So one glaring issue I have with the core rules are the chase rules. I find them to be arbitrary, slow-moving and dull. I have an idea of an alternative set of chase rules, I'm interested in the community's thoughts on my proposed idea for house-ruling at my table. The main reason for the change is to keep the chase narrative, keep it short and keep it moving. To use the normal rules kills all the excitement of a chase right at the start with an initiative roll & a round of piloting rolls. By the time you get to individual turns, they have no momentum.

At the beginning of the encounter, roll initiative as normal.

During the beginning of a PC pilot's turn, they must make an opposed piloting check against the NPC's involved.

This check can be modified as follows:

Handling applies as normal.

Speed of the PC's vehicle and the NPC's vehicle is compared. A PC vehicle with more speed gains the difference as boost dice. A PC vehicle with less speed gains the difference in setback dice.

Environmental factors can add boost and setback as normal.

Success results from each piloting check gets added to a pool for each PC vehicle in the encounter, with a goal of X* successes per PC involved. Allies not piloting but participating in the encounter can add success results from their actions towards the goal for the vehicle in which they are passengers. If the goal is met before 3 rounds have finished, the PC's escape/catch the pursued. If the PC's fail to meet the success requirement by the end of 3 rounds, they are caught, lose their prey, suffer enough damage to require landing, crash, etc... PC pilots are still allowed to take an action on their turn but suffer an additional 2 strain on top of the normal costs.

In this way, a PC pilot doesn't need to bother about arbitrarily burning maneuvers to increase the speed of their vehicle. This method cuts out all NPC piloting checks and instead of having a round of initiative rolling and a round of piloting checks, the PCs roll on their turns and the NPCs just take actions to attack or whatever else they are going to do.

*The number of success results required per PC involved can be multiplied to set the overall difficulty of the encounter, beyond just the NPC's skill and environmental factors.

I actually love the idea behind the chase rules. I agree they are very boring as written because they only refer to changes in range band, but the concept is sound, and I use them constantly, if quite a bit more freely. Whether it's space combat or personal scale, I don't think a PC needs to necessarily get to "Extreme range" to escape, that's really not the point. Changing range bands can be replaced with all kinds of opportunities, such as hiding, or wheeling around to make a surprise attack. Narratively it can depend on terrain: if you have asteroids or space junk or busy city streets, changing a range band can be replaced with any other suitable action. This also allows a mix of skills to be used, so you're not just stuck with Piloting and Athletics. Someone could use Perception or Astrogation to find a nice hidden crater, or Mechanics to turn off all the power quickly and pretend to be destroyed (ala Obiwan in E2); or on the ground someone could use Streetwise to find an alley that leads to a more defendable position.

In general I think your solution is too codified, still sticks with the Pilot as the main vehicle for "range change", and a bit arbitrary with the "3 rounds" limit. The latter is something you might set on a case-by-case basis, not as a fixed rule.

If you did want a Pilot-only action, not sure if this will help, but one of the Pilot abilities in my "speedless" space combat system is "Never Tell Me the Odds", basically any pilot can issue a kind of "catch me if you can" challenge. (It's blatantly stolen from a Traveller mechanic.)

1 hour ago, whafrog said:

In general I think your solution is too codified, still sticks with the Pilot as the main vehicle for "range change", and a bit arbitrary with the "3 rounds" limit. The latter is something you might set on a case-by-case basis, not as a fixed rule.

This actually helps me modify the homebrew a bit, I missed something that needed to be written in. Range bands won't really play into the chase rules at all. In the normal chase rules, you can be at long range away from a bunch of thugs with blaster pistols that only reach medium range for 6 rounds if you keep rolling the same number of successes as them. It's boring & it allows there to be a length of time where the NPCs are chasing and never catching up. Besides that part, I find the whole way you move range bands within a chase to be incredibly arbitrary and tiresome to calculate.

The chase should feel more exciting, so there should be distance between the participants but not so much as to disallow all interaction between the parties involved. I think it should stay vague for the most part and only come into context when the players want to do something fancy with their Triumphs (such as leap onto the enemy's air speeder and fight the passengers hand-to-hand). Even so, rather than bother with the range bands, I think it'd be better to just narrate the distance instead.

As far as the 3 rounds limit, that's something I've begun doing with a lot of my action-oriented encounters. I have a group of 7 players, 1 round of combat can take an hour+ due to ADD & analysis paralysis. I've taken other steps to keep turns faster but rather than spend the entire session on a chase in case the turns still take too long, I'd like to keep it fast paced and exciting, so either they succeed within an amount of time or they get caught/catch their target.

Got a more revised version, where the round limit and success goal is variable to represent the unpredictable nature of a chase. Your thoughts and feedback are appreciated.

Chases

At the beginning of the encounter, roll initiative as normal.

After initiative is rolled but before the first turn, the PC’s who are piloting make a combined opposed piloting check against the NPC pilots.

This check can be modified as follows:

Handling applies as normal.

Speed of the PC's vehicle and the NPC's vehicle is compared. A PC vehicle with more speed gains the difference as boost dice. A PC vehicle with less speed gains the difference in setback dice.

Environmental factors can add boost and setback as normal.

The amount of success results needed to win the chase (also called the difficulty multiplier) starts at 2 x the amount of players.

The default round limit is 1.

The dice result of the piloting check alters the difficulty and time limit to win the chase.

During the round, PC’s participating in the encounter can add success results from their actions towards the success goal.

If the goal is met before the round/turn limit, the PC's escape/catch the pursued. If the PC's fail to meet the success requirement by the end of the round limit, they are caught, lose their prey, suffer enough damage to require landing, crash, etc... PC pilots are still allowed to take an action on their turn but suffer an additional 2 strain on top of the normal costs.

Range bands are not part of the chase rules. Participants are assumed to be within enough distance to attack each other’s ships or interact in other ways. A triumph result might allow you to do something special, such as board the enemy’s air speeder and fight the passengers hand-to-hand.

Firing hand-held weaponry while in a moving vehicle is challenging. As such, all personal scale ranged combat checks against other participants have a base difficulty of 3, with 2 setback added for making a “called shot”. Ranged combat checks with the vehicles themselves act as normal.

On-foot chases are handled almost exactly the same except for two differences.

After rolling for initiative, the participating players roll a combined opposed Athletics check against the NPC’s that determines the round limit and success goal for the entire group.

Firing hand-held weaponry while in a foot chase has an average difficulty of 2 purple.

The rest of the on-foot chase plays out exactly the same as the vehicle chase rules.

21 hours ago, GroggyGolem said:

Dice Result	Effect
Success	Each Success adds rounds to the limit, max 5
Advantage	· Spend 1 Advantage to reduce the difficulty multiplier, to a minimum of 2. · Spend 1 Advantage to add 1 boost die to any one player’s next check.
Triumph	The pilot may take a free maneuver immediately that does not count successes towards the goal
Failure	Each Failure subtracts rounds or turns from the limit, minimum turns would be ½ the PCs.
Threat	· Spend 1 Threat to increase the difficulty multiplier, to a maximum of 4. · Spend 1 Threat to add 1 setback die to any one player’s next check.
Despair	The vehicle or character suffers a critical hit. Roll a d100 and apply the effects based on the critical hit chart.

About despair result. Do you use plain critical, or minor / major collision? (Only difference being that plain critical is "deadlier", because shields help in collisions. Difference is not huge. Personally I always use collisions (minor/major depends on situation), because event critical -20 can ruin the PC's day. And often has.

47 minutes ago, kkuja said:

About despair result. Do you use plain critical, or minor / major collision? (Only difference being that plain critical is "deadlier", because shields help in collisions. Difference is not huge. Personally I always use collisions (minor/major depends on situation), because event critical -20 can ruin the PC's day. And often has.

That's actually a really good point. My thought was to make the chase feel more dangerous if you happen to roll a Despair and use a regular critical with both vehicle and on-foot chases. A collision could make more sense instead for vehicle chases. Great idea!

I like this groggy, I think it addresses the pacing problem well.