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.

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.

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