They didn't catch it unless it was a tortoise. They used traps and threw spears and such. Or they could jog for days and exhausted the faster creature, essentially tracking it to death rather than chasing it down.
In a quick chase the way D&D does it, speeds are critical. If the party moves at a 30, something that moves 40 is literally 33% faster. You aren't outrunning that without a great deal of terrain luck(ie you can maneuver through the terrain much easier).
Yeah. The 5e chase rules are mostly hokum. They even say and I'm paraphrasing, "Chases are boring if you take speeds into account, because of movement speed, so these rules ignore speed and are more fun." That's fine if you don't care that one side or the other isn't really capable of running(baring special modes of movement that the other doesn't have), but not if want a chase that makes sense. If both sides have the same movement rate, then shifting to those rules works.Not really in either case IME because just about 80-90% of everything in the game has the same speed, and the creatures that don't have the same speed are nearly always faster than the PCs....
1. PC disengages and moves 30 feet. Monster moves 30 feet and attacks, repeat until PC dead.
OR
2. PC flees (dashing), provokes OA. Monster dashes to re-engage, repeat until PC dead.
You can't take the Hide action under direct observation in most cases, and if you are Disengaging or Dashing, you have no action to Hide anyway...
(bold)
Now, your modified versions might work better and are good enough for you, but using RAW unless I am missing something, they pretty much suck.
No, but it's the prime consideration in a chase. 5 feet faster movement is about 17% faster, which is huge. It should grant advantage on chase rolls to catch the slower runner, and it would just get more lopsided from there. It would take very specific terrain almost designed for the slower creature over the faster one in order to escape.
The whole point of chase rules is to incorporate environment just so that speed doesn't have an overwhelming impact. Otherwise you wouldn't need chase rules, you would just compare speeds.
I get it. The chase rules ignore speed pretty much entirely and make a half assed attempt to incorporate the environment, but in the vast majority of environments, the faster party is still going to win. It has to be a very unique set up for the slower party to get away. In the midst of a very crowded city market for example.
