Mad Max: Fury Road (Spoilerrific)

Skarg · 06-25-2015, 11:39 AM

My favorite scenes are the opening car combats from Mad Max and The Road Warrior, and I'd like good rules for those sorts of thing. If I were a player (or GM), I'd want to play it before Fury Road started and not get the freakin' Interceptor destroyed in scene 1.

I bought GURPS Autoduel in hopes of being able to play a game like Mad Max and The Road Warrior, about fencing with cars, and using skill and a great sports sedan to cause others to crash. But I still don't know any system that'll do that well, since it's all about skill and perception and simultaneous tricky subtle maneuvers and fake-outs and playing chicken and those don't seem to easily translate well to "I-go, you-go" turn-based hex movement, and certainly not to Car Wars vehicles with gun turrets (nor really to Fury Road with so many guns and grenades and silly people on tall bendy poles, nor riding on your hood trying to spit a little extra gas into your air intake).

As a GM, I've actually contemplated doing GURPS Fury Road for a convention game - that is, the chase scene from the film, laid out for GURPS tactical combat. However, I would have to add a lot of house rules for the situation of almost all of it, which involves everyone keeping a similar pace and direction, so the map has a velocity and all movement in relative to that, and apparently involves die rolls and skills.

Also, if I ran such a game, my opinion of the tactics and techniques would tend to result in it being a satirical comment on what I think is the gross silliness of the film's events. The people clinging to car hoods and bendy poles during violent maneuvers would have a series of rolls to hang on, and I would expect them to die off pretty quickly, likely for little or no gain whatsoever. Given that they seemed to have quite a few decent guns, too, I think the pursuit (if anyone had Tactics instead of Berserk, which I guess they didn't) would just drive up alongside but far enough away to not get sideswiped, and shoot the truck driver and/or passengers before too long. And/or Max in the cab with a stockpile of firearms, would be picking off drivers in the pursuit. And if they did make it to the canyon, my rules for jumping a motorcycle over a truck in order to drop a molotov cocktail on it, would tend to have that not be a safe or effective thing to do. That is, I found a lot of the tactics and stunts to seem extremely impractical, so I imagine it would play out as a short-lived comedic disaster.

The truck chase from The Road Warrior would be much more interesting to me, because of there being so few bullets involved, and far fewer ludicrously silly tactics.

06-25-2015, 11:39 AM	#17
Skarg Join Date: May 2015	Re: Mad Max: Fury Road (Spoilerrific) My favorite scenes are the opening car combats from Mad Max and The Road Warrior, and I'd like good rules for those sorts of thing. If I were a player (or GM), I'd want to play it before Fury Road started and not get the freakin' Interceptor destroyed in scene 1. I bought GURPS Autoduel in hopes of being able to play a game like Mad Max and The Road Warrior, about fencing with cars, and using skill and a great sports sedan to cause others to crash. But I still don't know any system that'll do that well, since it's all about skill and perception and simultaneous tricky subtle maneuvers and fake-outs and playing chicken and those don't seem to easily translate well to "I-go, you-go" turn-based hex movement, and certainly not to Car Wars vehicles with gun turrets (nor really to Fury Road with so many guns and grenades and silly people on tall bendy poles, nor riding on your hood trying to spit a little extra gas into your air intake). As a GM, I've actually contemplated doing GURPS Fury Road for a convention game - that is, the chase scene from the film, laid out for GURPS tactical combat. However, I would have to add a lot of house rules for the situation of almost all of it, which involves everyone keeping a similar pace and direction, so the map has a velocity and all movement in relative to that, and apparently involves die rolls and skills. Also, if I ran such a game, my opinion of the tactics and techniques would tend to result in it being a satirical comment on what I think is the gross silliness of the film's events. The people clinging to car hoods and bendy poles during violent maneuvers would have a series of rolls to hang on, and I would expect them to die off pretty quickly, likely for little or no gain whatsoever. Given that they seemed to have quite a few decent guns, too, I think the pursuit (if anyone had Tactics instead of Berserk, which I guess they didn't) would just drive up alongside but far enough away to not get sideswiped, and shoot the truck driver and/or passengers before too long. And/or Max in the cab with a stockpile of firearms, would be picking off drivers in the pursuit. And if they did make it to the canyon, my rules for jumping a motorcycle over a truck in order to drop a molotov cocktail on it, would tend to have that not be a safe or effective thing to do. That is, I found a lot of the tactics and stunts to seem extremely impractical, so I imagine it would play out as a short-lived comedic disaster. The truck chase from The Road Warrior would be much more interesting to me, because of there being so few bullets involved, and far fewer ludicrously silly tactics.