had cars move on their driver's 
action cards just like pedestrians, but this gave some pretty unrealistic 
results, especially if a driver got a single high card. He could floor it and 
pull out of sight in a single action before anyone could react. Adding the 
phases put an end to this and gave much more realistic results. 

I think the fact that the Road Warriors system limits a driver to a single 
maneuver per second (two if he's got a sleeve card) is actually more 
realistic than Car Wars, where a car can pull 1 maneuver for each 1" of 
movement it has per second. That means a car going 60 mph could attempt 6 
maneuvers per second (provided the driver doesn't blow a roll). The next time 
you watch an action movie with a car chase count seconds and see how long it 
takes to pull off some maneuvers. Hard turns and bootleggers can take nearly 
an entire second for the one maneuver.

Sincerely,

John Hopler
Pinnacle