Motorcycles are like jetskis, and cars like mechs: my sheep thoughts about racing ttrpgs
(be prepared for a lot of yapping)
First for the non-Brasillians readers the title is a reference to a old Brasillian commercial that said "Cars are like motorboats, motorcycles are like jet skis, and pedestrians are like swimmers." but this post is not about that, is about why i don't like a lot of racing ttrpgs.
How uma musume kickstart this thought
i always felt disappointed with a lot of racing ttrpgs but didn't put much thought on why, but after reading a ttrpg that made me angry enought that i started writing my own i got a better understanding of my issue. The ttrpg was a Brasillian Uma musume game, the promise was that it would be a great racing ttrpg, but what was delivered was a hack of a generic Brasillian ttrpg called 3d&t without even the good parts of it (3d&t has a point based character creation as one of its best features and the hack choose make it a class based game) and the d&d 4e skill challenge mechanic as the "racing mechanic," this made me quite angry because having a racing ttrpg be just a generic system with a skin is just lazy.
What i think would be a chance for good
If you want just a meme, here it is "racing ttrpgs should be writen like mech ttrpg" but what i want to say with this is that the best Mech ttrpgs (or at least the most highly regarded ones) mold their mechanics to make you feel you are piloting a mech and sometime they even create some very innovative mechanics to do so (like celestial bodies with the grid system where you almost play Battleship against other mechs) but a lot of racing ttrpgs don't do that and sometimes seen afraid of doing the same. It makes look like some creators think that turning a race in its own thing would make their ttrpg less of a ttrpg and just a boardgame, but for thing like combat most people don't follow this logic. When you pilot a mech on a ttrpg you want to feel what is to pilot a mech, it can be different styles and levels of crunch because the genre is vast but you want to bring stuff that makes you pilot a mech, and i want more racing ttrpg that make stuff that makes you race and fast... And a lot of stuff from mecha systems can be borrowed, if it is a car you can manage your heat to go faster,structure or other forms of damage other that just hp, customization by pieces etc. And new stuff specific to racing like gear shifting for cars or bikes, stamina for running on foot, new ways to think on a grid or gridless. What i want is not that racing games become a lancer or metkon, i want racing ttrpg try to become it own thing.
What i been doing
yapping is easy, i do a lot, but i don't like ttrpg manifestos and prefer action in itself, so i started writing my own racing ttrpg called RPM to prove myself right or wrong, not gonna lie it was not easy because finding a mechanic that felt right for my vision took a lot of trial and error but i feel i found it, and the "discovery" came from me playing a boardgame named heat. Heat is a racing boardgame that uses management of cards, a resource named heat, even the speed to bring the feel of a race to the players. If you want to give my ttrpg a read to even say that i'm a dumb sheep and my game is bad, you can find it here