Sigwald
Nitrous injected suicide machine

I believe if you don’t make it too difficult to hit with a weapon while driving fast or making a hard maneuver than you’ll end up with games that end too quickly, and you will be taking away the motivation of setting up a well timed and thought out attack. Driving fast would still be encouraged from a strategic perspective because it will aid in defense and still be important for inflicting damage during any ramming maneuvers.

Style points are another interesting dilemma. I don’t think they should be considered when you are adding up damage or chance to hit, but it would be a cool way to bring in the effect of morale of the drivers. If someone keeps hitting your car and they are taunting you while they are doing it then it may affect your ability to make sound decisions. Perhaps the best way to deal with it is to have any style points earned go against the opponent’s accuracy roll in future attacks.

Anyway I think I am going to create some cars for this next weekend. Cool game idea!

Another idea would be to have a gunner / co-pilot to aid in the shooting. adding a bonus to your “to hit” number, this could be offset by the points you pay for how good your gunner is.

Andy

That raises an idea- lots of RPG systems have “style points”, where you can gain bonuses on rolls for roleplaying out or doing stuff that’s just really cool.

Something like that would actually be good for this game- there should be a way to improve your attacks by being utterly ridiculous.

The ideas on the posts sound groovy and can’t wait for the alpha test rules.

Lord knows, I reviewed the rules for MageKnight and Last Night on Earth before formulating the combat system for the game I’m working on.

Neither here nor there.

As to your last question, I think the obvious answer is “a little of both”. A game named “Death Race” really deserves crazy, chaotic gameplay, but any good game should force the player to make interesting tradeoffs.

Your current maneuvering should be taken into account, but weighted less than your opponents maneuvers. Without knowing how your maneuver system works, I imagine it like this:

Maneuver difficulty: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
To hit modifier: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 (added to the target’s defense)
To shoot modifier: 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 (subtracted from the attacker’s offense)

Basically, maneuvers break down into easy(1-3), medium (4-6) and hard (7,8). If you wanted to, you could even weight the defense in the same way, all easy maneuvers grant a +3, all medium maneuvers grant a +6, and all hard maneuvers grant a +9.

That would be nicer because you wouldn’t need to track the actual difficulty number of the last maneuver, just its category.