GURPS Autoduel

My brother and I grew up playing Car Wars. We would spend long summers making our own car counters with rulers and magic markers, designing hundreds of cars, and playing massive races and arena battles with each other. This was our childhood, along with the Commodore 64 (welcome back), Atari 2600, MTV (I wish I could welcome this back), and many of the other classic 1980s greats. Car Wars killed AD&D for us, and only Aftermath and Traveller survived as our generic games.

We had a role-playing campaign, and we used the Traveller book for a jury-rigged role-playing system. We did not use GURPS since basic Traveller worked exceptionally well for the tabletop game, and all the skills were perfect for the 2d6 game. We switched hand weapons to a 1d6 damage scale; roughly, 3 points of hand weapon damage equaled one point of vehicle damage.

The Traveller Book is such a great game, simple in ways that today's Traveller often overlooks, and one of the true great generic systems of the 1970s and 80s. I'm thrilled that the community version lives on today, powered by the Cepheus engine and bringing so many amazing 2d6 games to life.

GURPS Autoduel handles its own vehicle designs, but it utilizes GURPS Vehicles. Although the GURPS design system offers more options, we found it easier to stick with the classic Car Wars rules, as we had more car designs available and didn't want to reinvent the wheel. Or a few hundred vehicles. What we had, with the original Traveller rules, worked incredibly well together, but it did start to break down with too many XP and skill levels. You need to cap skills at a +4 maximum.

So we never got a chance to try GURPS Autoduel, just because we were such fans of the original game and our hacked Traveller system. I would like to try it, even with the book being for 3rd Edition GURPS, since the GURPS system is far more character-based than our sort of wargame-like 2d6 system. Just like GURPS Traveller, immersion occurs when the game system transitions to GURPS.

I would love to see the third edition templates translated to GURPS 4th Edition, for this and GURPS: Traveller. Those are great resources and give a lot of flavor to characters. When I get GCS working again, I will work on that.

Until then, I keep my counters and Car Wars books out for the memories. GURPS, one day, shall see this world again.