as much an RP niche as I think?

[Unrest]

Because frankly, are there any pen-and-paper RPGs that do a good job of emulating the thrill of a rooftop chase, assembly lines hopping or collapsing mine escape of platform games? Something that can make your players sit on the edge of their seats, with sweat dripping from their foreheads?

Now, before someone goes "it's all about the imagination", well, no. My eternal inhibition is that the people I play with are not the kind of people you can really grip with just a description. Even if it was Fritz Leiber there in person describing what's happening, they'd be just as mindblanked. But they revel in games, and the thrill of more rightly-available visuals, of anticipating the number of eyes on the dice and so on, so what I need is a system, a game system, to get that kind of thing across.

I've been thinking on how to do this, and came upon a wall. I don't have a clue. How do you transfer a Crash Bandicoot-style run and the sense of urgency and frantic dropping of pieces into a puzzle before the clock reaches 0:00 into a PnP?

Do you know of a system - or subsystems, like mini-games - that would do this kind of thing efficiently? What do you, in your games, use to evoke such atmosphere?

Bestow upon me thine wisdom, Oh Playground!

[The Big Dice]

1st edition L5R had a good idea for this kind of thing. The lead starts off a certain number of successes ahead, opposed rolls and that game's Raise mechanic are used to close the gap or increase the lead. It gets surprisingly tense, especially if you add in scenery and mix the rolls required to run, jump and climb through the scene.

There are others, but I can't get to my Mutants and Masterminds MAsterminds Manual to discuss how that game suggests handling pursuits.

[dsmiles]

I don't know how, as I'm not the most descriptive DM in the world, but I managed to do a pretty good job of it with the latest incarnation of Gamma World.

[Oracle_Hunter]

Feng Shui - I've never played the system, but I have associates who swear by it for this sort of thing.

EDIT: Also, you need to figure out what your Players find exciting. As noted in this excellent comic some people find dice rolling itself to be the exciting activity. It sounds like your Players might be like this. If so, pick a system with a lot of variance built in: since every die roll is uncertain, they should hang on every one.

There's no general procedure to making a game exciting. It depends on what the Players find exciting.

[Moofaa]

You can use skill challenges in 3rd/4th edition in addition to lots of fun description to create excellent escape/chase scenes.

[mabriss lethe]

Hollow Earth Expedition should fit your needs nicely.
(Simplified explanation: You roll a handful of dice, the actual numeric value is irrelevant, only the number of evens and odds rolled. You could even do it with a handful of pocket change. The way the game is set up, there are variable degrees of success/failure, based on how many successes (evens) you missed or exceeded the target by. If a player wants to do something stupid and needs more successes, they can blow style points to get more dice, or if they want to do something really really stupid, they can beg the GM for more dice, but this last bit ups the difficulty by 1 for every 2 dice they get. You also streamline play by having a number of auto successes equal to 1/2 your total dice rolled.)

[erikun]

I remember X-Crawl being rather exciting, although that was more due to being forced to make speedy decisions and with bonuses to dramatic moves. Shadowrun might give you the same thrill with contant anticipation of danger.

Burning Wheel is a one-roll system: you roll, and succeed/fail (or more accurately, pass as intended/with complications) based on the one roll. If that doesn't work, or doesn't work as you'd like, you need to find something else to do or change things enough to allow a second roll - enough that rolling would have significant different bonuses.

For some reason, your description reminded me of World of Darkness.