Doing a big chase combat ala Mad Max Fury Road with GURPS

[Skarg]

GURPS Autoduel bridges GURPS (1st edition) with Car Wars, but I tried it as soon as it came out (1986), and I wouldn't say it really gives me all that I want. One would want the gasoline engine rules, and to adapt the cars to not be the things designed for Car Wars, which are electric cars built often with weird ablative armor for arena purposes, equipped with turrets and ranged weapons for shooting at each other. The movement system tends to be on a large arena map, and while it may say something about chasing along at mostly similar speeds, I remember that I couldn't find anything that would help me satisfactorily game out the basic scenes from the original Mad Max and Road Warrior films, which are mainly about driving cars really fast and playing chicken and feinting each other into crashing in contests of driving skill. I pretty much had to narrate and improvise my own rules and roles for that, and I felt the Car Wars mechanics largely got more in the way than they helped, though there were some good usable bits and suggestions such as the driving skill checks for maneuvers and the mishap table and some skill modifiers and stuff.

And yes, the spitting engine into a port on the car hood is extremely stupid. When I saw Fury Road I was inspired by the idea to run a giant GURPS version at a game con, just to show how completely stupidly most of that film's action played out, when you give actual players that situation. But it would be a huge amount of work to make a snarky point about a film people mostly like.

[corwyn]

Originally Posted by Skarg

GURPS Autoduel bridges GURPS (1st edition) with Car Wars, but I tried it as soon as it came out (1986), and I wouldn't say it really gives me all that I want. One would want the gasoline engine rules, and to adapt the cars to not be the things designed for Car Wars, which are electric cars built often with weird ablative armor for arena purposes, equipped with turrets and ranged weapons for shooting at each other. The movement system tends to be on a large arena map, and while it may say something about chasing along at mostly similar speeds, I remember that I couldn't find anything that would help me satisfactorily game out the basic scenes from the original Mad Max and Road Warrior films, which are mainly about driving cars really fast and playing chicken and feinting each other into crashing in contests of driving skill. I pretty much had to narrate and improvise my own rules and roles for that, and I felt the Car Wars mechanics largely got more in the way than they helped, though there were some good usable bits and suggestions such as the driving skill checks for maneuvers and the mishap table and some skill modifiers and stuff.

Well, there is an Autoduel for 3e but honestly, I don't like the 3e Vehicles rules for gaming. I love it as a thought experiment - as in "That was a cool vehicle in that movie i just saw, let's build it in GURPS." Honestly, as much a this is my go-to system for anything but Supers, when I want to run a vehicle heavy game, I'll try M&M or Savage Worlds first. If I was to do Autoduel now, I'd probably start with SW Deadlands Hell on Earth - post-apocalypse setting with rules for vehicles, chases, and scrounging the wasteland. Be great for Mad Max as well, come to think of it.

When i do want the occasional chase in a gurps game, I use the abstracted system in Action 2.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by corwyn

(SNIP)

When i do want the occasional chase in a gurps game, I use the abstracted system in Action 2.

I use an even lighter weight version of this, with rolls to determine relative successes during chase scenes when the players say they want to try something. I tend toward narrativism as a GM, anyway, and stringing together a fun description of a chase scene based on player decisions and player rolls, under the circumstances, works pretty well for the group.