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Old 07-10-2017, 02:59 PM   #1
swordtart
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Default Sensible Driving Speed

We have had a little incident in the road campaign.

One of the drivers left a wheel behind and now has HC 0.

Up until now, the maximum speed that the convoy travelled was purely a function of fuel efficiency and habit. 55 seemed a sensible number so there was no need to drill down into the detail, we simply had encounters determined at in semi-random points. Travel between encounters was done by the random tyre damage rules in convoy. Periodic road debris magically caused damage, but it was agnostic to your tyres (meaning there was little incentive to get solids other than the extra DPs).

We find that real roads generally don't require much manoeuvring other than overtaking (and in CW we aren't sure how often that takes place). The gentle bends on most highways wouldn't even count as a D1.

Now we are in a tense situation, a stern chase by bandits. Unfortunately at HC 0 you can travel at 110 mph and be safe, which removes the tension a bit. Now on an unpatrolled county road there should be bumps and wrinkles that stop a car with a wheel missing bombing along at that sort of speed.

But how do we assess that? I started off by simply taking the base HC of the car, taking off three and then looking at that speed (on the assumption that with a D3 you could avoid virtually every incidental hazard). Better roads might only be -2 and a well maintained Interstate might allow an unmodified roll.

Of course the problem is that with HC 0 not only do you have a lower threshold speed before you have to start making control rolls, but also when you manoeuvre it takes much longer to get the HC back. With HC 3 you can recover back from that D3 in the next second. With HC 0 it will take 3 seconds.

The question then becomes "will you encounter another hazard before you have recovered from the last one?" How often should these hazards occur.

We don't want to actually lay each debris and obstacle counter down and play every inch of a 3 mile dash to safety phase by phase. Equally we don't want the chase to be reduced to who has the highest top speed.

Looking for suggestions.
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