You Don’t Need A Chase Mechanic
There’s a constant debate in the Pathfinder community on how to run chases. Everyone has their own homebrew, or element they borrow from a different edition or system. But... you don’t need to a chase mechanic. You don’t. Do you want to know how I resolve almost all the chases in my games? Movement speed. It really is that simple. If one person is running from another, what do they have over the other person? Are they wearing Boots of Striding and Springing? Can they cast Haste? What’s their base speed? You can really easily tell if someone is going to catch someone else or not. It’s fast, elegant, and rewards players for playing a Barbarian or investing in certain magical items. So why don’t people like it? People think chases should be epic. Okay, sure, there’s some value to that. If you planned on having a chase be the big centerpiece of your night, it should be interesting. The simple solution here is to just not do that. Seriously. Resolve that chase in a few real-life seconds. When we think about chases, we think about action movies. But see, those characters in movies are usually fairly physically equal humans, with no magical powers, getting into cars or onto motorcycles or something. They go the same speed, so chasing each other down should feel tense. When a long movie chase involves things that don’t go the same speed, like Superman going after Batman, it usually feels contrived. In your games, your players have spent a lot of time investing in feats, gear, and choices that make them fast or slow. When you try to make a chase “interesting,” you need to be careful not to arbitrarily rob your players of their prior investments. Let’s say you do find yourself in a situation where two characters of roughly the same speed are chasing each other. You still don’t need to go all 80′s action movie on your players. The players have a big decision to make here. If they chase this person, what happens when they catch them? Will they be in an unfamiliar part of the city or dungeon? Look, your players know you aren’t going to kill them when they decide to slide under signpost, or swing from a clothesline. But they might die just from blindly pursuing someone and ending up in a totally unexplored dungeon area. Whether to chase someone or not should be more interesting than how exactly you pursue them. When someone is chasing someone of roughly the same speed, I describe the scene and ask my players what they want to do. “The thief takes off through a narrow alleyway, through a network of streets that you know to be twisting. It might be easier to follow his movement if you took to the low rooftops, but there is a temptation to rush immediately after him. What do you do?” I try to avoid outright asking for X or Y action. I’ve strongly insinuated that there are two paths here, but maybe the player would rather not pursue at all, or maybe the player sees a third path in my description that I haven’t considered. If the player decides to take to the rooftops, we roll an Acrobatics Check. If the player decides to navigate the streets, Knowledge Local Check. These have relatively low DCs, because “success” just means that the pursuit is possible. You’re nimble enough to get on the roof, or know enough to follow the thief through the twisting streets. For every 5 points that you beat the DC by, you’re getting a +1 to your next and final roll. Since you’re chasing someone with roughly your own speed, we make opposed Dexterity checks. If you win, you catch the other player. You might still be screwed, since you followed someone hostile through half a city/dungeon, but hey, you caught them. Note that I only do this once. You could choose to do this iteratively, with a bunch of extra scenes and a bunch of extra rolls, with gaining and losing ground instead of simply catching someone. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. Short and sweet, get on with the game. I mentioned the possibility that the player doesn’t pursue the opponent. Maybe they used Diplomacy to discover the thief’s favorite bar, and are going to ambush them there tonight. This is the kind of outside the box thinking you get when you don’t force your players into an Indiana Jones chase mini-game. In general, avoid stripping away the rules of Pathfinder, whether it’s for a chase, a cooking contest, or putting on a musical. Reward your players for decisions they’ve already made at character creation, and don’t drag things out thinking that longer equals more fun. Thanks for reading.