We sometimes run funky casual tournaments in between standard format tournaments, and these are the rules we're going to use for a mini-tournament in a couple of days. The idea is that you build your ships from the chassis up, with lots of unusual customization options for the fun of it. It's possible there are some totally broken combos in here, but I'm going to have all the players take a look over it to try to catch the biggest breaks, and I'll issue a corrected version of the rules if necessary.

UPDATED RULES:

http://www.outworld-studio.com/xwing/pdf/Rat-Rod-Tournament-Rules-v2.pdf

EDIT: The rules PDF has been updated. Posts 1-18 in this thread were discussing the original (quite flawed) rules.

2 point upgrade from Z-95 dial to X-wing dial? You're moving your greens from 2 to 1 and K-turn goes from 3 to 4. Is that a two point disadvantage?

You need a way to force players to upgrade. As it stands, I'd take a load of bare chasses. Five TIE defenders would do nicely, even with Bomber dials and focus only.

I'll swap the X/Z dials. Good catch.

But a PS 1 Defender is 21 points, so four is the maximum you can field. I'm not sure they're going to be all that impressive with a Bomber dial, and I don't think anyone in our group has four of them anyway. Still, it'd be an interesting squad.

I'm okay with players not investing too heavily in upgrades. I think some will and some won't. My goal is to provide a lot of options players normally don't get to experiment with, and just see what happens. It's going to be a very casual night of X-Wing.

I really enjoyed the work you put into this project, as well as your trench run. As you said above you don't mind if players upgrade, but it would be cool to incentivize players to do so because after all, a rat rod is super customized. Playing into the lore of car racing lolz

Thanks.

We're probably going to use a system like this for an X-Wing racing league eventually. I've got a full set of rules for that, too, but it didn't include this level of customization.

I'm not sure how to incentivize upgrades, except perhaps to reduce their costs by 1 point each or something. Any ideas?

Is it limited to 1 of each type of component? I didn't see any mention of that in the rules.

Will this just be a stand up fight? Or is it a race? I could see a race being a lot of fun on a 4'x8' sheet of plywood/mdf with a defined area in the center that they have to go around with a few asteroids scattered on the course. A race would give incentives to do weird upgrades we wouldn't normally use. A stand-up fight will keep people using the same ideas we go with currently. Mix this with roller derby rules and it would be a blast to play!

I'm not sure how to incentivize upgrades, except perhaps to reduce their costs by 1 point each or something. Any ideas?

I think the simplest way would be to have a minimum number of hardpoints that have to be filled for each ship (say, half of the maximum). Sure, people might still just take the cheapest options, but at least they'd have some customization that way.

But it is true that the current cost structure lets you get a lot more efficient with your squad-building than usual. A PS1 Defender with its native dial, barrel roll, and target lock would get you everything on the actual card except its upgrade slots, and it comes in at 25 points. A PS1 Starviper with its native dial, boost, barrel roll, and target lock costs 21 points. SImilarly, you can build the equivalent of a naked Blue B-wing for 17 points.

If you're worried about hyper-efficiency lists, it might be good to change the minimum cost from 12 to whatever the cost of the lowest-PS generic of that ship is.

Other than that, a few questions/comments in no particular order:

Is there any way to get an EPT slot?

The M3A starting with the Aggressor dial as its base seems more like an upgrade than a downgrade. I feel like having the Z-95 dial as the base, and the Aggressor dial as a 3-point upgrade, would make more sense.

The base maneuver dial for the Firespray (both Scum and Imperial) just says "Wing".

Anyway, great work with this! I always like seeing your X-wing "mods".

I think it's minorly confusing to have the ships start at ps 0 with a mandatory 1 point buy to ps 1 instead of just costing them 1 more and including ps 1.

The answer to most of your questions is that these are first draft rules and I made errors and omissions. A second draft will be ready soon based on feedback. Fortunately, it looks like the core idea is pretty functional, and it just needs fine-tuning.

In particular, the dial options are not very well-balanced yet, but I planned to tidy those up and I'm doing that now.

And I simply forgot to include EPT slots. Those will be available.

We're going to use these rules for standard dogfights to begin with, but then we'll probably use them for racing later on. I'll post a link to my racing rules when I get to a non-phone computer.

By my accounting, it costs 23 points to recreate a Blue Squadron Pilot B-Wing. In reality, almost no one uses the torpedo slots, and the modification slot could go too. There's probably a brutal BBBBZ squad possible here, but I'm okay with that. I think the PS bidding is going to be a concern, and PS isn't cheap here.

As for starting at 0 PS and then having to pay to increase it, I think it's easier to say "you pay 1 point for each point of PS" because you can just look at your PS and know that's how many points you spent, rather than mentally subtracting 1 from that total. It also forces you to remember to upgrade PS, which you might not do if they default to PS 1.

For racing, I'm going to allow crazy customization. I'm thinking Decimators with A-Wing dials and cloaking. Just bonkers stuff.

Is it limited to 1 of each type of component? I didn't see any mention of that in the rules.

Yes. I'll make that clear in the update.

Woohoo! A-Wings with Heavy Laser Cannons!

That looks really fun. What's the default maneuver dial for the Firespray?

Anyone ever read Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway (Book 1: Clypsis)?

These ships are not really designed for that, but coming up with courses and gravity wells and being able to shoot each other? That would be awesome in my book!

I always wanted to try it in EVE Online, but the logistics were too incredible to make it a thing... and then it would get PvPed to death. But to do it with miniatures... man, that would be sweet! Hot Rod customs too? Hmm....

Hmm... indeed... custom cut tiered tracks would be fun... and deadly...

Thanks.

We're probably going to use a system like this for an X-Wing racing league eventually. I've got a full set of rules for that, too, but it didn't include this level of customization.

I'm not sure how to incentivize upgrades, except perhaps to reduce their costs by 1 point each or something. Any ideas?

I'm not exactly sure how to do so, but a point reduction could work. Maybe even reward players for their customization in the form of an in game upgrade, such as if you choose an engine upgrade, once per game use the 2 template instead of the 1. If they take a munition upgrade, give them the extra munition card free of charge.

Like I said before I really enjoy this format and it would be cool to see these ships cobbled together with all different parts from around the Galaxy, keeping to the tradition of heavy customization like the Falcon or Slave 1.

You asked for constructive criticism, so.... here it is.

I think the real problem here is that everything is prohibitively priced. For 35 points(the cost of a naked corran horn) you can make a Z-95 into an almost E-wing, with everything but barrel roll, and included 8 PS. Except it's worse than Corran horn, because it has less evade and doesnt have BR. And this is prior to actually filling those upgrade slots. You cant afford anything with this system... The base chassis' are cheap, but to get them beyond their current effectiveness is too expensive. A Z-95 with Evade, Attack +1, and TL with +6 PS is 4 points more expensive than Airen Cracken. So i guess i fail to see the point with this. In essence, it's the literal personification of 2-ship fat point fortresses wrapped up in a needlessly complicated gamemode. You don't even get the advantages of running naked Zs or TIE fighters because it gets rounded up to 12 anyways, so you might as well upgrade the crap out of them. Squads like Fat Han can only gain advantage from this. Swarm squads can only suffer from this. The point of having a Z-95 or a TIE fighter at all is lost entirely.

For instance. Getting a YT-1300 to it's normal effectiveness + PS9 only costs 34 points... what?! Han himself costs 45!! get rid of the crew and system slots and target lock(4 points) and you can add an additional hull and STILL run 3 PS9 millennium falcons!! Meanwhile, just getting a Z-95 up to roughly E-Wing effectiveness completely breaks the bank. i dont even want to both looking at getting an E-Wing up to it's max upgrade potential through this system. but i did anyways. All i added was boost, an A-wing Dial, and an additional Hull, ontop of the E-Wings usual abilities. and 40 points was what it cost. Add the upgrades to fill the empty slots and you've got half the squad in 6 HP. Meanwhile 3 PS9 1300s are running around with 14 HP each for 99 points. Of course it'd be unrealistic to run those 3 1300s without upgrades, but the point stands. 3 PS9 1300s at one time? By running only two, imagine the insane and game breaking amount of upgrades you could run on them.

A YT-2400 at PS7 with all the same stuff a normal one can do is still a point cheaper than Dash. Add an evade and PS9 and it's 40 points, which is STILL cheaper than a naked Han.

The different dials is rather...nonsensical, since the first thing youre gonna do is upgrade that, which steals a hardpoint away from things that could actually improve upon the base ships abilities.

Getting up to a ships base effectiveness works with some. A PS2 Z with only the stuff it's supposed to have is in fact 12 points. So that's fair. What was overlooked is that with the large amount of upgrades the large ships get by default, and the related cheapness of chassis price, you'd be insane not to use 1300s or 2400s. Big ships in general. Not to mention that when it comes time to actually play the game, MOV is going to heavily favor these massively overpowered points fortresses. You need to go in and reprice pretty much everything, ESPECIALLY related to big ships.

Price-wise, I don't think things are as bad as they might seem to you, Razgriz. I worked backward, starting with the price for the cheapest generic ship of each type and subtracting the cost of components from that price, then putting those components back on sale for the same (or very close to the same) price.

There has been some attempt to "fix" point values (such as the TIE Advanced, M3A Interceptor) which I feel are overpriced in the standard game. But other than that, it should be possible to rebuild most of the ships back up to something very much like their generic equivalents in the standard game.

One major update to these rules is that there's now a minimum number of hardpoints that must be filled. The solves the problem of running only naked ships (no 4 Defenders with focus only).

It's not very useful to compare these squad building rules to the standard game, because everyone is using the same (altered) rules. It doesn't matter if it costs a few points more or less to create a Dash Rendar equivalent in this system -- it costs the same for everybody. But if you're using these rules just to rebuild the ships from the standard game, you're missing the point of using these rules.

The logic behind the maneuver dial options is that you can stick with the default dial (which is almost always worse than the usual dial for that ship) and "save" some points. The base prices and starting hardpoints take this into account. I could have included downgraded dials in the components list, but I didn't want downgraded dials taking up a hardpoint. It just made more sense to start with a weaker dial, give each ship a hardpoint that can be spent to upgrade their dial -- or, if they dare, they can use that hardpoint for something else entirely. I think the ability to use different dials is one of the most interesting aspects of it, personally. The actual dial options I set up originally were problematic, but I think those have mostly been corrected in the updated version of the rules.

In any case, the players who will be using these rules in tomorrow's tournament are all excited about it, and are coming up with some really interesting ideas. That's mission accomplished, as far as I'm concerned.