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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 5507889" data-attributes="member: 38357">So, 4e has a lot of stuff to make movement and movement-related effects interesting. But I'm starting to think that, in some ways, it's actually counterproductive to producing the kinds of movement that I'd like to see in a game. I think of the fiction of a D&D game as being similar to an action movie, and one of the things I'd like to see is the running fight, a chase sequence with combat occurring throughout.As an example, let's take an encounter that occurs across a series of rooftops in a city (and at night, I would think, although there's no real specific need for that). The objective, from an encounter-design standpoint, would be to both A) get the PCs from point X to point Y, with meaningful consequences based on how well (ie: fast) they make the journey & B) have a good combat encounter at the same time. Now, it would seem to me that, separately, A would be more likely handled as a skill challenge, while B is, well, a combat encounter...So I could see simply running this as a combat encounter with a skill challenge element thrown in. But it doesn't seem to me that this would reflect the "fictional reality" that the PCs are racing across the rooftops. Specifically, movement is more likely to be governed by tactical considerations that as a race (against the clock or against the opponents, I'm not sure which would work better?). IDK, maybe it's asking too much, but it seems to me there ought to be a way to get that sort of thing worked into an encounter. (And, obviously (I hope?) there would be a lot of room in the rooftop chase example for cool terrain, etc.)I can think of some things that ought to help - a "floating map" for instance, where the trailing edge of the encounter area gets pulled (this would work well with dungeon tiles) and new sections added in front as the action moves along. But the main consideration, I'd think, would be to encourage (or even force?) the PCs (and their opponents) moving in the right direction... I was thinking that something like giving each character / monster an extra move (say: you get to move up to your base speed at the start of your move) might help to mitigate the fact that, otherwise, certain conditions, etc. (forced movement?) could take someone completely out of the race... But, then again, if everyone gets it it would just even out, wouldn't it?Possibly you could adjudicate the skill challenge based on distance traveled, who's "in first", or how close any PC is to the target of the chase on a given round, instead of skill checks as normal. I wouldn't be sure exactly how to balance that, though. A couple of particular problems that I see are that certain effects (as noted above) could have an overly-powerful effect on this kind of thing, and some builds are going to just be much better / worse at this kind of encounter, possibly to an unbalancing degree...Anyone else have any thoughts / suggestions?</blockquote>

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