Hi guys! In IH on p.224 there are rules for pursuits, which seem pretty normal, until you've actually playtested them - unless I got them all wrong.

What they basically say is:

1) You roll Initiative, whoever wins - gets 1 Pursuit point.

2) Each turn you can take Chase or Flee Action, which is actually an Agility test, with difficulty that depends on terrain, traffic etc. If you pass the test - you gain 1 Pursuit Point + 1 PP for each degree of success. Failure nets you loss of PP's.

The problem is I don't get what happens when you manage to catch the fleeing guy? Starting at 0 PP's also makes you lose the pursuit real fast - not fun, especially for starting Acolytes.

So please share how you handle pursuits!

Thank you!

I do persuit diferently. but by the rull them selves it is the first one to ten gets away or catches. so youcan put a higher level on the points, ie 20 not 10, if you thing it is not going for long enough. you can make it that if the chaser has the same or more persuit points he can try a grapple and take him down and if he fails it puts him 2 PP behind the runner. at ten the losing character is ether dead tired or if he wins has turned them around somewhere and lost them. using this method is as much about the naration that the numbers bring as anything else. so bobby the tech priest rolls s success with 2 dos so he has 3 points but the evil ken cultest has the inititive and 1 dot so he is on 3 too he tries and jumps to tackle bobby and fails and ends up at 1. but Timmy the ken cultest is the first to ten and then bobby is shagged out and can run any more so he has to stand and fight. pulls his bolter and shoots timmy the cultest in the head for 34 point od damage and wonders why he ran in the first place

Yeah, the pursuit rules are a load of old tosh.

I have a set of pursuit rules I plan to use, though I have only used them once so don't have much evidence of how successful they are. Say you have two characters who start X metres apart. Each character then rolls agility, with the difference in degrees of success determining how the distance between them changes. So e.g. if the pursuer rolls one degree of success while the quarry rolls two degrees of success, then the characters move one metre further apart. I then set an "escape distance" which is how far away the quarry has to get to escape. The "catch distance" at which the pursuer catches the quarry depends on his aim - to grapple the quarry the distance must drop to zero, for example.

The tricky part is making it work so that you can run combat in parallel, though (e.g. with one character chasing another while a third takes pot-shots). My intention is that each round you move both the characters doing the chasing a distance equal to the movement rate of the slowest character. You then move the character who wins the pursuit roll additional distance according to their degrees of success. But I guess if you assume both characters are running, then to get roughly the right movement rate you have to either give them six agility rolls per combat round, or multiply the difference in degrees of success by six (because running movement equals agility bonus times six).