Has anyone managed a Longterm Road Warriors type campaign?

[aco175]

Just saw the video in the Kobold Press thread from GenCon and they mentioned a book of theirs Waste of Chaos- Apocalypse. Sounds just like what you need. They even mentioned Mad Max and how you can tailor your fall of the world before the start of your campaign.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I do think this is very much my concern too, the Road Warrior Action racing genre is about highly contrived set peice battles with vehicle as both weapon and platform for pc rp.
and I agree I also havent found good rules for PCs battling on top of a rig or leaping from one vehicle to another while in hot pursuit.

We played a long campaign with it, and just leaned in as hard as possible. Combat was about people leaping from vehicle to vehicle and that was that. Why was that the most appropriate way to resolve violent conflict? Who knows, that's just the way it is. Kind of the same blinders one has to do for mecha games or the like.

Anyways, it was a homebrew system, so the mechanics will be different. What I can say that one can apply broadly is that we had to re-assess stakes and success/failure based on genre and theme. In the playtest, we were having characters miss jump checks for going from car-to-car and (since that either killed them or at least took them outside of the action for the rest of the fight) that pretty much can't happen*. We had to keep adding re-roll checks and abort-to-grab abilities and eventually realized it made more sense for the jump to be automatically successful and the roll to instead indicate in what tactical position did the leaper land. Likewise, if the party (or at least the half that haven't leapt off to fight on top of other vehicles) are all in one car, having that car catastrophically fail (either be destroyed by being reduced to 0 hp through vehicle combat, or by failing a check to jump a canyon) again pretty much can't happen*. So again instead vehicle-canyon-jump checks tell you how much damage the car takes or what position it lands relative to the opposing cars who also jumped the canyon**. Vehicle damage, for that matter, doesn't really go against a basic hit point system where the car (and all occupants) are destroyed, but go against a side's general 'red line' (resisted by their driver's driving checks, so good idea for your team to screen your drivers from attack). If a side's redline breaks, the encounter ends with the general situation going more towards the side who didn't break (and here important cars can crash, people can fall off, etc., as the situation demands).
*by which I mean it supremely disincentivizes the playstyle upon which the genre is dependent.
**unless they are 'mooks,' and both vehicles and enemies could be mooks who absolutely can be taken out of the fight in a single bad roll, since they are mostly around for that purpose.