Entry 2006: Mississippi Steel

[JenniferS]

Time: 10 sessions of an hour each
Ingredients: Law, Steel, Team

A game of roleplaying... Redneck Stockcar racing at the Dirty Waters Speedway! First session to pick your car, introduce your driver and pit crew, and generally learn how to play. Then nine races out of a short-track season, the grand-prize winner is picked from the total amount of points.

Car wrecks, endorsements, and lots of "Brum-Brum" sounds from the players!

Yay!

More will follow as I figure out the mechanics...

[Antti-san]

Sorry for the nitpicking, but isn't it Entry 2006?

This sounds quite fun. Much like a boardgame but with roleplaying elements.

....

There will be roleplaying, right? And what character do you play, the driver?

[JenniferS]

[quote="Antti-san"]Sorry for the nitpicking, but isn't it Entry 2006? ]

Well, after confirming, yes, there will be roleplaying. I'm thinking you roleplay the different aspects of the driving team though: You control the roles of the driver as well as the pit crew. As you earn money, you can improve your skills in driving and maintenance and soup up the car a bit.

But there is only so much you can do with the car, I would think. Since these are backwoods machines, they are not going to be plastic newfangled light cars--these are steel-framed monsters. There will be a catalog in place for people to order parts from.

[matthijs]

This sounds like great fun

What if... each session, you play the crew of a new car; and each session, a new player is the driver, with the rest being supporting cast?

Or perhaps players compete against each other in two teams each session?

Oh shit. There's a Norwegian movie you should totally see for this game. It's an animated film called "Flåklypa Grand Prix", and has funny animals driving an insane contraption made by a bike mechanic and sponsored by an Arab oil sheik.

[adgboss]

[JenniferS]

Well, after a bunch of research I decided to go with figure-8 car racing. The races only last a half-hour at most. The driver, crew, and car will have 4 stats each between 1 and 3 (average of two). In determining racing ability or crew ability, the score of men's stats and the car stats will be added together (about 16), and then the GM rolls a six-sider, total has to be an 18 or something bad happens. The driver is the main guy, so his stats double as personality stats (i.e. Control = Temper). So off-track, rolls can still be made as to whether he gets that endorsement, gets upset over the fact that his girlfriend is rumored to be sleeping with the driver of car #87, and so on. The advice to the players is given via the LAWS, such as the Law of Averages, the Laws of Physics, The laws of Thermodynamics, it'll be kind of funny.

Anyway. I have to write all this out long-hand at work and then type it in, so I won't start entering the real stuff until Wednesday.

But I got it pretty much figgered out.

Yee-haw!

[ennobee]

[JenniferS]

Or a leading driver gets asked to do a 30-second TV promo for Gary's U-Pull-It in return for some spare parts (and there's your "Actor" ingredient, albeit lightly used).

Alternative rules can include:

Each player could also play two cars as entries from a single owner. Therefore they could help each other on the track.

Variations could include the train-car racing (Three cars chained together), or bus racing (yes, indeed, there is such a thing as short-track figure-eight BUS racing). Average tracks are between 1/4 to 3/8 of a mile total and average speed is about 60 mph.

60-mile an hour buses!

Anyone wanna help me with the math on how many laps a car can make in 30 minutes doing an average of 60 mph on a quarter mile track? Figure the race will be stopped a couple of times while they clean up debris,

[darwin]

60 mph=240 laps per hour so 120 laps or so depending on stops. Say

[JenniferS]

Well, there actually is a 1/3 mile track and that would be 90 laps, but roleplaying 100 laps would be boring in my book so we'll do a 50-lap race to make it a little more handle-able.