Looking for Chase Scene Tips

#1

One of the sessions I want to run is a giant chase, where the players feel pressured to keep moving, and that if they sit around or turtle up they will be much more in harms way than if they keep moving. There will be opportunity for occasional interludes of peace, but by and large I want the bulk of the 4 - 5 hours to be an adrenaline filled race. I want them to overcome hazards as creatively as they can, while trying to get at least one of their team to the destination with the McGuffin.

In true Dungeon World style I’m going to have the PCs contribute some of the hazards they can potentially encounter or work to avoid.

What tips do you have for running good chase scenes?
What game systems do chase scenes well?

#2

Are the PCs being hunted or are they competing with another group to be the first to reach a destination?

What kind of environment are they navigating? Is it vast space where overland travel speed matters or a claustrophobic cavern where vision and mobility are required?

I think what is important is to focus on the the group’s positions relative to one another rather than locations on a map. There should be some way for the players to have a constant reminder of their opponent and how close/far away they are. Things like beating drums, campfires in the distance, or even limited scrying.

I would also keep a minimum, like one or two max, of barriers that create a dead stop until overcome. A sheer cliff or stubborn door will be much more frustrating, especially under time pressure, to work around rather than hazards that can be mitigated with precision but save time by barreling through. A plain example would be a valley full of thorny briars, but even something like a room full of pressure plate traps that are easy but time-consuming to disarm. This can give the continual choice of balancing time vs safety instead and allows the players to focus on the “meta” of the chase instead of being bogged down by the individual encounters.

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#3

Their airships just crash-landed, and their goal is to get the artifact they were transporting in those ships a crash-site to a place of power before all being harvested.

Each player has a primary PC with one or two useful occupational skills, and a good handful of Funnel World style villagers as followers. Those followers can both be useful for their knowledge/skills, and as ablative hit points.

As for setting, I expect it to be a primeval forest, lush, heavily canopied, with thick undergrowth. I was going for “claustrophobic with occasional clearings”.

I was going to have the players tell me what their characters saw between the airships and the Place of Power, and add those to the encounter list.

I’m good with having the thing following them be either a dramatic prod or a mechanism controlled threat.

Your idea of having PCs make frequent choices between using extra time to be extra safe now, or do something risky fast so the Threat doesn’t gain ground is strong. It is kind of what I was thinking of doing, I just hadn’t clarified it quite so well.

Thanks!

#4

I once played a scenario in D&D where the DM literally set a countdown clock on their phone for one hour, and we players knew we had to complete various tasks in game during that real-life time. (The story was that we found out by intercepting a message there would be an attempt on the king’s life at a particular time.)

I think the DM partly came up with the idea because some of us were a bit slow deciding what to do when it was our turn in combat… but it worked really well for the whole group, giving a sense of urgency to the play itself as well as our actions in the fiction.

I wouldn’t want to play to timer every game, but as a special event it was great fun!

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#5

I agree this isn’t an “every session” sort of mechanism, but I really want to give something like this a try.
It’ll be interesting to explore this as a way to build tension and drama.

Maybe a big doomsday clock of some sort as a prop.

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#6

If you’re looking for a pacing mechanic, you can’t go wrong with clocks: https://bladesinthedark.com/progress-clocks !

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#7

I ran a long Night’s Black Agents campaign (hacked to PbtA) that involved a lot of chases. One thing I found helpful was breaking longer chases into distinct parts or legs (e.g., first leg of car chase through town to police roadblock gives way to second leg of offroad chase through the woods gives way to foot chase), and making sure they faced a variety of challenges or decisions. Some basic types to consider:

Reactive decisions: The most common thing to throw into a chase scene, but overuse can make things feel exhausting or repetitive. You take a few steps on the rope bridge and one of the support ropes just snaps, tipping the whole thing sideways. What do you do?

Navigational decisions: If it’s an epic chase, consider integrating one or more junctures where they have to choose between two routes, each with inherent temptations and drawbacks. From the ridgeline you’ve just topped, you can see the tower in the valley far below. The right slope is a massive scree, tumbling steeply toward a dark wood of broken fir trees; to the left the mountainside cuts down into a sheltered ravine, but to get there you’d have to cross a stretch of exposed rock. What do you do?

Team management decisions: Give them tough choices by threatening their followers or fellow PCs. A cry rings out, and you look back to see that Darcy took a spill at that last rotten log you crossed. He’s not back on his feet yet, and the big lizard is bearing down. What do you do?

As far as mechanical approaches, consider formalizing the chase with a move. For example (off the top of my head, so untested):

RUN FOR IT
When you lead a chase, set Quarry (that’s you) to 1, Pursuer (that’s them) to zero, and ask the GM to choose a Finish value from 3-7, depending on how far you need to go to reach the next juncture.

Then, go go go and roll +DEX: on a 10+, Quarry gains 2 and you describe how you outdistance your pursuer; on a 7-9, Quarry and Pursuer each gain 1, and they’re still on you when you look over your shoulder; on a 6-, you face an unexpected hazard, hard decision, or other problem of the GM’s choosing, which probably includes Pursuer gaining 1 on you.

When Pursuer equals or exceeds Quarry, they’ve caught up—you’ll have to deal with them somehow before you can do anything else. When Quarry equals or exceeds Finish, you’ve reached the next juncture, and the GM says what happens next.

In my own playstyle it’s super-important for failure on the part of the PCs to be a real possibility. If the PCs get captured or the opposition seizes the MacGuffin first, things can get really interesting in unanticipated ways. If you haven’t already done so, give some consideration to what a fail state would look like, and think about the implications, given the motivations and goals of all concerned.

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#8

I like this, and it makes me think that clocks–like @darren suggests–could work really well to represent the two “factions” of Quarry and Pursuer. The “finish value” would be how many segments the clock has, and you’d tick those off as you roll. I do think there should be ways to tick segments other than just the Run for It move, though–in my experience rolling the same move over and over can be kind of boring.

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