Attributes, Abilities & Specialties

DRIVE

Description: This Skill reflects the everyday complexities of automobile handling: the higher your rating, the better you are behind the wheel. This Skill does not automatically entail familiarity with complicated vehicles such as tanks or 18-wheelers, and difficulties may vary depending on your experience with individual automobiles. After all, helming a station wagon doesn’t prepare you for double-clutching a Maserati at 100 miles per hour.

Allowed Specialties: Evasive Driving, Pursuit, Off-Road, Motorcycles, Heavy Trucks (18-wheeler etc), Military Vehicles, Sedans (and other vehicle types, etc)

Rules: A single dot in this Skill represents basic operation of an automatic transmission car. Higher levels represent familiarity with a manual transmission, or something like a limousine or a racecar. The difficulty of a given Drive roll might increase or decrease depending on the terrain and the character’s familiarity with the vehicle.

Story Example #1: You try to pull alongside the fleeing Mercedes so your friends can leap aboard. Make an extended Dexterity + Drive roll, resisted by the Mercedes driver’s Wits + Drive. If you accumulate five total successes more than his total successes, you’re in position. If he accumulates a total of five more successes than you get, he escapes.

Story Example #2: Suddenly, a man pushes a crate out of the van you’ve been chasing — roll Wits + Drive (difficulty 6) to swerve out of the way in time.

• Shadowing someone is easier on foot than it is in a car; even so, a skilled driver or navigator can shadow someone from behind the wheel, or next to it, as well. See the Stealth entry for more information.

• The Motorcycles, Heavy Trucks and Military Vehicles specialties are required to operate any of these vehicle types without considerable penalties – if at all in the case of a big eighteen-wheeler or a tank.

• Stunt Driving: When car chases, wild stunts, and hazardous conditions crop up, it’s time to roll that trait. Using either her Dexterity or his Wits (Storyteller’s choice) + Drive, the player tries to beat the odds and keep her vehicle under control. The Storyteller determines the difficulty, based on the nature of the maneuver and the circumstances (slick road, gunfight, car on fire, etc.) involved.
  • Certain vehicles are easier to control than others: The chart below features an array of vehicles, their approximate speeds, and the Maneuverability rating for each one. This rating limits the number of dice you can use in your Dexterity (or Wits) + Driving roll with that vehicle.
    • If Chaser, for instance, tries to jump his Harley over a police barricade, his player’s maximum dice pool would be 8; if he tries to do the same thing with a truck, his dice pool limit would be 3.
  • Speed kills: Each vehicle type has a maximum safe speed, and for every 10 mph over that limit the difficulty of the feat rises by one.
    • Chaser’s difficulty with the Harley, for example, would be two levels higher if he tries to make the jump at 110 mph. Even if he can make the jump successfully, however, momentum is momentum. A character who’s driving like Vin Diesel on crystal meth had better hope he’s still got enough room to stop.
      
      
• Ramming and Collisions: In order to avoid absurdly complicated rules, assume that a vehicle ramming a character inflicts that vehicle’s Durability in bashing damage, plus one die for every 10 MPH (14” per turn) that the vehicle was traveling at the time. Thus, a crotch rocket motorcycle ramming someone at 50 MPH inflicts eight dice of bashing damage, but a limo going at that speed inflicts 10.
  • Certain vehicles inflict additional dice of damage simply because they’re bigger and harder than a character is: The extra impact-based damage is up to the Storyteller, though usually ranges for +1 for a mid-sized sedan to +3 for an armored limousine or a city bus, to +5 for an 18-wheeler or tank.
  • Passengers inside a colliding vehicle take the usual damage, minus that vehicle’s Durability rating; if they’re strapped in, halve the damage they would normally suffer. However, be warned that car crashes are chaotic events – the Storyteller has the final say on the end result.

• Drive-By Shooting & Passenger Concealment: Characters firing from inside a moving vehicle suffer a penalty of between -1 (low speed) to -3 (high speed). This goes up, of course, if they’re moving through rough or obstructing terrain (rain, fog, ice, off-road, etc.).
  • Characters inside a vehicle are typically protected by that vehicle’s Durability. Unless the shooter rolls four successes or more to hit her target, assume that the vehicle protects the passengers. A targeted shot through the window normally adds +3 to the shooter’s difficulty, although smaller windows (say, like on an armored car) may add +5 or more.
  • Certain attacks, of course, can easily exceed that Durability rating; in that case, the passengers might take damage from the attack, minus the vehicle’s Durability rating. For typical firearms, just figure that the usual cinematic “car protects the passengers” rule applies; however, for heavy weapons – .50 caliber machine guns, rocket launchers, pulse cannons, etc. – all bets are off. Any vehicle that hasn’t been specifically armored to withstand such carnage is essentially a rolling death trap.
  • Shooting the Gas Tank: An attack on a vehicle’s gas tank demands at least three successes on the attack roll, and must inflict no fewer than six health levels’ worth of damage, before the fuel goes off. An exploding car detonates for roughly 12 dice of flaming aggravated damage. Larger vehicles (helicopters, boats, tanker trucks, etc.) can inflict far more.

Vehicle Traits

The following Traits define the essential systems for common vehicles:

• Safe/ Max. Speed: Safe Speed reflects how fast a character can drive the vehicle in question without being penalized for high speed; Max. Speed is more or less where a baseline model realistically tops out without further modification.
• Acceleration: Characters add +1 to the difficulty of their vehicle operation rolls for every 10 MPH over its Safe Speed. Acceleration modifies that number, (e.g., an Acceleration of 1.5 would add +1 difficulty for every 15 mph over a vehicle’s Safe Speed).
• Maneuverability: Certain vehicles handle better than others. Maneuverability reflects the maximum dice pool a character can use when operating this vehicle. (This applies only to the dice pool used for driving, of course… although it’s also hard to seduce someone in the middle of a high-speed chase.)
• Durability: The number of health levels it takes to penetrate the vehicle’s body; until that point, damage just bounces off the surface.
• Structure: The amount of damage the vehicle can take before it’s too destroyed to function as more than a block of wreckage.

Wheeled Street Vehicles

Vehicle	Safe Speed	Max. Speed	Acceleration	Maneuver	Durability	Structure
Scooter (Vespa, etc)	30	60	0.5 (5 MPH)	7	1	2
Dirt Bike*	40	80	1.0 (10 MPH)	8	2	3
Standard Motorcycle1	60	120	1.5 (15 MPH)	7	2	3
Cruiser2	70	110	1.0 (10 MPH)	7	3	3
Touring Motorcycle 3	80	120	1.0 (10 MPH)	6	4	4
Sports Bike4	60	160	2.0 (20 MPH)	9	2	3
Superbike5	60	185	2.5 (25 MPH)	10	3	3
‘Badass Hypercycle’6	90	240	3.0 (30 MPH)	10	5	5
ATV*	30	60	0.5 (5 MPH)	5	3	5

Cars (WIP)

Vehicle	Safe Speed	Max. Speed	Acceleration	Maneuver	Durability	Structure
Jeep*	60	80		6	4	5
Compact Car	70	130		6	3	3
Midsize Sedan	70	120		5	3	4
Luxury Sedan				6	4	5
Hatchback					4	4
Station Wagon	80	120		4	3	5
Crossover (car-like SUV)
Sports Car	130	200		9	3	4
Street Racer	70	240		8	4	4
Patrol Car	80	200		7	5	5
Police Interceptor	100	250		8	5	5
‘Supercar’	100	250		10	6	5

Trucks (WIP)

Vehicle	Safe Speed	Max. Speed	Acceleration	Maneuver	Durability	Structure
Limo	70	110		4	4	6
Armored Limo	70	100		4	8	6
Stretch Car	80	100		3	3	5
Pickup Truck	70	110		5-7	3	6
SUV / Van	60	120		6	4	7
Armored Supervan	50	100		5	10	10
Off-Road Truck	60	90		5	4	7
Hummer	80	120		5	5	8
Armored Car	60	80		4	10	10
RV	60	80		3	3	8
Bus	60	100		3	4	8
Large Truck	60	110		4-5	4	6
Heavy Truck	60	100		4	6	8
18-Wheeler	70	110		4	5	8

Military Vehicles (WIP)

Vehicle	Safe Speed	Max. Speed	Acceleration	Maneuver	Durability	Structure
APC	30	60		4	12	15
Riot Tank	30	50		3	10	15
Light Tank	20	30		2	18/15	18
Heavy Tank	30	50		2	22/20	25