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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 5508429" data-attributes="member: 38357">There is, but I'm hoping to find something other than just a skill challenge. I've played through a few chases this way and found them pretty underwhelming. Mind you - the people I've played 4e with have generally been of the mind to completely hide the mechanics of skill challenges. The big issue, I think, is lack of compelling decision-making - it seems to always end up boiling down to "which skill do I have the highest bonus at".I agree. I ran some "gauntlet" style encounters when I was running 3.5 (in part just because I was able to get 12' of table space and wanted to use all of my dungeon tiles), and the ability of the players to ignore the point of the encounter and just sit and take damage because there was a monster still standing was pretty mind-boggling.Yeah, ideally I would have a really big map (in sections, or maybe even just drawn at a larger scale?) with a lot of stuff going on and several ways to get across, each with advantages and disadvantages... One problem, however, is getting all the relevant information to the players. Even if they're willing to be given the mechanical details that's a lot of info to pass out, and if not you're relying on them to guess what's going on. I also think that, personally, I'd be happier describing such stuff without the battlemat and stuff. With it, the best way to get information across in a way that the players will actually remain aware of is by having a 100% accurate representation of everything, and I don't really have the time / space / money to have lots and lots of 3D terrain or even minis for every monster I might want...I definitely agree about the action economy. As for falling off, I'd just not make it an option. Set up obstacles so that they hinder / slow down the PC on a skill check failure, not actually put them out of the fight / race. This is what I've been doing with recent encounters, where it made huge amounts of sense to have lava as a terrain feature, but I didn't want to deal with the <a href="http://www.yourgamesnow.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1938" target="_blank">mechanics</a> of it.This seems reasonable, if rather disappointing. Part of the issue is that I'm finding that a lot of the area that gets mapped out goes unused. Maneuvering is something that mainly happens before the two sides meet in melee, and with the distances a creature can move (especially with a charge) that segment of the encounter doesn't last long. Once you're engaged movement largely becomes a matter of shifting a square or two. Also, movement in chases is a bit funky - you want to give the guy in front an advantage (so that there's an incentive to try and get out in front), but at the same time anyone who's behind needs a way to catch up... If part of the fight involves stopping a given monster from reaching the artifact / summoning circle / whatever, it would ideally be handled in the form of a skill challenge of some sort: X successes before Y fails. Because the way that movement actually works on the battlemat is too much of an unforgiving, all-or-nothing kind of thing.</blockquote>

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