[Solar System] Drive to Win - sample scenario for Solar System

[Markku Tuovinen]

Here's the deal: I happened to watch the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious a couple of weeks after my latest dose of Solar System with Eero and it clicked really hard: the movie felt like something played by using a custom-made set of Solar System rules. After about six hours of motivated typing, design and editing, I completed the rough version of Drive to Win.

After the finishing touches I took it to the road to work out the bugs: I played it at Ropecon over three days as a demonstration scenario. I used it to introduce Solar System and its possibilities to a dozen or so con-goers, and used the insight gained to do some changes.

Please see http://www.arkkikivi.net/muut/Complete_Drive_to_Win.pdf for the current version (it's a work in progress, and I may start to work up an original scenario in the vein of First City in The World of Near). Any comments are welcome.

Here is the text from the Introduction:

Drive to Win is a scenario that uses Solar System: it is a focused implementation of the rules that is meant for telling stories about illegal street racers and their fates to the tune of the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious. It is also a demonstration about how to use Solar System to launch a game in any genre.

In Drive to Win, each character has three pools: Drive, the burning desire to win; Cool, the ability to impress and influence; and Bang, capability for sudden violence. Each Pool supports Abilities that are used for skill checks and in conflicts to see who succeeds in their objective. In Drive to Win the Abilities are Driving (D), Tuning (D), Sweettalk (C), Trashtalk (C), Roughing Up (B) and Killing (B). The narrow Ability selection speeds up the character creation and focuses the events to the genre-specific action.

The selected Keys should inspire and motivate the players to seek events that are faithful to the genre and explore the themes that are common to the genre. The Secrets have been tuned for this scenario by renaming and adding some limitations. I've created a set of 31 cards of the Pools, Abilities, Keys and Secrets (Drive to Win - Cards.pdf) to facilitate character creation and tracking of keys. In addition to the rules text on each card, I've also distilled the essential rules on 12 cards for easy reference. Another file (Drive to Win - Cars.pdf) has a few examples of possible cars, and the scenario description (Drive to Win - Scenario.pdf) contains a terse listing of possible races and events in a Drive to Win game.

Markku Tuovinen