What is Wheels On Fire?

Wheels On Fire is a role-playing game of car combat based on d10 dice pools, counted successes, and opposed rolls.

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General Task Resolution

In Outlier each task requires an appropriate Ability and Skill. Ability ratings describe your Driver's modus operandi. Skill ratings are the brass tacks of her training and abilities. Add your Ability and Skill ratings together and roll this many ten sided dice. Each die that is greater than or equal to the Difficulty rating of the task is a success. Usually a single success represents barely scraping by, while additional successes improve the Outcome of the attempt.

A fumble occurs when you fail and roll a one. If you fumble, you not only fail, but the situation actually deteriorates. Use the Outcome table to estimate the severity of the failure.

Difficulty Ratings

Keep in mind that, descriptive adjectives aside, that 95% of the tasks that 95% of people undertake are not even considered Routine. Going to work, going to church, paying your taxes, and helping your landlady carry out her garbage do not require rolls.

Contests

The majority of rolls will be opposed by the rolls of another Driver, either the Driver of a fellow player, or a non-player Driver controlled by the GM. In a contest each Driver will roll against their individual Difficulty rating. The Driver with the most successes wins. Subtracting the number of success of the loser from those of the winner yields an Outcome. Successes beyond the first may be carried over to a subsequent related attempt.

Outcome

This chart is sort of like putting table salt on your bacon, but here you go. Just in case you haven't played enough to know how awesome it is to roll 5 successes on 7 dice...

Abilities

The Ability names hopefully capture the flavour of rough 'n' tumble autoduel jockeying. Don't fancy playing a game with an Ability called Balls? Feel free to use one of the terms from the description column instead. Chicken.

Wheels On Fire Skills

Different genres may place a greater or lesser emphasis on skills. Some may extract certain skills, such as attack and defense, into Abilities. Wheels on Fire aims for speed and flexibility.

Hey, there's no Driving skill!

That is correct. The game is Wheels on Fire. Everyone is an expert at driving, riding a motorcycle, piloting a speedboat, and flying a helicopter. As you will see later, vehicles have ratings that you use as 'Skills' in combination with your Driver's Abilities. An important part of Wheels on Fire is earning enough fame, fortune, and glory to possess the best vehicle(s).

Sample Tasks

Drivers

Drivers are created by following a few simple steps.

Campaign

Discuss with the GM whether the game will take place in pre-Collapse or post-Collapse times. Keep this in mind when answering the following questions.

Questions

• Where were you born, and what was your family like?
• What did you do before becoming an autoduel jockey?
• How did you get involved in the world of autodueling?
• What do you look like?
• What is your strangest feature, belief, or experience?

Abilities

Assign 12 points to the 5 Abilities. No Ability may exceed 5. No Ability may be less than 1. A rating of 2 is considered normal for healthy adult humans.

Skills

Assign 25 points to the Skills of your choice. No Skill may exceed 5. If you feel a particular Skill is missing, discuss creating a new one with the GM.

Qualities

Do two of the following:

1. Take a Quality as Minor. A Minor quality reduces the Difficulty of any task to which it applies by 1. Standard tasks covered would have a Difficulty of 5.
2. Raise an Attribute from 5 to 6. This is Super Human .
3. Raise two Skills from 5 to 6. This is Grand Mastery.
4. Take a Psionic power.

With the GMs approval you may take option 1 twice, resulting in a Major Quality. A Major Quality grants a free success on any task to which it applies. If you Fumble the roll you cannot claim the free success. Only one Driver in each group may possess a particular Quality as Major. In gritty games the Major rank should be prohibited.

Glory

Glory is a pool of dice that represents your Driver's fame, fortune, achievements, good karma, connection with politicians, magazine cover exposure, or whatever. You may add Glory dice to any task, contest, damage, or resistance roll. The number of dice you may add to a roll is limited to doubling the number of dice, or 5, whichever is greater.

There is no limit to the size of your Glory pool.

Gaining Glory

• Every track and arena has a Glory rating. If you win you gain this many Glory. If you place second you gain 1/4 of this amount.
• Tracks and arenas have one or more stunts attached to them. The first contestant to complete a specific stunt recieves a Glory award specific to that stunt.
• If you cause a crash, you steal any Glory points that your victim has acquired during the current race or duel.
• When you start each session your Glory pool increases by 1.

You can also spend Glory to improve your Driver. The following table gives some perks on which to spend Glory. Your GM may require 1 day of study/practice for each Glory Point spent.

Signature Vehicle

Designing your vehicle in 5 easy steps. If your game is pre-Collapse you won't be allowed to use any ranged weapons during a race, so keep that in mind.

1. Concept

The hard part is coming up with a concept. Luckily there are a number of excellent games (and some awful ones) that inspired us. Check out Rogue Trip, Vigilante 8, and the Twisted Metal franchise for wacked out Drivers and their cars.

2. Distribute Dice

You have 15 dice to distribute among the five vehicle Abilities. As with a Driver, they must be within the 1 to 5 die range.

• Sensors are used for detecting other Drivers and determining their status.
• Armor resists damage caused by weapons and mishaps
• Special is the killing power of your signature attack
• Speed is good for running away and for catching runaways
• Handling is the vehicle's overall maneouverablity

  Fixed Features

  All vehicles have gas tanks, spare tires, windshield washer fluid, built in fire supressors, roll cages, and licorice dispensers.

3. Select Weapons

Your weapon capacity is inversely proportional to your Handling. Choose 8 - Handling weapons. If your Handling is 4 you can mount 4 weapons. Normally you get 5 shots with each weapon before you run out of ammo. If you wish you may take a weapon multiple times. If the weapon has an Accuracy rating, add these dice to your attack roll.

1. Basic Missile (Accuracy 2 Damage 5 Type: Medium Ranged)
2. Homing Missile (Accuracy 3 Damage 3 Type: Long Ranged).
3. Autocannon (Damage 7 Type: Medium Ranged).
4. Machine gun (Accuracy 1 Damage 1 Type: Short Ranged) unlimited ammo.
5. Mine Dropper (Mines Damage 10 Type: Small Trap).
6. Caltrop Dispenser (Caltrop Damage 5 Type: Medium Trap) damage resisted by Handling and applied evenly to Speed and Handling.
7. Molotov Cocktails (Damage 2 Type: Short Ranged) even if you resist the damage, you suffer temporary Sensor damage equal to the damage roll as the smoke and flames blind you. The damage lasts for a number of turns equal to the damage.
8. Ramming Spar (Damage x2 Type: Fixed) damage bonus to ramming attacks.
9. Oil Slick (Type: Large Trap) forces those who drive over it to make a Difficulty 7 Handling check or crash.
10. Poison Gas (Type: Driver Attack) ignores Vehicle Armor and attacks Driver with 10 dice of stun.

4. Select Bonus Feature

Drivers have Qualities - Vehicles have Bonus Features. Choose one of the following:

• Next generation engineering - You may have a Vehicle Attribute of 6. You still have to work with just 15 dice though. As you enhance your vehicle you will need this Bonus Feature 5 times to cover all 5 Abilities.
• Nanobots - Well, they are really about the size of cockroaches, but they repair your vehicle. Choose a vehicle Ability (so you might have Handling nanobots for example) that regenerates. The cost? You sacrifice 1 shot of ammo for each point regenerated.
• KR Power Plant - Your vehicle taps into the Astral to obtain fuel. You never run out of fuel. Otherwise your range is Handling x 100km on the road, Handling x 5 turns of combat. Yes each turn of combat costs you 100km of road travel and vice versa.
• Hovering - The vehicle is immune to oil slicks and caltrops, and takes half-damage from falling.
• Life Support - Vehicle (or rather the Driver) is immune to poison gas, suffocation, and drowning.
• ATV - Vehicle ignores the first point of any terrain based penalty. For example, driving on ice usually causes a 2 point increase in the Difficulty of any Handling and Speed check. For you, 1 point. You can buy this as many times as you want.

OPTION - ATV may be set to be complete immunity to penalties for any one terrain effect (sand, ice, water, steepness, etc). I guess you could have parallel ATV on one vehicle and serial ATV on another in the same campaign. The more options the merrier! Don't mix them on the same vehicle though.

• Satellite Uplink - 5 dice bonus to any navigation checks, plus a bonus of 50% on any Stunt Glory award due to exciting live Driver-cam. Also earn 5 Glory if you crash.
• Ejection System - Your Driver is automatically saved from Power Plant explosions, driving off a cliff, driving into lava, driving into a car crushing compactor, etc.

5. Design a decal

Kids across Newmerica will want your logo on their lunchbox. Design as many of the following as you have the patience for:

• decal(s)
• paint scheme
• horn sound
• catch phrase(s)

The Long Haul - Enhancing Your Vehicle

You can spend Glory to improve your Vehicle. The following table gives the Glory costs of various enhancements. 1000 dollars per Glory Point spent are also required.

Races and Chases

Races

Each course is divided into several legs of Handling difficulty X. The length of each leg of the course is given as a number of successes required to complete it. You don't complete the leg of the course until you accumulate the requisite number of successes.

1. You may make a Speed(6) roll to reduce the difficulty by reducing speed. This adds 1 to the number of Handling successes required for each point of reduction.
2. You may make a Speed(5) roll to speed up and reduce the number of successes required by adding to the difficulty. You must add 1 to the Handling difficulty for each success removed.

While multiple Drivers are on the same leg, they may make Handling rolls
against each other. The loser drops a like number of successes from his leg
total. If a maneouver reduces your leg total below 0 you crash.

1. If you get extra successes toward leg completion they are lost.
2. If you botch a Speed roll you crash.
3. If you botch a Handling roll you crash.
4. Yes, you can double crash if you fail a Handling roll that results in your leg total dropping below zero. This is called a wipe-out.

Sample course:

1. Opening run 4[4]
2. First zig-zag 6[2]
3. Corkscrew 8[1]
4. Hilly pass 5[2]
5. Switchback 9[1]
6. Home stretch 4[6]

For lap-based races divide the number of laps by 20. This is the number of successes required to win. For purposes of Manouevres Drivers are always considered to be in the same leg. The difficulty for the track is fixed at 4, 5 or 6.

Chases

Chases are just the same, except the quarry chooses the difficulty and number
of successes for each leg, adding legs as the chase goes on. For example, James is being chased by Chantelle. James says "I swerve off the road into a crowded shopping mall, weaving through customers, fountains, and shop displays. The difficulty is 8 and 3 successes are required to navigate the mall."

1. If the quarry clears a leg while the pursuer is more than a full leg behind, or the pursuer crashes, the quarry may make a Dodge & Escape roll to end the chase.
2. If the quarry crashes the pursuer may make a Vehicle Attack to end the chase.
3. If the quarry manages to get a 5 success lead on his persuer, he escapes.
   

Damage

Threat

Any situation that might create injury is a Threat. Here are a few Threats and their associated Damage dice.

Any roll that results in a physical threat to a Driver or vehicle requires a Damage roll. Roll the dice specified for the Threat involved versus a Difficulty of 6. The subject of the Threat makes a Resistance roll. A Resistance roll is your Muscle rank plus any Armor that applies to the Threat in question (a bulletproof vest applies to a 9mm pistol but not a fall). This is a contest. The Threat adds any successes from the roll that created it to the Outcome of the damage. For Vehicles the Armor stat is all you get for Resistance.

Damage roll - Resistance roll = Wound rank

Roll one die and consult the hit location table to see which Ability takes the damage.

How severe is the Wound? The target of the Threat loses one or more dice with a total rank value greater than or equal to the Damage Outcome. If a hit is delivered on an Ability that is disabled, move down the list (and back to the top if necessary) to the first Ability that is not disabled and apply the damage there. If you are completely disabled and are wounded again, it's all over.

NOTE - The absolute most times you can be damaged in an Ability without
becoming disabled is Rank-1. So, with extremely lucky rolls, a Driver with
14 Ability dice could sustain 8 minimal Wounds without becoming disabled (not likely).

Glory points can be used to force a hit location reroll.

Psionic Powers

Psionic powers grant you special abilities due to the phenomenal (or freakish) powers of your mind. Most powers are available only in post-Collapse games. Powers available in pre-Collapse games are marked with an asterisk *.

• Aura Sight
• Danger Sense*
• Empathy*
• Healing
• Precognition
• Pyrokinesis
• Remote Viewing (Clairvoyance)
• Telekinesis
• Telepathy
• Teleportation

This Thousandpress page © Vincent Diakuw 2003, 2004, 2005.