What's the RPG about a journey from A to B, with examples about French soldiers going to kill Hitler and a team trying to win a TV race contest?

Question

There's this roleplaying game that's all about a group of people trying to get from point A to point B.

The two example scenarios that are the base for all the examples in the manual are French soldiers going to Berlin to kill Hitler and guys on a TV game show needing to reach point B to win a prize before a team of hunters catches them.

If I'm not mixing two different games together, the main game mechanic is throwing dice from a certain distance at a target lying flat on a table. Rolling outside the target (too long or too short) or knocking over the pile of dice stacked in the center of the target means failure.

Answer 1

It sounds like Hell For Leather.

Hell For Leather is a game which prominently features a paper target with a tower of dice stacked in the middle of it as part of its resolution system:

As part of its rules explanation the game uses two sample frames, one of which is the French Resistance trying to be some inglourious basterds (sic), and the other of which is the titular game show, "HFL (Hell For Leather)".

It's also, to quote the game's own tagline, "the game where murder equals extra dice", because HFL is one of those Running Man-style dystopian ultraviolent game shows, to the point where people's actual play reports were being banned from RPG.net for explicit content. And, content warning, the provided examples of play in the rules don't exactly shy away from that either. I confess to being a bit thrown by your description not mentioning it, since ultraviolence is such a prominent feature, but I'm confident now that I've had the chance to look back at the rules and verify the two frames.

Unfortunately the dev team around the game seems to have drifted apart - the book discusses plans for a dice-tower-less version to facilitate online play, and the DriveThruRPG page links to the old dev website, but it's effectively defunct, having been bought up by a domain squatter/link farm.