High Performance Driving

From Edge of Darkness Wiki

Your character is trained in advanced driving techniques. Maybe he’s a cop or a federal agent. Maybe he’s a stuntman for film and TV or the wheelman in a heist gang. Dots purchases in this Merit allow access to special driving maneuvers. Each maneuver is a prerequisite for the next. Your character cannot possess “Smuggler’s Turn” until he has “Speed Demon.” Maneuvers and effects are described below.

Contents 1 Speed Demon (●) 2 Smuggler’s Turn (●●) 3 Safe Passage (●●●) 4 Offensive Driving (●●●●)

Speed Demon (●)

For this character, a vehicle’s Maximum Speed is now the same as the vehicle’s Safe Speed. The character is very comfortable with driving fast, and thus does not suffer penalties for driving in excess of a vehicle’s Safe Speed^[1].

Smuggler’s Turn (●●)

Also known as a J-Turn, this is essentially a radical U-turn used at high speed: the driver puts the car into a controlled skid, the car turns around, and as it’s turning, he puts it into gear and keeps driving — except now, in the other direction. Used by bootleggers during Prohibition, it’s a great way to escape a pursuing vehicle, if it works. The character must succeed on a Dexterity + Drive + Handling roll to make this turn. In doing so, any pursuing vehicles lose the Handling bonus when trying to follow, unless the pursuing driver also possesses this Merit.

Safe Passage (●●●)

Driving through strange or unsafe conditions — icy road, debris-littered highway, gridlocked highway — invokes penalties for most drivers, but not this character. He’s able to zip past wreckage and control his car even when in a fishtailing hydroplane. Doing so still requires a Dexterity + Drive + Handling roll, but the character can ignore up to three dice of penalty caused by bad or unsafe conditions.

Offensive Driving (●●●●)

When locked in vehicle pursuit^[2], it’s good to drive in a way that distracts and disrupts the other driver. Whether the character is the pursuer or the pursued, he can perform a number of distracting and disrupting techniques to hamper the other car. The quarry might drive over the median, clip trashcans with his bumper to knock them over or even careen through a busy intersection. The pursuer can perform maneuvers such as bumping the back end of the fleeing car or distracting the fleeing driver by weaving in and out of traffic behind him (even disappearing momentarily behind, say, an 18-wheeler) inan effort to draw the driver’s attention away from what he should be paying attention to: the road. The effect is the same for whether the character is the pursuer or the pursued: the tricky driving hampers an opponent’s driving. The opponent’s Acceleration and Handling scores are halved (round up) as he is distracted.

Drawback: The character must expend a Willpower point at the beginning of vehicle pursuit to achieve this effect. Moreover, by the end of it, the vehicle the character was driving assumes an automatic loss of two Structure from the highly offensive driving.

See Also Drive Skill • Drivers Charm • High Performance Driving • Steady Driver • Stunt Driver • Stunt Rider • Vehicles • Wheelman

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