Chariots of Steel (Part 2)

The tanker that smelled good

The first part of the critic can be found here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lucrécia

Stress remains the main engine of Chariots of Steel, as does Energy. Of course, Energy is completely overhauled.

Ground vehicles are heavy and cumbersome, unable to draw on the power of gravity and wind to keep themselves on motions. As such, Energy manifests not as Altitude and Speed, but purely as Speed.

Since you cannot play with Energy conversion between Altitude and Speed, this leaves you dependent on your Engine as your sole source of Speed. As such, RPM — and the Wear of the Engine,— as representation of capacity to draw Speed from your Engine, determines if you win fights or are a burning wreck on the side of the road. No RPM, no more Speed. No Speed, you cannot avoid obstacles, position yourself to fire against enemy fire, shake off infantry or react to the environment.

Customizing your tank (or other vehicle) is around choosing what of the four “hard points” that you cannot modify on the fly, and each modifies how you can use Energy:

• Torque: Maneuver obstacles and travel safely, avoiding having to spend Speed in the first place and thus conserving Energy.

• Reliability: Helps you draw more Speed from the Engine without blowing it up by accumulating Wear and helps you start the Engine in the first place — a dangerous proposal in battle, in case your Engine dies.

• Stress: Where the main engine of Flying Circus hooks with the Energy engine. A Stressed crew limits how well you can use the attributes and systems of your tank. Tanks and ground battlefields tend to be more stressful than the skies, making this an even more important lever.

• Fuel: Hard limiter on how you can push the Engine and how long you can keep Speed; needs to be managed between engagements and for travelling from and back to town.

• Integrity: The vehicle equivalent of Stress. Keeps the tank from catching fire — which eats away your Fuel, and makes hard to do anything else.

Around this core flow of Energy, you can take actions to influence how things will go, allowing customization and adaptation, with an easy to read trade-off. For example, you can load more Fuel, allowing you to fight more combats or travel further away; however, that comes at the cost of Torque and Speed — so, you are now going to have more opportunities to have to use Speed for other things AND have one less Speed. All of these small nudges end up mattering, and tanks end up being much easier to customize on the fly — or build from the ground-up — than planes.

Brad

I will not repeat myself, so I will instead bring a narrow focus to the change to Seize The Initative. In base Flying Circus, initiative is a nebulous concept, your primary goal as referee is to make sure everyone gets to do at least one thing.

In Chariots, you have a move to make. Seizing The Initiative is used whenever an unexpected combat breaks out. The mixed result focuses on putting you in cover, whereas the total success focuses on giving you the opportunity to go first and be in cover.

Why you ask? Because Cover is just a little important, considering it will be your primary armor provider, and in a game where three injury can knock you out, and the average firearm deals two injury, you may want some protection.

But, this little change shows how different of a world you are in, no longer fancy free and engaged in dance, this is a brutal battle where an inch of concrete matters as much as your strange gifts from the sea gods. Use both wisely.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Ludo

Being an expansion, Chariots of Steel is not very worried about roping your in. It is assumed that if you have this book, you in too deep; you’re already doomed. One benefit from that is how easy it is to start rolling out Chariots of Steel if you are even somewhat familiar with Flying Circus. The next time the pilots crash, have them fight and navigate the Wilds Chariots of Steel style; next time you are partying in town, steal some cars and get into a disastrous chase.

Throwing some combat or ground vehicles to Flying Circus is a good one-shot introduction to Chariots of Steel within the context of the plane game, it is much trickier to just jump on tanks.

The easiest way may be to showcase some of the cool features you want to try. Rather than spend time making squads and tanks, make two armies and give one to the players. With the classic premise of “you’re part of a bigger Circus until you struck on your own”, have they command squads or tanks that belong to this bigger Circus, letting them test the waters. Start maybe with some infantry combat, throw in a tank, mix artillery later, etc.

Reading the Gamemaster section (pg.220) is pretty much essential for this. It shows you the levers you can club, and one hour reading this will let you know where to get what you want to try at the table. It will also make you better at running Flying Circus.

Brad

Lu is absolutely correct, I personally don’t have terribly much to add other than a double endorsement to read the Gamemaster section, it’s so useful.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lucrécia

There are a lot of moving parts in combat, and with more symmetry, there is a considerable increase in cognitive load in Chariots of Steel. compared with the original game. Way more things can affect combat, in comparison with the Energy economy of Flying Circus. Cover and detection (either hiding yourself and noticing enemies) is key to understand combat. There are many modifiers to the new attack rules, they affect PCs and NPCs, and until you get used. While the additional levers to pull are quite enjoyable, and welcomed by those that hoped for more of those, there are additional levers.

Panic is triggered by everything, and almost every single action Squads take will be affected by Panic triggers or trigger Panic in others — and Panic will be what decides almost every single fight. Chariots of Steel has the best morale rules I have ever seen in a TTRPG, so use them; those are so often ignored or forgotten or kinda pointless, that you will miss panic triggers plenty of times. The sooner you get used to them, the better you will play Chariots of Steel. You should be doing Panic! checks often, on a level similar to attacks; if not, you are either forgetting some triggers and/or not having the battlefield as confusing or dynamic enough — which also self-corrects so you can have a fun Chariots of Steel combat.

While infantry very rarely can pack the punch to go toe-to-toe against a tank, success in combat requires mixed units. Infantry are essential for recon and for clearing obstacles for tanks; tanks are essencial for securing positions and duel another armored vehicles. If one side has only infantry or only tank, they can easily have their tables turned on them.

The game expects you to flesh out the personalities of your squad or tank crew, but the efforts rarely pay off beyond character creation. With so much things going on, having to keep track of ten people and flesh them as individuals is the first thing to be sacrificed. Unless you are purposefully keeping very small squads (like a witch and two apprentices), your squadmates will soon become a blur distinguished only by the mechanical differences you have to track and account for — and who has been hurt so far. It certainly does not flow as naturally as in Flying Circus. In the more “crowded”, tangled and messy world of those that live, fight and fuck in the ground, opportunities to flesh out these characters will not happen if there is not a determined effort to focus them.

Of course, the biggest weakness of Flying Circus continues in Chariots of Steel: intimacy moves. Intimacy moves are a great tool in PbtA games where intimacy is in the periphery but can be nudged towards with powerful/unique moves. It is a good solution that keeps things dipping in an out. However, Flying Circus/Chariots of Steel are games about intimacy; it is too good at doing intimacy with stress, trust, downtime, confidants, move exchange. Suffering from its success at portraying the nuances of intimacy across its key engine-systems, the intimacy moves look like the crude tools they actually are, abandoned to the wayside and forgotten¹.

Where the game starts to break down is at the intersection between planes and tanks. Things like a strafing run work just well enough, with planes being treated as Angels of Death scorching the battlefield — until you can mount a proper anti-air response. Where it starts acting weirdly is when you need to handle an aircraft bombing run compared to artillery shelling, or when you have to handle the mechanics of Flying Circus at the same time you handle Chariots of Steel’s — either through combined forces with NPC/PC planes or, more likely, plane-likes like a witch’s broom or a wingsuit.

Oh, and learn to use artillery. Just… artillery. Artillery. There is nothing you cannot solve with artillery. No wait, there is one. Get a goddamned medic.

The gremlin grenade will always fail you, so do not be tempted by the Pokéball. The clockwerk missile will always be there for you, and is an wife of expensive tastes, but one that you will be ever grateful force when you need a desperate “delete target from reality” button.

Brad

Definitely spend time introducing the squad mates, and do a classic war movie flash whenever one of ‘em bites it. Make sure you really know how the hell you are doing tank stuff, because they do have some interesting moving parts.

If you wanna survive? Get a medic, and stay moving, a rolling stone gains no moss and a moving soldier gains no bullets!

Laser weapons continue to rule, build a laser tank and show them Gotha scum what the future looks like!

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Ludo

Oh well, what can I say. I wish we lived in a world where more art like this could be made. And I don’t mean everyone committing to design-intensive 300 pages expansions that completely turn your game in its head. The most impressive thing of Flying Circus — and what I wish we could all afford to learn, — is how rewarding making the best version of design you can imagine, and how powerful a game is when it is constantly updated. It is not “only” how Chariots of Steel had years of labor and design to make a new game that still works with all other iterations and has something to offer everyone. Now, it is how tank and aircraft workshops, the core rulebook and every single Flying Circus expansion, has been updated free of additional costs to incorporate the best designs the most brilliant designer working today could have put to paper.²

It is not fair to expect sourcebooks and expansions to be like Chariots of Steel. However, Chariots of Steel gives something for everyone to think about what they want their expansions of sourcebooks to be like: how much “standalone” they are, do they give something for everyone; what they add in design and how they reimagine what you already made the best version of? Should this be an expansion or should this be part of the core game? Why is it not? If it is not important enough to ask of me to change things, is it important to stand on its own and apart?

Those are hard questions for us to do, and Chariots of Steel is a humbling companion to sit alongside while thinking about these.

And get it if you play any PbtA or Flying Circus. You can use so much of it and will make you so much better at designing and playing those games.

Oh, and the vehicle rules can make mechs as easily as they can cars and tanks — especially once you have computers as crew members, — so, stealthy, Chariots of Steel is the best mech PbtA and one of the best mecha TTRPGs ever made.

Brad

Chariots of Steel had an uphill battle for my heart, believe it or not. I genuinely wondered why it needed a ground component when the air components had won me over so thoroughly.

I was a fool, a rube! Chariots is a fantastic art piece, a wonderful continuation of adventures in Himmilgard that adds stuff to Flying Circus while being potent enough to stand on its own and that where I think we could all learn a little bit.

Don’t be afraid to fill in blanks, if there is a part of your game that you think is interesting and want to illuminate it in a new game you should do that.

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1. Unless they are the absolute bunker-busters, like the Fisher and the Soldier intimacy moves. And because of how rich the tapestry of intimacy is across the systems of the game(s), you actually have to work to NOT make sense to use intimacy. So, either not used or everyone is perma hypnotized.

2. “Putting to paper” is key here, as this is where material conditions hit Flying Circus like a truck. Because the only way to keep doing this is to sell books, the best version of a game that strives so much to be always the best version its designer can imagine at all time, is obvious to imagine but impossible to reach. With the poor, strained layout, and the additional labor put on updates for distribution as PDFs, more work is done than what a web-based/”living document” Flying Circus constantly updated would look like. The tank and plane workshops are a window into that potential, and Proserpina, what an alluring and seductive promise they are.