Question about tracking

[El Ravager]

I had a situation come up in my last game involving a ranger tracking. The PCs had been ambushed in the city streets and the leader of the group of bad guys saw how things were going and ran away. This villian was a monk and had a higher speed so leaving the scene was not too hard.

So the PCs mop up the remaining thugs and the ranger decideds to follow the guy using his tracking skill. I was hoping the PCs wouldn't find him at this point but I wasn't worried because tracking through a crowded street should be pretty tough. We open up the book to look for the situational modifiers to the tracking roll and there is no modifiers at all for tracking over well traveled ground. None at all.

I was stunned.

I was going to rule that since the person being tracked had made his way down a busy street that tracking was very difficult. There was however nothing in the book to back me up. I should, however, have stuck to me decion, but the players know how to push my buttons.

One of them said 'Dude, if you don't want us to find him we will stop looking'. Ooooh, I hate that! I hate it when DMs arbitrarily make things impossible so that they get the outcome they want. There is another DM in our group that does this constantly and it is my mission to avoid it. So I gave in and ran it by the book.

As I look over the book now, I notice that it says that a tracker needs to make a check every time that the track the character is following is crossed by another set of tracks. This would have helped me as it would have meant that the tracker would have need to take a check about every five feet or so of distance. Still, I found it hard to believe that there is no modifier to the DC for a situation like this.

Is there something I am missing?

 

[Christian]

1. The Symptom

The specific line you refer to at the end states that the tracker must make another roll 'every time the tracks become difficult to follow'. That's obviously a spot for a DM judgment call if there ever was one. And on a well-traveled city street (which would also be DC20 'hard ground'), that could very easily be very frequently ...

2. The Cause

DON'T LET THE PLAYERS PUSH YOUR BUTTONS!! If you make a genuinely fair ruling, stick with it. While you knew that your misgivings were based on the difficulty of following one set of tracks of thousands on a well-used street, your players read both your desire for the villain to escape and your determination not to fall into the railroading habits of the other DM and talked you out of it. As long as you're being honest with yourself, the players will eventually stop expecting you to behave that way and enjoy the challenges they run up against without second-guessing them. But it may be a long, bumpy road. Eventually, the day will come when they see that a totally unexpected direction they take completely short-circuits the adventure, and you let them do it and allow the consequences to flow naturally anyway. And that's when the real fun starts.