This is Rallycross. It’s exactly what Burning Rubber is, only in Burning Rubber, when you’re falling behind, you shoot the guy in front of you.
Category: game design
How skidding works
I’m happy to say that this is pretty much how skids work in Burning Rubber. Also, you see how, on a lot of these corners, the dude is laying down tread? That’s where he’s skidding. He’s still in control of the car, but he’s skidding. And you see how all of a sudden, the car snaps and the tire tracks stop and suddenly he’s accelerating? That’s where he’s lined up his car with his vector.
The Lancia Stratos Is The Coolest Car Ever
I’m pretty sure I had a Matchbox Lancia Stratos as a kid. It’s an astonishingly cool car. Apparently, it was pretty dominant in the mid-70s as a ralley racer, which is really neat, given its street car looks. I guess it held on to the corners as tightly as the other top racers, then took off on the straights and pavement.
The only thing cooler than the Lancia Stratos Ralley, though is the Lancia Stratos prototype. Holy crap.
… and the only thing cooler than that is the Kraftwerk knockoff music followed by actual Kraftwerk.
Gotta get those Launching Over It rules.
Burning Rubber 0.2
(see also Burning Rubber 0.1)
Got together tonight with Rob Bohl, Emily Care-Boss, and Epidiah Ravichol for a first round playtest of Burning Rubber. We weren’t shooting at each other. I wanted to see if the driving game was fun, and when, if ever, you’d wish you could shoot. Each of them gave really solid feedback. Thanks, guys!
The big things we noticed:
- Skidding and crashing work great. They’re reasonably intuitive and make a really solid, comical mess.
- The ruler design is critical. Units were twice as long as they should have been and there were about half as many as there should have been, resulting in everyone achieving their top speed on turn 2 and having no problem keeping it, even around the tightest curve on the course.
- Driving is too easy. If no one gets aggro on your ass, you just drive around.
- I have to be clear that you can’t accelerate with Yellows.
- You need two rulers to keep from losing track of stuff.
The following rules supercede the previous post on the matter. They are much simpler. My sacred cow of “facings” is by the side of the road, trying to hitch a ride to a different game.
Burning Rubber
I really like racing games. I like Formula D, I like Burnout, and I played the shit out of Car Wars as a lad. What Formula D (née Formula Dé) and Burnout have in common is fast, sleek gameplay. What Formula D and Car Wars have in common are vehicle construction rules (otherwise excellent 5th ed. notwithstanding). What Car Wars and Burnout have are frenzied automobile combat. You will note that those don’t overlap.
I’ve been kinda trying to figure out how to adapt Vincent’s Mechaton rules to car combat for a couple of years now. I’ve got a couple of specs that make it non-trivial.
- You’ve only got one car. Instead of having 3-5 guys to spread your resources around, you have one complex guy.
- Facing has to matter. It’s a car, so it’s all about maneuvering, for both offensive and defensive gain.
- You have to go forward. You accelerate and have a speed.
- The game is about racing, not just blowing each other up. One of the great things about Mechaton is the objective system; it makes fighting a matter of tactics rather than one of bashing. In this game, I want the fighting to be about winning the race, or if you can’t do that, crashing your car really spectacularly.
- Build a car in 30 minutes
- Play in about 90-120 minutes
- Have good crashing rules! Losing should be fun and funny!
So I started writing this up. What I got so far is under the break. Maybe you’ll get a chance to play before I will!
Robot Checkbox
There’s something very exciting (and painfully ironic) going on over here at the Glyphpress with Two Scooters Press.
We’re hoping it’s funny.
Eyes in the Night, Delivered To Your Doorstep
Beowulf is off to press on the morrow! I’m doing a very limited run, Ashcan-style, so if you want to read the poem, consider the exegesis, play the game, and give me feedback, this is your chance!
I’m selling it for $14+$5 S&H, or just regular $14 at Gen Con. Since the run is limited, I’ll be selling the remainder at Gen Con that I haven’t sold via my own site, so if you want to make sure you have a copy, preorder and I’ll shoot it off to you as soon as they get to my doorstep. If you want to wait until Gen Con, you can, but I’ve had a few people interested in preorders already, so you take your chances with the Wyrd.
Even better than picking up a copy at the Playcollective or Ashcan Front booths, order one from me, play with your friends, play with me at Gen Con, and give me feedback that will both be fun to generate and help produce a great final book.
It’s 244 pages long, 5″ x 8″, and I’ve made uglier things in my life.
(sold out. Please give feedback!)
So Many Words, So Many Meanings
Frickin’ Beowulf is frickin’ 162 pages already. By the end, it’s gonna be fucking huge. Like, seriously, 250 pages.
It’s got the full text of the poem (Grummere translation — 1.0 may be a different translation if I can convince myself to typeset it again), an explanation by Dr. Michael Drout of the “Situation” (in Big Model terms) of Beowulf (Guess what! It’s about sex, families, and power!), a summary of the events of the poem, and a 27-page appendix explaining the various ways of dating the poem that come down to the reason I’m including the essay:
Let me give an example closer to home: in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” we read of Giovanni’s feelings about Beatrice: “Least of all, while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni to have remained so near this extraordinary being that the proximity and possibility even of intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing.” The date of the production of the text is very significant for our interpretation of the meaning of “intercourse” in this sentence, and we might interpret that passage very differently if we thought that a 20th-century reviser/editor/copyist would have felt free to change Hawthorne’s text for one purpose or another.
That is, the inclinations of the reader — traditionally, a single, horny dude with a political mandate in a scriptorium — matter at least as much as the putative intentions of the poet himself. In this case, it’s the intentions of the player, not our ideas about history; our own moral stance, not the “what would a 6th century dude think,” that makes a difference.
Because when you draw from the Runes, and they tell you, “A young woman, rune-rich, vying for glory despite her sex.” you’re going to read it with your Postmodern eyes, through a Feminist filter, through a filter that forces us to wonder what “glory” is to us, through eyes that see the word “hero” used speciously to describe anyone who was killed for the acts of their government.
Far as I can tell, Beowulf is only about ten degrees deeper than Conan, but because of the incredible history of the text, it makes an excellent canvas upon which we can cast our tale of blood, glory, and remarkable circumstance. And all the questions we ask when we experience such a tale.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (and Dragons and Monsters)
I’m starting a new project. I’m excited about it. Let’s see how it goes!