Monday, September 17, 2012

Chase cards revisited - again

I loved the concept of the chase rules as first presented in Pathfinder but using them in play left me feeling that they were too linear - just a sequence of tests without any real decisions to make on the part of the participants.

My first attempts to rectify got too complicated all too quickly as I created cards that tracked the pursuit in 3 levels, street, balcony/low roof, and roof tops.

The more recent set of cards I am using rely on 4 decks; Streets, alleys, encounters, and rooftops. The street cards have a few intersections (3 of 24 cards), more crowds, and more blank cards. The advantage with these lies with faster participants and those with ranged weapons.

The alleys have more encounters (4 of  32), a lot more corners (6 of 32), and more intersections (8 of 32) as well as a larger range of specialty cards like dead ends.

The rooftop deck is intended to allow for the sneaky folks who want to go up - there is always a one in any group. The rooftop cards have a lot of Acrobat and Ref checks as well as some opportunity cards that allow for shortcuts or delays. On the flip side are some rules regarding crossing streets and alleys - rooftop cards are placed next to the normal cards and are interrupted by branching alleys or streets.

The encounter deck has a wide variety of chance encounters that can be used to help or hinder the chase.

Finally I included some options on a few of the cards - alleys for example may include additional checks for large creatures or folks on horseback.

The last thing I did was to print the cards out at a 3x5 size and use over sized card protectors - this makes them easier to read and more able to accommodate any miniatures being used.