NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8113057" data-attributes="member: 42582">The pursuit rules in B/X and AD&D don't have any sort of "opposed check" system.The base chance for evasion is 80%, +10% because fewer than 6 (a single runner), -20% because fewer than 12 pursuers, = 70%. So the biggest determinant of who gets to win is who gets labelled the evader.This effect is only exacerbated by differences of movement rate, because the pursued being faster is +10%, while the pursuer being faster is -20%.So the pursuit rules cannot be used to handle a race.With the thief-acrobats, what roll is made as the bar is raised? The thief-acrobat jumping mechanics don't involve checks, only maximum distances.Again, all this ultimately tells us is that for those early 70s wargamers athletics wasn't a focus of the action. They had morale rules for determining if soldiers run away, but didn't bother having rules for whether or not they could be caught.The idea that these idiosyncrasies of wargaming design have taken on shibbolethic status in parts of the RPG community - so that eg combat rules are a must-have but rules for athletics are needless bloat - is actually pretty weird when you think about it.See eg this:Races? Competitions of song or other performance? Seeing who can clean stables the quickest, or cut the most firewood, or shovel the most soil? These things all figure in the stories that D&D presents as its inspiration. They can easily be elements of fantasy adventuring.They don't pose any mechanical difficulty in principle. And will produce rules bloat only if the mechanical framework is one of activity-based subsystems, rather than generally extendable conflict resolution.</blockquote>

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