Chase Me

I played a couple of quick Machinas chases with Mrs Kobold last night. Life has been a bit traumatic for us recently with one thing and another and we needed a bit of a distraction.

Obviously it was also an opportunity for me to tweak a few mechanisms I want to change, mostly to do with how time and endurance work. As ever when you try to test some changes, the games didn't pan out in a way that made it worthwhile. So I'll have to play some more.

Anyway, in the first game Catherine chose the ram-car Red Tide and the gun-armed rat-rod Rhapsody In Blue, and they were chasing the flamethrower-armed ute Jockey Full Of Bourbon. 

She led with Red Tide, pushing it into aggressive passes in an attempt to bash me off the road. I held her off and gave her a dose of the flamethrower, badly damaging her vehicle.

Unfortunately Rhapsody In Blue had a terrible time with random events, skidding all over the place and, in one case, almost colliding with Red Tide. This left her having to continue to use Red Tide as her main attack still. She tried a pass but I almost forced the damaged car off the road.

Rhapsody in Blue put a seal on Catherine's run of bad luck by pulling out of the chase at pretty much the first opportunity. This now left Red Tide to make all of the running. Catherine tried another pass, I got a shot lined up with Jockey Full of Bourbon and flamed her off the road.

We set up another game. This time I ran Big Yellow Taxi, which was being pursued by Rock Lobster and Here Comes The Sun. This time she had the flamethrower, although Big Yellow Taxi is well-armed, with guns to the front and rockets to the rear.

Rock Lobster led the attack, but its spikes did little more than scratch the taxi's paintwork.

Rock Lobster fell back and Here Comes The Sun moved into the attack. Big Yellow Taxi swerved to avoid the worst of the flames, but unfortunately this left me with no bonus dice. With the taxi on fire I had to make a control roll, failed it and flipped.

Both games only lasted two or three turns, so I didn't really get to test the chase endurance mechanisms the way I wanted to. At the moment I'm veering towards all vehicle - pursuers and pursued - testing to see if they stay in the running at the end of each turn, but with the lead vehicle not accumulating time towards this test. So as long as the target stays in front it will never drop out, and generally it will always be testing with better odds that its pursuers. In the case of a team, if one member is the lead vehicle then they can opt to accumulate time instead of another vehicle in the team. I'll see how it all works out with some longer chases.