A few weeks ago I played the new chase rules for the current Savage Worlds Kickstarter (closing about 11/13). As part of the rules, each entity (PC, bad guy, group of minions) has their distance from the other entities represented by a number of tokens. Count up the tokens for you and your “target” and you get the distance between.

The issue we found is when you try to use miniatures to also represent relevant distances along with the tokens. With each entity having potentially different numbers of tokens, if you want to represent relative distances, you need to calculate the distance to everyone with each change to any entity included in the chase.

For example, four of us (PCs) are chasing/running from the headless horseman. We all choose different actions; run, attack, support, etc. Everyone starts a relative distance from each other and the horseman. At the beginning of the battle it works great, but as the battle continues, it becomes a greater issue. One PC just ran, and they rapidly left the encounter. Even with a tremendously large play mat, pretty soon they were out of the encounter, and all interest in the encounter is gone.

On the other side of the spectrum, two of us “tried” to be brave and stall the horseman so our compatriots could run away. Now we are essentially in parry range of the horseman, and trying to do maneuvers that now appear limiting. In the chase rules, the standard of move and act is replaced with everything is an action including movement. Because we could see our miniatures in conflict (next to on the mat) it felt limiting to use the abstract rules.

In retrospect, it might have been better to divide the party into chase rules and standard combat once a few PCs closed with the horseman, but I think the real issue was using minis and a mat combined with theater of the mind.

We had some really cool minis.

Yes they are awesome – check out my friend Dave’s games at GenCon – search Party of One.I think Dave had the best comment “I already have the cool minis, just need to adapt the rules to make it fun.”