Lichtenstein

The most cursed build I enabled in the v0.8 draft of Downforce: a V8 engine hooked up to a triple turbocharger.

The most cursed build I enabled in the v0.9 draft of Downforce: a cybertruck technical so you can pop autonomous driving and crawl out the back to operate the big gun.

I think I'll turn the latter into a premade NPC, because the mental image amuses me greatly.

PS. I'll probably do a series of chosts about the game's actual dice mechanics and how the driving is conveyed rather soon. I've been meaning to do so for quite a while, but had to wait for some streamlining changes to settle in first.

Hi!

As for your first question, not really at this point. In principle, I don't mind showing the text around to some fresh pair of eyes, but whenever I build up a to-do list for the next draft I get really self-conscious about all of the warts of the previous one. It's brainworms, really, but you know how it is.

Try hitting me up once you see me talking about the next round of playtests and I should be pretty happy to show things around. I'm firmly enough in the "polish and balance, no big upheavals" stage and I could devote some time to rewrite parts that worked well, but were confusing to grok at first.

Having said that, I expect to do some write-up on the real meat and bones - the resolution mechanics and driving - real soon. I would've done so already, but work has been keeping me real busy and ultimately social media is not at the top of my free time triage.

As for the second question, yes, I have been made aware of this, but nevertheless thank you for pointing it out. To be honest, I was a bit of a dumbass about it: having never spotted it in the wild, I assumed it to be a non-factor really: some random board game, a different kind of product, from a five years ago.

Then I learned from American friends that it's actually being actively sold in fucking Walmarts. Oof.

I've reached out to Restoration Games and, in some cruel cosmic joke, discovered the company is literally helmed by a guy whose day job is copyright law attorney. I braced for the worst, but thankfully they proved very gracious and chill about the whole thing. We good, and I'll probably have to send them a complimentary copy as my thanks.

Howdy, Cohost! Long time no see, been keeping busier than I'd like. But the current beta of Downforce is going stable enough I really should get arsed to start sharing some thing. Yeah, this is the classic ttrpg post that's half shilling one's own work, but I really think there's a greater point to my experiences and I made an attempt to excise excessive shilling to a separate post.

I never really 'got' classes in RPGs. Even back in the ancient games of lunchbreak D&D in school, they never sit right with me. They felt really arbitrary and artificial and I've just never felt them. Point buy or lifepath character creation always felt more natural and expressive to me, and frankly they've always had enough tools to sketch out different niches for the players.

The game that finally made it click for me years later was Apocalypse World. Something about them made has felt much more natural - most likely the fact that the way it the engine strongly rewarded sticking to the narrative logic of specific genres. If you grabbed a PbtA hack for a given genre, the playbooks represented all of that genre's classic archetypes, rather than, like, a collection of random shit Gygax has happened to read recently.

You know how this went - it was a great couple years until we all eventually got oversaturated on shitty, half-baked PbtAs. As the exhaustion slowly accumulated, I once again began to grow restless about the old limitations of what was essentially a a class systems. Creating characters turned into filling checkboxes, as any concept eventually morphed to fit whatever premade angle the game designer thought of when coming up with cool special abilities. The ability to quickly hack a system to fit your own bespoke ideas was greatly compromised, as the playbooks were often tied to very specific setting assumptions (that would take proper redesigning, rather than a simple reskin, to change).

By the time Blades became the new indie darling everyone seems intent on copying, I was already really fed up with this shit, even in games I otherwise liked quite a lot. BitD playbooks really seemed like the worst of both worlds: tying you to a specific setting and assumptions, but also being really fucking boring. Here's a Sneakman archetype, you can pick an ability that gives you an additional die to sneaking, or an ability to give you a die to ambushing.

So, of course, once I sat down to work on Downforce, my car racing ttrpg, I almost immediately went "man, I could really use some playbooks in this".

Alright, the overly long, rambling post explained my reasoning behind defining racing teams as archetypes, now I just wanna say what exactly I've been cooking up.

The five default Affiliations that come with the game generally assume a professional motorsport environment - your Formula Ones, your Nascars, your 24h of Somethings. I want Downforce to be an engine ready to facilitate most car-centric games, whether it's playing out Redline or Fury Road - God knows car racing is already a niche enough topic for a ttrpg, no-one will give a shit about my precious carburetor lore.

Personally, I really rarely play ttrpgs as written. I usually come up with some idea, look for a system that could facilitate it well, then tear out whatever setting it comes with, sans for a few bits and pieces that caught my interest. From the very beginning I knew I'll probably end up doing the same with my own fucking game, so while I had to made some calls to establish a default baseline, I also ensured it won't strangle the various ideas I myself would want to run. So don't worry, the book will have a guide on both how to tear out the good parts for a game with no Affiliations and how to remix it for a different flavor (such as a street racing campaign that'll come as one of three default settings) without, you know, having to redesign the fucking game yourself.

So, without further ado, here's the five flavors:

Howdy, Cohost! Long time no see, been keeping busier than I'd like. But the current beta of Downforce is going stable enough I really should get arsed to start sharing some thing. Yeah, this is the classic ttrpg post that's half shilling one's own work, but I really think there's a greater point to my experiences and I made an attempt to excise excessive shilling to a separate post.

I never really 'got' classes in RPGs. Even back in the ancient games of lunchbreak D&D in school, they never sit right with me. They felt really arbitrary and artificial and I've just never felt them. Point buy or lifepath character creation always felt more natural and expressive to me, and frankly they've always had enough tools to sketch out different niches for the players.

The game that finally made it click for me years later was Apocalypse World. Something about them made has felt much more natural - most likely the fact that the way it the engine strongly rewarded sticking to the narrative logic of specific genres. If you grabbed a PbtA hack for a given genre, the playbooks represented all of that genre's classic archetypes, rather than, like, a collection of random shit Gygax has happened to read recently.

You know how this went - it was a great couple years until we all eventually got oversaturated on shitty, half-baked PbtAs. As the exhaustion slowly accumulated, I once again began to grow restless about the old limitations of what was essentially a a class systems. Creating characters turned into filling checkboxes, as any concept eventually morphed to fit whatever premade angle the game designer thought of when coming up with cool special abilities. The ability to quickly hack a system to fit your own bespoke ideas was greatly compromised, as the playbooks were often tied to very specific setting assumptions (that would take proper redesigning, rather than a simple reskin, to change).

By the time Blades became the new indie darling everyone seems intent on copying, I was already really fed up with this shit, even in games I otherwise liked quite a lot. BitD playbooks really seemed like the worst of both worlds: tying you to a specific setting and assumptions, but also being really fucking boring. Here's a Sneakman archetype, you can pick an ability that gives you an additional die to sneaking, or an ability to give you a die to ambushing.

So, of course, once I sat down to work on Downforce, my car racing ttrpg, I almost immediately went "man, I could really use some playbooks in this".