Vroom! Car Chases in DFRPG

[admiralducksauce]

Yee-haw, boys and girls. This is my attempt to split off the nascent car chases discussion from Sanctaphrax's skills thread. First up I'm copying the relevant bits I could find from there:

Part of the reason the driving skill gets no use is that there aren't any chase mechanics. Are there any good chase mechanics for other games that might be stolen?  Or does anyone want to take a crack at coming up with some?

An additional problem is that car chases work fine when you only have one or two protagonists, but tend to get odd when you have 4 or more.  One guys makes a character who's good at driving, and he expects to get into cool car chases.  What he really gets to do is drive the minivan that the rest of the team rides around it.  And if there is a car chase, the car character has the embarrasment of driving a minivan for his part of it.  Or even worse, the wizard in the back of the minivan waves his staff around and all the cars chasing the minivan suddenly explode.  All that's left for the car character to do is drive the minivan back to base, carefully obeying the speed limit the whole way.

As for Driving, Spirit Of The Century has some chase rules. I've never actually played SotC, so I'm not sure whether they're good, but still I'm kinda surprised that Evil Hat didn't bring them into DFRPG.

Exalted also got some chase rules in a recent supplement. They look pretty solid to me.

Personally, though, I think the lack of rules for using a vehicle in combat is a bigger issue than the lack of rules for chases. If I make a wheelman, I want to run some vampires over. Needing to ad-lib the rules for that makes me a little less keen on playing a wheelman.

As you may remember, I tried to come up with some vehicle combat rules ages ago. They were okay, thanks mostly to devonapple doing most of the work, but they were never really complete. Recently I've been thinking about taking another shot at at them.

I think, if I were to do Driving rules for combat I would treat the vehicle as a sort of "zone within a zone". All attacks moving from outside in would face a border penalty of a rating equal to the quality of the vehicle (tanks would be, say, 5 with a high armor as well).

Drive would modify movement based on the speed of the vehicle, and then ramming would be a contest of 4dF+Drive, Weapon Rating: Armor as an attack roll against their 4dF+Drive & Armor rating.

Attacks from inside out would depend on the vehicle, but generally would be either 0, half or full depending on the type of vehicle in question.

When it comes to dealing with vehicles, I think covering chases and crashes are more important that rules for using vehicles as moving platforms for gun battles.  The assumption with most combats is that they would be over long before a 10 minute car chase could resolve things, which would mean that actual car chases are almost always resolved by shooting at each other, never by one guy crashing, or whatever.  But most people who want car chases in their games want actual car chases, not a gun battle with moving cars as a set piece.

Ever since Spycraft I’ve been entranced by the idea of simulating car chases in RPGs. I’ve worked up homebrew chase mechanics for everything from Savage Worlds to ORE, but hadn’t tackled FATE yet. This scene was pivotal, and I wanted to emphasize the monster-hunting bikers aspect of the campaign by having a chase. But because I didn’t have anything concrete mechanically ready to go, I asked the table. We felt the “default” suggestion of “best X of Y” rolls wasn’t going to be satisfying. The SOTC idea of “follow the leader’s roll” was too simple - again, not varied or satisfying enough. Each party in the chase had a stress track?  Too fiddly, and how would you handle this three-way chase if there was only 1 stress track? I felt going back to the FATE fractal was the right idea, though, and Diaspora’s social combat popped into my mind. My ORE chase rules involve participants shifting in between abstract states or range bands, and this idea mapped well to a zone map! I hastily scribbled out the following zones on our map:

Lost
Trailing
Sight
Shoot
Ram
Cornered

Abel’s men and Dallas started in “Sight”. The gang all started in “Trailing”. The idea here was if you and another character were in the same zone, you could do that action to them. I ruled that opposed Driving checks would let you move yourself OR another character, and if you beat the DC by 3 you could move an additional zone. Abel’s goons, Rowsdower and Troy, wanted to get themselves and Dallas Junior Brown into the Shoot, Ram, or Cornered zones. Dallas wanted everyone “off the map”, and tried to keep himself down towards the “Lost” zone. The PCs mostly went after Abel’s men but worked to hinder Dallas and keep him from giving them the slip. I saw a few potentially weird conditions in this thrown-together map but the problems were specific to the map I’d designed and not the basic idea.  I’ll get into that after the session writeup.

Engines roared and tires squealed as Dallas and his pursuers ripped through the strips and suburbs of Austin. It was a close thing - Dallas had a Driving +4 compared to everyone else’s +2, but the bikers used Maneuvers and teamwork to even the odds.  Rowsdower and Troy got Dallas into “Shoot” - Dallas threw the Chevelle into reverse down a narrow alley and the Crown Vic followed, headlights to headlights.  Troy carved up Dallas’ hood with a Micro-Uzi but Dallas blanketed the mercs’ windshield with buckshot. Rowsdower and Troy didn’t see Bill roaring up alongside them until it was too late. The former denarian host unloaded his Judge into both the Crown Vic’s left tires (it could’ve been damage, but Bill wanted to name the nature of the Aspect himself and so rolled it as a Maneuver). The black sedan trailed sparks as it slid into the main throughfare, unable to follow Dallas as he executed a perfect J-turn and headed for the highway. In zone terms, both Dallas and the PCs conspired to move the Crown Vic into the “Lost” zone.

Scott was ahead of the chase nearly the entire time. He saw Dallas trying to escape and swerved in front of a semi making for the onramp.  The truck blocked the freeway exit and forced Dallas back into the rat’s nest of strip malls and Whataburgers. Dallas knew he had to get these bikers off of him one way or the other.  He chanced moving Scott into the “Ram” zone (it’s like the friend zone but more violent), but it backfired.  Scott’s store of FP prevented him from falling back and clever use of saved free tags led to Dallas being forced into the loading dock at the local Home Depot.  The wheelman, a showoff until the end, put his blue Chevelle up on two wheels to fit through the loading door. Tires squealed, the car slid sideways, and Dallas parked his muscle car - hard - into the lumber aisles.

And also:

I really liked the idea of using a zone map for relative positioning during a chase scene, and for the most part I think it worked out well. I’m not sure how much I liked the simplification where you moved 1 zone on any success and an additional zone if you rolled 3 over the difficulty. That could be fixed by having a series of intermediate zones or obstacle ratings, then you could simply use your Driving effort-as zones moved. I do know I liked the ability to move other participants, and that’s a key feature towards making this rules variant work. That part’s taken straight from Diaspora’s social combat, though, so I probably just need to locate their SRD and reread it a bit.

Another bugbear with the system occurs when you have A chasing B who is chasing C, like the Dallas Junior Brown chase (I can’t not write his full name). You can end up with a situation where Alice rolls against Bob but manages to end up in a zone more suited for tackling Charlie, effectively using Bob’s lower skill to bootstrap her way into an advantage. Another hiccup is that when Bob is “Trailing” Charlie, he’s automatically also trailing Alice.  Maybe a Venn diagram-style zone map would fix multiparty chases, I don’t know yet. I think the idea is sound, the maps just need some thought.

Shooting the car vs. shooting the driver: I ruled Kathryn’s attack on the helicopter pilot as a “RCV blood sack” situation. First, she has to be using a weapon that can penetrate the vehicle - no headshotting tank drivers with a rifle unless they’ve stuck their head out. Second, she needs to hit by 3 over the difficulty or have an appropriate Aspect to tag for effect, much like starting a grapple requires an Aspect placed first.

My car stats were basically just stress tracks (Armor:1, 3 stress boxes), but you could easily use the FATE Fractal to give them Aspects (“Supercharged”, “Last of the V8s”), Stunts/Powers (“Turbo Boost”), and Skills (“Maneuverability”, “Durability”, “Speed”). IMO car “skills” would work best as modifiers to the driver’s own skill. The stress tracks I kept low because it was fairly difficult to line up shots, so a successful shooting attempt should have significant impact.

[crusher_bob]

Here's After Sundown which may have chase mechanics worth looking at.

Here's a rough attempt to adapt them to fate:
There are four different 'distances' in a chase:

Caught
Narrow Lead
Wide Lead
Escaped

Chases generally start at 'narrow lead'.

If neither side attempts a maneuver, the distance changes one step by whoever is going faster.

Maneuver types generally depend on the type of chase (athletics, driving, etc)

The chasee declares they are attempting a maneuver of a particular difficulty.  If they fail this maneuver, they have 'wiped out' (crashed, or something similar).  If they succeed at the maneuver, note the amount of 'spin' they got.

The to stay in the chase, the chaser has to succeed at a maneuver of the same difficulty.  If they fail, they crash or suffer a similar mishap.  If they succeed, note amount of 'spin'.

The distance in the chase changes depending on who got the most spin.

If the range is 'caught' the people in the chase are close enough to effect each other directly.

[admiralducksauce]

That After Sundown system is foundationally similar to the one I posted, cool. It's a lighter version - like, if you've got a chase that you don't want to be decided on a single roll, BUT you also don't want to make it an event, you could go for that implementation.

A lot of your observations about chases are in line with my own, actually, crusher_bob. What I'd want out of a chase system would be the following (at least):

• Keep track of positioning but only in a vague sense. Chase mechanics where positioning is tracked by car length feel static. Break it down into large groups ("Can I see him?" "Can I shoot him?" "Can I jump from my car to his?").
• Handle multi-party and many-on-one chases.
• Make it difficult to end the chase by simply shooting or magicking everything in sight. Either make vehicles tough (I don't like this option, it has too many ramifications for using cars as "poor man's powered armor") or make them hard to hit or make the circumstances under which you can target a vehicle fleeting and hard to achieve.
• Differentiate vehicles from each other, at least a little bit.
• Make the chase about the driver's skill, not horsepower.
• Involve passengers in a way that isn't simply hanging out the window with firearms.
• If possible, change up the skills used. You need to have a deep tactical game if you're just rolling Drive for all of it, but if you can try other skills, you don't need as many little options to keep players interested.

[Todjaeger]

Road Wars, once it gets uploaded, includes some rough rules for a car "race" similar to these rules for car chases.  Unfortunately there is currently some issues with the host account, so uploading it has been delayed a bit.

-Cheers

[Lamech]

There are rules for car chases. Their on 193-195. On a side note, you should be able to make attacks with drive, probably at weapon 4 or 5 for most cars.

[Sanctaphrax]

Those aren't chase rules. They're general conflict resolution rules that can be used for chases as long as nobody does anything interesting.

[admiralducksauce]

Those aren't chase rules. They're general conflict resolution rules that can be used for chases as long as nobody does anything interesting.

And they're set up so you can't pull off Maneuvers and stuff to spice up the situation, because you need to generate effort on those rolls or you fail. Or a many-on-one situation completely hoses the one because the many CAN simply do Maneuvers. Anyway, I don't mean to poo-poo those rules, they work in certain situations, but I think we can do a better job for modeling car chases than "best of 3 Drive rolls". Heh. And if we can't, we have that to fallback upon.

[admiralducksauce]

I want to use a zone map of some type for chases. Thing is, for 3-way (and more) chases to work, we can't use a subjective zone map as detailed above. After Sundown's chase distances and my own similar Trailing/Sight/Shoot/Ram ideas won't work when A is chasing B who is chasing C. It has to be an objective map, and you determine the available "chase actions" depending on the relative distances between each participant in the chase.

We're further hampered by really only having Drive as our skill (or Athletics for foot chases). Getting other skills in might take some creativity.

I say every exchange everyone rolls Drive as a sort of initiative (if you're a BCV with Supernatural Speed, you can roll Athletics, sure). Everybody's driving, and everyone rolling at once just might help to connotate a teeny bit of the chaos you get in a chase scene.

For every participant, ask:
1. Are you chasing someone? Yes? Did you roll better? Move your car relative to your prey.
2. Are you trying to escape? Yes? Did you roll better than someone chasing you? You may move THEM further away.

Any tiebreakers are resolved according to base Drive skill, then in favor of the PC, if applicable.

I'll have more bad ideas to come. Right now there's not much there to recommend it over the "best of 3 rolls" thing, I know.

[admiralducksauce]

After the simultaneous positioning roll, I figure that's when you go around (fixed order is fine, positioning order, PCs first, whatever) and people can do other things. Popular actions might be:

1. Move again, rolling an opposed Drive roll against someone you want to close on (or someone you want to move away from you).
2. Maneuver - this doesn't need to be Drive, either, but it works. Creating obstacles, redlining your engine, etc.
3. Block - suppressive fire from passengers or jumping a bridge or evocating up a broken gas main
4. Attack - either Drive, for ramming, Athletics to leap onto another car, Weapons to actually swipe with something, or most typically Guns.

Now, except for the positioning roll and a complete lack of what you are actually positioning on, we're not too far off from normal combat. It's not very flavorful but it could work for expanding a chase into a meaningful conflict.

[Sanctaphrax]

You know, this all seems similar enough to regular combat that you might as well just use normal combat rules with like four minor tweaks:

1. You get to move each round even if you do something else. Maybe as a supplemental action.
2. There are some actual rules for vehicles.
3. The zone map is a moving area rather than a fixed one. It's centred on the chaser(s).
4. If a character ever gets off the zone map, they escape.

[admiralducksauce]

You know, this all seems similar enough to regular combat that you might as well just use normal combat rules with like four minor tweaks:

1. You get to move each round even if you do something else. Maybe as a supplemental action.
2. There are some actual rules for vehicles.
3. The zone map is a moving area rather than a fixed one. It's centred on the chaser(s).
4. If a character ever gets off the zone map, they escape.

Yeah, I suppose there's merit in NOT completely revamping everything. And a car chase that can easily involve gunplay or BCVs ripping through van fenders shouldn't stray too far from combat rules, lest they become strange and incompatible.

#1. My positioning roll idea is the "Everyone gets to move each round" idea. I don't think I would count this as a supplemental action, although during the normal round's events I'd charge the driver a supplemental penalty if they tried anything that wasn't driving-based (shooting out the window's the easiest example). I would not apply the penalty if they used their car to ram or maneuver or block, however.
#2. Yep, gotta know how hard it is/how you go about doing terrible things to your cars.
#4. Ending the chase is actually an area where we might need a few custom rules, because in addition to the more "active" ways to end a chase:
- The prey escapes off the map/loses their pursuers
- One party destroys the other vehicle(s) or incapacitates the drivers directly
There a few other ways a chase could end:
- The predator corners the prey, preventing escape, but without actually destroying their vehicle.
- One party destroys their vehicle on an obstacle or otherwise becomes a victim of their own lack of talent. As seen in countless police chases. Basically "hounded until they make a chase-ending mistake".

The prey escaping seems like the flipside to the predator cornering the prey. They could both be Taken Out results, but what exactly are you applying stress to here? You can lose your quarry without ever attempting to damage their vehicle.

I think obstacles could be almost handled like Evocation, actually, and that's actually similar to how SotC does chases. You pick an obstacle difficulty before you roll, and then you have to make the roll as well as everyone else (or maybe just one target, or maybe the difficulty drops by 1 for each zone someone is behind you, or maybe use the Spray rules, or maybe you can roll at a -2 to apply the obstacle to every chase participant). Failure results in stress to your as-yet-unstatted vehicle, probably.

[crusher_bob]

I'd prefer the chase mechanics to work for any sort of chase, rather than just be vehicle based.  I'm also a bit unhappy that our current ideas for chase mechanics so far are just 'roll drive (or athletics, or whatever the chase skill is) until the chase is resolved'.

Of course, the problem with allowing you to use 'other skills' during the chase means that most people will attempt to apply whatever their best skill happens to be.  The same problem cropped up when discussions were ongoing about how to make a skill challenge system for DnD 4th that actually worked.

[admiralducksauce]

I'd prefer the chase mechanics to work for any sort of chase, rather than just be vehicle based.  I'm also a bit unhappy that our current ideas for chase mechanics so far are just 'roll drive (or athletics, or whatever the chase skill is) until the chase is resolved'.

Of course, the problem with allowing you to use 'other skills' during the chase means that most people will attempt to apply whatever their best skill happens to be.  The same problem cropped up when discussions were ongoing about how to make a skill challenge system for DnD 4th that actually worked.

Yeah, just using the one Drive skill is not so great. However, we either need to expand the skill list so there's multiple skills you can take and use in a chase, find some way to add tactical depth on top of the Drive skill, or figure out what else we can roll.

I'm not a fan of the first option unless your campaign is all about chases, then by all means, tweak the skill list.

I think the second option is a laudable goal no matter what we roll.

But I think the third option might have merit, at least for vehicle chases: Vehicles have skills, and you roll THOSE. You can modify them with your Drive skill, but the skills come from the vehicle. Alternately, the vehicle stats act as modifiers to your Drive, either in the sense of restricting/complementing or as actual flat modifiers (+3, -2, etc). Either way, you can end up with a range of different stats that you can roll on, and those stats don't need to unnecessarily complicate characters outside of chase scenes.

I like Speed, Handling, and Body:
Speed: outrunning pursuit, acceleration, drag racing, maximum velocity
Handling: cornering, driving the wrong way through traffic, avoiding collisions, braking
Body: surviving collisions, ramming, passenger protection, plowing through obstacles

See, now cars can even have Stunts like "Cut Off", where you move the "ramming" trapping from Body to Handling, or maybe "Boxed In", where Body gets used for the "cornering" trapping.

[admiralducksauce]

The more I think about it more I think having a chase zone map might be unnecessary. Let's treat it more like trying to start a grapple, where you need an appropriate Aspect in place before you can attempt to directly engage another vehicle. Otherwise you're assumed to be chasing them but too far back to make attacks at will. And that's how your passengers can help and how other skills can come into play, by making those maneuvers to place aspects that help you get close enough to shoot, wreck, corner, cut off, or otherwise catch or escape the other guy.

I think losing the zone map actually helps because it removes the overwhelming need for continuous Drive checks to set or maintain position. If the focus remains on what you want to do to the other guy, it hopefully will inspire more creativity and description. Therefore, chasing is the default, and you roll for cool stuff.

Stress Tracks: Vehicles have got to have stress tracks. I think it's unavoidable. A vehicle's stress track is a representation of how useful the vehicle is in a chase. Stress inflicted could be as abstract as losing lead on your quarry to specific things like being riddled with bullets or having a cracked windshield.

I also am coming back around to the "bidding" system used in SotC, James Bond RPG, and maybe some others. Whoever's being chased gets to pick a difficulty and they roll against that. Failure results in stress. Everyone else chasing that person has to roll against that difficulty as well - failure results in stress, but a success that ALSO beats the quarry's roll can inflict stress on the quarry. So the quarry's chosen difficulty sets one obstacle, while their roll kind of acts like a block each round.

Maybe blocks could be set against certain vehicle skills, ie "I'm zipping through back alleys, taking 90 degree turns every couple of streets. Nobody can use Speed this exchange unless they beat a... 4." I dunno, this is still percolating.

[Sanctaphrax]

Yeah, I like the bidding idea. IIRC Exalted uses something kinda similar.

But I also like the zone map. It's an easy way to track what's going on.

Random idea: maybe there could be such a thing as "chase stress" which measures how close people are to getting away/being caught.