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.

Another ship

Ch't Station

Ch't Ch't Station
For the Sunday game.

Copernicus deck plans take III

Continuing to add to the deck plans. 1-6 now done. 7 has medical facilities and some other things that need defined, 8 will need the shuttle designs to be nailed down first.

Decks 3 and 5

Yet another deck done for the Copernicus.

Copernicus deck plans

After a fall that saw little time for getting on top of my gaming projects, I have been able to do some catch up lately. High on the priority list was deck plans for the players' ship in my new firefly inspired Sunday night game.

First up is the second deck, the crew quarters. Unlike most sci fi games this ship is following physics with gravity along the axis of travel and thus is oriented more like a sky scraper than a cruise ship.

My version of Chase Cards

For quite some time, as in 20+ years, I have been disappointed with how chases were handled in RPGs. When Pathfinder came out I was excited because they gave some chase rules that seemed to work and were close to ideas I had derived after using the Hot Chase rules.

Unfortunately I found the Pathfinder chase rules too linear. 10 cards, most with obstacles summed up into make one of 2 checks. There is no room for tactical thinking, no room for options, just pick which you are better at. This was the burr in my saddle with 4th ed D&D skill checks as well so I have finally sat down and tried to design my own cards to  work with the Pathfinder rules.

They aren't that different than the normal Pathfinder rules, rather I have tried to add a little bit of choice. Each card has obstacles broken into 3 categories by level - brown for street level, green for 2nd story, balconies, etc. and red for the roofs.


There will be two decks - street cards and alley cards. These cards are fairly preliminary - a few of you will see them in this week's playtest, but essentially the alley cards allow for more twists and turns as well as a better chance of ditching the opponent.

















Broadly speaking the cards will be divided into

Obstacles - a skill check or decision must be made to pass to the next card
Options - a choice is available - intersections, alleys, courtyards, etc. If pursuers are out of sight these cards may end the pursuit if the followers fail a track or random guess.
Encounters - People who may react to the chase or present the opportunity to recruit help.
Dead Ends - These block movement on one or more levels.
Corners - may have an obstacle as well, but they block line of sight. More common in alleys, they can shut down the long range snipers.

Essentially the deck then becomes a map that may either be preplotted by the GM or random. Each card will also be numbered to make pre planning easier.