A Better Way to Run Chases in D&D 5e

A few years ago, my DM ran a chase for our group during a session, following the rules for chases in the DMG verbatim. It was not fun. We spent the better part of half an hour going through the initiative order, grinding through a mountain of chase complications, while a giant Retriever crashed through the brush trying to catch us and we kept asking the DM in our theater of the mind if there was a place to hide from it. A year later, I played Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, my heart pounding as Edward Kenway sprinted down the street, down alleys, and up and down buildings trying to shake off a group of guards of Havana hot in pursuit, and had a blast.

Then, a month ago, I sat in the theater watching Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves as Doric the druid led an intense chase, complete with multiple Wild Shapes, several locations at different elevations, arrows whizzing past her, and even a failed Deception check posing as a guard in a stolen suit of armor! 

I know that roleplaying games have the capability of providing satisfying and triumphant relief at the end of a worthy battle, so there's just got to be a way to capture that same result during and after a fast-paced, exciting chase scene. Let's look over the current mechanics, where they go wrong, and a possible alternate set of rules to make chases in 5e fun.

Chase Rules by the DMG

You can look in the Dungeon Master's Guide for the more detailed rules, but this is a summary of the rules for chases there:

1. When the chase begins, determine the distance between the quarry and the pursuers.
2. Chase participants are strongly motivated to use the Dash action every round. A participant can use the Dash action a number of times equal to 3 + Constitution modifier. Afterwards, it must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution check at the end of its turn or gain a level of exhaustion. A participant drops out of the chase if it reaches 5 levels of exhaustion.
3. Chase participants can make attacks and cast spells, but they cannot make opportunity attacks.
4. A quarry can escape if it succeeds on a Stealth check at the end of each round contested by the pursuers' passive Perception scores, if the quarry is out of the lead pursuer's sight.
5. Complications can occur randomly. Each participant rolls a d20 at the end of its turn and consults a complication table and applies that complication not to itself, but to the participant after it in the initiative order, and a creature can spend Inspiration to negate the complication.
6. Groups of quarries can split up into smaller groups, at which point each chase will be resolved separately.
7. A chase ends when the quarry escapes or when the pursuers are close enough to their quarry to catch it.

Man, this is even messier than I remember it. Let's break each of these steps down a bit and see what their problematic aspects are:

1

I already think this is starting off on the wrong foot. Distance isn't a huge issue to track in theater-of-the-mind combat, but when both sides of the chase are running the same direction and when there are a bunch of other factors to consider, worrying about exact measurements of distances between all the participants would slow things down, which is the worst thing that can happen to a chase sequence that should feel fast-paced and exciting.

Tracking distance seems to directly contradict the first paragraph about chases, which says "Strict application of the movement rules can turn a potentially exciting chase into a dull, predictable affair. Faster creatures always catch up to slower ones, while creatures with the same speed never close the distance between each other."

2

I think this could be the worst aspect of these sample chase rules. This encourages players and the DM to reduce a heart-pounding chase into a long series of boring dice rolls. If this is what all the participants of the chase continually chose to use their action on, this is basically how this would play out, round to round, assuming all the participants have the same speed:

1. For 3–5 rounds on average, nothing mechanical would happen as all the creatures just Dash mindlessly forward.
2. Constitution checks would start being made by the creatures. No creature has proficiency in Constitution checks, but a DC of 10 would most likely be higher than a 50% success rate for most players who valued having a positive hit point level adjustment, so gaining levels of exhaustion would probably be pretty slow going.
3. Note that these are Constitution checks, not saving throws, so after the first failure and 1 level of exhaustion, the checks each round would start being made with disadvantage. That would kickstart the decline of that creature's exhaustion a bit faster.
4. After 2 levels of exhaustion, the creature's speed would be halved. This could mean that a quarry could fall back far enough to be caught after its next turn, but if its pursuers have these levels of exhaustion as well, it would just keep things the way they are.
5. The following 2 exhaustion levels don't make a difference, so that means at least two more rounds of rolling Con checks.
6. Finally, assuming that the creatures haven't given up the chase yet (or their players haven't given up just out of boredom), creatures start to collapse from 5 levels of exhaustion, and the chase starts to end.

Even if creatures are super unlucky with their rolls, this constitutes a chase that lasts at least 8 rounds, and that's without any actually interesting parts to the chase, like natural complications or a creature sacrificing its Dash action to hurl a spell at the other side. Only boss combat encounters last this long normally, meaning by the rules, just Dashing over and over alone turns a chase into a slog!

3

I'm mostly in agreement here. I don't think opportunity attacks would make sense in a chase. As far as attacks go, I would assume that most pursuers would try to Grapple their quarry if they caught up to them. However, I just feel like the action economy in this case is all wrong. More so even than combat, I think chases need to have all their actions be simultaneous. Sprinting 30 feet up to your quarry, making a slash at them, and then watching them run 30 feet ahead and out of reach of you 6 seconds later just doesn't make sense to me. 

4

I like this. It makes sense that the way to escape someone is to make it impossible for them to keep chasing you. If they don't know where you are, they can't make any progress closer to you. It might become an issue of tracking at that point, but either way, this is a great way to end the chase for a quarry. The only problem is, how can the DM make it clear that there's a way to get out of sight? And
what's to stop that sight range from just closing up the next round and adding another two rounds of running before the quarry can try to duck into an alleyway or crowd again?

5

I realize now what my DM did wrong that made our chase even worse: He had us each roll on the complication table every single round. It makes sense that it would instead be done randomly, but how often? Some clarification could be added here, and I don't like the complexity of having people roll for each other's complications. What's the point? It's just a d20 roll anyway, so if stats don't come into play, that's just needlessly making a rule that's more difficult to remember to do.

6

As if one chase didn't take long enough, you have the option to split it into two chases that might be marginally shorter duration from fewer creatures, but still a slog.

7

The problem, as has been stated before, is that there's no guarantee that a chase won't go on and on long after anyone's even interested in it anymore. A chase needs to be brief, exciting, and cinematic, and the tug-of-war aspect of the pursuers and the quarry may stop that from happening without some tweaks to the rules.

A Better Way

I think the best way to formulate a chase in D&D would be to (1) limit the amount of time it would take, (2) give the players more choices during a chase, (3) reward characters that would have innate skills to succeed in a chase, and (4) simplify complications and the things that make chases exciting.

Limit the Time

Chases by their very nature are moments of tense conflict, and like any conflict that is drawn out for too long, they can become exhausting to the point where everyone is just looking forward for it to finally end. I think the first trick to making chases fun in D&D 5e is to limit them to a number of chase rounds. Not combat rounds run by initiative.

I think three chase rounds would be a good number (though you could do more), and they could follow a similar level of intensity to death saving throws, tracking successes and failures. Each success would give a participant headway in the chase, and a failure would mean falling behind. After three rounds, pursuers who had more successes than any of the quarries would be able to start attacking or attempting to Grapple them, and quarries with more successes than any of the pursuers would be able to escape. Also, the following rules could apply:

• If a quarry got three successes, they would escape.
• If a quarry got three failures, they would fall behind and be caught.
• If a pursuer got three successes, they could catch any quarry that had any failures.
• If a pursuer got three failures, they would tire, fall behind, and lose the quarries.

If for any reason there was somehow a tie, a Stealth vs. Perception contest, or even just an initiative roll, could be a tie breaker. These rules could be the same if a group splits up—the pursuers and quarries would just have a different set of enemies to deal with in their checks.

Depending on the conditions of the area, the pursuers, or the quarries, you could also impose an easier or more difficult chase by simply skewing the success/fail requirement. A more difficult chase could require 5 successes but only allow 3 failures before being caught, and an easier chase could do the opposite.

Character Choices

With this base objective in place, we could figure out the fun part: Determining what happens during the chase. At the start of each chase round, all of the participants in the chase would choose an action. This could be a spell, a ranged attack, an attempt to knock over obstacles to slow down the pursuers, or honestly, any other action at all that is feasible in the current situation. I would encourage creativity among players by allowing them to describe the environment. If they were running through a town, for example, a player could have the narrative power to say "Seeing a cart with barrels tied on top of it, I slash at the ropes to block the roadway behind me." Doing so would require an attack roll with an improvised DC. Each action would have to be up to the DM's discretion, but since the goal of gaining successes remains the same regardless of what happens narratively, this could encourage some really fun moments of roleplaying.

As an alternative to creative actions like this, any participant could also opt to simply Dash. They would make a Constitution (Athletics) check contested with any other participant on the opposing side.

If a participant expended a resource (such as a spell slot) as part of their action, the DM could decide that doing so constituted an automatic success. There could also be cases where on a failure, a DM could allow a player to turn it into a success by expending a resource, taking damage, or losing some items. The important thing would be to make the chase exciting and give the players (and the DM's creatures) creativity in what they do.

Reward Characters Good at Chases

The DMG's version of chases tends to level the playing field and resort to base, flavorless actions to resolve them. But I think that characters who have abilities that would let them excel in a chase should be rewarded for them, not put on a baseline with everyone else, who might have strengths in other areas.

For example, a rogue could automatically succeed on her first Constitution (Athletics) check in a chase because of Cunning Action. A monk could similarly auto-succeed if Step of the Wind was used. A fighter's Action Surge might allow a second chance in a round to succeed on a failed check, to help an ally gain advantage on their check, or to try and inhibit the other side of the chase by giving them disadvantage on a check somehow. 

You could even grant bonuses (or penalties) to characters' checks if their movement speed was higher or lower than 30 feet (perhaps a +2 bonus for every 5 feet faster, or -2 for every 5 feet slower). This would reward monks and barbarians, who—let's face it—truly would be able to escape or finish a chase more easily than someone who ran more slowly.

These abilities should be celebrated, not ignored in favor of graceless balance. Besides, granting the players these bonuses means that the enemies could gain some interesting advantages as well...

Less Complicated Complications

Finally, I get that chase complications are an essential fun aspect of cinematic chases, but just because they complicate the chase for the characters doesn't mean that it should be complicated and time-consuming to run in the game.

As a DM, I personally would maybe just roll a d3 at the beginning of a chase and see after which round a complication would occur. And instead of everyone rolling for the complication of the person below them in the initiative order, I would just have the same complication affect all of them during that round.

The complications in the DMG tables tend to lean on penalties like difficult terrain and falling prone. Since we're no longer dealing with distances, I think mainly the complications would just impose a chase check failure on a failed saving throw, and those mechanics could be abstracted in a similar way. The complications could still deal damage as usual.

At a glance, these mechanics look a lot better overall: They're simpler, they encourage a shorter and more tense time running a chase, and they offer more fun options for players and their characters to make the chase part of their own fun story. But I'll of course need to try the rules out with my own groups to see if there are any kinks in the rules. As usual, any mechanics that are homebrewed should be thoroughly playtested before they're classified as acceptable or not. But I have a hard time believing that the ones in the DMG were playtested at all.

If you try these new rules or see any glaring issues with my rules as presented, please let me know in the comments below!